The Last Sunday After the Epiphany                                                         2 Kings 2: 1 – 12

Sunday, February 19, 2012                                                                 2 Corinthians 4: 3 – 6

The Rev. Bambi Willis                                                                                     Mark 9: 2 – 9

Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”

Mark 9: 7

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”  Award winning children’s author Robert McCloskey offers us a humorous glimpse into the reality of communication: we do not always hear what is being said.  What we hear is often quite different from what someone is trying tell us.  In our gospel reading this morning Peter does not hear what God is telling him.  God tells Peter this morning the glory of God is revealed through suffering and Peter, like all of us, would like to hear something different. 

Today in our gospel reading, Peter is overwhelmed by a vision of the glory of God, seeing Jesus “transfigured,” transformed from a man of flesh and blood into an other worldly figure clothed in brilliance, flanked by Moses and Elijah.  Peter is terrified and fumbles for something to do, something to say, finally blurting out a suggestion that he make tents in which this majestic company might stay.  Poor Peter; as usual Peter appears impetuous, not knowing what to say but saying something anyway. 

And then God speaks: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”

Listening was a task Peter had to learn.  And Peter had to learn like most of us the hard way.  Peter, whose unfailing love for Jesus had led him to give up everything to follow this man he believed to be the Messiah, ultimately learned that even he, the most devout of disciples cowered at the cross, denying his Lord three times.  Peter heard what he wanted to hear and what Peter wanted to hear was that the Messiah was coming in glory and great power and Rome was going down in defeat.  Peter had no clue the Messiah was going to die.  Peter heard what he wanted to hear and what Peter wanted to hear was that the promised Messiah had finally come.  What Peter could not or would not hear was that this Messiah was going to be crucified.

The story of the Transfiguration, the vision of Christ transformed, radiant in light, glorious in power alongside Moses and Elijah is the hidden meaning of the cross, the truth buried within Christ’s humiliating and shameful death.  The glory Peter sees at the Transfiguration will come through suffering, by way of the cross and cannot be known without the cross.  The glory of God will be revealed only as Christ gives up all claims, surrenders himself to God completely, dies to any desire to save himself. 

The vision Peter sees at the Transfiguration is a vision of the glory of God made known through Jesus’ self-giving love, a love that abandons itself utterly to the will of God.   In the Transfiguration, the very glory of God is revealed and a foretaste of the Resurrection is given to Peter.  But in the Transfiguration, Christ is robed in white, the color of martyrs.  The glory of the Lord will be revealed but not before Christ suffers and dies.   

Love, for all of the glory and majesty we ascribe to that word, will inevitably lead us to the cross.  If we love we will suffer.  Our most intimate relationships bear witness to us of this truth.  When we love someone, we suffer when they suffer.  The agony of watching someone we love suffer is perhaps the worst agony we can know.  Walking with someone we love through trials, sickness, despair and maybe even death, is perhaps the most tragic part of being human, of being able to know the joy of love.  Our capacity to love one another is indeed God’s greatest gift to us but is also a most excruciating cross to bear.  Compassion, suffering with someone, is not a warm and fuzzy feeling.   

Some of the time we can relieve the suffering of those we love.  My husband A.G. has on any number of occasions come to my rescue, given me a kiss or a hug or simply said “I love you” and my world has changed.  But one day, one of us will be dying and the other will be able to do nothing, say nothing, be powerless to change what is happening and in all honesty I cannot say whether on that day I want to be the one who is dying or the one who is watching.  If you do not want to suffer, do not fall in love. 

Former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey knew something about loving and the cost of loving.  And for Ramsey, loving in all of its heights and depths leads us into the very truth of God – God is willing to suffer for the sake of God’s love for the world:

Except for an agnostic patch in my teens, I’ve never doubted the existence of God.  But I’ve sometimes found my faith in him so painful that I would rather be without it.  But that is the Christian way.  Since the early tragedies of my life I have been as sensitive as anyone can be to suffering – to God himself taking on the darkness of alienation.  That has made me very wary of any attempt to reconstruct the Christian faith without maintaining the place of the cross of Christ in the redemption of suffering.” 

We live in a culture that tries desperately to avoid suffering.  We are uncomfortable often with the old or the sick or the dying.  We are fed a steady diet of advertising that lauds the young, the proud and the beautiful.  And we are embarrassed  often by our own suffering and weakness, all those times we feel powerless, helpless and out of control.  We so desperately want to “do” something and sometimes we can do nothing. 

Nothing but pray: Lord have mercy.  Suffering sends us to the foot of the cross waiting upon God’s mercy, pleading to God, knowing God was as present on Calvary as God was present on Easter morning even though no one knew it then.  In the face of suffering, our own or that of others, choose your words carefully.  “Cheer up.  It could be worse” is cheap and hollow in the face of Christ’s words on the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  On the cross Christ experienced the absence of God, the same absence we feel when our lives are falling apart.  The cross was not pretend but very, very real.  We look to God in the sure and certain hope of deliverance but cannot until or unless we acknowledge we cannot save ourselves. 

On Ramsey’s grave are inscribed the following words written by the second century Greek Father St. Irenaeus: “The Glory of God is the living man; and the life of man is the vision of God.”  Ramsey knew we live and die between the cross and the hope of the Resurrection.  The vision of God and all that God is – all goodness, all truth, all beauty – is precisely what opens our eyes to the truth that the world is not filled with goodness nor truth nor beauty.  The vision of God begs us to be with this world, a world so often besieged by pain and turmoil, not offering cheap words nor cheap fixes, but self-giving love.  Out of compassion for this world Christ died for us and in compassion for this world we are called not to judge but to love, not to speak so much as to listen, not to “fix” others but to wonder how they may be “fixing” us.  What the world needs is not our good advice, no matter how very good that advice may be, nor one more self help book.   What the world needs is our commitment to be with this world, not another of our own making, sharing the struggle, bearing one another’s burdens, willing to live and die for one another.  Only as we live in this world, a world that does not belong to us but belongs to God, can we with any truth whatsoever pray: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name.” 

The Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany                                                                    2 Kings 5: 1 – 14

Sunday, February 12, 2012                                                                          I Corinthians 9: 24 – 27

The Rev. Bambi Willis                                                                                             Mark 1: 40 – 45

 

A leper came to Jesus begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ”If you choose, you can make me clean.”

Mark 1: 40

A leper came to Jesus begging him, and kneeling he said to him, ”If you choose, you can make me clean.”  A leper comes to Jesus this morning in our reading from the gospel of Mark, begging Jesus to make him clean.  And Jesus does, touching the man with his hand and sending the man away to the priests to be declared “clean.”  The leper does not ask Jesus to heal him, but rather to make him clean.  How odd.  When was the last time you went to a doctor and asked the doctor to make you clean rather than cure you? 

The leper in our story this morning is afflicted with some sort of skin disease, which may or may not be what we have come to call Hansen’s disease, or leprosy proper.   His affliction is visible and disfiguring and may or may not have been contagious as we understand contagion.  But for his contemporaries, this man’s affliction was a sign that his body was “wasting away,” in the words of one commentator, that the power of life was being taken away from him.  This man’s leprosy was a sign of death and death was to be shunned.  

In a world before modern medicine, life and death were completely in the hands of God who gave life and who could also take life away.  Life, for our ancestors in the faith, meant following God’s law; failures to follow God’s law led to death.   Death was a sign that God was withdrawing God’s favor and like the rotten apple that can spoil the whole barrel, death could be passed on to others, and therefore, to be avoided.      

Shunning death meant keeping away from lepers, dead bodies, menstruating women and anyone who lost blood or body fluids.  Blood was the symbol of life and the loss of blood meant life was being taken away.  Death, the absence of life, was a curse and those who tasted death in any way could only be restored to life by God.  And accordingly, in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, we find a variety of “purification” rituals, rituals recognizing that life had been restored.   After giving birth, which included the loss of blood, a woman was “impure” or “unclean” and needed to seek to be restored to the land of the living.  Restoration meant bringing an offering to God which the priests would make on her behalf. 

To be “unclean” was to be separated from God, the source of life, and from the community.  “The person who has the leprous disease,” Leviticus tells us, “shall wear torn clothes and let the hair on his head be disheveled; and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out, ‘Unclean, unclean.’  He shall remain unclean as long as he has the disease; he is unclean.  He shall live alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.”  Before the advent of modern medicine, we can only presume that those with real leprosy lived out their lives away from all human community. 

What Jesus does this morning is to restore this man with leprosy to the community, a community that had no way of doing what Jesus did.  And not because the community was harsh, unloving or unforgiving, but rather because only God could take away this man’s affliction.  The priests could restore this man to the community but they could not take away his leprosy.  This Jesus did and then sent the man to the priests to be re-admitted to the community. 

The purity laws of our ancestors are often seen as a bunch of silly laws that make little sense to us today.  And sometimes, the next move we make is to turn Jesus into the only man with the good sense to know that eating pork would not keep God from loving you.   But the purity laws codes kept the people of Israel safe, secure in a world that was subject to death and decay.  Without those “rules,” life was not secure and could easily dissolve back into the chaos out of which God brought forth life “in the beginning.”    

What Jesus does in our text today is not to overturn a way of life meant to create a holy and life giving people but to be for the people of Israel what the Temple was meant to be, the very locus of the power of God.   Jesus is not saying that the Jewish way of life is wrong and the Temple rituals misguided; Jesus is bearing witness to a power greater than that of the Temple.  In cleansing the leper and sending him back to be declared “clean” by the priests, Jesus is not destroying the boundary between clean and unclean, but rather extending the boundary so that those who were excluded from the community such as this leper could now be included. 

Ultimately, what begins this morning with the cleansing of an “unclean” Jew, will become a cleansing for us, non-Jews who through Jesus are “ingrafted” into the people of God.    

We no longer consign folk to “uncleanness,’’ but we do, because we are human, continue to draw  boundaries between the clean and the unclean, who’s in and who’s out, as we forge a common life with our families, friends and neighbors.   Most of the boundaries we create are unspoken, recognized only when we engage a new relationship.  The first time I had dinner with A.G.’s family I learned that grace was always said before meals and the grace was always offered by the most senior gentleman – either his dad or his granddad.   The first time A.G. came to dinner with my family, he learned that my father never said grace.   As we began our life together, we quickly saw that the rituals our families observed were different and that we would have to determine our own. 

The same is true for our common life.  The first time I came among you, I learned that St. Asaph’s is not a community given to waving their arms in the air nor especially inclined to kneel during the Eucharistic prayer nor given to having their priests vested in chasubles.  All well and good but nothing John Nunnally told me when he asked if I would supply on Ash Wednesday, 2010.  Had I arrived that night waving either incense or my hands or intoning the entire liturgy, I suspect you would have been surprised.  You knew who you were and I would not have “fit in.”  That did not happen, thanks be to God. 

Yet, every Sunday we throw open our doors and have no idea who might come among us.  Those who come, those who are new to this community, have a steep learning curve which we do not always appreciate.  No one wants to feel “strange,” we all want to “fit in” but the bulletin and the website do not communicate our boundaries, our ethos, the way we do things.  The only way to know those things is to come and get a sense of who we are.  Strangers, newcomers, are very quick to pick up on our unspoken rituals, the boundaries we draw without ever even knowing we are drawing boundaries. 

If your native language is Spanish, for example, you will be very aware that we do not read the gospel in Spanish.  If you are homeless, you will be very aware that this community presumes you have an address and a phone number and probably email.  If you are Catholic, you may find it strange that I am a married woman with children.   

Now we might and we often do, say: “Well, this is who we are. Take it or leave it.”   There is some truth in that but not a particularly helpful truth.  Not a truth that brings us to life but only an affirmation that we have found life where we are and we are not going to risk finding life somewhere else.  Strangers in our midst invite us to examine our unspoken assumptions about who we are and what we are about. 

Strangers challenge us and we would like to be left alone.  The leper is a stranger in our text this morning, a stranger calling out for justice, for redemption, for restoration.   The leper amazingly puts his trust in Jesus.  The leper kneels down before Jesus and says simply: “Help me.”  We can help and we can hurt and we usually hurt when we ask folk to become who we are rather than asking who we need to become in order to include them.  Saint Paul will speak of this as being all things to all people.  You and I resist that because we value who we are and fear becoming something we do not want to be. 

But who we are is not a gift we give to God; rather, who we are is a gift God gives to us.  Who we are as a community will not be static, but will grow and change as new folk come among us, hoping to find a place at God’s table.  We are called to be gracious as God is gracious and who this day, makes a way for a leper long separated from the holy people of God, to return to the community of the faithful.  The community was now tasked to receive this cleansed leper, to make a place for him among the “clean.”  That is our task as well, to make a place for those who by the power of God have been led to be with us.  May God give us all the grace to receive those who God sends to us as friends and not as strangers.  

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.”  

 

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. 

 

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.  

The Eve of Christmas                                                                                                  Isaiah 9: 2 – 7

Saturday, December 24, 2011                                                                                   Titus 2: 11 – 14

The Rev. Bambi Willis                                                                                               Luke 2: 1 – 20

But the angel said to them “Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

Luke 2: 10 - 11

“Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”  We celebrate this night the message of an angel and we celebrate in the dark of night surrounded by family and friends, bathed in the light of candles, in a beautifully appointed church, disturbing the quiet of night with organ and trumpet and magnificent voices lifted in song.  What we do this night is anything but ordinary.  What we do this night is extraordinary because the message of the angel was extraordinary.  

Tonight is a holy night and in response, we come here, late at night to pray and to sing with those we love, in a small church filled with candles and decorated with poinsettias.  And as we pray and sing, we know others all over the world are doing just the same thing, some in grand cathedrals and some in the chapels of a hospital or a prison.  Tonight is a holy night and millions of folk all across this world are, this night, finding ways to “lift up their hearts” to God in awe and wonder. 

What we do this night is extraordinary because what the angel said was extraordinary.  The angel of the Lord said the Savior of the world has been born.   A savior is someone who rescues us and delivers us from trouble and protects us and sets us free when we get trapped.   In the Bible, a savior is someone who does for us what we cannot do ourselves, a little like those who “saved” those thirty-three Chilean miners when their mine collapsed in 2010, leaving them underground for sixty-nine days or the folk who found Robbie Wood this past October, an eight year old child with autism who had wandered away from his father and was alone for six days and nights in Hanover County .   

In the Bible, the words “savior” and “salvation” are rooted in the great act of God who in the Exodus led a poor band of Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt and into freedom.  Salvation for our ancestors in the faith was a very real event in which slaves were set free and rescued from the oppression of Pharoah.  What happened to these Egyptian slaves was nothing they could have made happen themselves; these slaves knew that their freedom was the work of God.  And in response, they rejoiced and celebrated, at least initially, in gratitude and awe of this God who had saved them. 

Tonight is a holy night because you and I live in a world that is unholy, a world that is not always friendly to us and to our well being.  We are not slaves of Pharoah, but we, much like our ancestors in the faith, are still subject to powers beyond our control, the power of others to exploit and hurt us, the power of disease to rob us of our strength, the power of nature to destroy our homes and communities and ultimately the power of death to take life away from us.  None of us are all powerful and none of us are able to protect ourselves against all that wishes us harm.

Not that we do not try.  We live in the shadow of the Enlightenment, a movement during the eighteenth century to use the power of reason to overcome suspicion and make this world more amenable to human flourishing.  As a result of the Enlightenment, you and I no longer believe that a solar eclipse signals the end of the world but know that a solar eclipse is a fairly regular natural phenomenon that occurs when the moon passes between the sun and the earth.  The Enlightenment gave birth to many wonders, not the least of which is the wonder of science, of which you and I are the beneficiaries. 

But the more we discovered about how much we humans can do, the less willing we became to acknowledge that we are limited and finite creatures who cannot do everything.  In other words, the more we recognized our powers to save the world, the less we needed a savior to do it for us.  So tonight as we celebrate the birth of a Savior, we do so in a world that does not always acknowledge that we need to be saved, to be rescued - enlightened perhaps, given some good advice or better medication or a more able financial planner or a good therapist – but not saved.   In this world, the announcement of the angel we hear tonight is often heard as “nice” news, but not fundamentally “good news of great joy.” What the angel says tonight is extraordinary and we hear that message in a world that no longer sees much of anything as extraordinary. 

This night is holy because what the angel says is extraordinary – a savior is born.  Into this world, this enlightened world in which peace still eludes us, justice remains beyond the reach of many and in which none of us will be spared suffering in one form or another, God has come, to save a world that cannot save itself.   We are here on this holy night, raising glad strains with those we love in the middle of the night because all is not right with this world, disturbing the powers of this world that want us to make peace with the way things are.  If all is right with the world, you and I do not need a savior and we all would be better off in bed getting rest for the day to come.  We are here in the dark of night because we who live in darkness have been given light.  This is no ordinary night.

I wish church always looked like church does not tonight, overflowering with folk, glorious with music and decoration.  I wish every Sunday looked the way this church does tonight.  I wish every Sunday was extraordinary in response to this “extraordinary” announcement this night of the angel.  Extraordinary is what we are meant to be as people of faith and yet, most of us are content to make peace with the ordinary and that is very sad. 

For sure many folk do not think of church as extraordinary; indeed many find church a rather stuffy and joyless place, a place filled with a bunch of rules that we cannot possibly follow and difficult people we would prefer not to be with and whose sole purpose is to remind us how awful we are.  For sure, in the light of Christ, we all fall short of who God created us to be.  And, yes, in the light of Christ, the church is that place in which we confess we are not who God created us to be.    

But our confession is a part of a much grander affirmation, an affirmation we dramatize every Sunday and will tonight, in the Eucharist, that great Thanksgiving we make to God for creating us, sustaining us and redeeming us in Christ.  With bread and with wine, we offer up to God all that we are and all that we have, and God, extraordinarily, returns to us bread from heaven and a cup of salvation.  We will break bread together this night so that we might go out into this darkened world to be for others what God is to us, light in the darkness, good news in a world that believes there is nothing new to hear.  What we will do this night is extraordinary and we do it every Sunday, giving thanks to a God who wants to save us, who wishes to rescue us, who wants us to live and not die. 

“Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”  This is good news not nice news, news for all people and not just us, news that will lead us away from this lovely manger in the months to come, to follow this Savior who is anything but ordinary, and who will call us to be anything but ordinary.  This extraordinary Savior will ask us to do extraordinary things, things like feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, welcoming the stranger, caring for the sick, seeking justice and peace among all nations and peoples.  This extraordinary Savior will ask that we give ourselves completely away to others, and there is nothing ordinary about that.  In this world, if you give away everything, you are left with nothing, nothing except the hope of a Savior and the message of an angel whose first words are: “Do not be afraid.” 

May this extraordinary and most holy night fill you with all joy and wonder, lifting your hearts, encouraging you in the days and months to come, and may the extraordinary grace, mercy and peace of God be yours this night and forever.   

 

The Fourth Sunday in Advent                                                                        2 Samuel 7: 1 – 11, 16

Sunday, December 18, 2011                                                                              Romans 16: 25 – 27

The Rev. Bambi Willis                                                                                             Luke 1: 26 – 38

Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”  Then the angel departed from her.

Luke 1: 38

Many years ago, I visited the Vatican in Rome.  After waiting outside for a goodly while in the rain amidst a sea of pilgrims with umbrellas, we finally were able to make our way into that ancient and august cathedral known as St. Peter’s Basilica.   Once inside, we walked along a cordoned off path to our right, that took us along the back wall of the Basilica, making our way down along the long side of the Basilica, before coming to the front of the Basilica to stand under the great dome, designed by Michelangelo in the sixteenth century.   The path was marked off for us, I suspect, so that we did not get overwhelmed in that majestic space which is a veritable feast for the eyes, adorned everywhere with incredible works of art.  As we moved along, I had a lot of trouble staying focused on the path and wanted to look around, to take it all in, to see everything at once, which is simply not possible. 

As the line moved along and I was turning this way and that, I glanced to my right and without any warning whatsoever found myself in front of Michelangelo’s Pieta, a breathtakingly beautiful marble sculpture of Mary holding the crucified Christ.  I vividly remember thinking – My God, Mary is so young!

I grew up in the Episcopal Church and we Protestants do not spend a lot of time thinking about Mary, unlike our Catholic brothers and sisters.  I am not sure what I thought Mary looked like but somehow the youth Michelangelo graced her with took me by surprise.  Mary was very young, barely a teenager, incredibly beautiful, tenderly cradling in her lap the body of her dead son. 

On this last Sunday in Advent we hear the story of the Annunciation from the gospel of Luke.  The angel Gabriel visits Mary and tells Mary she will give birth to the Son of the Most High.  Mary wonders how this can be as Mary is a virgin, engaged to a man named Joseph.  The angel Gabriel tells Mary that “the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.”   On this last Sunday in Advent, we hear that God is about to do the impossible. 

And Mary consents to the impossible possibility that she will conceive and bear the Son of God. 

And what the angel Gabriel tells Mary is impossible – that Mary will conceive a child without any help from Joseph.  Much ink has been spilled by theologians over the historicity of the virgin birth.  For some, this story of the virgin birth is not a historical fact but rather a theological statement, intended to ground the identity of Christ in God.  For others, like the Catholic theologian Raymond Brown, who published a massive essay on the infancy narratives in 1977, the historical evidence is “inconclusive,” and dismissing the virgin birth out of hand leads down a road that ultimately makes Jesus simply human but not divine. 

A more fruitful reflection on the Annunciation was offered to me this week by Kathleen Norris, a poet and a writer and a woman of faith.   Norris maintains that our concept of virginity is “narrow and impoverished,” reduced to nothing more than biology.  Virginity, for Norris, is the possibility of belonging solely and utterly to God and not to the powers and principalities of this world, whatever they may be.  To be a virgin is to be able to say like Mary, “Let it be with me according to your word” rather than saying “Let it be with me according to the words of the world.”  

We do not know a lot about Mary.  She was clearly a young Jewish woman, planning to be married.  I suspect like most women of her time, Mary anticipated having children and raising them up in the faith of her family and community.  We first meet Mary in the gospel of Luke when the angel Gabriel comes to her saying: “Greetings, favored one!”  Mary is not presented to us as woman hoping for a visit from an angel, much less as a woman hoping to be pregnant before she moves in with Joseph.  Indeed, a pregnancy before marriage was grounds to be stoned to death.  And yet, Mary consents to this impossible possibility in the face of the very real possibility Mary will be spurned both by Joseph and her community. 

Mary is virginal not so much because she has not slept with Joseph but much more because she is willing to consent to God in spite of not knowing what the future will look like.  Mary was poised to be married, to live a quiet life as a wife and a mother and then, suddenly, turns away from that comfortable possibility to embrace the impossible possibility of giving birth to the Messiah.  “Let it be with me according to your word” are words of profound trust that what God has given Mary to do, God and God alone will make happen.  Mary is no longer in control. 

Mary is undefiled, undefiled by a world that wants us to believe that we can control what happens to us, that we are masters of our own fate.  We can for sure avoid stepping in some mud puddles but we cannot avoid getting our feet wet altogether.   Life, we know, is not a carefully orchestrated affair which we can plan.  Life is a gift to us from God which we do not plan but can only receive.  Letting life be what life is can be a challenge, especially when life is not the way we want.  At those times, those difficult and trying times, letting life be means resisting the temptation to overpower what we cannot control and acknowledging that in spite of the circumstances within which we find ourselves, God has not abandoned ship or like Elvis, left the building.    

Through the centuries, Mary has been portrayed as pure and spotless, with an innocence that Michelangelo captured beautifully.  But Mary must have had nerves of steel and a recent commentator described Mary as a “resister” who was willing to brave the condemnation of her community to follow this strange divine request, made known only to her.  Mary had not a clue and Gabriel never told her that she would bury her son, who would be crucified as a criminal.  Michelangelo’s Pieta shows us the beginning and the end of the story and Mary, when she consents to Gabriel’s announcement is innocent, wholly unaware of what lies ahead, utterly trusting in the power of God to do the impossible. 

You and I live at a time when belief in the God we know through Christ can mean either that we have all the answers or, alternatively, nothing but questions.  For some, the Bible answers every question we have about life, clearly and unambiguously.  For others, the Bible is filled with irrational claims such as the story of the Annunciation that are too preposterous to take seriously.  To confess faith in a man who was “born of the virgin Mary” is nothing but an invitation to leave our good sense at the door when we enter a church.  Better for many is to be “spiritual” but not religious, trying to choke down claims that are impossible to believe.    

We are creatures who in the words of Saint Anselm, seek understanding.  We are not meant to leave our brains at home when we come to Church.  On the other hand, we will never know God fully and completely and will be asked, probably fairly often, to say with Mary: “Let it be with me according to your word.”  Mary had no way of knowing what was going to happen, but assented in advance to the possibility that God could and would do the impossible. 

What we want is a God we can understand, not a God who is cloaked in mysteries we cannot understand.  What we want in the words of Kathleen Norris, is a God who is “readily comprehensible and acceptable to us.”  We want a God who makes sense, much as we want our lives to make sense.   Unfortunately we do not get to tell God who God ought to be anymore than we can fashion our lives the way we want our lives to be.  We can, though, open ourselves to the mystery that is life, the impossible possibilities that confront us every hour of every day, possibilities for joy in the midst of sorrow, for beauty in the midst of ugliness, for love in the midst of the unloveable.  The impossible happens all the time if we allow God to be God and invite the possibility that the impossible can and does happen and happens, amazingly, with some amount of regularity. 

As Advent comes to a close, Mary asks: “How can these things be?” To all of us, who have asked that same question, be assured that the next time we come together, on Christmas Eve, the impossible will happen and Mary will give birth to a son.  Nothing is impossible for God. 

The Third Sunday in Advent                                                                                 Isaiah 61: 1 – 4, 8 – 11

Sunday, December 11, 2011                                                                               Thessalonians 5: 16 -24

The Rev. Bambi Willis                                                                                            John 1: 6 – 8; 19 – 28

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.  He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.

John 1: 6 - 7

Many years ago, for Christmas, my sister-in-law made me a ceramic nativity scene, painted in soft hues of rose and blue.  Last week, I carefully unwrapped them and set them out once again on our dining room table.  There was Joseph and Mary, the three wise men, a donkey and a small sleeping sheep and a baby in a manger.  One by one as they came out of the shoe box they live in most of the year, I arranged the figures as I always do, placing Joseph and Mary at the head of the manger, the sheep at the foot, the wise men on either side and the baby in the manger in the center. 

A nativity scene is one of many ways we tell the story of Christmas; next Sunday we will tell the same story dramatically in our pageant and on Christmas Eve we will hear the Christmas story from the gospel according to Luke.  No matter how we tell the story of Christmas, we expect certain characters to be present – Mary and Joseph and a baby and wise men and probably angels and a few animals. 

But this morning we hear from the gospel according to John and the story we encounter looks very different from the way we usually tell the Christmas story.  Mary and Joseph are not present, the wise men are nowhere to be found, and we have no baby in a manger.  Instead we have “a man named John” who has come “as a witness to testify to the light” and is surrounded by priests and Levites who demand to know who this man is.  This morning we are not gazing upon a child in a manger, but in the midst of a confrontation between a man who calls Jesus “the light” and others who do not know who this man is nor why he has come among them.   “Who are you?”  the priests and the Levites ask this man named John.  “Are you the Messiah?  Elijah? A prophet?”  “No,” says this man John, “I am a witness to the light.”   

In the gospel of John, the Christmas story does not begin in a stable with the birth of a child, but in a world wrapped in darkness, a world very much like the one we meet in the opening chapters of the Bible where we read:

In the beginning when God created* the heavens and the earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God* swept over the face of the waters.

In the gospel of John, Christmas comes into a darkened world, a world in which we who live in this world struggle to see and to know, but cannot see and know truly because we live in darkness.  When we come to the gospel of John, it is as if we were standing in my dining room with the lights turned out trying to see my lovely nativity scene.  In the darkness, the figures are unrecognizable, much like this man named John is unrecognizable to the priests and the Levites. 

But as we continue reading in the opening chapters of the Bible, God does not leave this world shrouded in darkness: 

3Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. 4And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

This man named John comes to bear witness that in Christ, God has sent light into a dark world.  In the gospels of Matthew and Luke, Christmas takes place with the birth of a child in a manger;  in the gospel of John, Christmas takes place before the beginning of creation when the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.  Try turning that into ceramic figurines or a pageant!   

The gospel of John was a late arrival into the canon of the New Testament.   The Church was a bit skeptical about this gospel that sounds so very different from the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke.  In the gospel of John, we are taken back to the very beginnings of the world, to a time before time, a time we can know nothing about.  In the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, we have stories that we can re-create and image with ceramic figurines and in pageants; in the gospel of John we have a witness to a story we cannot put on our dining room table. 

In John’s gospel, Jesus is not a babe in a manger but the “Word” of God, present with God at the beginning of creation.  In the gospel of John, Jesus is much more than simply a human being, a child born to Mary, or a man baptized by John.   In the gospel of John, Jesus is with God before creation, and our evangelist John comes closer than any other gospel in calling Jesus “God.”   Which is why the gospel of John was received with skepticism because no human being can be God. 

The New Testament does not give us a simple uncomplicated picture of Jesus whose birth in a humble manger we will celebrate two weeks from now.  In the words of theologian Donald McKim: “The writings of the New Testament present neither a unified picture nor an intellectually developed statement of who Jesus is.”  Jesus may well be the “reason for the season,” but who Jesus is another question altogether. 

For the curious among us, you can find the Church’s answer to the question: “Who is Jesus?” on page 864 in The Book of Common Prayer, a statement crafted after much angst and conflict in 451 A.D.  What the Church affirmed was that Jesus  was both fully human and fully divine but shied away from saying exactly how all of that could come to pass.  Today, most folk in the Church never give a second thought to the question of Jesus’ identity, oftentimes I suspect because they simply figure we all know, do we not, who Jesus was. 

Truth is, Jesus remains as much of a mystery for us today as Jesus did in the first centuries of the Church.  Our confession that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine honors the variety of New Testament witnesses but does not seek to explain or tell us how a person can be both God and man at the same time. 

Over the centuries, we Christians have struggled to embrace both the humanity and the divinity of Christ.  Throughout the history of the Church, folk have veered off in one direction or another, either making Jesus more divine than human or the other way round.  Early on, Jesus’ divinity was understood to be something we all could attain and the gospel of John became a favorite text for gnostics.  Gnostics were folk that believed there was a secret wisdom hidden in this world, a wisdom that would enable the “enlightened ones” to live lives free from the stress and strain of normal life.  Gnostics believed that there was secret code and if you had that code you could unlock the secrets to a successful and painfree life.  The “light” to which our evangelist John bears witness was a great secret given to those who followed Christ and not peculiar to Christ alone.  Christ was the bearer of something we all can attain to.   And so today, we have a rather healthy crop of folk who search for the meaning of life in crystals and tarot cards and who believe we all bear within ourselves a “a divine light” which enables us to achieve  a higher consciousness.   In Gnosticism we are all gods.   

Others saw in Jesus a moral exemplar who was not divine but a very very good man.  Because Jesus was human and therefore like us, we can become like Jesus.   If we are “good,” God will save us, like God saved Christ.  Jesus is human being which we can all emulate but not God who did what we cannot do.  On this take Jesus was the best we can be, but not God.

 Most of us and most of our prevailing culture embrace Christmas  with a fervor.  We decorate our streets with lights and our homes with wreathes and trees and plan parties and close our schools.  Economically Christmas is big business, a retail dream.  And not wanting to exclude anyone from this economic daydream, we re-name Christmas to be a winter break or a happy holiday so that everyone can participate, regardless of what you believe.  Christmas has become less a celebration of the Incarnation - that in this man Jesus, God came into the world – and more of an opportunity to celebrate ideas such as “love,” “peace,” or “joy.”  What we want is love and peace and joy, but confessing that the way to achieve such lofty desires is through a man who was both fully human and fully divine, who lived and died as one of us and who was raised up on the third day, is not a confession many folk find easy to make. 

Christmas is for most folk a time when we acknowledge that this world is not as it should be, not a place of peace and joy and love and we work hard to make Christmas a kind of oasis in the midst of a world that is still violent, still unloving, still suffering.  On Christmas, as we give and receive gifts, visit with family and friends, enjoy a respite from school and work, we bring into being a different kind of world.  Such is the world made known to us in Christ, an odd figure indeed, a man who sought out the company of the poor and not the rich, the simple and not the successful, a man who chose not to save himself.  Believing in the Incarnation may not be as difficult as believing that we will find our lives only as we give our lives away.  That, not the Incarnation, is the challenge (and the reason) of this season.  

The Second Sunday of Advent                                                                    Isaiah 40: 1 – 11

Sunday, December 4, 2011                                                                        2 Peter 3: 8 – 15a

The Rev. Bambi Willis                                                                                     Mark 1: 1 - 8

 “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:  Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”

Mark 1: 3

Every year just weeks before Christmas, John the Baptist crashes into the lectionary preaching a message of repentance.  “Prepare the way of the Lord,” we hear this Sunday just as we are putting wreathes on our front doors and decorating Christmas trees.  In the midst of shopping, wrapping and planning parties, John the Baptist intrudes on the Christmas scene year after year sounding a little like a Bible waving T.V. evangelist, demanding we “Come to the river and wash away our sin.”  John the Baptist like a telemarketer who calls in the middle of dinner, is an irritating frustration in this season of love, joy and peace, disturbing us with all this talk about repentance. 

The Greek word for repentance is metanoia and means literally to change direction, to turn around and head a different way.  The Jews that John was baptizing in the Jordan River knew exactly what John meant when he said they had to change directions because they remembered when God had called their ancestors to change direction six hundred years earlier.  Six hundred years earlier the Jews turned away from Babylon in the east to return to Jerusalem nine hundred miles to the west.      

In 587 B.C. the great city of Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians.  The temple was razed, the city was destroyed and the people were taken to Babylon where they would live in captivity as exiles in a strange land for over forty years. The exile in Babylon was a “watershed” moment in the life of Israel in the words of historian John Bright.  The religious faith of Israel was rooted in the belief that the temple was the meeting place between Israel and God, holy ground where prayers and sacrifices were offered and God’s word could be heard.    

When the temple was destroyed, Israel had no place to meet God.  Without a meeting place, Israel was separated from God, unable to offer sacrifices and unable to hear God speak a word back to them.  Deported into a foreign land, the faith of Israel rooted as it was in worship in the temple in Jerusalem was on the verge of collapse.  The  Israelites were aliens, strangers in a strange land, with no idea what their political fortunes might be nor how they might continue to honor their covenant with God.  And if the Israelites could not honor their part of the covenant, would God honor God’s part?        

Uprooted, upended, thrust into a foreign land with no hope of return, they struggled to “keep the faith.”  Babylon was a great city, a comfortable city, the cultural center of the known world.  Babylon was the city of Hammurabi who developed a code of law to govern an empire.  In Babylon writing was developed and the arts of medicine, mathematics and astronomy were pursued.  And under King Nebuchadnezzar the magnificent Hanging Gardens, one of the seven wonders of the world was built.  Babylon had it all.  Everything but the temple and the temple was everything.       

Almost two generations pass before Cyrus the Great of Persia conquers Babylon in 539 B.C. and allows the Jews to return to Jerusalem.  On the eve of their release, the prophet Isaiah writes the magnificent text we hear this morning in our Old Testament reading and which is often heard this time of year in Handel’s Messiah:

Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.            
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her
that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand double for all her sins.

God has not forgotten God’s people, Isaiah says.  God is in control and God is bringing Israel’s exile to an end.  Isaiah calls Israel to a new understanding of God’s covenant with them - being God’s chosen people does not mean you will not suffer exile.  At the very point in Israel’s history when Israel is about to lose faith, prophets such as Isaiah remind Israel that God’s ways are not Israel’s ways; Israel must change directions and think differently about God.       

But nine hundred miles lie between Babylon and Jerusalem, nine hundred miles through the desolation of the desert of Arabia.  An entire generation has grown up in exile.  An entire generation has no idea where Jerusalem is or what life looks like in Jerusalem.  Jerusalem is now foreign, strange, alien.  The young people probably do not want to go back.  They have friends, a life, a home in Babylon.  The old people wonder if going back is worth the trek – a long way through an unforgiving and formidable desert.  If they start the trip they may die on the way.  Why not stay and live out their days here in Babylon?

Some but not all of the Israelites left the comfort of Babylon, determined to return to Jerusalem.  Through prophets like Isaiah, they heard the message that their understanding of God was too small, too narrow, too colored by their desires.  God was doing a new thing, calling Israel back to Jerusalem to start all over again, rebuild the temple and re-interpret their faith in this God who had led them into and out of exile. 

God led the Israelites into and then away from the comforts of Babylon six centuries before Christ and this morning John the Baptist leads God’s people again out into the wilderness to prepare for the coming of Christ.  Changing directions – repenting - is never easy and always means leaving behind the comfort of familiarity for the discomfort of unfamiliarity.    

You and I will do just about anything to keep from being uncomfortable.  Like putting on a warm coat on a cold day, we seek comfort, not discomfort.  We are comfortable in familiar surroundings with people we know.  We like coming home and finding our things pretty much where we left them; we like having a certain routine in our lives and probably have started the day in the same way for years.  As we all look forward to Christmas, most of us will repeat traditions we have embraced for years.  We are creatures of habit and habits make us comfortable. 

But our desire for comfort can become a barrier to God’s grace.  The very comforts we seek can insulate us, keeping us from being transformed, changed by God’s love, made into new creatures.  We open ourselves to transformation when we become vulnerable, when the comforts to which we are accustomed are lost to us, when we confront the unfamiliar and the uncomfortable.  We open ourselves for transformation not by maintaining our comforts and the security of our daily rituals, but rather when we loose our footing and are thrust into the desert and the uncertainty of the unknown. 

Consider those moments in your life you would name “life changing.”  In my own life such life changing moments would include falling in love with my husband, the birth of my first child, the death of my mother, the day I told Bishop Lee I wanted to be ordained, to name just a few.  At those times, times when we say “I do” or suffer through labor to give birth or stand before the open grave of someone we love or get a job or lose a job or discover we have cancer - at those times our lives are disrupted and interrupted.  At those times, those metanoia moments, times we often describe as “life changing,” times when the future is unknown and uncertain, times when we are stripped of the comforts of the familiar, we are able to be changed, to be open to the grace and love of God. 

John the Baptist this morning calls us out into the wilderness this morning, away from our securities and our comforts and our certainties so that, in the words of Isaiah, “The glory of the Lord might be revealed.”  On Christmas, the glory of the Lord is revealed to us, the glory of a God who does not leave his people in exile but who wishes to lead them home. 

Advent is a season in which we remember we are a people in exile, a people who long for God to come among us and show forth God’s glory.  May the Christmas crowds and the perfect gift you cannot find and the memories of Christmases past which you cannot re-create remind us all that we are not at home.  And may we each expect this Christmastide to be a revelation of God’s glory, changing us, turning us around and making us new.