The Last Sunday After Pentecost: Christ the King Ezekiel 34: 11 – 16, 20 - 24
Sunday, November 20, 2011 Ephesians 1: 15 – 23
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 25: 31 – 46
And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me. “
Matthew 25: 40
In the spring of 2010, four members of a church in Kansas spent the day in Richmond, visiting the Holocaust Museum in Shockhoe Bottom, the Jewish Community Center in Henrico County, Hermitage High School and a Jewish cultural center in South Richmond. Carrying signs and chanting: “God hates Jews” and “God hates the USA,” the small group provoked hundreds of counter protestors to gather in opposition. The Richmond visitors were members of the Westboro Baptist Church, known for picketing the funerals of service men and women killed in combat, as a protest against their defense of a nation of “sodomite hypocrites” and a sign of God’s judgment against an errant nation.
The actions of those four people - three adults and one child – were not only despicable, but seem bizarre in our enlightened age, an age in which such angry rants suggest deluded thinking at a minimum, mental illness at worse. Such wholesale condemnation of Jews, gays and the military is not only hard to listen to, but dangerous – inviting those who disagree to respond with similar vehemence.
I remember reading the story in the Richmond Times Dispatch and feeling very angry at how, in the hands of these folk, the gospel had been twisted into a demonic shape, a weapon to be used to condemn and to hate and not a well spring of life and love. I remember thinking how wrong these folk were, how hateful they were, and how much I did not want to be like them nor even be around them. How dare they presume to know what God hates!
And yet today, on this the last Sunday of our liturgical year, just before we enter Advent and a new church year, we hear from Jesus that one day “all the nations” will be gathered together and like a shepherd, the Son of Man will separate the sheep from the goats, the righteous from the unrighteous. The righteous will inherit a kingdom and the unrighteous will be sent away “into eternal punishment .”
On this, the last Sunday of this liturgical year, we encounter a God of justice, a God who will, in the words of the Nicene Creed, “come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” a God who will finish what God began long ago when God created a world and called this world “very good.” Today we encounter a God who will one day establish a kingdom in which no one is hungry, no one is thirsty, no one is naked or sick or in prison or left unwelcomed. The God we encounter this morning will make good on God’s promises to bring the world round right, a world in which “mourning and crying and pain will be no more,” in the words of Revelation. When God’s kingdom comes, the righteous will rejoice and the unrighteous will weep.
Today we are confronted with the promise of God’s judgment in a world that either disdains judgment altogether or is wholly assured of who among us are sheep and who are goats. For some, the idea that God will judge us makes little sense because we live in a world which is neither black nor white but a muddled grey. We cannot always be assured we are doing good or evil, so we “do the best we can” and “live and let live.” And we hope God will understand.
On the other hand, for some, the idea that one day God will separate the righteous from the unrighteous means we can distinguish between what is good and what is evil. For the folk of Westboro Baptist Church, good is picketing the funerals of American service men and women and I, for one, find their actions to be evil, not good.
We live in a world that is not of like mind on the promise of God’s judgment. For some, the judgment of God is incompatible with the mercy of God; for others, God’s judgment is license to draw moral lines in the sand, condemning those who step over the line. I, for one, take comfort in hearing that both the righteous and the unrighteous are taken by surprise in our text this morning. But alongside that comfort is the promise of judgment and I suspect most of us would prefer to be counted among the sheep and not among the goats.
Our text has a long history of interpretation and not all of the interpretations have been the same. Our text has two major interpretative difficulties. The first comes early with the phrase “all the nations.” Who is being judged? Does our evangelist Matthew mean all the peoples of the earth or just the gentiles, the non Jews? If Matthew means all people, then the righteous are those who have fed the hungry and given drink to the thirsty regardless of their faith in Christ. Good news for the compassionate of the earth whoever they are; bad news for those who, like Martin Luther, claimed we are saved by grace and not good works.
The other interpretive difficulty is how we understand the phrase “the least of the members of my family.” Are we to understand the “least” as all those who suffer in this world or just those in the church, those “who are members of my family,” the body of Christ?
For the most part, current interpretation favors what we might call a universal reading – all of humanity is called to serve all those who suffer and will be judged accordingly. This reading became popular during the nineteenth century, replacing earlier interpretations which understood our text to be an admonition to care for the “least” in the church and those who are judged to be only Christians.
Reading our text universally has the clear advantage of acknowledging our hope that all of humanity will be rescued by God; but reading our text universally sounds like we can orchestrate our own rescue by doing good deeds. Our text not only confronts us with the promise of judgment but also with the difficulty of knowing exactly what Matthew meant when he wrote these verses. And even if we knew exactly what Matthew meant, we still would need to make sense of this text in a world that is very different than one in which Matthew lived and wrote.
I live in the west end of Richmond. I often frequent the library at Union Seminary. To get to the library I drive down 64 east and exist at Laburnum. I have yet to take that exit and not encounter someone at the end of the ramp with a sign saying “Please help.” I have yet to roll down my window and give anyone money but I have always felt guilty making that turn. I never make that turn when I do not remember the priest and the levite who passed by the wounded man in the story of the Good Samaritan or the words we hear this morning: “Just as you did it for one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” I never take that ramp off I 64 onto Laburnum without some angst. Always I keep hoping, those folk will not be there.
For most of my five years in Richmond, I have encountered a double amputee, a woman in a wheel chair with a sign asking for help. I noticed the last few times she is not there and her usual place along the side of the road is now occupied by a young man who stands holding a sign. I could not help but wonder what had happened to the woman I was accustomed to seeing. I wondered if she had gotten sick or perhaps had finally found a safe place to spend her days. Wondering does not make me one of the sheep for sure, but did remind me how much that woman had become a part of my world, however marginally.
The folk of Westboro are a part of my world as well, but unlike those who spend their days on the streets looking for help, the folk from Westboro engender no sympathy, evoke no compassion, and only convict me of my righteousness and their lack of righteousness. The Westboro folk are strangers I really do not want to welcome.
If the Incarnation means anything at all, if indeed God did come and live as one of us, God does indeed know what it means to be human, to be hungry and thirsty and sick and naked and a stranger and in prison. God wants us to know as well and not keep a safe distance between ourselves and those who are “the least.” God became one of us so that we might become one with God, people who hold fast to a vision of a world made new, a world in which “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things will have passed away.” On this last Sunday of the year, we remember God’s will, in the words of our collect “to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of Kings and Lord of lords,” remembering that the world in which we live will one day pass away. We can live now as people who anticipate this new heaven and new earth or spend our time justifying ourselves and our actions in the hope of being a sheep rather than a goat. What I know is that the harder I try to become a sheep the more I become a goat.
Sunday, November 20, 2011 Ephesians 1: 15 – 23
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 25: 31 – 46
And the king will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me. “
Matthew 25: 40
In the spring of 2010, four members of a church in Kansas spent the day in Richmond, visiting the Holocaust Museum in Shockhoe Bottom, the Jewish Community Center in Henrico County, Hermitage High School and a Jewish cultural center in South Richmond. Carrying signs and chanting: “God hates Jews” and “God hates the USA,” the small group provoked hundreds of counter protestors to gather in opposition. The Richmond visitors were members of the Westboro Baptist Church, known for picketing the funerals of service men and women killed in combat, as a protest against their defense of a nation of “sodomite hypocrites” and a sign of God’s judgment against an errant nation.
The actions of those four people - three adults and one child – were not only despicable, but seem bizarre in our enlightened age, an age in which such angry rants suggest deluded thinking at a minimum, mental illness at worse. Such wholesale condemnation of Jews, gays and the military is not only hard to listen to, but dangerous – inviting those who disagree to respond with similar vehemence.
I remember reading the story in the Richmond Times Dispatch and feeling very angry at how, in the hands of these folk, the gospel had been twisted into a demonic shape, a weapon to be used to condemn and to hate and not a well spring of life and love. I remember thinking how wrong these folk were, how hateful they were, and how much I did not want to be like them nor even be around them. How dare they presume to know what God hates!
And yet today, on this the last Sunday of our liturgical year, just before we enter Advent and a new church year, we hear from Jesus that one day “all the nations” will be gathered together and like a shepherd, the Son of Man will separate the sheep from the goats, the righteous from the unrighteous. The righteous will inherit a kingdom and the unrighteous will be sent away “into eternal punishment .”
On this, the last Sunday of this liturgical year, we encounter a God of justice, a God who will, in the words of the Nicene Creed, “come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,” a God who will finish what God began long ago when God created a world and called this world “very good.” Today we encounter a God who will one day establish a kingdom in which no one is hungry, no one is thirsty, no one is naked or sick or in prison or left unwelcomed. The God we encounter this morning will make good on God’s promises to bring the world round right, a world in which “mourning and crying and pain will be no more,” in the words of Revelation. When God’s kingdom comes, the righteous will rejoice and the unrighteous will weep.
Today we are confronted with the promise of God’s judgment in a world that either disdains judgment altogether or is wholly assured of who among us are sheep and who are goats. For some, the idea that God will judge us makes little sense because we live in a world which is neither black nor white but a muddled grey. We cannot always be assured we are doing good or evil, so we “do the best we can” and “live and let live.” And we hope God will understand.
On the other hand, for some, the idea that one day God will separate the righteous from the unrighteous means we can distinguish between what is good and what is evil. For the folk of Westboro Baptist Church, good is picketing the funerals of American service men and women and I, for one, find their actions to be evil, not good.
We live in a world that is not of like mind on the promise of God’s judgment. For some, the judgment of God is incompatible with the mercy of God; for others, God’s judgment is license to draw moral lines in the sand, condemning those who step over the line. I, for one, take comfort in hearing that both the righteous and the unrighteous are taken by surprise in our text this morning. But alongside that comfort is the promise of judgment and I suspect most of us would prefer to be counted among the sheep and not among the goats.
Our text has a long history of interpretation and not all of the interpretations have been the same. Our text has two major interpretative difficulties. The first comes early with the phrase “all the nations.” Who is being judged? Does our evangelist Matthew mean all the peoples of the earth or just the gentiles, the non Jews? If Matthew means all people, then the righteous are those who have fed the hungry and given drink to the thirsty regardless of their faith in Christ. Good news for the compassionate of the earth whoever they are; bad news for those who, like Martin Luther, claimed we are saved by grace and not good works.
The other interpretive difficulty is how we understand the phrase “the least of the members of my family.” Are we to understand the “least” as all those who suffer in this world or just those in the church, those “who are members of my family,” the body of Christ?
For the most part, current interpretation favors what we might call a universal reading – all of humanity is called to serve all those who suffer and will be judged accordingly. This reading became popular during the nineteenth century, replacing earlier interpretations which understood our text to be an admonition to care for the “least” in the church and those who are judged to be only Christians.
Reading our text universally has the clear advantage of acknowledging our hope that all of humanity will be rescued by God; but reading our text universally sounds like we can orchestrate our own rescue by doing good deeds. Our text not only confronts us with the promise of judgment but also with the difficulty of knowing exactly what Matthew meant when he wrote these verses. And even if we knew exactly what Matthew meant, we still would need to make sense of this text in a world that is very different than one in which Matthew lived and wrote.
I live in the west end of Richmond. I often frequent the library at Union Seminary. To get to the library I drive down 64 east and exist at Laburnum. I have yet to take that exit and not encounter someone at the end of the ramp with a sign saying “Please help.” I have yet to roll down my window and give anyone money but I have always felt guilty making that turn. I never make that turn when I do not remember the priest and the levite who passed by the wounded man in the story of the Good Samaritan or the words we hear this morning: “Just as you did it for one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” I never take that ramp off I 64 onto Laburnum without some angst. Always I keep hoping, those folk will not be there.
For most of my five years in Richmond, I have encountered a double amputee, a woman in a wheel chair with a sign asking for help. I noticed the last few times she is not there and her usual place along the side of the road is now occupied by a young man who stands holding a sign. I could not help but wonder what had happened to the woman I was accustomed to seeing. I wondered if she had gotten sick or perhaps had finally found a safe place to spend her days. Wondering does not make me one of the sheep for sure, but did remind me how much that woman had become a part of my world, however marginally.
The folk of Westboro are a part of my world as well, but unlike those who spend their days on the streets looking for help, the folk from Westboro engender no sympathy, evoke no compassion, and only convict me of my righteousness and their lack of righteousness. The Westboro folk are strangers I really do not want to welcome.
If the Incarnation means anything at all, if indeed God did come and live as one of us, God does indeed know what it means to be human, to be hungry and thirsty and sick and naked and a stranger and in prison. God wants us to know as well and not keep a safe distance between ourselves and those who are “the least.” God became one of us so that we might become one with God, people who hold fast to a vision of a world made new, a world in which “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things will have passed away.” On this last Sunday of the year, we remember God’s will, in the words of our collect “to restore all things in your well-beloved Son, the King of Kings and Lord of lords,” remembering that the world in which we live will one day pass away. We can live now as people who anticipate this new heaven and new earth or spend our time justifying ourselves and our actions in the hope of being a sheep rather than a goat. What I know is that the harder I try to become a sheep the more I become a goat.
All Saints’ Day Ecclesiasticus 2: 1 – 11
Sunday, November 7, 2010 Ephesians 1: 11 – 23
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 6: 20 – 36
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Luke 6: 36
This past Monday, November 1, was All Saints’ Day. All Saints’ Day is an important day in the life of the church, joining Christmas and Easter as days of special significance. Unfortunately, the observance of All Saints’ Day tends to be overshadowed by our celebration of Halloween. Halloween is the night before All Saints’ Day or All Hallows Day as the day used to be known. As All Hallows Eve morphed into Halloween, costumes and candy trumped remembering dead saints.
Yet, All Saints’ Day continues to be important in the life of the church because on All Saints’ Day we remember all the saints, all the holy people of God, in the hope that their witness may encourage us as we continue to live out our lives of faith.
The tradition of remembering the saints has roots in the early church who desired to keep alive the memory of the early martyrs. The witness of the martyrs gave hope to those who struggled to live out their faith in a world that resisted the gospel and persecuted those who believed. In time, as Marion Hatchett, commentator on The Book of Common Prayer notes, “The saints came to represent intercessors and protectors rather than witnesses for the faith.”
By the sixteenth century, saints were not only remembered but had become the object of prayer. Many in the church prayed to various saints, believing that a saint could advocate for them before God. But for the reformers, Christ is our sole mediator and advocate and the practice of invoking the name of a saint was unscriptural and blasphemous.
So, whereas, we in the Episcopal Church, continue to remember saints, we do not worship them. And in The Book of Common Prayer, we have a calendar that designates particular days of the year when we remember the lives of those throughout all generations who have born witness to the faith in their lives and sometimes through their deaths.
“Saint” comes from the Greek word “sanctus” and means holy. “Holy” is what God is. And what we, who are made in God’s image, are called to be. Holy is what the people of Israel were called to be, a people set apart by God and for God. Holy is what Christ was and is, the image of God, a perfect and complete manifestation of who God is and what God desires. To be holy means to be like Christ.
You and I are made one with Christ in baptism. In baptism we are joined to Christ forever. In baptism, we are united with Christ for all time and beyond time. In baptism, we are deemed holy because Christ is holy. In baptism, we become saints.
Sainthood is not an achievement, a designation God confers upon us if we live a life of moral perfection. Sainthood is a gift God gives us in and through Christ at baptism and then calls us to live out. We are all saints by virtue of our baptism, not by virtue of our morality.
In baptism, we are baptized into the death of Christ and raised to new life, Christ’s risen life, the life of the world to come, life as God intends life to be, life lived no longer under the shadow of death. In baptism, we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit, the power of God to enable us to live this new life, this resurrection life. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we can live no longer for ourselves, but for Christ and all those for whom Christ died.
Baptism is the beginning of a journey, a journey with God who leads us from the font out into the world, by the power of the Holy Spirit to go where God would have us go and do what God would have us do. For some, like Mother Theresa, the Spirit called her to spend her life on the streets of India with the poorest of the poor. For others, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Spirit called him to oppose Hitler even if that meant helping to assassinate Hitler and to support the killing of another human being. For Martin Luther King, the Spirit led him to oppose racial segregation and led directly to his death. Baptism for the church is not a quiet and quaint ritual but a revolution, a revolution of the heart and mind in and through which we are called to live as Christ lived and empowered to do so by the gift of God’s Holy Spirit.
In baptism, we take our place within the communion of saints, a cloud of witnesses who in every generation have looked to God with hope, have seen God’s hope for the world enfleshed in Jesus and sought to follow the pleadings of the risen Christ, the spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit. Each witness is different – we are not all called to be martyrs or to live out our lives on the streets of India. But we are all called and graced by the power of the Holy Spirit to become witnesses to the new life God gives us in baptism.
Jesus this morning in our reading from the gospel of Luke pronounces a blessing upon the poor, the hungry, those who weep and those who are excluded. The rich, the well fed, those for whom life is good and who enjoy the esteem of their neighbors are not given a blessing for they have already been blessed, graced with the good things of God.
I, for one, would not choose to be poor or hungry or grief stricken or excluded. I cannot begin to imagine what life must be like when every day is spent simply looking for something to eat. I have never been persecuted and I do not go to bed at night fearing that the Gestapo might come and load me onto a cattle car. I have never worried that if I get sick, I might not have enough money to pay for my prescriptions.
What I know is that the God revealed to us in Christ desires no one to be hungry, no one to be poor, no one to be in grief and no one to be excluded. What I know is that in the age to come, when God comes again in glory to make all things new, no one will be hungry or poor or in tears or marginalized. That vision of a world made new has been and remains the hope of all the saints, that great cloud of witnesses, who in every generation have refused to rest satisfied that the way world is, is the way the world is meant to be.
“Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful,” Jesus tells us this day. To be merciful is to show compassion, to suffer with the poor and the hungry and the grief stricken and the excluded, to bring hope to those with no hope, to be a blessing to others and not a curse. We are to be merciful because God has been merciful to us, giving us free of charge the promise of a new life in baptism and then gracing us with the power of the Holy Spirit, to be the people, the witnesses, God would have us be.
In baptism, we are “sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.” In baptism, Christ takes us to himself, not because of anything we have done, certainly not because we can in any way earn Christ’s love, but solely because of who Christ is, the incarnation of the God who created this world and all of us and who loves, each of us and all of us without exception.
In baptism, we become a member of Christ’s body, the church, and participate, sometimes memorably and sometimes not, in the communion of saints, a communion that includes some whose names are known to us like Mary, Joseph, Peter, Paul, Matthew, Mark and Luke, but also many who are known only to God.
Remember this day that you are a saint, “marked” by God as holy not because you are holy but because God is. And what God wants and will one day make happen, is for the whole world to be holy, a vast sacred space in which all are safe and sustained, able to flourish and to grow, a world of friendship not enmity.
In the meantime, we are this day reminded that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, people who have cleaved to a vision of a world made new. May their lives and their acts encourage us and give us hope, so that we may become bearers of hope for others in a world that more often than not seems destined to remain as it is, a place of comfort for some and a place of discomfort for others, a place where some folk eat three meals a day and others are grateful just to eat one, a place where some folk can afford to take a vacation while others cannot escape the sound of gunshots and the terror of war, where some of us take our rest at night in warm beds and others lay down on heating grates. May we, who have been saved by grace, by the merit and mediation of Christ, cleave to a vision of a world made new, a place of joy and peace and goodness for all of God’s creatures and live lives that reflect the mercy God has shown toward us, trusting in the power of the Holy Spirit to lead us where God would have us go.
Sunday, November 7, 2010 Ephesians 1: 11 – 23
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 6: 20 – 36
Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.
Luke 6: 36
This past Monday, November 1, was All Saints’ Day. All Saints’ Day is an important day in the life of the church, joining Christmas and Easter as days of special significance. Unfortunately, the observance of All Saints’ Day tends to be overshadowed by our celebration of Halloween. Halloween is the night before All Saints’ Day or All Hallows Day as the day used to be known. As All Hallows Eve morphed into Halloween, costumes and candy trumped remembering dead saints.
Yet, All Saints’ Day continues to be important in the life of the church because on All Saints’ Day we remember all the saints, all the holy people of God, in the hope that their witness may encourage us as we continue to live out our lives of faith.
The tradition of remembering the saints has roots in the early church who desired to keep alive the memory of the early martyrs. The witness of the martyrs gave hope to those who struggled to live out their faith in a world that resisted the gospel and persecuted those who believed. In time, as Marion Hatchett, commentator on The Book of Common Prayer notes, “The saints came to represent intercessors and protectors rather than witnesses for the faith.”
By the sixteenth century, saints were not only remembered but had become the object of prayer. Many in the church prayed to various saints, believing that a saint could advocate for them before God. But for the reformers, Christ is our sole mediator and advocate and the practice of invoking the name of a saint was unscriptural and blasphemous.
So, whereas, we in the Episcopal Church, continue to remember saints, we do not worship them. And in The Book of Common Prayer, we have a calendar that designates particular days of the year when we remember the lives of those throughout all generations who have born witness to the faith in their lives and sometimes through their deaths.
“Saint” comes from the Greek word “sanctus” and means holy. “Holy” is what God is. And what we, who are made in God’s image, are called to be. Holy is what the people of Israel were called to be, a people set apart by God and for God. Holy is what Christ was and is, the image of God, a perfect and complete manifestation of who God is and what God desires. To be holy means to be like Christ.
You and I are made one with Christ in baptism. In baptism we are joined to Christ forever. In baptism, we are united with Christ for all time and beyond time. In baptism, we are deemed holy because Christ is holy. In baptism, we become saints.
Sainthood is not an achievement, a designation God confers upon us if we live a life of moral perfection. Sainthood is a gift God gives us in and through Christ at baptism and then calls us to live out. We are all saints by virtue of our baptism, not by virtue of our morality.
In baptism, we are baptized into the death of Christ and raised to new life, Christ’s risen life, the life of the world to come, life as God intends life to be, life lived no longer under the shadow of death. In baptism, we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit, the power of God to enable us to live this new life, this resurrection life. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we can live no longer for ourselves, but for Christ and all those for whom Christ died.
Baptism is the beginning of a journey, a journey with God who leads us from the font out into the world, by the power of the Holy Spirit to go where God would have us go and do what God would have us do. For some, like Mother Theresa, the Spirit called her to spend her life on the streets of India with the poorest of the poor. For others, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Spirit called him to oppose Hitler even if that meant helping to assassinate Hitler and to support the killing of another human being. For Martin Luther King, the Spirit led him to oppose racial segregation and led directly to his death. Baptism for the church is not a quiet and quaint ritual but a revolution, a revolution of the heart and mind in and through which we are called to live as Christ lived and empowered to do so by the gift of God’s Holy Spirit.
In baptism, we take our place within the communion of saints, a cloud of witnesses who in every generation have looked to God with hope, have seen God’s hope for the world enfleshed in Jesus and sought to follow the pleadings of the risen Christ, the spirit of Christ, the Holy Spirit. Each witness is different – we are not all called to be martyrs or to live out our lives on the streets of India. But we are all called and graced by the power of the Holy Spirit to become witnesses to the new life God gives us in baptism.
Jesus this morning in our reading from the gospel of Luke pronounces a blessing upon the poor, the hungry, those who weep and those who are excluded. The rich, the well fed, those for whom life is good and who enjoy the esteem of their neighbors are not given a blessing for they have already been blessed, graced with the good things of God.
I, for one, would not choose to be poor or hungry or grief stricken or excluded. I cannot begin to imagine what life must be like when every day is spent simply looking for something to eat. I have never been persecuted and I do not go to bed at night fearing that the Gestapo might come and load me onto a cattle car. I have never worried that if I get sick, I might not have enough money to pay for my prescriptions.
What I know is that the God revealed to us in Christ desires no one to be hungry, no one to be poor, no one to be in grief and no one to be excluded. What I know is that in the age to come, when God comes again in glory to make all things new, no one will be hungry or poor or in tears or marginalized. That vision of a world made new has been and remains the hope of all the saints, that great cloud of witnesses, who in every generation have refused to rest satisfied that the way world is, is the way the world is meant to be.
“Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful,” Jesus tells us this day. To be merciful is to show compassion, to suffer with the poor and the hungry and the grief stricken and the excluded, to bring hope to those with no hope, to be a blessing to others and not a curse. We are to be merciful because God has been merciful to us, giving us free of charge the promise of a new life in baptism and then gracing us with the power of the Holy Spirit, to be the people, the witnesses, God would have us be.
In baptism, we are “sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.” In baptism, Christ takes us to himself, not because of anything we have done, certainly not because we can in any way earn Christ’s love, but solely because of who Christ is, the incarnation of the God who created this world and all of us and who loves, each of us and all of us without exception.
In baptism, we become a member of Christ’s body, the church, and participate, sometimes memorably and sometimes not, in the communion of saints, a communion that includes some whose names are known to us like Mary, Joseph, Peter, Paul, Matthew, Mark and Luke, but also many who are known only to God.
Remember this day that you are a saint, “marked” by God as holy not because you are holy but because God is. And what God wants and will one day make happen, is for the whole world to be holy, a vast sacred space in which all are safe and sustained, able to flourish and to grow, a world of friendship not enmity.
In the meantime, we are this day reminded that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, people who have cleaved to a vision of a world made new. May their lives and their acts encourage us and give us hope, so that we may become bearers of hope for others in a world that more often than not seems destined to remain as it is, a place of comfort for some and a place of discomfort for others, a place where some folk eat three meals a day and others are grateful just to eat one, a place where some folk can afford to take a vacation while others cannot escape the sound of gunshots and the terror of war, where some of us take our rest at night in warm beds and others lay down on heating grates. May we, who have been saved by grace, by the merit and mediation of Christ, cleave to a vision of a world made new, a place of joy and peace and goodness for all of God’s creatures and live lives that reflect the mercy God has shown toward us, trusting in the power of the Holy Spirit to lead us where God would have us go.
The Twenty-Fifth Sunday After Pentecost Isaiah 65: 17 – 25
Sunday, November 14, 2010 2 Thessalonians 3: 6 – 13
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 21: 5 - 19
By your endurance you will gain your souls.
Luke 21: 19
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, in the Harvard University Memorial Church, professor of divinity Peter Gomes delivered a sermon entitled, “Outer Turmoil, Inner Strength.” In the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center, Gomes shared the story of the people of God, a story in which over and over again, God’s people were tasked to endure tremendous suffering as they waited upon God to deliver them. “The whole record of scripture,” Gomes noted, “from Genesis to Revelation, and the whole experience of the people of God from Good Friday down to and beyond September 11, suggests that faith is forged on the anvil of human adversity. No adversity; no faith.”
Following September 11th, fueled by the outrage that terrorists would stop at nothing to make their point, security was heightened at airports and vast resources were spent upon bringing the terrorists to justice. On September 11th 2001, we all were reminded that we are vulnerable and our vulnerability makes us afraid, fearful of others who can exploit our vulnerability.
In our reading this morning from the gospel of Luke, Jesus is standing in the magnificent temple of Jerusalem, that holiest of places for the Jewish people, the place where God was present and in which the people of God were safe and secure. And Jesus says the temple will be destroyed, utterly and completely, “not one stone will be left upon another.” Those who listened to Jesus that day must have thought Jesus was crazy because God’s temple was as inviolable as were our shores before 9-11. God would never let God’s temple be destroyed; God would never do that.
But in 70 A.D., after four years of war, the Romans burned the temple in Jerusalem to the ground. The unimaginable had happened. Luke is writing his gospel a generation after that fateful day, to a people who can still remember the temple which is no more. And Luke is writing his gospel some fifty years before another revolt in 135 A.D. which promised to overthrow the empire of Rome and enable the Jews to live in peace, but which only resulted in more death and disaster.
Endure, Jesus says. Persevere.
No one of us desires to suffer and when we are confronted with any tragedy, large or small, our impulse is to relieve our pain as quickly as possible, to fix what is wrong, to return as soon as possible to what we believe is “normal” – a comfortable existence free from all threats to our happiness or well-being. Enduring the pain of suffering is not something most of us are wont to do. And, yet, we all, in this life will suffer, sometimes horribly. Our faith in a good and loving God will be tested.
Over and over again, our ancestors in the faith met suffering, suffering in spite of the fact that they were the chosen people. In the face of the destruction of the temple by the Romans and, even before, as the empires of Assyria and Babylon threatened to swallow up the tiny nation of Israel, a kind of literature developed that proffered hope in a coming redemption. God would come and rescue God’s people but not before a period of great tribulation. Cosmic signs, “great signs in heaven,” as our text today reads, signs no one could miss, would announce the final triumph of God. Tribulation was to be expected but would not be the last word. “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom,” Jesus tells those standing under the protection of the temple. Before the great and final Day of the Lord, the faithful will be persecuted, but “I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict,” Jesus announces, and “by your endurance, you will gain your souls.”
The idea that the people of God would have to suffer was a new awareness to our ancestors in the faith. Chosen by God to be a blessing to all the peoples of the earth, the children of Abraham never thought that they would have to drink from the cup of woe. If the children of Abraham were faithful to this God who had brought them out of slavery in Egypt, they would be blessed not cursed. But as the centuries wore on, these children of Abraham came to know something different, came to know woe, came to know persecution and heartache and suffering. In time, these children of Abraham, looked for vindication not in the present but in some future day when God would come and rescue them from their oppressors. Until that day, that day when God would come with signs no one could miss, the people of God were called to endure, to be steadfast, to persevere.
And to this day, faithful Jews have persevered, persevered in spite of their suffering, suffering that reached diabolic heights when God’s chosen people were almost completely eradicated from the earth during the Holocaust, when in the name of Christ, six million Jews, homosexuals and the mentally retarded were systematically and very efficiently eliminated from the face of the earth.
Suffering and adversity is not anything we court; adversity comes to us unbidden and leaves us with a choice. Either God is and wishes us well or God is not and we are alone, alone to do the best we can, which usually means keeping ourselves as comfortable as possible as long as possible. Ultimately, though, none of us can escape the reality that we are not invincible, we can be hurt, and just about everything we count on to keep us feeling safe and secure – our families, our homes, our bank accounts – can be taken from us.
Many of us, I suspect, were raised to minimize our suffering, to “buck up” and “be strong” because “things could be worse.” Crying over spilled milk was a waste of time and energy. Tears were a sign of weakness and only made others uncomfortable. Afraid of falling apart, of losing control, we seek to be stoic in the face of adversity, telling others we really are alright when in truth we are not. Suffering, our suffering, is an embarrassment, a sign of weakness in a culture that tells us we need to be strong.
Suffering is real and cannot simply be dismissed. Not to acknowledge our suffering only increases our suffering, isolating us from others, others who like us suffer as well. Acknowledging our suffering, grieving the inevitable losses we all must endure, is the means whereby we become compassionate, able to be with others in their grief and in their pain. We simply cannot hear the cries of the world if we have never shed our own tears.
At the heart of all suffering is the painful truth that we are mortal, limited and finite creatures who cannot save ourselves. We can acknowledge that reality and take our place with the rest of the human race or we can dismiss our suffering as a character flaw that we can overcome. What we cannot do is escape suffering.
Suffering, in whatever form suffering takes, tempts us to despair, to give up, to throw in the towel, to sometimes literally “lay down and die.” And therein is the greatest of all evil – the temptation to despair, to despair that we and this world in which we live are destined not for a life of joy and delight but rather a life of misery and angst and pain.
And so Sunday after Sunday, we hear in our readings the story of a people who in spite of all good reason to believe otherwise, followed a promise of a new heaven and a new earth, a world in which suffering would be no more, mourning and crying and pain would be no more. In the fullness of time, a man came along who longed for that promise to be fulfilled. But the way forward meant he would have to suffer and to die. And he did. And on the third day he rose again.
Suffering is real, but suffering does not have the last word. The last word, like the first, belongs to God. Maybe knowing we do not have the last word is the best news of all.
Sunday, November 14, 2010 2 Thessalonians 3: 6 – 13
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 21: 5 - 19
By your endurance you will gain your souls.
Luke 21: 19
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, in the Harvard University Memorial Church, professor of divinity Peter Gomes delivered a sermon entitled, “Outer Turmoil, Inner Strength.” In the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center, Gomes shared the story of the people of God, a story in which over and over again, God’s people were tasked to endure tremendous suffering as they waited upon God to deliver them. “The whole record of scripture,” Gomes noted, “from Genesis to Revelation, and the whole experience of the people of God from Good Friday down to and beyond September 11, suggests that faith is forged on the anvil of human adversity. No adversity; no faith.”
Following September 11th, fueled by the outrage that terrorists would stop at nothing to make their point, security was heightened at airports and vast resources were spent upon bringing the terrorists to justice. On September 11th 2001, we all were reminded that we are vulnerable and our vulnerability makes us afraid, fearful of others who can exploit our vulnerability.
In our reading this morning from the gospel of Luke, Jesus is standing in the magnificent temple of Jerusalem, that holiest of places for the Jewish people, the place where God was present and in which the people of God were safe and secure. And Jesus says the temple will be destroyed, utterly and completely, “not one stone will be left upon another.” Those who listened to Jesus that day must have thought Jesus was crazy because God’s temple was as inviolable as were our shores before 9-11. God would never let God’s temple be destroyed; God would never do that.
But in 70 A.D., after four years of war, the Romans burned the temple in Jerusalem to the ground. The unimaginable had happened. Luke is writing his gospel a generation after that fateful day, to a people who can still remember the temple which is no more. And Luke is writing his gospel some fifty years before another revolt in 135 A.D. which promised to overthrow the empire of Rome and enable the Jews to live in peace, but which only resulted in more death and disaster.
Endure, Jesus says. Persevere.
No one of us desires to suffer and when we are confronted with any tragedy, large or small, our impulse is to relieve our pain as quickly as possible, to fix what is wrong, to return as soon as possible to what we believe is “normal” – a comfortable existence free from all threats to our happiness or well-being. Enduring the pain of suffering is not something most of us are wont to do. And, yet, we all, in this life will suffer, sometimes horribly. Our faith in a good and loving God will be tested.
Over and over again, our ancestors in the faith met suffering, suffering in spite of the fact that they were the chosen people. In the face of the destruction of the temple by the Romans and, even before, as the empires of Assyria and Babylon threatened to swallow up the tiny nation of Israel, a kind of literature developed that proffered hope in a coming redemption. God would come and rescue God’s people but not before a period of great tribulation. Cosmic signs, “great signs in heaven,” as our text today reads, signs no one could miss, would announce the final triumph of God. Tribulation was to be expected but would not be the last word. “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom,” Jesus tells those standing under the protection of the temple. Before the great and final Day of the Lord, the faithful will be persecuted, but “I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict,” Jesus announces, and “by your endurance, you will gain your souls.”
The idea that the people of God would have to suffer was a new awareness to our ancestors in the faith. Chosen by God to be a blessing to all the peoples of the earth, the children of Abraham never thought that they would have to drink from the cup of woe. If the children of Abraham were faithful to this God who had brought them out of slavery in Egypt, they would be blessed not cursed. But as the centuries wore on, these children of Abraham came to know something different, came to know woe, came to know persecution and heartache and suffering. In time, these children of Abraham, looked for vindication not in the present but in some future day when God would come and rescue them from their oppressors. Until that day, that day when God would come with signs no one could miss, the people of God were called to endure, to be steadfast, to persevere.
And to this day, faithful Jews have persevered, persevered in spite of their suffering, suffering that reached diabolic heights when God’s chosen people were almost completely eradicated from the earth during the Holocaust, when in the name of Christ, six million Jews, homosexuals and the mentally retarded were systematically and very efficiently eliminated from the face of the earth.
Suffering and adversity is not anything we court; adversity comes to us unbidden and leaves us with a choice. Either God is and wishes us well or God is not and we are alone, alone to do the best we can, which usually means keeping ourselves as comfortable as possible as long as possible. Ultimately, though, none of us can escape the reality that we are not invincible, we can be hurt, and just about everything we count on to keep us feeling safe and secure – our families, our homes, our bank accounts – can be taken from us.
Many of us, I suspect, were raised to minimize our suffering, to “buck up” and “be strong” because “things could be worse.” Crying over spilled milk was a waste of time and energy. Tears were a sign of weakness and only made others uncomfortable. Afraid of falling apart, of losing control, we seek to be stoic in the face of adversity, telling others we really are alright when in truth we are not. Suffering, our suffering, is an embarrassment, a sign of weakness in a culture that tells us we need to be strong.
Suffering is real and cannot simply be dismissed. Not to acknowledge our suffering only increases our suffering, isolating us from others, others who like us suffer as well. Acknowledging our suffering, grieving the inevitable losses we all must endure, is the means whereby we become compassionate, able to be with others in their grief and in their pain. We simply cannot hear the cries of the world if we have never shed our own tears.
At the heart of all suffering is the painful truth that we are mortal, limited and finite creatures who cannot save ourselves. We can acknowledge that reality and take our place with the rest of the human race or we can dismiss our suffering as a character flaw that we can overcome. What we cannot do is escape suffering.
Suffering, in whatever form suffering takes, tempts us to despair, to give up, to throw in the towel, to sometimes literally “lay down and die.” And therein is the greatest of all evil – the temptation to despair, to despair that we and this world in which we live are destined not for a life of joy and delight but rather a life of misery and angst and pain.
And so Sunday after Sunday, we hear in our readings the story of a people who in spite of all good reason to believe otherwise, followed a promise of a new heaven and a new earth, a world in which suffering would be no more, mourning and crying and pain would be no more. In the fullness of time, a man came along who longed for that promise to be fulfilled. But the way forward meant he would have to suffer and to die. And he did. And on the third day he rose again.
Suffering is real, but suffering does not have the last word. The last word, like the first, belongs to God. Maybe knowing we do not have the last word is the best news of all.
The Last Sunday After Pentecost Jeremiah 23: 1 – 6
Sunday, November 21, 2010 Colossians 1: 11 – 20
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 23: 33 - 43
The he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will with me in Paradise.”
Luke 23: 42 – 43
Today is the last Sunday of Pentecost and the end of this liturgical year, a year which will begin anew for the church next Sunday, on the first Sunday of Advent. On the last Sunday of every year we proclaim in our collect that Christ is “King of kings and Lord of lords,” giving thanks to God that through Christ our present divided and troubled world might be brought together and made new. What we celebrate today is God’s gracious act in Christ which is a gift not just for us and our salvation but the hope of the whole world. In Christ, the grace of God – God’s wholly undeserved and unmerited favor – has been given not just to a chosen few but to everyone. What we remember this day is that God is gracious, to everyone, without exception.
In our reading from the gospel of Luke this morning, Jesus is crucified, nailed to a cross between two criminals. One of the criminals mocks Jesus; the other criminal asks Jesus to remember him when Jesus comes into his kingdom, to which Jesus responds: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” Both criminals deserve their sentence of death, but one looks to Christ for mercy and is promised Paradise. Both criminals know they cannot save themselves; one criminal believes God can and will be gracious.
Our ancestors in the faith, the people of Israel, first experienced the grace of God when as slaves in Egypt, Moses finally persuaded Pharaoh to set them free. The Exodus was nothing less than an act of God, a wholly unexpected act of grace in which a band of poor slaves was suddenly set free. And once freed, God led these slaves through a harsh desert with a pillar of fire by night and a cloud of smoke by day, feeding them with manna and drawing water from a rock. Over and over again, God showered the Israelites with God’s goodness and love and over and over again the people of Israel doubted God really had their best interests at heart.
Impatient that Moses was taking so long receiving the Ten Commandments, the Israelites made a golden calf to worship. Not able to find food and water in the desert of Sinai, the Israelites longed to return to Egypt, where even as slaves they would eat. And then after they finally reached the Promised Land and were subsequently taken into exile first by the Babylonians and then the Assyrians, the people of Israel wondered if God had simply forgotten them altogether.
What sustained and continues to sustain our ancestors in the faith is the remembrance of God’s gracious dealings with God’s people, their sacred story, which begins with the call to Abraham, speaks of a miraculous exodus, and then a journey into exile and a return. By the grace of God, Abraham was called to leave his home and his kindred and to go a new land; by the grace of God, when the people of Abraham became slaves in the land of Egypt, God called Moses to lead God’s people out of slavery and into freedom; by the grace of God, when this poor band of slaves were afraid they might die in the Sinai desert and longed to return to the “fleshpots” of Egypt, God fed them with manna and drew water from a rock. When this people of God were taken into exile first by Babylon and then Assyria, God raised up prophets to remind God’s people who they were and what they were supposed to be about. In the telling and re-telling of that story, the people of God look back and remember so that they can look forward in hope.
The story of the people of Israel is our story and Sunday after Sunday, we hear readings from the Old Testament, the sacred story God’s dealings with the people of Israel. For us, though, the story does not end with God’s gracious favor toward Israel but continues in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, God’s ultimate act of grace in which God overcame death itself. In Christ, God’s grace is poured out upon the whole world, not just the people of Israel. As we tell and re-tell that story, we look back and remember that God has been gracious and continues to be gracious.
You and I are a part of that story, the latest actors in this drama of salvation. As we look back this afternoon during our congregational meeting at our common life this past year, we will be remembering what God has done through us, celebrating the grace of God who has led us through another year and who promises to be with us in the year to come. We need to remember what has happened, to see God at work among us so that we might not grow weary nor disheartened in the year to come. The year to come will not look like this past year; this past year did not look like the year before.
Throughout this long season of Pentecost we have prayed in our Eucharistic Prayer: We give thanks to you, O God, for the goodness and love which you have made known to us in creation; in the calling of Israel to be your people; in the Word spoken through the prophets; and above all in the Word made flesh, Jesus your Son.” God’s goodness and love have been made known to us and God sends us out into the world to bear witness to what we have seen and what we have heard.
God has been gracious to us and this afternoon I trust will be a time of glad thanksgiving. But God is also free, free to lead us where God would have us go. The Spirit of God has moved among us and will in the days and months to come, but not in ways we can predict or control. We can rejoice and give thanks but we will not know in advance, so to speak, where God would have us go and what God would have us do. That can be disconcerting for those of us who would like know where we are going before we agree to go!
What we can be assured of is the grace of God, the goodness of God that brought a band of slaves out of slavery, led them through a desert and into a Promised Land, brought forth prophets when the people lost their way, and finally raised Jesus from the dead, assuring all of us that not even death will be able to separate us from the love of God.
What we can be assured of is that none of us are here by accident, but rather have been called together by the grace of God. The Spirit of God has moved among us and I, for one, have been amazed at what the Spirit has done! But the Spirit of God also moves within us, within each one of us, gracing us with individual gifts to be shared for the upbuilding of all. No one of us is any more or less important to our common life – all of us, as Saint Paul tells us, are members of the same body whose head is Christ.
Appreciating and appropriating our gifts, recognizing that all of us have something to give and something to receive, is and will remain, the way of life God ordained when God named Christ to be “King of kings and Lord of lords.”
As we come to the end of this year and the beginning of another, we remember and give thanks for the goodness and love of God which we have experienced in our common life this past year and look forward in hope to a new year, not grounding our hope in what we can do but rather what God can do through us.
Sunday, November 21, 2010 Colossians 1: 11 – 20
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 23: 33 - 43
The he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will with me in Paradise.”
Luke 23: 42 – 43
Today is the last Sunday of Pentecost and the end of this liturgical year, a year which will begin anew for the church next Sunday, on the first Sunday of Advent. On the last Sunday of every year we proclaim in our collect that Christ is “King of kings and Lord of lords,” giving thanks to God that through Christ our present divided and troubled world might be brought together and made new. What we celebrate today is God’s gracious act in Christ which is a gift not just for us and our salvation but the hope of the whole world. In Christ, the grace of God – God’s wholly undeserved and unmerited favor – has been given not just to a chosen few but to everyone. What we remember this day is that God is gracious, to everyone, without exception.
In our reading from the gospel of Luke this morning, Jesus is crucified, nailed to a cross between two criminals. One of the criminals mocks Jesus; the other criminal asks Jesus to remember him when Jesus comes into his kingdom, to which Jesus responds: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” Both criminals deserve their sentence of death, but one looks to Christ for mercy and is promised Paradise. Both criminals know they cannot save themselves; one criminal believes God can and will be gracious.
Our ancestors in the faith, the people of Israel, first experienced the grace of God when as slaves in Egypt, Moses finally persuaded Pharaoh to set them free. The Exodus was nothing less than an act of God, a wholly unexpected act of grace in which a band of poor slaves was suddenly set free. And once freed, God led these slaves through a harsh desert with a pillar of fire by night and a cloud of smoke by day, feeding them with manna and drawing water from a rock. Over and over again, God showered the Israelites with God’s goodness and love and over and over again the people of Israel doubted God really had their best interests at heart.
Impatient that Moses was taking so long receiving the Ten Commandments, the Israelites made a golden calf to worship. Not able to find food and water in the desert of Sinai, the Israelites longed to return to Egypt, where even as slaves they would eat. And then after they finally reached the Promised Land and were subsequently taken into exile first by the Babylonians and then the Assyrians, the people of Israel wondered if God had simply forgotten them altogether.
What sustained and continues to sustain our ancestors in the faith is the remembrance of God’s gracious dealings with God’s people, their sacred story, which begins with the call to Abraham, speaks of a miraculous exodus, and then a journey into exile and a return. By the grace of God, Abraham was called to leave his home and his kindred and to go a new land; by the grace of God, when the people of Abraham became slaves in the land of Egypt, God called Moses to lead God’s people out of slavery and into freedom; by the grace of God, when this poor band of slaves were afraid they might die in the Sinai desert and longed to return to the “fleshpots” of Egypt, God fed them with manna and drew water from a rock. When this people of God were taken into exile first by Babylon and then Assyria, God raised up prophets to remind God’s people who they were and what they were supposed to be about. In the telling and re-telling of that story, the people of God look back and remember so that they can look forward in hope.
The story of the people of Israel is our story and Sunday after Sunday, we hear readings from the Old Testament, the sacred story God’s dealings with the people of Israel. For us, though, the story does not end with God’s gracious favor toward Israel but continues in the life, death and resurrection of Christ, God’s ultimate act of grace in which God overcame death itself. In Christ, God’s grace is poured out upon the whole world, not just the people of Israel. As we tell and re-tell that story, we look back and remember that God has been gracious and continues to be gracious.
You and I are a part of that story, the latest actors in this drama of salvation. As we look back this afternoon during our congregational meeting at our common life this past year, we will be remembering what God has done through us, celebrating the grace of God who has led us through another year and who promises to be with us in the year to come. We need to remember what has happened, to see God at work among us so that we might not grow weary nor disheartened in the year to come. The year to come will not look like this past year; this past year did not look like the year before.
Throughout this long season of Pentecost we have prayed in our Eucharistic Prayer: We give thanks to you, O God, for the goodness and love which you have made known to us in creation; in the calling of Israel to be your people; in the Word spoken through the prophets; and above all in the Word made flesh, Jesus your Son.” God’s goodness and love have been made known to us and God sends us out into the world to bear witness to what we have seen and what we have heard.
God has been gracious to us and this afternoon I trust will be a time of glad thanksgiving. But God is also free, free to lead us where God would have us go. The Spirit of God has moved among us and will in the days and months to come, but not in ways we can predict or control. We can rejoice and give thanks but we will not know in advance, so to speak, where God would have us go and what God would have us do. That can be disconcerting for those of us who would like know where we are going before we agree to go!
What we can be assured of is the grace of God, the goodness of God that brought a band of slaves out of slavery, led them through a desert and into a Promised Land, brought forth prophets when the people lost their way, and finally raised Jesus from the dead, assuring all of us that not even death will be able to separate us from the love of God.
What we can be assured of is that none of us are here by accident, but rather have been called together by the grace of God. The Spirit of God has moved among us and I, for one, have been amazed at what the Spirit has done! But the Spirit of God also moves within us, within each one of us, gracing us with individual gifts to be shared for the upbuilding of all. No one of us is any more or less important to our common life – all of us, as Saint Paul tells us, are members of the same body whose head is Christ.
Appreciating and appropriating our gifts, recognizing that all of us have something to give and something to receive, is and will remain, the way of life God ordained when God named Christ to be “King of kings and Lord of lords.”
As we come to the end of this year and the beginning of another, we remember and give thanks for the goodness and love of God which we have experienced in our common life this past year and look forward in hope to a new year, not grounding our hope in what we can do but rather what God can do through us.
The First Sunday of Advent Isaiah 2: 1 – 5
Sunday, November 28, 2010 Romans 13: 11 – 14
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 24: 36 – 44
Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.
Matthew 24: 42
Today we begin our journey through Advent, a season in which we look forward to the birth of Christ. On the first of the four Sundays of Advent, we always hear a gospel reading that speaks of a future coming, a time when God will come again and bring to a close this age, this age in which we live, the age that began with the resurrection of Christ.
The gospel accounts of this “second” coming are filled with language and images that are difficult for us to understand. In our reading this morning from the gospel of Matthew, Jesus likens this time to the time of Noah, a time when folk were carrying on with the ordinary business of life, never expecting a great flood. When the Son of Man comes, Jesus continues, those who work in the fields and grind meal will be separated from one another. No one knows when these things will take place, Jesus says, but one day God will make all things new so stay awake.
Jesus, this morning, draws our attention to the one great hope of Israel – that in spite of all of their many trials and tribulations, their domination first by the Babylonian empire, then Assyria, and later Rome, God would vindicate Israel and her way of life. As the centuries passed and being Jewish grew increasingly difficult in a world that sought to eradicate the strange Jewish way of life, the hope that God would come and rescue God’s people grew ever more fervent.
Two centuries before Christ, Israel’s hope for a coming vindication was embodied in a series of visions described in the Old Testament book of Daniel. In those visions, one like a Son of Man comes on the clouds of heaven and is presented before God. To him is given the lordship of the world. The rulers of this world, in other words, will not have the last say.
This hope in a coming vindication fueled the passions of many pious Jews, leading to a revolt in 167 B.C. led by Judas Maccabeus. The Maccabean revolt left Israel with a measure of independence but not for long; a hundred years later, Israel was once more a vassal state under the careful watch of Rome. This morning, Jesus affirms the ancient hope of Israel that God will come and rescue God’s people but no one knows when. A generation later, the Jews revolted again only to be crushed by Rome who burned the Temple to the ground.
Keeping awake, keeping watch for the coming of God, invited the Jews to be assured that God would come but in God’s own time and in God’s own way. Taking up arms against Rome would only lead to death and destruction. On the other hand, the Jews were not to give in to Rome and forsake their way of life. The Jews were not to give in nor give up but rather trust that God would act in God’s own time.
The word our evangelist Matthew uses which we translate “keep awake” is the same word Matthew uses later in his gospel in the Garden of Gethsemane. On the night of his arrest, Jesus takes his disciples with him to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. Jesus goes off by himself to pray and asks the disciples to “stay awake with him.” Upon his return he finds the disciples sleeping and grieves: “Could you not stay awake with me one hour?” Facing his death, Jesus bids the disciples to stay awake with him and the disciples do not. Perhaps the disciples did not understand the gravity of what lay ahead.
On that night a whole world was about to pass away and a new one was about to be born. On that night, a world haunted by the shadow of death, reigned over by evil, a world in which all of life is doomed to decay, was about to pass away. Evil was about to reign one last time, killing the Son of God. Three days later a new world would be born, a world in which death would be no more, a world embodied by the risen Christ. The world as the disciples knew it, was about to change. And the disciples were asleep!
Saint Paul would describe the world in which we live following the death and resurrection of Christ as a “world groaning in travail,” a world in labor pains, yearning for the life of the world to come, a world in which in the words of Revelation, “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” As any woman who has given birth knows, you cannot sleep through labor! Labor has a funny way of keeping you very much awake.
Advent is the time in which we live, the time between the first and second coming, the time between the resurrection of Christ and the time when God will complete what God began in Christ, making the whole world new. During Advent, we are to keep awake, alert for the coming of God’s kingdom, on guard lest we miss the signs and wonders of God acting among us. God is bringing a new world to birth and we are called to bear witness to a cynical and disbelieving world that believes this world is all there is and we just need to get used to that fact.
During Advent, we embrace and hold fast the great hope of Israel, that God would not abandon God’s people but would one great and glorious day, deliver Israel from all who sought to threaten her way of life. We believe God has fulfilled that promise in Christ, defeating not just empires like Rome but death itself, opening the door to a world we can only imagine. We live between the times, between the resurrection of Christ and the promised new creation, when God will be all in all.
For some, the passing away of this world will not be good news. For some, life in this world is good and comfortable and filled with pleasures to be enjoyed. For others, the passing away of this world cannot come soon enough. Life for many is mere survival, a constant search for food and shelter and safety from violence. During Advent we remember that although the resurrection has opened the door to a whole new world, we all live and move our being in a world that is not yet ruled by God, a world created to be good for all not just some. During Advent we remember that God’s kingdom is yet to come.
Our journey through Advent is short – only four Sundays. Advent begins for us today with the promise that God will come again and Advent will end with the story of the birth of a child, a child whose life and death and resurrection will focus our attention for the rest of the church year. Advent prepares us to hear this story, to see within this story God’s promise of a new heaven and a new earth, not just for some of us, but for all of us. Advent bids us to keep awake, alert to the in breaking of God’s kingdom in Christ, the beginning of the end of everything that seeks to keep us from life.
Advent, outside the church, is the last four weeks before Christmas, the last twenty-eight shopping days before Christmas. While Advent does encourage us to live lives that anticipate God’s final and glorious act when God will finish what God began when God created the world, I doubt God intended for us to spend our last days shopping, which seems to be the significance of these last days leading up to Christmas for much of the world.
On the other hand, for those who decry the mad preparations, Christmas trees that show up at Food Lion before Thanksgiving, the hectic search for the perfect gift and the long lines we must stand in to get that perfect gift, the careful preparation of a Christmas dinner with family and friends, replete with fruitcake that some of us love and some us do not, I want to say, ‘tis not all bad. Preparing for Christmas, anticipating a Christmas that is beyond our wildest hopes, longing to be together with those we love, to give and to receive gifts that will give expression to our love for one another is exactly what God wants to do for us, and not just us, but the whole world. Imaging the way God wants the world to be with the beauty of a Christmas tree, with lights and decorations, with gifts carefully chosen and carefully wrapped, with a feast and not just fast food, is a good thing, our way of showing forth God’s hope and God’s desire for all of us.
May your journey this Advent be alive with the goodness of God and filled with all good things. And may your journey this Advent be pregnant with possibilities, possibilities none of us can know now, but which God, if we keep our eyes open and stay awake, will reveal to us in God’s time.
Sunday, November 28, 2010 Romans 13: 11 – 14
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 24: 36 – 44
Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.
Matthew 24: 42
Today we begin our journey through Advent, a season in which we look forward to the birth of Christ. On the first of the four Sundays of Advent, we always hear a gospel reading that speaks of a future coming, a time when God will come again and bring to a close this age, this age in which we live, the age that began with the resurrection of Christ.
The gospel accounts of this “second” coming are filled with language and images that are difficult for us to understand. In our reading this morning from the gospel of Matthew, Jesus likens this time to the time of Noah, a time when folk were carrying on with the ordinary business of life, never expecting a great flood. When the Son of Man comes, Jesus continues, those who work in the fields and grind meal will be separated from one another. No one knows when these things will take place, Jesus says, but one day God will make all things new so stay awake.
Jesus, this morning, draws our attention to the one great hope of Israel – that in spite of all of their many trials and tribulations, their domination first by the Babylonian empire, then Assyria, and later Rome, God would vindicate Israel and her way of life. As the centuries passed and being Jewish grew increasingly difficult in a world that sought to eradicate the strange Jewish way of life, the hope that God would come and rescue God’s people grew ever more fervent.
Two centuries before Christ, Israel’s hope for a coming vindication was embodied in a series of visions described in the Old Testament book of Daniel. In those visions, one like a Son of Man comes on the clouds of heaven and is presented before God. To him is given the lordship of the world. The rulers of this world, in other words, will not have the last say.
This hope in a coming vindication fueled the passions of many pious Jews, leading to a revolt in 167 B.C. led by Judas Maccabeus. The Maccabean revolt left Israel with a measure of independence but not for long; a hundred years later, Israel was once more a vassal state under the careful watch of Rome. This morning, Jesus affirms the ancient hope of Israel that God will come and rescue God’s people but no one knows when. A generation later, the Jews revolted again only to be crushed by Rome who burned the Temple to the ground.
Keeping awake, keeping watch for the coming of God, invited the Jews to be assured that God would come but in God’s own time and in God’s own way. Taking up arms against Rome would only lead to death and destruction. On the other hand, the Jews were not to give in to Rome and forsake their way of life. The Jews were not to give in nor give up but rather trust that God would act in God’s own time.
The word our evangelist Matthew uses which we translate “keep awake” is the same word Matthew uses later in his gospel in the Garden of Gethsemane. On the night of his arrest, Jesus takes his disciples with him to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. Jesus goes off by himself to pray and asks the disciples to “stay awake with him.” Upon his return he finds the disciples sleeping and grieves: “Could you not stay awake with me one hour?” Facing his death, Jesus bids the disciples to stay awake with him and the disciples do not. Perhaps the disciples did not understand the gravity of what lay ahead.
On that night a whole world was about to pass away and a new one was about to be born. On that night, a world haunted by the shadow of death, reigned over by evil, a world in which all of life is doomed to decay, was about to pass away. Evil was about to reign one last time, killing the Son of God. Three days later a new world would be born, a world in which death would be no more, a world embodied by the risen Christ. The world as the disciples knew it, was about to change. And the disciples were asleep!
Saint Paul would describe the world in which we live following the death and resurrection of Christ as a “world groaning in travail,” a world in labor pains, yearning for the life of the world to come, a world in which in the words of Revelation, “Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” As any woman who has given birth knows, you cannot sleep through labor! Labor has a funny way of keeping you very much awake.
Advent is the time in which we live, the time between the first and second coming, the time between the resurrection of Christ and the time when God will complete what God began in Christ, making the whole world new. During Advent, we are to keep awake, alert for the coming of God’s kingdom, on guard lest we miss the signs and wonders of God acting among us. God is bringing a new world to birth and we are called to bear witness to a cynical and disbelieving world that believes this world is all there is and we just need to get used to that fact.
During Advent, we embrace and hold fast the great hope of Israel, that God would not abandon God’s people but would one great and glorious day, deliver Israel from all who sought to threaten her way of life. We believe God has fulfilled that promise in Christ, defeating not just empires like Rome but death itself, opening the door to a world we can only imagine. We live between the times, between the resurrection of Christ and the promised new creation, when God will be all in all.
For some, the passing away of this world will not be good news. For some, life in this world is good and comfortable and filled with pleasures to be enjoyed. For others, the passing away of this world cannot come soon enough. Life for many is mere survival, a constant search for food and shelter and safety from violence. During Advent we remember that although the resurrection has opened the door to a whole new world, we all live and move our being in a world that is not yet ruled by God, a world created to be good for all not just some. During Advent we remember that God’s kingdom is yet to come.
Our journey through Advent is short – only four Sundays. Advent begins for us today with the promise that God will come again and Advent will end with the story of the birth of a child, a child whose life and death and resurrection will focus our attention for the rest of the church year. Advent prepares us to hear this story, to see within this story God’s promise of a new heaven and a new earth, not just for some of us, but for all of us. Advent bids us to keep awake, alert to the in breaking of God’s kingdom in Christ, the beginning of the end of everything that seeks to keep us from life.
Advent, outside the church, is the last four weeks before Christmas, the last twenty-eight shopping days before Christmas. While Advent does encourage us to live lives that anticipate God’s final and glorious act when God will finish what God began when God created the world, I doubt God intended for us to spend our last days shopping, which seems to be the significance of these last days leading up to Christmas for much of the world.
On the other hand, for those who decry the mad preparations, Christmas trees that show up at Food Lion before Thanksgiving, the hectic search for the perfect gift and the long lines we must stand in to get that perfect gift, the careful preparation of a Christmas dinner with family and friends, replete with fruitcake that some of us love and some us do not, I want to say, ‘tis not all bad. Preparing for Christmas, anticipating a Christmas that is beyond our wildest hopes, longing to be together with those we love, to give and to receive gifts that will give expression to our love for one another is exactly what God wants to do for us, and not just us, but the whole world. Imaging the way God wants the world to be with the beauty of a Christmas tree, with lights and decorations, with gifts carefully chosen and carefully wrapped, with a feast and not just fast food, is a good thing, our way of showing forth God’s hope and God’s desire for all of us.
May your journey this Advent be alive with the goodness of God and filled with all good things. And may your journey this Advent be pregnant with possibilities, possibilities none of us can know now, but which God, if we keep our eyes open and stay awake, will reveal to us in God’s time.
