The First Sunday After the Epiphany Genesis 1: 1 – 5
Sunday, January 8, 2012 Acts 19: 1 – 7
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 1: 4 – 11
And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Mark 1: 10 - 11
The twelve days of Christmas came to an end this past Thursday. Friday, January 6, was the feast of the Epiphany and marked the beginning of a new liturgical season. The word “epiphany” means revelation and during the season of Epiphany, we celebrate the revelation of God in Christ. And on the first Sunday after the feast of the Epiphany, we always hear the story of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist in the River Jordan when a voice from heaven announces to Jesus: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
In the story of the baptism of Jesus, we meet Jesus “coming up out of the water” and “the Spirit descending like a dove on him.” “Water” and “Spirit” are words that take us back to an earlier story, the story of creation and our reading this morning from Genesis. In the beginning, before God created the heavens and the earth, “the earth was a formless void’ and “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” Before the world began, the wind or Spirit of God broods over a dark and watery deep, waiting for a word from God to bring forth light.
Now, in the story of Jesus’ baptism, God creates anew, bringing forth out of the water by the power of the same Spirit of God, a Son. The baptism of Jesus echoes the story of creation and what is revealed to us in this story of Jesus’ baptism is new creation, a new act of God, as dramatic as the creation of the first day.
But new creation is not the only revelation our evangelist Mark passes on to us this morning. The story of Jesus’ baptism is narrated by Matthew, Mark and Luke with striking similarity with one notable exception. In the gospels of Matthew and Luke, when Jesus comes up out of the water, we hear that the heavens “were opened.” In the gospel of Mark, the heavens are not “opened,” but rather “torn apart,” ripped as we might do with an old sheet in order to make rags. We will meet that same verb again at the end of Mark’s gospel when at the moment Jesus breathes his last on the cross, the veil in the Temple rips from top to bottom. Jesus’ baptism in the gospel of Mark, unlike the other gospels, is not a quiet and peaceful affair, but rather a cosmic event colored by a certain violence as the heavens are slashed open.
The first baptism I performed was at MCV on the labor and delivery floor. Twin boys had been born; one twin died before I was able to get to the floor; the other twin died shortly thereafter. In the midst of that unimaginable horror, mom and dad made only one request and that was to call for a chaplain to baptize their children. I like to think that the heavens were ripped apart that day as God decried the death of two infant boys before they ever had a chance to live.
Our evangelist Mark wants us to hear in this story of new creation words of life and words of death, triumph and tragedy. Mark is writing his gospel, his “good news,” around 70 A.D., just after Rome destroyed the city of Jerusalem, burned down the Temple and killed over a million Jews. In the aftermath, as the church was coming to life, baptism was serious business requiring those seeking to be baptized to wait three years as they learned what being a Christian in the Roman Empire might mean. Certain professions were prohibited – you could not be a charioteer or a gladiator or teach pagan myths or bear arms for the Empire. In the eyes of Rome, Christians were a strange lot who gathered together to eat the body and blood of a man who had been crucified. At times, Rome simply ignored those strange Christians, at other times Rome killed them.
Baptism no longer appears to us a matter of life and death. Most of us, thank God, will not be asked to die for our faith. Service on the vestry is probably the closest most of us will come to martyrdom! But just this past century we have the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor hung by the Nazis in 1945, for his participation in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and Oscar Romero, a Roman Catholic bishop in El Salvador gunned down in 1980, as he was celebrating the Eucharist. Baptism has not lost it’s peril and the Christian witness remains in many parts of the globe a threat to the powers and principalities of this world.
The threat of the Christian witness has everything to do with the Spirit of God which brooded over the face of the deep “in the beginning” and which descends like a dove upon Jesus at his baptism. This Spirit is God’s power to bring forth life and continues, we confess, to be at work in the world and in us. Baptism is the beginning of a journey known only to God, prompted and guided by, the power of the Holy Spirit. None of us can know at baptism where this Spirit will take us and what we might be called upon to do as a result. Into a world that longs for certainty and security, the Holy Spirit intrudes, disturbing us, troubling the waters, re-arranging life according to God’s desires, not ours.
When that mom and dad at MCV asked for a chaplain to baptize their infant sons, they were bearing witness to their trust that God, in the midst of the unspeakable horror of that day, was present, still bringing forth life, still active, still all powerful, even though neither Mom nor Dad nor I, could see anything other than grief and heartbreak. Whatever was being revealed to the three of us that day was wholly obscured, lost in something like that “formless void” or the dark watery deep at the beginning of creation. On that day the world went dark and those parents simply refused to believe that such darkness would ultimately prevail.
“I baptize you in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Those words just well may be the most audacious words we will ever speak. With those words, we are set upon a journey of uncertainty and unknowing trusting in a God whose Son was crucified. Baptism is not for the faint of heart.
Since that fateful day at MCV I have baptized others, healthy babies, young people coming to terms with who and what they are, older persons returning to a church that hurt them in their youth. Baptism is always a big deal, a turning point, a boundary between the way the world is and the way God intended the world to be when the Spirit of God brooded over those dark waters, a place of life, not death. At our baptism we turn away from “the evil powers of this world that seek to corrupt and destroy the creatures of God,” in the words of the baptismal liturgy, and turn towards “the grace and love of Christ.” Baptism commits us to seek and to serve the life giving power of God made known to us in Christ in a world that is fearful and afraid, grasping after life as a “right” we must protect, not a gift to be given away and shared with others.
I am bemused that in the world in which we live, no one asks us if we are baptized. I have a social security number and a driver’s license but had to root around a bit to find “proof’ of my baptism for the commission on ministry. What I have is a yellowed card declaring that on the 19th day of November, 1961, I was baptized in the diocese of Newark, New Jersey. My baptism came some time before the riots in Newark in the sixties and a goodly while before the installation of the renegrade Bishop Spong in 1977. I was baptized on a Sunday afternoon in a darkened church with only my family present. No one suggested to me any relationship between my baptism and what my baptism might mean in light of what was happening in the world. No one told me baptism was the beginning of a life long journey that might actually change the way I lived out my life. No one told me my baptism might disturb the powers of this world and call me into places others wished I wouldn’t go.
I sometimes think our baptismal certificates should carry a warning label like the one we find on packs of cigarettes: “Warning: Baptism could be hazardous to your health.” Our evangelist Mark seems to think so. Indeed, Mark ends his gospel saying the women “fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” In the gospel of Mark we have no return of the crucified Christ, no breakfast on the beach, no doubting Thomas assured by the presence of the risen Christ. The gospel of Mark ends in fear and trembling and silence. May we, who have been baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, be neither silent nor afraid.
Sunday, January 8, 2012 Acts 19: 1 – 7
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 1: 4 – 11
And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
Mark 1: 10 - 11
The twelve days of Christmas came to an end this past Thursday. Friday, January 6, was the feast of the Epiphany and marked the beginning of a new liturgical season. The word “epiphany” means revelation and during the season of Epiphany, we celebrate the revelation of God in Christ. And on the first Sunday after the feast of the Epiphany, we always hear the story of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist in the River Jordan when a voice from heaven announces to Jesus: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
In the story of the baptism of Jesus, we meet Jesus “coming up out of the water” and “the Spirit descending like a dove on him.” “Water” and “Spirit” are words that take us back to an earlier story, the story of creation and our reading this morning from Genesis. In the beginning, before God created the heavens and the earth, “the earth was a formless void’ and “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” Before the world began, the wind or Spirit of God broods over a dark and watery deep, waiting for a word from God to bring forth light.
Now, in the story of Jesus’ baptism, God creates anew, bringing forth out of the water by the power of the same Spirit of God, a Son. The baptism of Jesus echoes the story of creation and what is revealed to us in this story of Jesus’ baptism is new creation, a new act of God, as dramatic as the creation of the first day.
But new creation is not the only revelation our evangelist Mark passes on to us this morning. The story of Jesus’ baptism is narrated by Matthew, Mark and Luke with striking similarity with one notable exception. In the gospels of Matthew and Luke, when Jesus comes up out of the water, we hear that the heavens “were opened.” In the gospel of Mark, the heavens are not “opened,” but rather “torn apart,” ripped as we might do with an old sheet in order to make rags. We will meet that same verb again at the end of Mark’s gospel when at the moment Jesus breathes his last on the cross, the veil in the Temple rips from top to bottom. Jesus’ baptism in the gospel of Mark, unlike the other gospels, is not a quiet and peaceful affair, but rather a cosmic event colored by a certain violence as the heavens are slashed open.
The first baptism I performed was at MCV on the labor and delivery floor. Twin boys had been born; one twin died before I was able to get to the floor; the other twin died shortly thereafter. In the midst of that unimaginable horror, mom and dad made only one request and that was to call for a chaplain to baptize their children. I like to think that the heavens were ripped apart that day as God decried the death of two infant boys before they ever had a chance to live.
Our evangelist Mark wants us to hear in this story of new creation words of life and words of death, triumph and tragedy. Mark is writing his gospel, his “good news,” around 70 A.D., just after Rome destroyed the city of Jerusalem, burned down the Temple and killed over a million Jews. In the aftermath, as the church was coming to life, baptism was serious business requiring those seeking to be baptized to wait three years as they learned what being a Christian in the Roman Empire might mean. Certain professions were prohibited – you could not be a charioteer or a gladiator or teach pagan myths or bear arms for the Empire. In the eyes of Rome, Christians were a strange lot who gathered together to eat the body and blood of a man who had been crucified. At times, Rome simply ignored those strange Christians, at other times Rome killed them.
Baptism no longer appears to us a matter of life and death. Most of us, thank God, will not be asked to die for our faith. Service on the vestry is probably the closest most of us will come to martyrdom! But just this past century we have the witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor hung by the Nazis in 1945, for his participation in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and Oscar Romero, a Roman Catholic bishop in El Salvador gunned down in 1980, as he was celebrating the Eucharist. Baptism has not lost it’s peril and the Christian witness remains in many parts of the globe a threat to the powers and principalities of this world.
The threat of the Christian witness has everything to do with the Spirit of God which brooded over the face of the deep “in the beginning” and which descends like a dove upon Jesus at his baptism. This Spirit is God’s power to bring forth life and continues, we confess, to be at work in the world and in us. Baptism is the beginning of a journey known only to God, prompted and guided by, the power of the Holy Spirit. None of us can know at baptism where this Spirit will take us and what we might be called upon to do as a result. Into a world that longs for certainty and security, the Holy Spirit intrudes, disturbing us, troubling the waters, re-arranging life according to God’s desires, not ours.
When that mom and dad at MCV asked for a chaplain to baptize their infant sons, they were bearing witness to their trust that God, in the midst of the unspeakable horror of that day, was present, still bringing forth life, still active, still all powerful, even though neither Mom nor Dad nor I, could see anything other than grief and heartbreak. Whatever was being revealed to the three of us that day was wholly obscured, lost in something like that “formless void” or the dark watery deep at the beginning of creation. On that day the world went dark and those parents simply refused to believe that such darkness would ultimately prevail.
“I baptize you in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” Those words just well may be the most audacious words we will ever speak. With those words, we are set upon a journey of uncertainty and unknowing trusting in a God whose Son was crucified. Baptism is not for the faint of heart.
Since that fateful day at MCV I have baptized others, healthy babies, young people coming to terms with who and what they are, older persons returning to a church that hurt them in their youth. Baptism is always a big deal, a turning point, a boundary between the way the world is and the way God intended the world to be when the Spirit of God brooded over those dark waters, a place of life, not death. At our baptism we turn away from “the evil powers of this world that seek to corrupt and destroy the creatures of God,” in the words of the baptismal liturgy, and turn towards “the grace and love of Christ.” Baptism commits us to seek and to serve the life giving power of God made known to us in Christ in a world that is fearful and afraid, grasping after life as a “right” we must protect, not a gift to be given away and shared with others.
I am bemused that in the world in which we live, no one asks us if we are baptized. I have a social security number and a driver’s license but had to root around a bit to find “proof’ of my baptism for the commission on ministry. What I have is a yellowed card declaring that on the 19th day of November, 1961, I was baptized in the diocese of Newark, New Jersey. My baptism came some time before the riots in Newark in the sixties and a goodly while before the installation of the renegrade Bishop Spong in 1977. I was baptized on a Sunday afternoon in a darkened church with only my family present. No one suggested to me any relationship between my baptism and what my baptism might mean in light of what was happening in the world. No one told me baptism was the beginning of a life long journey that might actually change the way I lived out my life. No one told me my baptism might disturb the powers of this world and call me into places others wished I wouldn’t go.
I sometimes think our baptismal certificates should carry a warning label like the one we find on packs of cigarettes: “Warning: Baptism could be hazardous to your health.” Our evangelist Mark seems to think so. Indeed, Mark ends his gospel saying the women “fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” In the gospel of Mark we have no return of the crucified Christ, no breakfast on the beach, no doubting Thomas assured by the presence of the risen Christ. The gospel of Mark ends in fear and trembling and silence. May we, who have been baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, be neither silent nor afraid.
The Second Sunday After the Epiphany I Samuel 3: 1 – 20
Sunday, January 15, 2012 I Corinthians 6: 12 – 20
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 1: 43 – 51
Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.”
John 1: 46
I gained a new vocabulary word when I came to Bowling Green. I learned that a “come here” was someone who had not grown up in Bowling Green but rather had “come here” later in life. What I also learned was, once a “come here,” always a “come here.” What I remain unclear about is whether the designation as a “come here” is positive, negative or simply descriptive. What I know is that I am a “come here” and am wholly unable to change that reality.
For Nathanael , in our reading from the gospel of John this morning, Jesus is a “come here” and Nathanael does not think very highly of “come here’s.” Nathanael learns from Philip that the promised King of Israel has arrived. Unfortunately, this King hails from Nazareth and Nathanael asks wryly: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
In response, Jesus calls Nathanael a “true Israelite, in whom there is no deceit.” Perhaps, Jesus, like Nathanael, is not fond of “come here’s” either. Apparently what makes Nathanael a “true Israelite” is Nathanael’s willingness to tell the truth and Nazareth was a small poor town without any claim to fame. Nathanael is hard pressed to believe that the King of Israel grew up in a town that is never even once mentioned in the Old Testament, the Jewish scriptures.
And Jesus calls Nathanael an Israelite, a designation Jesus never uses again. The name Israel first appears in the Old Testament in the book of Genesis and means in Hebrew “the one who wrestles with God.” Isaac, the child born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, has two sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob and Esau were twins and Esau was born first. To the first born went all the glory and Esau was destined to receive the better inheritance when his father, Isaac died. Jacob, unfortunately , was not content to play second fiddle to his brother and on his father’s deathbed, Jacob tricks Isaac into giving Jacob the honor that was due Esau. Death bed blessings were irrevocable and Jacob walks away with what properly belonged to his older brother Esau.
Esau gets angry and Jacob has to flee for his life. On the far side of Dodge, Isaac makes camp alone and in the night wrestles with a man who leaves him with a limp and a new name. The unnamed man says to Jacob at daybreak: “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have wrestled with God and with humans and have prevailed.” Israel is the name given to Jacob after God takes Jacob to task for cheating his brother.
But before God changes Jacob’s name, Jacob has a vision, a vision of a ladder extending from earth into heaven and “the angels of God were ascending and descending upon it.” This morning Jesus tells Nathanael: “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” Israel was born of trickery and God chastened Jacob. But God honored the promise that Isaac had bestowed upon Jacob, that through Jacob all the nations would be blessed and that God would dwell with Israel.
In some way, Jesus seems to be acknowledging that in spite of Israel’s waywardness, God continues to hold fast to God’s promise that Israel will be the light of the world. Nathanael initially is skeptical and as we read through the Old Testament, we hear a story of intrigue and subterfuge, of trickery and deceit, of jealousy and war, a story that makes the most dysfunctional family look pretty good. Israel, the people whom God chose, were about the most unlikely lot we can imagine to be the dwelling place of God. Nathanael, this morning, mirrors the unlikeliness that God would deign to dwell with this stubborn and stiff necked people when Nathanael says: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nathanael could just as well have asked: “Can anything good come out of Israel?”
But Nathanael’s skepticism is changed by his encounter with Jesus, moving Nathanael to confess: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” The hope of Israel has come true.
The Church has from time to time sometimes forgotten that in and through Jesus, the hope of this strange people called Israel was fulfilled. The Church has sometimes forgotten that our story begins with the call of Abraham way back in Genesis and not on the first page of the New Testament. We are the “come here’s,” gentiles grafted into the family of Abraham by Christ. Once the church and the synagogue went their separate ways, the Church was tempted to forget that our ancestors in the faith were the people Israel, Jews, not Christians. This failure to remember led ultimately to disdain and then to mass murder during the Holocaust. Memory loss has its price.
We have Saint Paul to thank for reminding us that if God had abandoned the people Israel, we would have no assurance God would not one day abandon us. God’s promises to Israel remain and we share in those promises through Christ. In Jesus, the hope of Israel is coming true and this morning, our text invites us to remember that God kept God’s promises, even when Israel went astray.
And what was true for Israel is true for us. Through us, God is bringing the world back round right. We are not a group of isolated individuals hoping to go to heaven when we die. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were the fathers of a great nation promised to them by God. Through them God was birthing a people that would be a blessing to the whole world. We, the Church, are gathered together by the power of the Holy Spirit and are not here to “save” our souls but rather to save the world, a much harder task if you ask me. Israel was to be a great nation, a holy people, not a bunch of “holy” individuals, which cheating and deceitful Jacob clearly was not. The story of Israel is laced through and through with all kinds and sorts of human foibles to which God responds but from which God never walks away. Jacob had a “hard days night” that night at Bethel when God literally beat him up, but Jacob, chastened and renamed Israel went on to bear the twelve tribes of Israel. God never left the people Israel and today, Nathanael meets the long promised King of Israel.
We buried Carolyn Mason this past Wednesday. Carolyn was a long time member of this parish but had been unable to be with us for many years. Carolyn made a difference in our common life which we continue to feel even though many of us never knew Carolyn. Our common life is what it is because of Carolyn and Garland Gravatt and George Davis and Anne Willoughby all of whom we have buried in the last six months. Who we are has been shaped and transformed by their presence and I want to say that each and everyone of us shapes and transforms us in ways we often barely understand. We are a community and our communal identity is as significant and maybe even more significant, than our identity as individuals. We can be so focused on ourselves that we can fail to see how God is working through us, our fears and anxieties, our concerns and our “issues,” how God is bringing to birth a holy people not a bunch of saints.
I will confess this week was hard for me. We are watching an entire generation pass before our eyes and I am deeply grieved. I did not come among you a year and a half ago anticipating these days. But these days have come among us and I am reminded that where we come from is really important and not something to be forgotten. I am reminded our faith has roots that go way, way back and ought not to be dismissed. I am reminded that at root the story of the Old Testament is the story of a God who loved God’s people so well God would stop at nothing to be with them. And that gives me hope that in these days, these grievous days, God will be with us, lifting up new leaders, guiding us down new roads, transforming us and shaping us in and through our very human selves, selves who like Jacob wanted to be first when Jacob was second, through Isaac who had to endure indentured servitude to get the wife he loved, and through Abraham who took a concubuine because God wasn’t acting fast enough. God can really do the impossible and God has.
We do not have to be perfect but we do need to be faithful, trusting that God will do what God has promised. And we need each other to do that. We need to show up, to come to church, to share what we can and not be too concerned about ourselves. We need to be here – God will do the rest.
Sunday, January 15, 2012 I Corinthians 6: 12 – 20
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 1: 43 – 51
Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.”
John 1: 46
I gained a new vocabulary word when I came to Bowling Green. I learned that a “come here” was someone who had not grown up in Bowling Green but rather had “come here” later in life. What I also learned was, once a “come here,” always a “come here.” What I remain unclear about is whether the designation as a “come here” is positive, negative or simply descriptive. What I know is that I am a “come here” and am wholly unable to change that reality.
For Nathanael , in our reading from the gospel of John this morning, Jesus is a “come here” and Nathanael does not think very highly of “come here’s.” Nathanael learns from Philip that the promised King of Israel has arrived. Unfortunately, this King hails from Nazareth and Nathanael asks wryly: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
In response, Jesus calls Nathanael a “true Israelite, in whom there is no deceit.” Perhaps, Jesus, like Nathanael, is not fond of “come here’s” either. Apparently what makes Nathanael a “true Israelite” is Nathanael’s willingness to tell the truth and Nazareth was a small poor town without any claim to fame. Nathanael is hard pressed to believe that the King of Israel grew up in a town that is never even once mentioned in the Old Testament, the Jewish scriptures.
And Jesus calls Nathanael an Israelite, a designation Jesus never uses again. The name Israel first appears in the Old Testament in the book of Genesis and means in Hebrew “the one who wrestles with God.” Isaac, the child born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, has two sons, Jacob and Esau. Jacob and Esau were twins and Esau was born first. To the first born went all the glory and Esau was destined to receive the better inheritance when his father, Isaac died. Jacob, unfortunately , was not content to play second fiddle to his brother and on his father’s deathbed, Jacob tricks Isaac into giving Jacob the honor that was due Esau. Death bed blessings were irrevocable and Jacob walks away with what properly belonged to his older brother Esau.
Esau gets angry and Jacob has to flee for his life. On the far side of Dodge, Isaac makes camp alone and in the night wrestles with a man who leaves him with a limp and a new name. The unnamed man says to Jacob at daybreak: “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have wrestled with God and with humans and have prevailed.” Israel is the name given to Jacob after God takes Jacob to task for cheating his brother.
But before God changes Jacob’s name, Jacob has a vision, a vision of a ladder extending from earth into heaven and “the angels of God were ascending and descending upon it.” This morning Jesus tells Nathanael: “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” Israel was born of trickery and God chastened Jacob. But God honored the promise that Isaac had bestowed upon Jacob, that through Jacob all the nations would be blessed and that God would dwell with Israel.
In some way, Jesus seems to be acknowledging that in spite of Israel’s waywardness, God continues to hold fast to God’s promise that Israel will be the light of the world. Nathanael initially is skeptical and as we read through the Old Testament, we hear a story of intrigue and subterfuge, of trickery and deceit, of jealousy and war, a story that makes the most dysfunctional family look pretty good. Israel, the people whom God chose, were about the most unlikely lot we can imagine to be the dwelling place of God. Nathanael, this morning, mirrors the unlikeliness that God would deign to dwell with this stubborn and stiff necked people when Nathanael says: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nathanael could just as well have asked: “Can anything good come out of Israel?”
But Nathanael’s skepticism is changed by his encounter with Jesus, moving Nathanael to confess: “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” The hope of Israel has come true.
The Church has from time to time sometimes forgotten that in and through Jesus, the hope of this strange people called Israel was fulfilled. The Church has sometimes forgotten that our story begins with the call of Abraham way back in Genesis and not on the first page of the New Testament. We are the “come here’s,” gentiles grafted into the family of Abraham by Christ. Once the church and the synagogue went their separate ways, the Church was tempted to forget that our ancestors in the faith were the people Israel, Jews, not Christians. This failure to remember led ultimately to disdain and then to mass murder during the Holocaust. Memory loss has its price.
We have Saint Paul to thank for reminding us that if God had abandoned the people Israel, we would have no assurance God would not one day abandon us. God’s promises to Israel remain and we share in those promises through Christ. In Jesus, the hope of Israel is coming true and this morning, our text invites us to remember that God kept God’s promises, even when Israel went astray.
And what was true for Israel is true for us. Through us, God is bringing the world back round right. We are not a group of isolated individuals hoping to go to heaven when we die. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were the fathers of a great nation promised to them by God. Through them God was birthing a people that would be a blessing to the whole world. We, the Church, are gathered together by the power of the Holy Spirit and are not here to “save” our souls but rather to save the world, a much harder task if you ask me. Israel was to be a great nation, a holy people, not a bunch of “holy” individuals, which cheating and deceitful Jacob clearly was not. The story of Israel is laced through and through with all kinds and sorts of human foibles to which God responds but from which God never walks away. Jacob had a “hard days night” that night at Bethel when God literally beat him up, but Jacob, chastened and renamed Israel went on to bear the twelve tribes of Israel. God never left the people Israel and today, Nathanael meets the long promised King of Israel.
We buried Carolyn Mason this past Wednesday. Carolyn was a long time member of this parish but had been unable to be with us for many years. Carolyn made a difference in our common life which we continue to feel even though many of us never knew Carolyn. Our common life is what it is because of Carolyn and Garland Gravatt and George Davis and Anne Willoughby all of whom we have buried in the last six months. Who we are has been shaped and transformed by their presence and I want to say that each and everyone of us shapes and transforms us in ways we often barely understand. We are a community and our communal identity is as significant and maybe even more significant, than our identity as individuals. We can be so focused on ourselves that we can fail to see how God is working through us, our fears and anxieties, our concerns and our “issues,” how God is bringing to birth a holy people not a bunch of saints.
I will confess this week was hard for me. We are watching an entire generation pass before our eyes and I am deeply grieved. I did not come among you a year and a half ago anticipating these days. But these days have come among us and I am reminded that where we come from is really important and not something to be forgotten. I am reminded our faith has roots that go way, way back and ought not to be dismissed. I am reminded that at root the story of the Old Testament is the story of a God who loved God’s people so well God would stop at nothing to be with them. And that gives me hope that in these days, these grievous days, God will be with us, lifting up new leaders, guiding us down new roads, transforming us and shaping us in and through our very human selves, selves who like Jacob wanted to be first when Jacob was second, through Isaac who had to endure indentured servitude to get the wife he loved, and through Abraham who took a concubuine because God wasn’t acting fast enough. God can really do the impossible and God has.
We do not have to be perfect but we do need to be faithful, trusting that God will do what God has promised. And we need each other to do that. We need to show up, to come to church, to share what we can and not be too concerned about ourselves. We need to be here – God will do the rest.
The Third Sunday After the Epiphany Jonah 3: 1 – 5, 10
Sunday, January 22, 2012 I Corinthians 7: 29 – 31
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 1: 14 – 20
Immediately Jesus called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.’
Mark 1: 20
I shamelessly admit that my reflection on the gospel this morning is sparked by David Lose, a Lutheran seminary professor, who writes: “The thing about this passage that makes it kind of hard to preach is that while most of us may admire what the disciples do, few of us would consider following their examples.” This morning we hear Jesus call the first disciples, telling them to “follow me,” and Simon and Andrew, James and John, all fishermen, immediately drop their nets and go. In our gospel reading, four men walk away from their livelihoods and, James and John leave their father Zebedee “in the boat with the hired men.”
The gospel according to Mark is the shortest and most breathless of all the gospels and this morning, Mark needs only six verses to tell us how four men, without warning and with no preparation, “immediately” walk away from what they have been doing their whole lives to follow a man who is a known associate of John the Baptist, who Mark tells us “has been arrested” and is in prison. James and John leave their father Zebedee and in first century Palestine, the departure of his two sons meant the future of the family fishing business was no longer secure. Moreover, in first century Palestine, sons were expected to honor their father, not walk away without explanation, leaving their father to manage on his own.
The call of the first disciples in the gospel of Mark is sudden, immediate, and a radical break with the past. Which leads David Lose to wonder: “What would make you drop everything and pursue an entirely new life?” For our evangelist Mark, what draws the disciples away from a way of life that is respectable and secure, lived out by their families for generations, is something called “the kingdom of God.”
“The kingdom of God has come near,” Jesus tells the disciples, and upon that reality, the disciples drop everything and follow. What Mark calls the “kingdom of God,” is sometimes called “the kingdom of heaven” by others. What the disciples are seeking, and what they have seen in Jesus, is both a reality and a vision of, what you and I often speak of as “heaven.”
Left in the hands of advertisers, usually those selling beer, heaven is that moment when we say “It just doesn’t get any better than this!” Commercially speaking, heaven is somewhere in the Bahamas where the sun is warm and the breezes soft, the water crystal clear and the cooler always full. Sadly, for many, heaven is little more than a break from the rat race of life.
The kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven for our ancestors in the faith embodied a whole host of hopes and dreams, hopes for freedom and justice, for joy, and for peace among all people. The kingdom of God was what came true in the Exodus, when Egyptian slaves suddenly were set free; the kingdom of God looked something like the opening chapters of Genesis when God created the world and called God’s world “very good”; and the kingdom of God looked something like the vision given to John in the book of Revelation, a vision of a world in which “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” In the kingdom of God, the prophet Isaiah tells us: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid” and “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.”
The kingdom of God for our ancestors was never about a personal get away from this world but a reality they had seen come true in the Exodus and which those first disciples saw come true in Jesus. In and through Jesus, God was making the world new, not inviting the disciples on a Caribbean cruise. And this reality was so compelling, so unimaginably wonderful, Simon and Andrew, James and John dropped everything, left all that they had, to follow.
My Lutheran companion, David Lose, continues his reflection wondering if the declining membership in mainline churches is not in part due to our failure to be a compelling presence in this world, a community so desirable that people would prefer to be here than someplace else on Sunday morning. What we know, because the beer commercials tell us, is that folk are seeking “heaven” but what we also know is that the church is not where they are going to get a taste of God’s kingdom.
Our common life is a far more powerful sermon than I will ever preach. What we do together and how we do it, can be compelling, meaningful and desirable or distancing, irrelevant and not particularly attractive. In and through us, folk can catch a glimpse of the kingdom of God or alternatively, see something akin to a reality T.V. show. What is it about us that would draw the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the weak and the strong into our midst? What might compel a stranger to walk through our doors? What might draw someone back into the church they left long ago? We are all preaching and we are preaching all the time. Are we preaching “good news of great joy for all people” or simply hoping no one will ask us to serve on the vestry?
Every parish every year is asked to complete a parochial report. A parochial report is a form that asks for such things as the number of services we held the past year and how many folk attended them. The report always comes at the end of the year and becomes one of the first tasks to be done after Christmas. The report is tedious and as I sat this week crunching numbers, I struggled to see how filling out that report had much to do, if anything, with the kingdom of God. Yet, I know that those reports provide the data that tell us that the church we know and love is falling on hard times. What the future looks like is anybody’s guess but what we are learning is that the problem is not about money. Folk are as generous as they have ever been but they are giving to organizations that they deem to be making a difference in the world and the church is not high on their list.
What is clear is that the church, once again, is being called into new places and, like those first disciples, will most probably be asked to leave behind the comfort and securities we have long known. And, yes, The 1979 Book of Common Prayer, like The 1928 Book of Common Prayer, will not last forever. The church has survived for over two thousand years not because of us but because of God, who has given to us in the life and death of Jesus a whole new world, an unbelievable world where lepers are healed, the blind see and death will not have the last word.
We, all of us, embody that world, enflesh that world for others. Here, at St. Asaph’s, I have told you before and I will tell you again, God has graced us richly and “to whom much has been given, much will be required.” God has not called us together for our sakes but for the sake of the world and what we show forth in our common life, in great and little ways, preaches. The only question is what are we preaching? Are we bearing witness to a world made new by God or are we preaching out of fear that we really would like God to leave us alone and not disturb our comforts and securities?
I confess I do not like change and would really like things to stay the same. But as I consider where God has led me in life, I have to wonder where I thought I had come to the place I would want to stay. Was that place in high school? Hardly. Was it when I got married and before I had children? No. Was it when my children grew up and left home and I was relieved of the burdens of children under foot? No. Was it when I was ordained to the priesthood and put on a collar for the first time? No, that moment lasted only minutes, quickly giving way to life in the church which is sometimes messy and difficult, but also often wondrous and joyous.
Where in our common life would you have liked our life together to stop? We began life in this world as a yoked parish with St. Peter’s and Vauter’s parish. We broke the yoke but then took on the challenge of finding and sustaining a clergy person alone, without the help of our sister parishes. On the way, we gave up an old prayer book and took on a new one and that was not easy. And then you all installed and paid for an elevator so that no one would be excluded from our midst. And now, as of May, 2011, you have called a woman to be your priest-in-charge and that is as new for me as it is for you. Where, dear friends, would you like to stop? I am with a good bit of fear and trembling wondering where God will take us next. I hope you are too. And as we prayed this morning “may God give us grace to answer readily the call our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works.”
Sunday, January 22, 2012 I Corinthians 7: 29 – 31
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 1: 14 – 20
Immediately Jesus called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.’
Mark 1: 20
I shamelessly admit that my reflection on the gospel this morning is sparked by David Lose, a Lutheran seminary professor, who writes: “The thing about this passage that makes it kind of hard to preach is that while most of us may admire what the disciples do, few of us would consider following their examples.” This morning we hear Jesus call the first disciples, telling them to “follow me,” and Simon and Andrew, James and John, all fishermen, immediately drop their nets and go. In our gospel reading, four men walk away from their livelihoods and, James and John leave their father Zebedee “in the boat with the hired men.”
The gospel according to Mark is the shortest and most breathless of all the gospels and this morning, Mark needs only six verses to tell us how four men, without warning and with no preparation, “immediately” walk away from what they have been doing their whole lives to follow a man who is a known associate of John the Baptist, who Mark tells us “has been arrested” and is in prison. James and John leave their father Zebedee and in first century Palestine, the departure of his two sons meant the future of the family fishing business was no longer secure. Moreover, in first century Palestine, sons were expected to honor their father, not walk away without explanation, leaving their father to manage on his own.
The call of the first disciples in the gospel of Mark is sudden, immediate, and a radical break with the past. Which leads David Lose to wonder: “What would make you drop everything and pursue an entirely new life?” For our evangelist Mark, what draws the disciples away from a way of life that is respectable and secure, lived out by their families for generations, is something called “the kingdom of God.”
“The kingdom of God has come near,” Jesus tells the disciples, and upon that reality, the disciples drop everything and follow. What Mark calls the “kingdom of God,” is sometimes called “the kingdom of heaven” by others. What the disciples are seeking, and what they have seen in Jesus, is both a reality and a vision of, what you and I often speak of as “heaven.”
Left in the hands of advertisers, usually those selling beer, heaven is that moment when we say “It just doesn’t get any better than this!” Commercially speaking, heaven is somewhere in the Bahamas where the sun is warm and the breezes soft, the water crystal clear and the cooler always full. Sadly, for many, heaven is little more than a break from the rat race of life.
The kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven for our ancestors in the faith embodied a whole host of hopes and dreams, hopes for freedom and justice, for joy, and for peace among all people. The kingdom of God was what came true in the Exodus, when Egyptian slaves suddenly were set free; the kingdom of God looked something like the opening chapters of Genesis when God created the world and called God’s world “very good”; and the kingdom of God looked something like the vision given to John in the book of Revelation, a vision of a world in which “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more.” In the kingdom of God, the prophet Isaiah tells us: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid” and “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.”
The kingdom of God for our ancestors was never about a personal get away from this world but a reality they had seen come true in the Exodus and which those first disciples saw come true in Jesus. In and through Jesus, God was making the world new, not inviting the disciples on a Caribbean cruise. And this reality was so compelling, so unimaginably wonderful, Simon and Andrew, James and John dropped everything, left all that they had, to follow.
My Lutheran companion, David Lose, continues his reflection wondering if the declining membership in mainline churches is not in part due to our failure to be a compelling presence in this world, a community so desirable that people would prefer to be here than someplace else on Sunday morning. What we know, because the beer commercials tell us, is that folk are seeking “heaven” but what we also know is that the church is not where they are going to get a taste of God’s kingdom.
Our common life is a far more powerful sermon than I will ever preach. What we do together and how we do it, can be compelling, meaningful and desirable or distancing, irrelevant and not particularly attractive. In and through us, folk can catch a glimpse of the kingdom of God or alternatively, see something akin to a reality T.V. show. What is it about us that would draw the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the weak and the strong into our midst? What might compel a stranger to walk through our doors? What might draw someone back into the church they left long ago? We are all preaching and we are preaching all the time. Are we preaching “good news of great joy for all people” or simply hoping no one will ask us to serve on the vestry?
Every parish every year is asked to complete a parochial report. A parochial report is a form that asks for such things as the number of services we held the past year and how many folk attended them. The report always comes at the end of the year and becomes one of the first tasks to be done after Christmas. The report is tedious and as I sat this week crunching numbers, I struggled to see how filling out that report had much to do, if anything, with the kingdom of God. Yet, I know that those reports provide the data that tell us that the church we know and love is falling on hard times. What the future looks like is anybody’s guess but what we are learning is that the problem is not about money. Folk are as generous as they have ever been but they are giving to organizations that they deem to be making a difference in the world and the church is not high on their list.
What is clear is that the church, once again, is being called into new places and, like those first disciples, will most probably be asked to leave behind the comfort and securities we have long known. And, yes, The 1979 Book of Common Prayer, like The 1928 Book of Common Prayer, will not last forever. The church has survived for over two thousand years not because of us but because of God, who has given to us in the life and death of Jesus a whole new world, an unbelievable world where lepers are healed, the blind see and death will not have the last word.
We, all of us, embody that world, enflesh that world for others. Here, at St. Asaph’s, I have told you before and I will tell you again, God has graced us richly and “to whom much has been given, much will be required.” God has not called us together for our sakes but for the sake of the world and what we show forth in our common life, in great and little ways, preaches. The only question is what are we preaching? Are we bearing witness to a world made new by God or are we preaching out of fear that we really would like God to leave us alone and not disturb our comforts and securities?
I confess I do not like change and would really like things to stay the same. But as I consider where God has led me in life, I have to wonder where I thought I had come to the place I would want to stay. Was that place in high school? Hardly. Was it when I got married and before I had children? No. Was it when my children grew up and left home and I was relieved of the burdens of children under foot? No. Was it when I was ordained to the priesthood and put on a collar for the first time? No, that moment lasted only minutes, quickly giving way to life in the church which is sometimes messy and difficult, but also often wondrous and joyous.
Where in our common life would you have liked our life together to stop? We began life in this world as a yoked parish with St. Peter’s and Vauter’s parish. We broke the yoke but then took on the challenge of finding and sustaining a clergy person alone, without the help of our sister parishes. On the way, we gave up an old prayer book and took on a new one and that was not easy. And then you all installed and paid for an elevator so that no one would be excluded from our midst. And now, as of May, 2011, you have called a woman to be your priest-in-charge and that is as new for me as it is for you. Where, dear friends, would you like to stop? I am with a good bit of fear and trembling wondering where God will take us next. I hope you are too. And as we prayed this morning “may God give us grace to answer readily the call our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works.”
