The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost 2 Samuel 11: 26 – 12: 13a
Sunday, August 5, 2012 Ephesians 4: 1 – 16
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 6: 24 – 35
“For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
John 6: 33
Last Sunday we heard the story of “The Feeding of the Five Thousand” from the gospel of John. In that wonderful story, Jesus takes five loaves of bread and two fish and after giving thanks to God, feeds five thousand folk. And because last Sunday was a fifth Sunday, last Sunday we celebrated Kids’ Sunday. During my children’s sermon, I gave the kids brown paper lunch bags into which I put some bread which was the same kind of bread we use at communion and Pepperidge Farm goldfish. I then asked them to pass out the bread and the goldfish to all who were here. And as our young people moved among us handing out goldfish and pieces of bread, I was struck by their seriousness. They all knew they were doing something important and they assumed their task with great deliberateness.
This Sunday in our gospel reading from John, Jesus explains, if you will, what happened last Sunday at the Feeding of the Five Thousand. And what Jesus says is that what happened on that hillside by the Sea of Galilee was not about getting a free lunch. What happened on that hillside was all about God’s desire to bring forth life.
“The bread of God,” Jesus tells us this morning, “is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” Those who are listening to Jesus say these words had all eaten their fill of bread and fish just the day before. And now they are remembering another time God gave God’s people bread – in the wilderness after the Exodus when manna rained down from heaven. God gave God’s people manna in the wilderness – bread from heaven - to sustain them in the desert and to keep them moving on to the Promised Land as they grumbled and groaned about the harshness of their life, longing to return to Egypt life where even though they were slaves, at least they were able to feed themselves.
Just as God had fed the Israelites in the desert with manna, Jesus is now feeding the people, transforming a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish into a meal for thousands, with leftovers. The manna, the bread and the fish all came from God and not from Moses nor from the hands of an ordinary Jew from Nazareth. And then Jesus declares: “I am the bread of life,” claiming for himself the very name of God who had told Moses, the name of God was “I am who I am.” “I am who I am” is not much of a name, except to say that God is and will be.
And now God comes in the form of bread.
Unlike all the other gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke - in the gospel of John at the Last Supper, Jesus does not take bread and say “This is my body” and wine saying “This is my blood.” At the last supper in the gospel of John, Jesus kneels down and washes the feet of the disciples. In the gospel of John, the closest we come to a eucharist is the story of The Feeding of the Five Thousand. In the gospel of John, a young boy offers up his lunch and thousands are fed. In the gospel of John, Jesus takes five loaves of bread and two fish and after giving thanks to God, feeds thousands. The Greek word for giving thanks is εύχαριστέω or eucharist.
“I am the bread of life.” For our evangelist John, in the eucharist we are brought to life and the life that we are given is rooted in thanksgiving. We give thanks to God, offering up our bread and wine and our alms, and God returns them to us, bringing us to life and sending us out into the world to share our life and lives with others. Last Sunday, watching our young people move among us with great seriousness was life giving – life-giving to them as they took on a task of importance and life-giving to us as we were fed by our young people, who will assume the responsibility for passing on our faith as we all fade away. And all of what happened last Sunday was rooted and grounded in thanksgiving – thanksgiving for this place and this parish and for those who will steward our common life in the years to come.
In the gospel of John, our evangelist takes us back to the roots of our being, to the very beginning, to a time when God took a handful of mud and breathed into that mud the breath of life and made humankind.
In the beginning, “God formed man from the dust of the ground,” we read in Genesis, “and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” God’s breath or spirit is what makes us human and when God rained down manna from heaven and when God sent a Son filled with the Holy Spirit into the world, the spirit of God was bringing forth life. Every Sunday, in the eucharist, God is bringing forth life again as we remember what God has done and look forward to what God might do now. Every Sunday, we are called to sit down on a hillside and be fed, in the words on my ordination certification, “from the riches of God’s grace.”
Bringing forth life is not the same thing as making things better. When a child is born into this world, a family is not made better but is rather irrevocably changed, disturbed, made new. New life does not reform but transforms, changing us in ways we barely understand, inviting us to walk down new roads and to see new things. And when Jesus arrived on the scene in the midst of first century Jewish Palestine, Jesus was inviting good faithful Jews to do a new thing – to follow him and leave behind a way of life that was centuries old. Jesus was not “reforming” Judaism; Jesus was transforming the way the people of God knew God. God, who had been known for centuries by following the Law - was now to be known through a person, a very human person, a man who would get killed.
Bringing forth life sounds like a good thing. Until we remember that the life giver was put to death by good and righteous folk, folk wary of leaving behind a way of life that had sustained their faith for centuries. God does indeed want to bring us to life; but we, because we are human, often prefer death to life, as paradoxical as that sounds. We often would prefer to “stay put” than to trust in a God whose Spirit blows where it will.
The crowds ask Jesus this morning: “Sir, give us this bread always.” What the crowds want is another meal not a vocation. And want do we want? Do we come to church seeking comfort and reassurance that God will remove whatever trials and tribulations we face? Or do we come wondering about this God who leads us down paths not necessarily of our own choosing, whose desire is always to bring forth life and wonder what God might be about in the midst of whatever place we find ourselves in? Do we, in other words, come to church, looking for life or do we come hoping God will not pull the plug on our personal life supports?
Children’s Sunday is always a bit tentative as we never know exactly who and how many of our young people will be with us. And on the Saturday night that precedes our fifth Sundays, I am always in a bit of a quandary wondering what I might do if no children show up the next day. That clearly did not happen last Sunday and when I asked the kids to go out among us last Sunday giving out goldfish and bread, I was brought to wonder – wonder that they did so with such intent, that they were received with such grace, that our Sunday School teachers shepherded them with such gentleness and that, for a moment, we all were one – young and old, come here’s and always been here’s, those raised in the faith and those just getting started, all enjoying some goldfish and bread passed out by a few kids.
I hope the kids remember what happened last Sunday and I hope we all do too. I hope none of us, least of all our kids, ever forget that the church, this church, is about bringing forth life. And I hope that we all remember that the life we find in this place comes from God, not from any program or person. I hope that when you see life, in whatever way you do, you will speak of it, and name it, for the uplifting of us all. Life, the life we encounter as our choir leads us in song or as we break bread together at our community suppers or as our kids become our Eucharistic ministers during a children’s sermon or as we laugh together at coffee hour or take counsel together in vestry meetings – the life we encounter here is precious because that life comes from God. Give thanks.
Sunday, August 5, 2012 Ephesians 4: 1 – 16
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 6: 24 – 35
“For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
John 6: 33
Last Sunday we heard the story of “The Feeding of the Five Thousand” from the gospel of John. In that wonderful story, Jesus takes five loaves of bread and two fish and after giving thanks to God, feeds five thousand folk. And because last Sunday was a fifth Sunday, last Sunday we celebrated Kids’ Sunday. During my children’s sermon, I gave the kids brown paper lunch bags into which I put some bread which was the same kind of bread we use at communion and Pepperidge Farm goldfish. I then asked them to pass out the bread and the goldfish to all who were here. And as our young people moved among us handing out goldfish and pieces of bread, I was struck by their seriousness. They all knew they were doing something important and they assumed their task with great deliberateness.
This Sunday in our gospel reading from John, Jesus explains, if you will, what happened last Sunday at the Feeding of the Five Thousand. And what Jesus says is that what happened on that hillside by the Sea of Galilee was not about getting a free lunch. What happened on that hillside was all about God’s desire to bring forth life.
“The bread of God,” Jesus tells us this morning, “is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” Those who are listening to Jesus say these words had all eaten their fill of bread and fish just the day before. And now they are remembering another time God gave God’s people bread – in the wilderness after the Exodus when manna rained down from heaven. God gave God’s people manna in the wilderness – bread from heaven - to sustain them in the desert and to keep them moving on to the Promised Land as they grumbled and groaned about the harshness of their life, longing to return to Egypt life where even though they were slaves, at least they were able to feed themselves.
Just as God had fed the Israelites in the desert with manna, Jesus is now feeding the people, transforming a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish into a meal for thousands, with leftovers. The manna, the bread and the fish all came from God and not from Moses nor from the hands of an ordinary Jew from Nazareth. And then Jesus declares: “I am the bread of life,” claiming for himself the very name of God who had told Moses, the name of God was “I am who I am.” “I am who I am” is not much of a name, except to say that God is and will be.
And now God comes in the form of bread.
Unlike all the other gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke - in the gospel of John at the Last Supper, Jesus does not take bread and say “This is my body” and wine saying “This is my blood.” At the last supper in the gospel of John, Jesus kneels down and washes the feet of the disciples. In the gospel of John, the closest we come to a eucharist is the story of The Feeding of the Five Thousand. In the gospel of John, a young boy offers up his lunch and thousands are fed. In the gospel of John, Jesus takes five loaves of bread and two fish and after giving thanks to God, feeds thousands. The Greek word for giving thanks is εύχαριστέω or eucharist.
“I am the bread of life.” For our evangelist John, in the eucharist we are brought to life and the life that we are given is rooted in thanksgiving. We give thanks to God, offering up our bread and wine and our alms, and God returns them to us, bringing us to life and sending us out into the world to share our life and lives with others. Last Sunday, watching our young people move among us with great seriousness was life giving – life-giving to them as they took on a task of importance and life-giving to us as we were fed by our young people, who will assume the responsibility for passing on our faith as we all fade away. And all of what happened last Sunday was rooted and grounded in thanksgiving – thanksgiving for this place and this parish and for those who will steward our common life in the years to come.
In the gospel of John, our evangelist takes us back to the roots of our being, to the very beginning, to a time when God took a handful of mud and breathed into that mud the breath of life and made humankind.
In the beginning, “God formed man from the dust of the ground,” we read in Genesis, “and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.” God’s breath or spirit is what makes us human and when God rained down manna from heaven and when God sent a Son filled with the Holy Spirit into the world, the spirit of God was bringing forth life. Every Sunday, in the eucharist, God is bringing forth life again as we remember what God has done and look forward to what God might do now. Every Sunday, we are called to sit down on a hillside and be fed, in the words on my ordination certification, “from the riches of God’s grace.”
Bringing forth life is not the same thing as making things better. When a child is born into this world, a family is not made better but is rather irrevocably changed, disturbed, made new. New life does not reform but transforms, changing us in ways we barely understand, inviting us to walk down new roads and to see new things. And when Jesus arrived on the scene in the midst of first century Jewish Palestine, Jesus was inviting good faithful Jews to do a new thing – to follow him and leave behind a way of life that was centuries old. Jesus was not “reforming” Judaism; Jesus was transforming the way the people of God knew God. God, who had been known for centuries by following the Law - was now to be known through a person, a very human person, a man who would get killed.
Bringing forth life sounds like a good thing. Until we remember that the life giver was put to death by good and righteous folk, folk wary of leaving behind a way of life that had sustained their faith for centuries. God does indeed want to bring us to life; but we, because we are human, often prefer death to life, as paradoxical as that sounds. We often would prefer to “stay put” than to trust in a God whose Spirit blows where it will.
The crowds ask Jesus this morning: “Sir, give us this bread always.” What the crowds want is another meal not a vocation. And want do we want? Do we come to church seeking comfort and reassurance that God will remove whatever trials and tribulations we face? Or do we come wondering about this God who leads us down paths not necessarily of our own choosing, whose desire is always to bring forth life and wonder what God might be about in the midst of whatever place we find ourselves in? Do we, in other words, come to church, looking for life or do we come hoping God will not pull the plug on our personal life supports?
Children’s Sunday is always a bit tentative as we never know exactly who and how many of our young people will be with us. And on the Saturday night that precedes our fifth Sundays, I am always in a bit of a quandary wondering what I might do if no children show up the next day. That clearly did not happen last Sunday and when I asked the kids to go out among us last Sunday giving out goldfish and bread, I was brought to wonder – wonder that they did so with such intent, that they were received with such grace, that our Sunday School teachers shepherded them with such gentleness and that, for a moment, we all were one – young and old, come here’s and always been here’s, those raised in the faith and those just getting started, all enjoying some goldfish and bread passed out by a few kids.
I hope the kids remember what happened last Sunday and I hope we all do too. I hope none of us, least of all our kids, ever forget that the church, this church, is about bringing forth life. And I hope that we all remember that the life we find in this place comes from God, not from any program or person. I hope that when you see life, in whatever way you do, you will speak of it, and name it, for the uplifting of us all. Life, the life we encounter as our choir leads us in song or as we break bread together at our community suppers or as our kids become our Eucharistic ministers during a children’s sermon or as we laugh together at coffee hour or take counsel together in vestry meetings – the life we encounter here is precious because that life comes from God. Give thanks.
The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost I Kings 2: 10 – 12; 3: 3 -14
Sunday, August 19, 2012 Ephesians 5: 15 – 20
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 6: 51 – 58
So Jesus said to them, “Vey truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
John 6: 53
Four Sundays ago, on Children’s Sunday, we heard the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand from the gospel of John. That story, told in all four of the gospels, is a wonderful story about how Jesus took five loaves of bread and two fish and fed thousands until all were satisfied. The next day, the crowds followed Jesus looking for more bread. Since that Sunday, as we have continued to hear from the sixth chapter of the gospel of John, the satisfied crowds have become increasingly dissatisfied. First Jesus refuses to give them another free lunch, then Jesus tells them he has “come down from heaven,” that he has come from God, when they know full well Jesus is the son of Joseph. And now today, Jesus tells the Jews to eat his flesh and drink his blood, a rather revolting idea to say the least.
A Jew was strictly forbidden to eat blood. Blood was the very source of life and was holy, consecrated to God. Jews were commanded by God to drain the blood of slaughtered animals away, allowing the blood to return to the earth. Jews could eat the meat of animals but they were not to eat or drink the blood because blood signified life and life belonged to God. But today Jesus tells these Jews to eat his flesh and drink his blood.
Over the last four Sundays, Jesus has moved from delighting and satisfying the crowds by feeding them with a miraculous abundance of unexpected food to our reading this day in which Jesus appears to be asking the Jews to transgress a commandment of God. Jesus seems bent on pushing folk away.
You and I usually hear in our reading this morning the words of the Eucharist, the words we hear when we receive the body and blood of Christ, “the bread of life” and “the cup of salvation.” And we generally are not offended when we come to the communion rail to receive bread and wine. Indeed, in the Eucharist, we often experience the love of God for us in a profound way. We take comfort in the Eucharist, not offense; welcomed by God, not pushed away.
And yet, in our reading this morning which sounds so much like the language of the Eucharist, our evangelist John deliberately uses words that are not very welcoming. Interpreters of our text this morning note that our evangelist John uses two different Greek words to speak of eating – one which translates well as “eat” and then, later, a word better translated, not as “eat” but rather “chew” or “gnaw,” something akin to what an animal does when it eats, noisily and without much regard for good manners. In the Greek, our text this morning is a bit graphic and not very pretty, nothing like what we do at the altar rail on Sunday morning.
In our text this morning, Jesus wants us to gnaw on his flesh. And that sounds repulsive, not welcoming. That sounds a little like cannibalization, like we are feeding on a dead body. No wonder we read that the Jews “disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’”
Our evangelist John over the past several Sundays has led us slowly away from the delight of a miraculous feeding toward the truth that the bread which gives us life is the death of Christ, Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, a sacrifice made for us.
In the gospel of John, Jesus’ death on the cross is a voluntary act in which Jesus “lays down his life” for us. In the crucifixion, Jesus offers himself, gives himself up for us. On the cross, Jesus bears witness to a love that is supremely self-giving, withholding nothing, not even his life for the sake of the world. On the cross, Jesus reveals that the love of God is wholly unselfish, sparing nothing, for the sake of others. Jesus’ death is an act of love, the kind of love that Jesus commands his disciples to have for one another, when on the eve of the crucifixion, Jesus tells his disciples to “love one another as I have loved you.”
In the gospel of John, at the Last Supper, Jesus does not take bread and wine, giving it to the disciples as in the other gospels, saying, “Take, eat: This is my body which is given for you.” In the gospel of John at the Last Supper, Jesus leaves the table and kneels down to wash the feet of the disciples, an act we remember on Maundy Thursday during Holy Week. In the gospel of John, Jesus shows the disciples how to love one another, first washing their feet and then, the following day, going to his death on the cross.
And it is that act of outrageous self-giving love that our evangelist John wants us to feed on this morning, to eat, and even to gnaw upon as we seek to love one another as Christ loves us.
Loving one another as Christ loved us, dying for us on the cross, is far removed from any sentimental notion of love we might entertain. Dying to self, and Christ did so literally, not spiritually, is not a warm and fuzzy feeling. Jesus suffered in the flesh, painfully. And not just for his friends, but for the world.
Every Sunday I hold up the bread and the wine saying: “The gifts of God for the people of God. Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you and feed on him in your hearts by faith with thanksgiving.” And I say those words in the midst of a world more absorbed with ourselves than with Christ.
I grew up in what sociologists call the “me” generation. I have grown up in a culture which tells me I can do and be anything I want and need not acquiesce to the demands and expectations of others. I have grown up encouraged to think about me and what I want. In the culture I have grown up in, claiming myself, not dying to self, is what is important. I have been fed on television commercials which tell me “I am worth it” and entertained by shows that depict life as a game of survival in which sadly some of us can be simply voted off the island. And I live in a world in which real live human beings are routinely ignored if you happen to be on your cell phone. I have grown up in a world where it’s all about me!
Self absorption is of course nothing new; what is new is that we are finding more ways to be self absorbed, of keeping ourselves one from another. Loving one another as Christ loved us begins with seeing one another, in the flesh, in all of our wonder and all of our shame. And while we cannot choose to be self-forgetful, to “lay down our lives” as Christ laid down his life for us, we can choose to be with others, more ready to listen than to speak, to hear someone else’s story rather than needing to share our own, to be as interested in others as we are in ourselves.
About a week ago, two of our grandchildren came to visit and all was going well until dinnertime. I had made a hamburger casserole and as I was taking the dish out of oven I began to hear “Is that catsup? I don’t like catsup,” “Those carrots don’t look like the ones we eat at home,” and “How much do I have to eat to get dessert?” The comments were I suppose, wholly predictable, as my guests were not but seven and eight. But I was exasperated and not altogether patient with their presumption that dinner was all about them and what they liked and did not like. I was about to say something I remember my mother saying whenever I complained about what she had made us for dinner: “You know there are folk in this world who are starving,” but I bit my tongue.
We sat down and sang a grace the kids had recently learned – “Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen.” Kaelyn ate heartily; Connor ate nothing. And I thought to myself “so be it” which is the meaning of “amen.” Connor was sullen and didn’t say much of anything, refusing all invitations to try, if not the hamburger casserole, then the carrots or brocolli. Dinner was not to Connor’s liking and he was just opting out.
I felt sorry for Connor that night, about how his likes and dislikes would forever keep him from enjoying the company of others, others who do not share his likes and dislikes, his take on the world. The world does not revolve around us as much as would like to think the world does. Connor could not deny himself and in doing so Connor went hungry.
We will miss a lot in this world if we insist on having things our way. I do believe God wants to feed us and to love us and that God does, but not always the way we want. Four Sundays ago the crowds were delighted; now they are complaining because the Messiah they had hoped would save them chooses to die instead. And they are called to follow a way they do not like and cannot understand. And so are we.
Sunday, August 19, 2012 Ephesians 5: 15 – 20
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 6: 51 – 58
So Jesus said to them, “Vey truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”
John 6: 53
Four Sundays ago, on Children’s Sunday, we heard the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand from the gospel of John. That story, told in all four of the gospels, is a wonderful story about how Jesus took five loaves of bread and two fish and fed thousands until all were satisfied. The next day, the crowds followed Jesus looking for more bread. Since that Sunday, as we have continued to hear from the sixth chapter of the gospel of John, the satisfied crowds have become increasingly dissatisfied. First Jesus refuses to give them another free lunch, then Jesus tells them he has “come down from heaven,” that he has come from God, when they know full well Jesus is the son of Joseph. And now today, Jesus tells the Jews to eat his flesh and drink his blood, a rather revolting idea to say the least.
A Jew was strictly forbidden to eat blood. Blood was the very source of life and was holy, consecrated to God. Jews were commanded by God to drain the blood of slaughtered animals away, allowing the blood to return to the earth. Jews could eat the meat of animals but they were not to eat or drink the blood because blood signified life and life belonged to God. But today Jesus tells these Jews to eat his flesh and drink his blood.
Over the last four Sundays, Jesus has moved from delighting and satisfying the crowds by feeding them with a miraculous abundance of unexpected food to our reading this day in which Jesus appears to be asking the Jews to transgress a commandment of God. Jesus seems bent on pushing folk away.
You and I usually hear in our reading this morning the words of the Eucharist, the words we hear when we receive the body and blood of Christ, “the bread of life” and “the cup of salvation.” And we generally are not offended when we come to the communion rail to receive bread and wine. Indeed, in the Eucharist, we often experience the love of God for us in a profound way. We take comfort in the Eucharist, not offense; welcomed by God, not pushed away.
And yet, in our reading this morning which sounds so much like the language of the Eucharist, our evangelist John deliberately uses words that are not very welcoming. Interpreters of our text this morning note that our evangelist John uses two different Greek words to speak of eating – one which translates well as “eat” and then, later, a word better translated, not as “eat” but rather “chew” or “gnaw,” something akin to what an animal does when it eats, noisily and without much regard for good manners. In the Greek, our text this morning is a bit graphic and not very pretty, nothing like what we do at the altar rail on Sunday morning.
In our text this morning, Jesus wants us to gnaw on his flesh. And that sounds repulsive, not welcoming. That sounds a little like cannibalization, like we are feeding on a dead body. No wonder we read that the Jews “disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’”
Our evangelist John over the past several Sundays has led us slowly away from the delight of a miraculous feeding toward the truth that the bread which gives us life is the death of Christ, Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, a sacrifice made for us.
In the gospel of John, Jesus’ death on the cross is a voluntary act in which Jesus “lays down his life” for us. In the crucifixion, Jesus offers himself, gives himself up for us. On the cross, Jesus bears witness to a love that is supremely self-giving, withholding nothing, not even his life for the sake of the world. On the cross, Jesus reveals that the love of God is wholly unselfish, sparing nothing, for the sake of others. Jesus’ death is an act of love, the kind of love that Jesus commands his disciples to have for one another, when on the eve of the crucifixion, Jesus tells his disciples to “love one another as I have loved you.”
In the gospel of John, at the Last Supper, Jesus does not take bread and wine, giving it to the disciples as in the other gospels, saying, “Take, eat: This is my body which is given for you.” In the gospel of John at the Last Supper, Jesus leaves the table and kneels down to wash the feet of the disciples, an act we remember on Maundy Thursday during Holy Week. In the gospel of John, Jesus shows the disciples how to love one another, first washing their feet and then, the following day, going to his death on the cross.
And it is that act of outrageous self-giving love that our evangelist John wants us to feed on this morning, to eat, and even to gnaw upon as we seek to love one another as Christ loves us.
Loving one another as Christ loved us, dying for us on the cross, is far removed from any sentimental notion of love we might entertain. Dying to self, and Christ did so literally, not spiritually, is not a warm and fuzzy feeling. Jesus suffered in the flesh, painfully. And not just for his friends, but for the world.
Every Sunday I hold up the bread and the wine saying: “The gifts of God for the people of God. Take them in remembrance that Christ died for you and feed on him in your hearts by faith with thanksgiving.” And I say those words in the midst of a world more absorbed with ourselves than with Christ.
I grew up in what sociologists call the “me” generation. I have grown up in a culture which tells me I can do and be anything I want and need not acquiesce to the demands and expectations of others. I have grown up encouraged to think about me and what I want. In the culture I have grown up in, claiming myself, not dying to self, is what is important. I have been fed on television commercials which tell me “I am worth it” and entertained by shows that depict life as a game of survival in which sadly some of us can be simply voted off the island. And I live in a world in which real live human beings are routinely ignored if you happen to be on your cell phone. I have grown up in a world where it’s all about me!
Self absorption is of course nothing new; what is new is that we are finding more ways to be self absorbed, of keeping ourselves one from another. Loving one another as Christ loved us begins with seeing one another, in the flesh, in all of our wonder and all of our shame. And while we cannot choose to be self-forgetful, to “lay down our lives” as Christ laid down his life for us, we can choose to be with others, more ready to listen than to speak, to hear someone else’s story rather than needing to share our own, to be as interested in others as we are in ourselves.
About a week ago, two of our grandchildren came to visit and all was going well until dinnertime. I had made a hamburger casserole and as I was taking the dish out of oven I began to hear “Is that catsup? I don’t like catsup,” “Those carrots don’t look like the ones we eat at home,” and “How much do I have to eat to get dessert?” The comments were I suppose, wholly predictable, as my guests were not but seven and eight. But I was exasperated and not altogether patient with their presumption that dinner was all about them and what they liked and did not like. I was about to say something I remember my mother saying whenever I complained about what she had made us for dinner: “You know there are folk in this world who are starving,” but I bit my tongue.
We sat down and sang a grace the kids had recently learned – “Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen, Amen.” Kaelyn ate heartily; Connor ate nothing. And I thought to myself “so be it” which is the meaning of “amen.” Connor was sullen and didn’t say much of anything, refusing all invitations to try, if not the hamburger casserole, then the carrots or brocolli. Dinner was not to Connor’s liking and he was just opting out.
I felt sorry for Connor that night, about how his likes and dislikes would forever keep him from enjoying the company of others, others who do not share his likes and dislikes, his take on the world. The world does not revolve around us as much as would like to think the world does. Connor could not deny himself and in doing so Connor went hungry.
We will miss a lot in this world if we insist on having things our way. I do believe God wants to feed us and to love us and that God does, but not always the way we want. Four Sundays ago the crowds were delighted; now they are complaining because the Messiah they had hoped would save them chooses to die instead. And they are called to follow a way they do not like and cannot understand. And so are we.
The Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost I Kings 8: 1, 6, 10 – 11, 22 – 30, 41 – 43
Sunday, August 26, 2012 Ephesians 6: 10 – 20
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 6: 56 - 69
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
John 6: 56
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” Jesus tells the disciples this morning, and the disciples complain that these words are too difficult, too hard to hear and too hard to bear. “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life,” Jesus says, but to the diciples Jesus’ words are shrouded in mystery beyond their understanding.
This morning we come to the end of the long sixth chapter in the gospel of John, a chapter we have been hearing for five weeks. The chapter began with the story of The Feeding of the Five Thousand, a wondrous miraculous feeding that delights and satisfies the crowds. Over the next several weeks, Jesus slowly unfolded the meaning of the loaves and the fishes, explaining he was the bread, bread which had come down from heaven. And now, to the dismay of the disciples, Jesus tells them, they will find life by eating his flesh and drinking his blood – Jesus’ death will mean new life for the disciples.
“Does this offend you?” Jesus asks. “Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.” In other words, what if you were to see the resurrected and living Christ? Would you then believe Jesus was the bread of life? The bread which Jesus gives to the disciples is his death and resurrection, the mystery of God’s own life of love in which the Father sends the Son into the world and the Son returns in glory.
Our evangelist John has led us these past weeks from a miraculous feeding of thousands with five loaves of bread and two fish into the heart of our Christian proclamation – the dying and rising of Christ, the mystery of faith we proclaim every Sunday in the Eucharistic prayer. In the eucharist we remember that Christ has died and Christ is risen, enacting with bread and wine the mystery of our faith. In the eucharist we participate in that mystery, sharing in Christ’s death and resurrection, until Christ comes again. In the eucharist we become the Body of Christ, that strange fellowship of folk who bear witness in word and deed to the dying and rising of Christ. “It is in the celebration of the eucharist,” writes liturgical scholar Leonel Mitchell, “that the church most clearly acts as the Body of Christ, the people of God…for it is in the eucharist that the Church proclaims and lives out the Paschal mystery of Jesus’ dying and rising again.”
The Paschal mystery – the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection - is what gives us life and is what, this morning, drives many of the disciples away. Not everyone is able to trust in a crucified and risen Lord. And from the beginning, the Church struggled to be shaped and formed by this mystery of faith, to live out their lives as people who followed a Lord “who had died and on the third day been raised from the dead” in the words of Saint Paul. In the hope of resurrection, many in the early church became martyrs rather than deny their faith in this mystery and Saint Paul was one of them.
To be shaped and formed by this mystery of death and resurrection is our task as the people of God. And as theologian Daniel Migliore notes, the eucharist has implications for the way we act. “As a public, open, joyful, hopeful meal, the (eucharist) is a foretaste of a new humanity,” “the practice of ‘eucharistic hospitality,’ in which strangers are welcomed into the household of God.” We are, as people shaped by the eucharist, people of hospitality, a people who welcome everyone as God welcomes us into the mystery of Christ’s dying and rising.
Eucharistic hospitality is grounded in joy and hope as we look forward not to “going to heaven when we die,” but rather to that day when Christ will come again and make all things new, that day when God will create a new heaven and a new earth, and there will be no more pain or sorrow, for death will be no more. In the eucharist, we look back and remember Christ’s death and resurrection and look forward in anticipation of a brave new world, a world in which “God himself will be with us,” in the words of the book of Revelation, and “will wipe every tear from our eyes.” Shaped by the eucharist, we are a people with joy and hope to offer to a weary world.
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” Jesus tells us this morning. What we are abiding in is the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, the very mystery of God revealed to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a communion of love in which the Father sends the Son into the world and the Son returns to the Father by “laying down his life,” his flesh, at the crucifixion, which in the gospel of John includes the resurrection, one moment John calls glorious.
In the eucharist we show forth God’s glory, the glory made known to us through Christ’s death and resurrection, the glory of God who “trampled down death by death,” in the words of the fourth century preacher Saint John Chrysostom, “mocking hell” and the power of death.
The eucharist is, in the words of The Book of Common Prayer, “the principal act of worship on the Lord’s Day,” which is why we celebrate the eucharist every Sunday. And our eucharistic celebration is a communal act, not something I do and you watch. We celebrate the eucharist together and we do so with lectors and ushers and acolytes and crucifers and oblation bearers and our choir and with the altar guild. We make eucharist together so that we – all of us - might become the Body of Christ, not individual saints.
When I was growing up in the church, we celebrated what was then known as Holy Communion and we did so, only once a month. Taking communion, moreover, was reserved for those who were confirmed. All that changed with the “new” prayer book we began to use in 1979. At the heart of the prayer book we use now is a renewed appreciation of baptism and that in baptism we are united to Christ in his death and resurrection. And we abide in that holy mystery through our participation in the eucharist. All the baptized are invited to share in this “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” not just those who have been confirmed and we are invited to do so every Sunday. Every Sunday we are invited to remember who we are – the people of a crucified and risen Lord.
And every Sunday we are sent out into the world to proclaim the resurrection, to live as people who confess that hell has, in Chrysostom’s words, been “mocked,” that evil and death do not have the last word, that we, and indeed the whole world has been freed from the power of death, that in Christ, in the words I will say in a moment, “God has brought us out of death into life.” That is the good news we have to share with the world and ‘tis far better news than reducing the good news to the assurance that your soul will go to heaven when you die.
“Does this offend you?” Jesus asks the disciples this morning. Our brothers and sisters in the early church were no more able than are we to understand the mystery we confess. Professing faith in the death and resurrection of Christ was as shocking for those first Christians as it is for us two thousand years later. They knew, just as we do, that when someone dies, they do not come back to life. And yet, through the centuries, the faithful have persisted, confessing that Christ has died and Christ is risen, coming together week after week to break bread together in celebration of that very claim. We, unlike those early Christians, make our confession of faith and share in the eucharist as children of the enlightenment, at a time in human history when much of the mystery of the world in which we live has been dispelled. We know that sickness is not an affliction cast upon us by God but is rather a complex affair of microbes and molecules that we can often understand and treat. We know that the earth is round and not flat, that this planet is but one of many in the solar system. But what we also know, as did our ancestors in the faith, is that nothing in creation and no one of us will live forever.
What we say in the Creed is that we “look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” That claim is not the same as saying our soul goes to heaven when we die. That claim was made by the Greek philosopher named Plato four hundred years before the death and resurrection of Christ. That claim implies that something within us is not subject to death – something we call our soul - that death does not have dominion over all things in this world. If that were true, then our confession that Christ was raised from the dead is no more than an affirmation of what Plato said and we should be worshipping Plato, not the power of God who raised Jesus from the dead, whose power overpowered the power of death. What the church has always claimed is that Christ was resurrected, given life and a body to live it in, after death.
As we break bread together this day, I pray we will remember we do this as one and not as individuals, that we remember that we are not doing so in the hope that our spirit will go to heaven when we die, and that we remember that what we are doing is proclaiming for all the world to see that we worship a Lord who has and who will bring forth life out of death.
Sunday, August 26, 2012 Ephesians 6: 10 – 20
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 6: 56 - 69
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
John 6: 56
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” Jesus tells the disciples this morning, and the disciples complain that these words are too difficult, too hard to hear and too hard to bear. “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life,” Jesus says, but to the diciples Jesus’ words are shrouded in mystery beyond their understanding.
This morning we come to the end of the long sixth chapter in the gospel of John, a chapter we have been hearing for five weeks. The chapter began with the story of The Feeding of the Five Thousand, a wondrous miraculous feeding that delights and satisfies the crowds. Over the next several weeks, Jesus slowly unfolded the meaning of the loaves and the fishes, explaining he was the bread, bread which had come down from heaven. And now, to the dismay of the disciples, Jesus tells them, they will find life by eating his flesh and drinking his blood – Jesus’ death will mean new life for the disciples.
“Does this offend you?” Jesus asks. “Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.” In other words, what if you were to see the resurrected and living Christ? Would you then believe Jesus was the bread of life? The bread which Jesus gives to the disciples is his death and resurrection, the mystery of God’s own life of love in which the Father sends the Son into the world and the Son returns in glory.
Our evangelist John has led us these past weeks from a miraculous feeding of thousands with five loaves of bread and two fish into the heart of our Christian proclamation – the dying and rising of Christ, the mystery of faith we proclaim every Sunday in the Eucharistic prayer. In the eucharist we remember that Christ has died and Christ is risen, enacting with bread and wine the mystery of our faith. In the eucharist we participate in that mystery, sharing in Christ’s death and resurrection, until Christ comes again. In the eucharist we become the Body of Christ, that strange fellowship of folk who bear witness in word and deed to the dying and rising of Christ. “It is in the celebration of the eucharist,” writes liturgical scholar Leonel Mitchell, “that the church most clearly acts as the Body of Christ, the people of God…for it is in the eucharist that the Church proclaims and lives out the Paschal mystery of Jesus’ dying and rising again.”
The Paschal mystery – the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection - is what gives us life and is what, this morning, drives many of the disciples away. Not everyone is able to trust in a crucified and risen Lord. And from the beginning, the Church struggled to be shaped and formed by this mystery of faith, to live out their lives as people who followed a Lord “who had died and on the third day been raised from the dead” in the words of Saint Paul. In the hope of resurrection, many in the early church became martyrs rather than deny their faith in this mystery and Saint Paul was one of them.
To be shaped and formed by this mystery of death and resurrection is our task as the people of God. And as theologian Daniel Migliore notes, the eucharist has implications for the way we act. “As a public, open, joyful, hopeful meal, the (eucharist) is a foretaste of a new humanity,” “the practice of ‘eucharistic hospitality,’ in which strangers are welcomed into the household of God.” We are, as people shaped by the eucharist, people of hospitality, a people who welcome everyone as God welcomes us into the mystery of Christ’s dying and rising.
Eucharistic hospitality is grounded in joy and hope as we look forward not to “going to heaven when we die,” but rather to that day when Christ will come again and make all things new, that day when God will create a new heaven and a new earth, and there will be no more pain or sorrow, for death will be no more. In the eucharist, we look back and remember Christ’s death and resurrection and look forward in anticipation of a brave new world, a world in which “God himself will be with us,” in the words of the book of Revelation, and “will wipe every tear from our eyes.” Shaped by the eucharist, we are a people with joy and hope to offer to a weary world.
“Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them,” Jesus tells us this morning. What we are abiding in is the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, the very mystery of God revealed to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, a communion of love in which the Father sends the Son into the world and the Son returns to the Father by “laying down his life,” his flesh, at the crucifixion, which in the gospel of John includes the resurrection, one moment John calls glorious.
In the eucharist we show forth God’s glory, the glory made known to us through Christ’s death and resurrection, the glory of God who “trampled down death by death,” in the words of the fourth century preacher Saint John Chrysostom, “mocking hell” and the power of death.
The eucharist is, in the words of The Book of Common Prayer, “the principal act of worship on the Lord’s Day,” which is why we celebrate the eucharist every Sunday. And our eucharistic celebration is a communal act, not something I do and you watch. We celebrate the eucharist together and we do so with lectors and ushers and acolytes and crucifers and oblation bearers and our choir and with the altar guild. We make eucharist together so that we – all of us - might become the Body of Christ, not individual saints.
When I was growing up in the church, we celebrated what was then known as Holy Communion and we did so, only once a month. Taking communion, moreover, was reserved for those who were confirmed. All that changed with the “new” prayer book we began to use in 1979. At the heart of the prayer book we use now is a renewed appreciation of baptism and that in baptism we are united to Christ in his death and resurrection. And we abide in that holy mystery through our participation in the eucharist. All the baptized are invited to share in this “sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” not just those who have been confirmed and we are invited to do so every Sunday. Every Sunday we are invited to remember who we are – the people of a crucified and risen Lord.
And every Sunday we are sent out into the world to proclaim the resurrection, to live as people who confess that hell has, in Chrysostom’s words, been “mocked,” that evil and death do not have the last word, that we, and indeed the whole world has been freed from the power of death, that in Christ, in the words I will say in a moment, “God has brought us out of death into life.” That is the good news we have to share with the world and ‘tis far better news than reducing the good news to the assurance that your soul will go to heaven when you die.
“Does this offend you?” Jesus asks the disciples this morning. Our brothers and sisters in the early church were no more able than are we to understand the mystery we confess. Professing faith in the death and resurrection of Christ was as shocking for those first Christians as it is for us two thousand years later. They knew, just as we do, that when someone dies, they do not come back to life. And yet, through the centuries, the faithful have persisted, confessing that Christ has died and Christ is risen, coming together week after week to break bread together in celebration of that very claim. We, unlike those early Christians, make our confession of faith and share in the eucharist as children of the enlightenment, at a time in human history when much of the mystery of the world in which we live has been dispelled. We know that sickness is not an affliction cast upon us by God but is rather a complex affair of microbes and molecules that we can often understand and treat. We know that the earth is round and not flat, that this planet is but one of many in the solar system. But what we also know, as did our ancestors in the faith, is that nothing in creation and no one of us will live forever.
What we say in the Creed is that we “look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” That claim is not the same as saying our soul goes to heaven when we die. That claim was made by the Greek philosopher named Plato four hundred years before the death and resurrection of Christ. That claim implies that something within us is not subject to death – something we call our soul - that death does not have dominion over all things in this world. If that were true, then our confession that Christ was raised from the dead is no more than an affirmation of what Plato said and we should be worshipping Plato, not the power of God who raised Jesus from the dead, whose power overpowered the power of death. What the church has always claimed is that Christ was resurrected, given life and a body to live it in, after death.
As we break bread together this day, I pray we will remember we do this as one and not as individuals, that we remember that we are not doing so in the hope that our spirit will go to heaven when we die, and that we remember that what we are doing is proclaiming for all the world to see that we worship a Lord who has and who will bring forth life out of death.
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost Song of Solomon 2: 8 – 13
Sunday, September 2, 2012 James 1: 17 – 27
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 7: 1 – 8, 14 – 15, 21 - 23
“You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
Mark 7: 8
“Good fences make good neighbors” proverbial wisdom tells us. Better to make clear our boundaries and limits before someone (or their cows) crosses over them. Building good fences, letting others know our limits, prevents unwanted intrusion and conflict. But keeping cows out of your flower border or vegetable garden is a good bit easier than keeping your neighbor from “invading your space.”
In our reading from the gospel of Mark this morning, the Pharisees and the scribes are intent on keeping their fences in good repair. The fence at issue is the whole body of purity laws, that great body of law set forth largely in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, that describes how the Jews were to keep themselves holy before God, set apart from all other peoples. These laws - which prohibit the eating of pork, mandate the ritual washing of hands, prescribe rituals after contact with a corpse - seem strange to us. To us, these laws do not always make a lot of sense – like not wearing clothes made of a mix of fibers. Others, like those about the washing of hands and pots and having no contact with lepers make sense hygienically and to keep disease from spreading. But all told, the purity code seems, well, odd.
By observing all these laws, the Jews were set apart from all other peoples. By observing these laws the Jews were bearing witness, in the words of one commentator, to a God “who is stable and orderly and loving.” These laws gave their common life a particular shape and definition, an ordered life that made clear distinctions between a life lived under God and a life lived anyway you wanted to. The purity laws set the Jews apart from all other peoples as a people who worshipped a God who was not capricious, who was loving and who had created the world to turn in a certain direction for the well being of all.
This morning in our reading from the gospel of Mark, Jesus is taken to task for not washing his hands, to which Jesus responds saying: “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come:”
Well, of course, we think. Who would ever think that washing your hands makes any difference to God? And who would ever think that clean hands would be more important to God than not being greedy, deceitful, envious and proud? These Pharisees and scribes who want Jesus this morning to use more soap and water clearly have their priorities confused. And Jesus is simply setting them straight.
But no good Jew would have disagreed that it is the human heart and not unwashed hands that derails God’s purposes for the world. Jesus this morning is reminding these Pharisees and scribes of what God has always wanted, as the prophet Isaiah said, that worship needs to come from the heart and not be just lip service. Jesus is asking his accusers to look into their hearts, not just under their fingernails.
When Mark’s gospel was written, the people of God were living in the shadow of the Roman Empire, a mighty power whose desire was to unite the known world under the Roman Emperor. Conquered peoples were encouraged, we might say, to give up their cultural customs and literally worship the Emperor. Rome and Rome’s ways needed the ultimate allegiance of the people and so long as people recognized other ultimate loyalties, Rome’s power was threatened.
And the Jews were a problem. Rome wanted the Jews to be Romans first and the Jews were not buying in. And every time, a Jew was circumsized or observed the ritual washing of hands and pots, the Jews were declaring boldly they worshipped God, not the Emperor of Rome. Rome was trying to crush their identity as Jews and the Jews were resisting. The Jews were struggling to keep their fences in good repair.
So Jesus is being tested this morning and with good reason. Is Jesus suggesting that the whole of Jewish faith and practice be dismissed? Jesus was a faithful Jew but this morning Jesus sounds as if he has forgotten his roots.
Jesus this morning is not removing the fence that distinguished the Jews from all other people; but Jesus is relocating the fence. The fence that distinguishes the people of God is the purity of our hearts, not the cleanliness of our hands. Loving the Lord our God with all of our strength and all of our mind and all of our heart, and loving our neighbors as ourselves requires us to look inward not outward.
And when we look inward, we discover that the human heart is a great mystery. We are complicated creatures who usually act out of mixed motives – some good and some bad. We can trumpet a good cause for all the wrong reasons. We can decry injustice but act unjustly toward our enemy. We can loathe the actions of others with prideful disdain. We can love and we can hate. We can say things that may be true but say them to destroy rather than to build up. Most of us most of the time, do not act as the nineteenth century Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard remarked with a “purity of heart.” We want, most of the time, not just what God wants but what we want too.
What the Jews wanted in first century Palestine was to find a way to be Jews in the midst of the Roman Empire. Some advocated compromise; others advocated revolt. Jesus advocated neither and was crucified. And we, living in the twenty-first century, are still trying to figure out what it means to live as Jesus lived, to live lives of unselfish service, lives dedicated to the well-being of others and not the satisfaction of our many desires.
Jesus confronts the Pharisees and the scribes this morning with their own identity – people whose lives were dedicated wholly to God. And Jesus tells them that such single minded devotion was compromised by the devices and desires of our hearts, hearts inclined toward doing our will and not the will of God. And Jesus confronts us this morning, and every morning and all the days of our lives, with a life lived wholly and completely dedicated to God, even to the point of death.
None of us can do what Christ did. And in the light of Christ, the shadows of our hearts are exposed over and over again. We are a long way away from the debates in the early church about the necessity of keeping the ritual rules of purity, circumcision and abstaining from eating certain foods. But both in the letters of Paul and the book of Acts, we can still feel the tension that Jesus, a Jew who ate (probably without washing his hands) with sinners, tax collectors and prostitutes, created. Some felt the need to preserve the Jewish laws and some felt otherwise; some believed gentiles needed to become Jews before joining the church; some felt the church was something new and was neither Jewish nor Greek, a new community that needed to forge a new identity.
What pushed the church to claim their identity as followers of Jesus was the presence of strangers - folk who had no clue about the Jewish laws, folk who were ritually unclean, gentiles drawn to the good news but who lived on the other side of the fence of Jewish law. So the church had to rethink her boundaries, move the fence, so to speak, in order to include those God was calling into their midst.
Two thousand years later, you and I are confronted in the same way. When strangers come into our midst, they want to know who we are and if they will be able to fit in. Strangers want to know if we are serious about welcoming them and are quick to spot where we have built our fences. Our fences define our boundaries and tell folk who we are; but we need to be careful that our fences are not fences of convenience, placed so that we will not have to plow new ground and do things differently.
Strangers confront us with our identity as a people who follow a Lord who welcomed rich and poor, sinners and saints, the well-to-do and the ne’re-do-wells. Confronted by the stranger in our midst we are challenged to confess who we are and confront our own divided hearts. Strangers will come among us with new ideas and new suggestions. And we will, because we are creatures with divided hearts, draw back, wanting them to do things our way, skeptical about moving the fence which defines us.
Strangers will challenge our comfort level and will disturb us. We follow a Lord who disturbed just about everyone he met. I, for one, am not one who likes to be disturbed and made to feel uncomfortable. And what I know is that when I suddenly came among you on Ash Wednesday, 2010, I was welcomed. What I have learned since that fateful day is that having a woman in the pulpit was something very new for this parish and you all made a significant leap of faith when you asked Bishop Shannon to appoint me as Priest-in-Charge. What I have come to appreciate is that this parish is able and willing to do things differently and has a deep reverence for the past and how we all got to where we are. And I want to say “Amen!”
Jesus is not removing the fence that made the Jews the people of God. Jesus is relocating the fence so that folk like you and me could be included within God’s saving embrace. That is good news for us and I hope good news we will always want to share with others, even if it means we have to move a few fences.
Sunday, September 2, 2012 James 1: 17 – 27
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 7: 1 – 8, 14 – 15, 21 - 23
“You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.”
Mark 7: 8
“Good fences make good neighbors” proverbial wisdom tells us. Better to make clear our boundaries and limits before someone (or their cows) crosses over them. Building good fences, letting others know our limits, prevents unwanted intrusion and conflict. But keeping cows out of your flower border or vegetable garden is a good bit easier than keeping your neighbor from “invading your space.”
In our reading from the gospel of Mark this morning, the Pharisees and the scribes are intent on keeping their fences in good repair. The fence at issue is the whole body of purity laws, that great body of law set forth largely in the Old Testament book of Leviticus, that describes how the Jews were to keep themselves holy before God, set apart from all other peoples. These laws - which prohibit the eating of pork, mandate the ritual washing of hands, prescribe rituals after contact with a corpse - seem strange to us. To us, these laws do not always make a lot of sense – like not wearing clothes made of a mix of fibers. Others, like those about the washing of hands and pots and having no contact with lepers make sense hygienically and to keep disease from spreading. But all told, the purity code seems, well, odd.
By observing all these laws, the Jews were set apart from all other peoples. By observing these laws the Jews were bearing witness, in the words of one commentator, to a God “who is stable and orderly and loving.” These laws gave their common life a particular shape and definition, an ordered life that made clear distinctions between a life lived under God and a life lived anyway you wanted to. The purity laws set the Jews apart from all other peoples as a people who worshipped a God who was not capricious, who was loving and who had created the world to turn in a certain direction for the well being of all.
This morning in our reading from the gospel of Mark, Jesus is taken to task for not washing his hands, to which Jesus responds saying: “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come:”
Well, of course, we think. Who would ever think that washing your hands makes any difference to God? And who would ever think that clean hands would be more important to God than not being greedy, deceitful, envious and proud? These Pharisees and scribes who want Jesus this morning to use more soap and water clearly have their priorities confused. And Jesus is simply setting them straight.
But no good Jew would have disagreed that it is the human heart and not unwashed hands that derails God’s purposes for the world. Jesus this morning is reminding these Pharisees and scribes of what God has always wanted, as the prophet Isaiah said, that worship needs to come from the heart and not be just lip service. Jesus is asking his accusers to look into their hearts, not just under their fingernails.
When Mark’s gospel was written, the people of God were living in the shadow of the Roman Empire, a mighty power whose desire was to unite the known world under the Roman Emperor. Conquered peoples were encouraged, we might say, to give up their cultural customs and literally worship the Emperor. Rome and Rome’s ways needed the ultimate allegiance of the people and so long as people recognized other ultimate loyalties, Rome’s power was threatened.
And the Jews were a problem. Rome wanted the Jews to be Romans first and the Jews were not buying in. And every time, a Jew was circumsized or observed the ritual washing of hands and pots, the Jews were declaring boldly they worshipped God, not the Emperor of Rome. Rome was trying to crush their identity as Jews and the Jews were resisting. The Jews were struggling to keep their fences in good repair.
So Jesus is being tested this morning and with good reason. Is Jesus suggesting that the whole of Jewish faith and practice be dismissed? Jesus was a faithful Jew but this morning Jesus sounds as if he has forgotten his roots.
Jesus this morning is not removing the fence that distinguished the Jews from all other people; but Jesus is relocating the fence. The fence that distinguishes the people of God is the purity of our hearts, not the cleanliness of our hands. Loving the Lord our God with all of our strength and all of our mind and all of our heart, and loving our neighbors as ourselves requires us to look inward not outward.
And when we look inward, we discover that the human heart is a great mystery. We are complicated creatures who usually act out of mixed motives – some good and some bad. We can trumpet a good cause for all the wrong reasons. We can decry injustice but act unjustly toward our enemy. We can loathe the actions of others with prideful disdain. We can love and we can hate. We can say things that may be true but say them to destroy rather than to build up. Most of us most of the time, do not act as the nineteenth century Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard remarked with a “purity of heart.” We want, most of the time, not just what God wants but what we want too.
What the Jews wanted in first century Palestine was to find a way to be Jews in the midst of the Roman Empire. Some advocated compromise; others advocated revolt. Jesus advocated neither and was crucified. And we, living in the twenty-first century, are still trying to figure out what it means to live as Jesus lived, to live lives of unselfish service, lives dedicated to the well-being of others and not the satisfaction of our many desires.
Jesus confronts the Pharisees and the scribes this morning with their own identity – people whose lives were dedicated wholly to God. And Jesus tells them that such single minded devotion was compromised by the devices and desires of our hearts, hearts inclined toward doing our will and not the will of God. And Jesus confronts us this morning, and every morning and all the days of our lives, with a life lived wholly and completely dedicated to God, even to the point of death.
None of us can do what Christ did. And in the light of Christ, the shadows of our hearts are exposed over and over again. We are a long way away from the debates in the early church about the necessity of keeping the ritual rules of purity, circumcision and abstaining from eating certain foods. But both in the letters of Paul and the book of Acts, we can still feel the tension that Jesus, a Jew who ate (probably without washing his hands) with sinners, tax collectors and prostitutes, created. Some felt the need to preserve the Jewish laws and some felt otherwise; some believed gentiles needed to become Jews before joining the church; some felt the church was something new and was neither Jewish nor Greek, a new community that needed to forge a new identity.
What pushed the church to claim their identity as followers of Jesus was the presence of strangers - folk who had no clue about the Jewish laws, folk who were ritually unclean, gentiles drawn to the good news but who lived on the other side of the fence of Jewish law. So the church had to rethink her boundaries, move the fence, so to speak, in order to include those God was calling into their midst.
Two thousand years later, you and I are confronted in the same way. When strangers come into our midst, they want to know who we are and if they will be able to fit in. Strangers want to know if we are serious about welcoming them and are quick to spot where we have built our fences. Our fences define our boundaries and tell folk who we are; but we need to be careful that our fences are not fences of convenience, placed so that we will not have to plow new ground and do things differently.
Strangers confront us with our identity as a people who follow a Lord who welcomed rich and poor, sinners and saints, the well-to-do and the ne’re-do-wells. Confronted by the stranger in our midst we are challenged to confess who we are and confront our own divided hearts. Strangers will come among us with new ideas and new suggestions. And we will, because we are creatures with divided hearts, draw back, wanting them to do things our way, skeptical about moving the fence which defines us.
Strangers will challenge our comfort level and will disturb us. We follow a Lord who disturbed just about everyone he met. I, for one, am not one who likes to be disturbed and made to feel uncomfortable. And what I know is that when I suddenly came among you on Ash Wednesday, 2010, I was welcomed. What I have learned since that fateful day is that having a woman in the pulpit was something very new for this parish and you all made a significant leap of faith when you asked Bishop Shannon to appoint me as Priest-in-Charge. What I have come to appreciate is that this parish is able and willing to do things differently and has a deep reverence for the past and how we all got to where we are. And I want to say “Amen!”
Jesus is not removing the fence that made the Jews the people of God. Jesus is relocating the fence so that folk like you and me could be included within God’s saving embrace. That is good news for us and I hope good news we will always want to share with others, even if it means we have to move a few fences.
The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost Proverbs 22: 1 – 2, 8 – 9, 22 – 23
Sunday, September 9, 2012 James 2: 1 – 17
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 7: 24 - 37
Jesus said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Mark 7: 27
Several years ago, A.G. and I flew to Barcelona, Spain. After enjoying Barcelona, we rented a car and headed toward the southern coast of France to meet our son in Avignon. When we arrived at the border between Spain and France, we simply crossed over, surprised by the lack of interest in our crossing. Spain and France have an agreement, we came to understand, that makes travel between the two countries as easy as driving from Virginia over into Maryland.
That was not the case when I traveled to Ethiopia some years before. Landing in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, our group was detained for some time at the airport as our passports were checked, the nature of our visit was determined and assurances given that we were not bringing any dangerous items into the country.
Some borders are easier to cross than others.
This morning in our reading from the gospel of Mark, we encounter a difficult border crossing. This morning a woman, a Syro-phoenician woman, a gentile, comes to Jesus who is taking rest in a house in gentile territory. The border between gentiles and Jews was well defined and crossing over was not a simple matter. Jesus was a Jew, sojourning in gentile territory and a gentile woman intrudes asking for help. Her daughter is besieged by a demon and she wants Jesus to cast the demon out.
And Jesus calls her a dog, saying: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Ouch. Jesus sounds like one of those officials at the Ethiopia airport who wanted to know who we were and what we were up to, skeptical about us “westerners.” Jesus calls this gentile woman a “dog,” declaring that insofar as the Jews were concerned, gentiles were, not just outside the covenant, but little better than dogs.
I got the same message when we landed in Ethiopia. Just who did we think we were coming into Ethiopia, the poorest country of the world, from the richest country in the world? What were we doing there? At the border, in the airport at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia had all the power and could turn us away in a heartbeat. Unless those officials said we could enter their country we were going nowhere, no matter what our intentions were. We had come to learn; those officials perhaps thought we had come to gloat or maybe show them the light and that was the last thing those folk wanted or needed.
Held up for hours in an airport when all you can do is sit on the floor and wait after hours of travel is exasperating and frustrating and not a lot of fun. We were tired and now we were at the mercy of officials who saw us as outsiders and were wary.
Unless we travel to a foreign country, you and I rarely have the opportunity to be outsiders. Most of the time, we are the “insiders,” folk who are comfortable with our place and space. I doubt in any given week we are stopped, asked to show our credentials and requested to give reason for our presence. Most of the time we assume we belong here; we are able to do pretty much as we please and go wherever we wish to go. Indeed, as “insiders” we have the power to determine who may and who may not cross our borders.
The woman in our text is an outsider hoping for help from Jesus. This woman is a gentile who crosses over into a house occupied by Jews. And she does so in a patriarchal culture in which women were not to assert themselves before men. And after she makes her request, Jesus calls her a dog. What we know is that the Jews saw folk such as her as threats, a little like westerners are seen in any number places of the world. This woman was outside the covenant and Jesus so said. Jesus does not sound very welcoming nor very “inclusive,” and we are taken aback.
Jesus calls this woman a “dog.” Jesus’ language sounds strangely like the language often used to speak of Mexicans who cross the border. “Roaches” and “Wetbacks” are words used in some quarters to identify Mexican immigrants. Roaches, wetbacks and dogs are, generally speaking, not labels we would care to own. Such labels declare, crudely for sure, that the one doing the labeling is “in” and the one being labeled is “out.” And this gentile woman is clearly on the outside.
This woman stands at a border and this border is not going to be crossed easily. She stands her ground and so does Jesus. Jesus does not leave nor does Jesus tell her to go away. Jesus stands fast and so does this woman, saying: “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Sir, even wetbacks are human and need to eat. What are you going to do about us, us wetbacks and roaches? We, like you, need bread. Are you going to feed us?
As we waited in the airport in Addis Ababa, I thought about how we had come there, a group of eight seminary students, all excited about traveling to a distant land, all hoping for some kind of “spiritual” experience, now waylaid because the officials needed to verify our credentials. I never thought of myself as a threat, an outsider and a stranger whom others greeted with suspicion. I was white and a woman and an Episcopalian in a land of black skinned folk where women were to be seen but not heard and in which Christians were presumed to be Ethiopian Orthodox Coptic Christians. I was a stranger in a strange land and I was overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of the divides that separated me from these people. I could appreciate their caution; I was feeling a bit cautious myself.
The divide between this woman and Jesus was great indeed and Jesus does nothing to minimize that reality. On the other hand, Jesus does not summarily dismiss this woman who has transgressed just about every conceivable social boundary – a gentile who goes into the house of a Jew and then brashly engages in conversation with a man after she has been insulted. Jesus “suffers” her presence in spite of what she has done. Jesus does not withhold himself nor his power to heal her daughter, exposing himself, in all probability, to the condemnation of his Jewish brothers and sisters.
The gentile woman in our text this morning has often been praised for her boldness and persistence in spite of being initially dismissed. Her determination is understood to move Jesus to change his mind and we are left with the disturbing thought that Jesus might have refused to heal her daughter. Such a reading fails to appreciate the culture of first century Palestine which was rooted in notions of honor and shame. This woman acts shamelessly and by doing so, insults Jesus, dishonoring him with her shameless behavior. In the words of commentator Ched Myers: “Jesus allows himself to be ‘shamed’ (becoming ‘least’) in order to include this pagan woman in the new community of the kingdom.” Jesus humbles himself so that this gentile “dog” can have a share in the riches of God’s kingdom.
As we prepared to make our trip to Ethiopia the women were cautioned to wear skirts and shirts with sleeves. And in a Coptic Orthodox Church, women cover their heads. Had we not observed these cultural rules of engagement, we would have dishonored our hosts, insulting their culture and their way of life. On one occasion, we were all invited to the home of a local man for dinner and as we ate, the women in the family who had prepared the meal, all sat in another room, keeping themselves separated from the men of the family (and all of us) the entire evening. I was, to say the least, uncomfortable, but was never told to join the women in the back room. Our host was humbling himself to our way of life and I was grateful. I would have insulted our host had I, in a display of solidarity, picked up my plate and joined the women of the family in their seclusion.
And so I sat and ate rather uncomfortably, knowing that my experience as a woman was very different from the experiences of women in Ethiopia. I have grown up at a time and in a culture when women are no longer consigned to back rooms. My presence that night with the menfolk was not in keeping with their culture and I cannot say how uncomfortable the menfolk were as we ate dinner together. What I know is that I was uncomfortable knowing the women of the family were excluded from our gathering. My suspicion is that the men were uncomfortable as well with my presence in their midst. What the women in the back room were thinking is anybody’s guess. I would not be surprised if they thought I and my female companions, which included an internationally esteemed female professor, were being rather “shameless.”
Jesus crosses a border this morning and the border that he crosses was deep and wide. We, two thousand years later, are quick to sing the praises of unity but slow to appreciate what might be required of us to bring us to that unity, that oneness of heart and mind and soul. We will, no less than was our Lord, be asked to lay aside our privilege and our way of seeing and doing things. Being one will not come cheaply.
Sunday, September 9, 2012 James 2: 1 – 17
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 7: 24 - 37
Jesus said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Mark 7: 27
Several years ago, A.G. and I flew to Barcelona, Spain. After enjoying Barcelona, we rented a car and headed toward the southern coast of France to meet our son in Avignon. When we arrived at the border between Spain and France, we simply crossed over, surprised by the lack of interest in our crossing. Spain and France have an agreement, we came to understand, that makes travel between the two countries as easy as driving from Virginia over into Maryland.
That was not the case when I traveled to Ethiopia some years before. Landing in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, our group was detained for some time at the airport as our passports were checked, the nature of our visit was determined and assurances given that we were not bringing any dangerous items into the country.
Some borders are easier to cross than others.
This morning in our reading from the gospel of Mark, we encounter a difficult border crossing. This morning a woman, a Syro-phoenician woman, a gentile, comes to Jesus who is taking rest in a house in gentile territory. The border between gentiles and Jews was well defined and crossing over was not a simple matter. Jesus was a Jew, sojourning in gentile territory and a gentile woman intrudes asking for help. Her daughter is besieged by a demon and she wants Jesus to cast the demon out.
And Jesus calls her a dog, saying: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Ouch. Jesus sounds like one of those officials at the Ethiopia airport who wanted to know who we were and what we were up to, skeptical about us “westerners.” Jesus calls this gentile woman a “dog,” declaring that insofar as the Jews were concerned, gentiles were, not just outside the covenant, but little better than dogs.
I got the same message when we landed in Ethiopia. Just who did we think we were coming into Ethiopia, the poorest country of the world, from the richest country in the world? What were we doing there? At the border, in the airport at Addis Ababa, Ethiopia had all the power and could turn us away in a heartbeat. Unless those officials said we could enter their country we were going nowhere, no matter what our intentions were. We had come to learn; those officials perhaps thought we had come to gloat or maybe show them the light and that was the last thing those folk wanted or needed.
Held up for hours in an airport when all you can do is sit on the floor and wait after hours of travel is exasperating and frustrating and not a lot of fun. We were tired and now we were at the mercy of officials who saw us as outsiders and were wary.
Unless we travel to a foreign country, you and I rarely have the opportunity to be outsiders. Most of the time, we are the “insiders,” folk who are comfortable with our place and space. I doubt in any given week we are stopped, asked to show our credentials and requested to give reason for our presence. Most of the time we assume we belong here; we are able to do pretty much as we please and go wherever we wish to go. Indeed, as “insiders” we have the power to determine who may and who may not cross our borders.
The woman in our text is an outsider hoping for help from Jesus. This woman is a gentile who crosses over into a house occupied by Jews. And she does so in a patriarchal culture in which women were not to assert themselves before men. And after she makes her request, Jesus calls her a dog. What we know is that the Jews saw folk such as her as threats, a little like westerners are seen in any number places of the world. This woman was outside the covenant and Jesus so said. Jesus does not sound very welcoming nor very “inclusive,” and we are taken aback.
Jesus calls this woman a “dog.” Jesus’ language sounds strangely like the language often used to speak of Mexicans who cross the border. “Roaches” and “Wetbacks” are words used in some quarters to identify Mexican immigrants. Roaches, wetbacks and dogs are, generally speaking, not labels we would care to own. Such labels declare, crudely for sure, that the one doing the labeling is “in” and the one being labeled is “out.” And this gentile woman is clearly on the outside.
This woman stands at a border and this border is not going to be crossed easily. She stands her ground and so does Jesus. Jesus does not leave nor does Jesus tell her to go away. Jesus stands fast and so does this woman, saying: “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Sir, even wetbacks are human and need to eat. What are you going to do about us, us wetbacks and roaches? We, like you, need bread. Are you going to feed us?
As we waited in the airport in Addis Ababa, I thought about how we had come there, a group of eight seminary students, all excited about traveling to a distant land, all hoping for some kind of “spiritual” experience, now waylaid because the officials needed to verify our credentials. I never thought of myself as a threat, an outsider and a stranger whom others greeted with suspicion. I was white and a woman and an Episcopalian in a land of black skinned folk where women were to be seen but not heard and in which Christians were presumed to be Ethiopian Orthodox Coptic Christians. I was a stranger in a strange land and I was overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of the divides that separated me from these people. I could appreciate their caution; I was feeling a bit cautious myself.
The divide between this woman and Jesus was great indeed and Jesus does nothing to minimize that reality. On the other hand, Jesus does not summarily dismiss this woman who has transgressed just about every conceivable social boundary – a gentile who goes into the house of a Jew and then brashly engages in conversation with a man after she has been insulted. Jesus “suffers” her presence in spite of what she has done. Jesus does not withhold himself nor his power to heal her daughter, exposing himself, in all probability, to the condemnation of his Jewish brothers and sisters.
The gentile woman in our text this morning has often been praised for her boldness and persistence in spite of being initially dismissed. Her determination is understood to move Jesus to change his mind and we are left with the disturbing thought that Jesus might have refused to heal her daughter. Such a reading fails to appreciate the culture of first century Palestine which was rooted in notions of honor and shame. This woman acts shamelessly and by doing so, insults Jesus, dishonoring him with her shameless behavior. In the words of commentator Ched Myers: “Jesus allows himself to be ‘shamed’ (becoming ‘least’) in order to include this pagan woman in the new community of the kingdom.” Jesus humbles himself so that this gentile “dog” can have a share in the riches of God’s kingdom.
As we prepared to make our trip to Ethiopia the women were cautioned to wear skirts and shirts with sleeves. And in a Coptic Orthodox Church, women cover their heads. Had we not observed these cultural rules of engagement, we would have dishonored our hosts, insulting their culture and their way of life. On one occasion, we were all invited to the home of a local man for dinner and as we ate, the women in the family who had prepared the meal, all sat in another room, keeping themselves separated from the men of the family (and all of us) the entire evening. I was, to say the least, uncomfortable, but was never told to join the women in the back room. Our host was humbling himself to our way of life and I was grateful. I would have insulted our host had I, in a display of solidarity, picked up my plate and joined the women of the family in their seclusion.
And so I sat and ate rather uncomfortably, knowing that my experience as a woman was very different from the experiences of women in Ethiopia. I have grown up at a time and in a culture when women are no longer consigned to back rooms. My presence that night with the menfolk was not in keeping with their culture and I cannot say how uncomfortable the menfolk were as we ate dinner together. What I know is that I was uncomfortable knowing the women of the family were excluded from our gathering. My suspicion is that the men were uncomfortable as well with my presence in their midst. What the women in the back room were thinking is anybody’s guess. I would not be surprised if they thought I and my female companions, which included an internationally esteemed female professor, were being rather “shameless.”
Jesus crosses a border this morning and the border that he crosses was deep and wide. We, two thousand years later, are quick to sing the praises of unity but slow to appreciate what might be required of us to bring us to that unity, that oneness of heart and mind and soul. We will, no less than was our Lord, be asked to lay aside our privilege and our way of seeing and doing things. Being one will not come cheaply.
The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost Proverbs 1: 20 – 33
Sunday, September 16, 2012 James 3: 1 – 12
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 8: 27 - 38
But turning and looking at his disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’
Mark 8: 33
On Tuesday, eleven years after the terror of 9-11, a mob attacked the American Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans and several Libyans, sending yet another shock wave around the world in the wake of such acts of violence. As of Thursday, no one was sure whether this latest horror was the work of organized terrorists or the consequence of an amateur filmmaker who chose to mock the prophet Mohammed. Either way, more than four people are dead and thousands more are concerned for their safety.
Violence has once again, displayed its terrible power, a power over which we seem to have little control. Violence – the power to kill and to destroy – continues to threaten our lives and the lives of every living thing. We are, for sure, learning much about the prevention of violence, but violence remains a reality in this world in which we live, and when all else fails, sadly the use of more violence is the only way we have to respond. Let us pray that the Marines who were deployed this week to Libya and the warships that were sent to keep watch off the Libyan coast will not need to take action.
But it is in the light of the news this week that we hear our reading this morning from the gospel of Mark. In our reading, Jesus tells the disciples that he must undergo great suffering, be rejected and killed, and after three days rise again. In response, Peter rebukes Jesus, scolding Jesus for saying he must be killed. The Messiah of God must suffer the violence of the cross and Peter revolts.
Peter is acting quite humanly. Aside from whatever personal feelings Peter undoubtedly had for Jesus, Peter also knows that the Messiah’s job is to save us; a Messiah who cannot save himself is not going to be of much help to us. So Peter scolds Jesus for saying the wrong thing. And Jesus in turn scolds Peter for “setting his mind on human things.”
Peter wants a Messiah who will save him, who will rescue him from trouble and “deliver him from evil,” in the words of the Lord’s Prayer. And Peter knows that God promised to raise up a Messiah, someone who would bring justice and peace to Israel, who would free God’s people from the oppression of her enemies, and make Israel once again, the glory of the nations.
Peter, like all of us, knows what a Messiah is supposed to do and getting killed is not on the list. Like Peter, we would be aghast if our heart surgeon told us all of his patients died on the table or our financial planner told us he did not believe in saving money or our lawyer told us all of her clients ended up in jail or the troops deployed to Libya this week would carry no weapons. We would not look to those folks to help us because clearly they cannot. Peter learns this morning this Messiah is not the one he had in mind and his first thought is that Jesus is, at a minimum confused about the role of Messiah, at worst as deluded as that mythic heart surgeon that we might actually want him to operate on us.
Jesus says he must be killed and if that wasn’t bad enough, Jesus then tells the crowd, if they follow him they will share his fate. “For those who want to save their life will lose it,” Jesus says and Peter is left wondering if his hope for a Messiah who will save him is still just a promise God once made. Jesus looks nothing like the savior for whom Peter was hoping and his life and that of all those who follow this odd Messiah will be anything but glorious.
Peter, as a Jew, shared in a constellation of expectations about God’s promised Messiah. The expectations varied widely, but broadly speaking most, although not all Jews, expected the Messiah to restore the glory of the Temple and free Israel from the oppression of foreign overlords. The Messiah of God would be the true King of the Jews, leading them in right worship and leading the battle against Israel’s enemies. No one expected the Messiah to die; indeed, a dead Messiah was a false Messiah. From Peter’s human point of view, Jesus’ claim that he “must” die was wholly outside any expectation of the Messiah. The Messiah simply could not “get killed.”
Jesus did get killed and on the third day was raised from the dead. In light of the resurrection, the Church came to understand the crucifixion as the means by which God suffered the power of violence, an act of self-giving love through which the power of evil did not have the last word. Life will have the last word, not death.
In this world, death does indeed have the last word. No one comes back from the dead and that truth is what the perpetrators of violence rely upon. Evil is the undoing of God’s good creation, all that is opposed to life, all that seeks to undo what God has brought into being. Evil seeks to destroy what God has created and when God raised Jesus from the dead, God announced evil and death do not have the last word.
We, like our ancestors in the faith, want to know why God allows evil to exist. And the answer to that question has eluded humankind forever. What we know is that God brought forth life and God’s purpose is to sustain life and for reasons beyond our understanding, God allowed a snake into the Garden of Eden and evil to exist. What we know is that you and I live in a world destined for life but always shadowed by the reality of death.
What happened in Libya this week was evil. And what happened in the concentration camps, at Dachau and Aushwitz, during World War II was evil. What happens when a child is born into this world without the capacity to survive but for a few hours is evil. What happens when a woman is abused and forced to live in a relationship that is violent is evil. What happens to miners obliged to breath in coal dust in order to earn a living only to succomb to black lung disease is evil. Gossip is evil and not telling the truth is evil and not speaking up when we see injustice is evil and not sharing what we have with others is evil and, need I go on? Evil is a part of every act that seeks to destroy life – our own or that of others. Evil seeks to end life; God seeks to create life.
You and I do not have the power to overcome evil but we do not need to concede to evil ultimate power. We do need to confess and name the evil within us and around us. We need to acknowledge that evil is real and exists and infects each and every one of us – no one of us is able to free ourselves from the power of evil. But we can acknowledge another power, a power stronger than that of evil, the power that raised Jesus from the dead, a power that promises to empower us to tell the truth, to forgive and to be reconciled one with another – we can collude with the power of God to bring forth life.
The violence of this week is fraught with peril. We “westerners” are being attacked. And while we may and I hope we do, find the initiators of this latest round of violence and bring them to justice, the larger question remains: “What have we done to incur such wrath?” If we take evil and sin seriously, we will need to reflect on our ways. Evil does not much care whether you are American or Libyan, from the West or from the East – evil’s only desire is to wreck havoc and destruction. Evil has found yet one more way to divide us and has succeeded this week in killing at least a half dozen innocent folk and fueling an ever deepening divide between those of us who live in the west and those of us who live in the east. Every life is precious, be that life lived out in America or in Libya, lived out as a Muslim or a Christian or a Jew or one who worships nothing at all. Life, all life is precious, because life is always a gift and not anything we can earn or achieve.
Jesus rebukes Peter this morning saying: “Get behind me, Satan!” when Peter tries to dissuade Jesus from the cross. Peter wanted Jesus to make peace with the Enemy – with evil -and Jesus would not and could not do that. Jesus was going to die, die as an innocent man and die silently, without spewing curses against his executioners, “a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,” in the words of the prophet Isaiah. Jesus makes no attempt in the gospels to save himself, to defend himself against his accusers. Jesus allows evil to overpower him. Jesus literally hands himself over to evil and to the God whose mercy is everlasting and who raises Jesus from the dead on the third day.
Jesus trusted God to be faithful and God was. We cannot do what Jesus did but we can live with the good news that the power of God and not the power of evil, will have the last word. We can live as people who know that we as much as every other human being is tainted, infected by sin and cannot escape that reality. We can confess our sins, our complicity with evil and seek to redress the wrongs that keep us separated one from one another. We can make common cause with all of our brothers and sisters who like us this week live in fear that our ways of life are threatened, our children are at risk, and the future of the world in which we live is imperiled. This is not a time to rest satisfied that all is well because all is not. This is a time to consider anew the ways we have contributed to the dis-ease of the world and to consider how we might change. Jesus calls Peter “Satan” this morning. Peter was Jesus’ closest friend. If Satan could infect Peter, Jesus’ closest friend and follower, we are not immune – not from violence nor the presumption that we do not share in it.
Sunday, September 16, 2012 James 3: 1 – 12
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 8: 27 - 38
But turning and looking at his disciples, Jesus rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’
Mark 8: 33
On Tuesday, eleven years after the terror of 9-11, a mob attacked the American Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans and several Libyans, sending yet another shock wave around the world in the wake of such acts of violence. As of Thursday, no one was sure whether this latest horror was the work of organized terrorists or the consequence of an amateur filmmaker who chose to mock the prophet Mohammed. Either way, more than four people are dead and thousands more are concerned for their safety.
Violence has once again, displayed its terrible power, a power over which we seem to have little control. Violence – the power to kill and to destroy – continues to threaten our lives and the lives of every living thing. We are, for sure, learning much about the prevention of violence, but violence remains a reality in this world in which we live, and when all else fails, sadly the use of more violence is the only way we have to respond. Let us pray that the Marines who were deployed this week to Libya and the warships that were sent to keep watch off the Libyan coast will not need to take action.
But it is in the light of the news this week that we hear our reading this morning from the gospel of Mark. In our reading, Jesus tells the disciples that he must undergo great suffering, be rejected and killed, and after three days rise again. In response, Peter rebukes Jesus, scolding Jesus for saying he must be killed. The Messiah of God must suffer the violence of the cross and Peter revolts.
Peter is acting quite humanly. Aside from whatever personal feelings Peter undoubtedly had for Jesus, Peter also knows that the Messiah’s job is to save us; a Messiah who cannot save himself is not going to be of much help to us. So Peter scolds Jesus for saying the wrong thing. And Jesus in turn scolds Peter for “setting his mind on human things.”
Peter wants a Messiah who will save him, who will rescue him from trouble and “deliver him from evil,” in the words of the Lord’s Prayer. And Peter knows that God promised to raise up a Messiah, someone who would bring justice and peace to Israel, who would free God’s people from the oppression of her enemies, and make Israel once again, the glory of the nations.
Peter, like all of us, knows what a Messiah is supposed to do and getting killed is not on the list. Like Peter, we would be aghast if our heart surgeon told us all of his patients died on the table or our financial planner told us he did not believe in saving money or our lawyer told us all of her clients ended up in jail or the troops deployed to Libya this week would carry no weapons. We would not look to those folks to help us because clearly they cannot. Peter learns this morning this Messiah is not the one he had in mind and his first thought is that Jesus is, at a minimum confused about the role of Messiah, at worst as deluded as that mythic heart surgeon that we might actually want him to operate on us.
Jesus says he must be killed and if that wasn’t bad enough, Jesus then tells the crowd, if they follow him they will share his fate. “For those who want to save their life will lose it,” Jesus says and Peter is left wondering if his hope for a Messiah who will save him is still just a promise God once made. Jesus looks nothing like the savior for whom Peter was hoping and his life and that of all those who follow this odd Messiah will be anything but glorious.
Peter, as a Jew, shared in a constellation of expectations about God’s promised Messiah. The expectations varied widely, but broadly speaking most, although not all Jews, expected the Messiah to restore the glory of the Temple and free Israel from the oppression of foreign overlords. The Messiah of God would be the true King of the Jews, leading them in right worship and leading the battle against Israel’s enemies. No one expected the Messiah to die; indeed, a dead Messiah was a false Messiah. From Peter’s human point of view, Jesus’ claim that he “must” die was wholly outside any expectation of the Messiah. The Messiah simply could not “get killed.”
Jesus did get killed and on the third day was raised from the dead. In light of the resurrection, the Church came to understand the crucifixion as the means by which God suffered the power of violence, an act of self-giving love through which the power of evil did not have the last word. Life will have the last word, not death.
In this world, death does indeed have the last word. No one comes back from the dead and that truth is what the perpetrators of violence rely upon. Evil is the undoing of God’s good creation, all that is opposed to life, all that seeks to undo what God has brought into being. Evil seeks to destroy what God has created and when God raised Jesus from the dead, God announced evil and death do not have the last word.
We, like our ancestors in the faith, want to know why God allows evil to exist. And the answer to that question has eluded humankind forever. What we know is that God brought forth life and God’s purpose is to sustain life and for reasons beyond our understanding, God allowed a snake into the Garden of Eden and evil to exist. What we know is that you and I live in a world destined for life but always shadowed by the reality of death.
What happened in Libya this week was evil. And what happened in the concentration camps, at Dachau and Aushwitz, during World War II was evil. What happens when a child is born into this world without the capacity to survive but for a few hours is evil. What happens when a woman is abused and forced to live in a relationship that is violent is evil. What happens to miners obliged to breath in coal dust in order to earn a living only to succomb to black lung disease is evil. Gossip is evil and not telling the truth is evil and not speaking up when we see injustice is evil and not sharing what we have with others is evil and, need I go on? Evil is a part of every act that seeks to destroy life – our own or that of others. Evil seeks to end life; God seeks to create life.
You and I do not have the power to overcome evil but we do not need to concede to evil ultimate power. We do need to confess and name the evil within us and around us. We need to acknowledge that evil is real and exists and infects each and every one of us – no one of us is able to free ourselves from the power of evil. But we can acknowledge another power, a power stronger than that of evil, the power that raised Jesus from the dead, a power that promises to empower us to tell the truth, to forgive and to be reconciled one with another – we can collude with the power of God to bring forth life.
The violence of this week is fraught with peril. We “westerners” are being attacked. And while we may and I hope we do, find the initiators of this latest round of violence and bring them to justice, the larger question remains: “What have we done to incur such wrath?” If we take evil and sin seriously, we will need to reflect on our ways. Evil does not much care whether you are American or Libyan, from the West or from the East – evil’s only desire is to wreck havoc and destruction. Evil has found yet one more way to divide us and has succeeded this week in killing at least a half dozen innocent folk and fueling an ever deepening divide between those of us who live in the west and those of us who live in the east. Every life is precious, be that life lived out in America or in Libya, lived out as a Muslim or a Christian or a Jew or one who worships nothing at all. Life, all life is precious, because life is always a gift and not anything we can earn or achieve.
Jesus rebukes Peter this morning saying: “Get behind me, Satan!” when Peter tries to dissuade Jesus from the cross. Peter wanted Jesus to make peace with the Enemy – with evil -and Jesus would not and could not do that. Jesus was going to die, die as an innocent man and die silently, without spewing curses against his executioners, “a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,” in the words of the prophet Isaiah. Jesus makes no attempt in the gospels to save himself, to defend himself against his accusers. Jesus allows evil to overpower him. Jesus literally hands himself over to evil and to the God whose mercy is everlasting and who raises Jesus from the dead on the third day.
Jesus trusted God to be faithful and God was. We cannot do what Jesus did but we can live with the good news that the power of God and not the power of evil, will have the last word. We can live as people who know that we as much as every other human being is tainted, infected by sin and cannot escape that reality. We can confess our sins, our complicity with evil and seek to redress the wrongs that keep us separated one from one another. We can make common cause with all of our brothers and sisters who like us this week live in fear that our ways of life are threatened, our children are at risk, and the future of the world in which we live is imperiled. This is not a time to rest satisfied that all is well because all is not. This is a time to consider anew the ways we have contributed to the dis-ease of the world and to consider how we might change. Jesus calls Peter “Satan” this morning. Peter was Jesus’ closest friend. If Satan could infect Peter, Jesus’ closest friend and follower, we are not immune – not from violence nor the presumption that we do not share in it.
The Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost Proverbs 31: 10 – 31
Sunday, September 23, 2012 James 3: 13 – 4: 3, 7 – 8a
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 9: 30 – 37
‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’
Mark 9: 37
I received a gift from Joyce Goforth not too long ago. Her gift was a travel mug inscribed with the words: “Jesus loves you but I’m his special favorite.” For reasons known only to Joyce, she thought of me when she found this treasure and I have been laughing ever since.
But for the disciples in our gospel reading from Mark this morning, discerning who is Jesus’ special favorite is a matter of importance and they are arguing over who among them is the greatest. In response, Jesus takes a child into his arms and says: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” Those who are great in the kingdom of God are those who welcome the not-so-great. And children in the first century were numbered among the not-so-great.
In the first century, a web article from PBS notes: “Around twenty-five per cent of babies in the first century did not survive their first year and up to half of all children would die before the age of ten.” Children, from the moment of their birth, were at risk and their life was precarious. Such an uncertain future, would I suspect, taint whatever welcome they might be given. Remaining hospitable to a child who probably would die no doubt hardened many hearts.
And, a child was subject to the Roman cultural codes of the day, codes that gave the father of the family absolute power. When a child was born, this same article notes, the mid wife would place the child on the floor. If the father picked the child up, the father was accepting the child into the family. If the father refused to pick up the child, the mid wife would carry the child outside and leave the child on the side of the road. Either the child would die or someone would pick up the child to raise as a slave.
Life was harsh, in part because of biology and in part because of the culture. At a time when so little was known about medicine, exposing a child to the elements that had no hope of living may not have been the choice of a cold hearted father but rather a choice born of the reality that a child born with a severe handicap was destined to die.
When Jesus takes a child and puts this child in the midst of disciples who are arguing about greatness, Jesus invites the disciples away from themselves and their preoccupation with securing their own place in the kingdom and into a world that needed their help – a world in which children often died and, if they lived, they were understood as the property of their father, who had the legal right to disown them, sell them into slavery and even kill them. To be great in the kingdom of God, for Jesus, meant taking our place alongside the least.
“Jesus loves you but I’m his special favorite” is funny precisely because we know that God does not have favorites. In the kingdom of God all are welcome, not because any one of us deserve a place in God’s kingdom but because God loves us. And we who have been welcomed are now free to welcome others, giving ourselves away as God gave Godself away for us, dying on the cross that we might have life, abundant life.
And all that sounds wonderful so long as God does not ask us to give up everything. Because if we give up everything, we will be one of those who are the least, at the mercy of others, dependent and powerless. At the end of the day we want to be spared from the indignity of being powerless and at the mercy of others to care for us.
We each have power - we can do and we can choose not to do. And most of the time you and I are pretty good about protecting ourselves, using the power God has given us to keep ourselves safe. We wish to avoid discomfort and the possibility that we might be humiliated, that others will laugh at us or scorn us. And, human nature being what it is, that probably will happen. We do not want others to know that we are not the strong, dependable and in control people we wish we were. We are pretty good at finding ways, in popular parlance, to “save face.”
We really do want to be God’s special favorite – we do not want to admit that we, just like every other human being, is needy, dependent and very limited. We do not want others to know when we are suffering because we are afraid of what others will think. Others can and often do, take advantage of our weaknesses. No one of us wants to be like a child with no power and no way to control what happens to us.
We do in our own ways want to be great when the reality is we are not and cannot be.
We prayed this morning in our opening collect, that God might grant us the grace of not being “anxious about earthly things.” We all are fairly well consumed with “earthly things,” with our desire to care for ourselves and with “saving face,” putting up a good front so that others will not know our angsts and our pains and our troubles. What we want is for God to spare us from the earthly reality that we are human and need others to help us. What we want is to take of care of ourselves and none of us can do that.
What the disciples need, I would say, is a dose of humility, to know that none of us – save one - is great in the eyes of God. But no sooner do I say this than I am reminded of the words of Frederich Buechner who writes:
Humility is often confused with the gentlemanly self-deprecation of saying you’re not much of a bridge player when you know perfectly well that you are. Conscious or otherwise, this kind of humility is a form of gamesmanship.
If you really aren’t much of a bridge player, you’re apt to be rather proud of yourself for admitting it so humbly. This kind of humility is a form of low comedy.
True humility doesn’t consist of thinking ill of yourself but of not thinking of yourself much differently from the way you’d be apt to think of anybody else. It is the capacity for being no more and no less pleased when you play your hand well than when your opponents do.
Playing our hands well is what God wants us to do. And playing our hands well means, as Buechner notes, not thinking of yourself much differently from the way you’d be apt to think of anybody else. All of us humans are in the same boat. We all have gifts and none of us have been given everything we need to live in this world. We all have something to give and something to receive. None of us are dispensable and none of us are all-knowing. Recognizing and sharing our gifts is one side of the coin whose flip side is knowing we need the gifts of others. Owning both sides of that coin is the challenge God has given to us.
The church is an odd place, as odd as the God we worship, a God who chose to save us by dying, to deliver us from death by giving Godself up to death. In the church we will meet folk who are easy to be with and other folk who are not so easy to be with. We will be glad that so-and-so is such-and-such and wish other so-and-so’s were different. We will, I pray, be inspired from time to time but we will, I also know, be disheartened from time to time. We will wish that God would simply do things our way because as we all want to believe, “Jesus loves you but I’m his special favorite.”
None of us are God’s special favorite and God does not do things our way. God has brought us into being and graced each of us with different gifts and graces. And God has given us one to another to be helpmates and partners.
“Peace be with you” we say to one another every Sunday. “Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you,” we pray as we end our service of worship. “Go in peace” I say as we are dismissed. The disciples this morning are not at peace, wrestling as they are over who among them is the greatest. Making peace with ourselves – that we are both great and not so great, both graced and limited, both strong and weak – is the reality we must confront before we can go, in the words of the dismissal, “to love and serve the Lord.” God wants us to be at peace with ourselves, not for our sakes but for the sake of all those who God loves. God wants us to be at peace with ourselves so that we can be at peace with all who God has made.
Sunday, September 23, 2012 James 3: 13 – 4: 3, 7 – 8a
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 9: 30 – 37
‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’
Mark 9: 37
I received a gift from Joyce Goforth not too long ago. Her gift was a travel mug inscribed with the words: “Jesus loves you but I’m his special favorite.” For reasons known only to Joyce, she thought of me when she found this treasure and I have been laughing ever since.
But for the disciples in our gospel reading from Mark this morning, discerning who is Jesus’ special favorite is a matter of importance and they are arguing over who among them is the greatest. In response, Jesus takes a child into his arms and says: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” Those who are great in the kingdom of God are those who welcome the not-so-great. And children in the first century were numbered among the not-so-great.
In the first century, a web article from PBS notes: “Around twenty-five per cent of babies in the first century did not survive their first year and up to half of all children would die before the age of ten.” Children, from the moment of their birth, were at risk and their life was precarious. Such an uncertain future, would I suspect, taint whatever welcome they might be given. Remaining hospitable to a child who probably would die no doubt hardened many hearts.
And, a child was subject to the Roman cultural codes of the day, codes that gave the father of the family absolute power. When a child was born, this same article notes, the mid wife would place the child on the floor. If the father picked the child up, the father was accepting the child into the family. If the father refused to pick up the child, the mid wife would carry the child outside and leave the child on the side of the road. Either the child would die or someone would pick up the child to raise as a slave.
Life was harsh, in part because of biology and in part because of the culture. At a time when so little was known about medicine, exposing a child to the elements that had no hope of living may not have been the choice of a cold hearted father but rather a choice born of the reality that a child born with a severe handicap was destined to die.
When Jesus takes a child and puts this child in the midst of disciples who are arguing about greatness, Jesus invites the disciples away from themselves and their preoccupation with securing their own place in the kingdom and into a world that needed their help – a world in which children often died and, if they lived, they were understood as the property of their father, who had the legal right to disown them, sell them into slavery and even kill them. To be great in the kingdom of God, for Jesus, meant taking our place alongside the least.
“Jesus loves you but I’m his special favorite” is funny precisely because we know that God does not have favorites. In the kingdom of God all are welcome, not because any one of us deserve a place in God’s kingdom but because God loves us. And we who have been welcomed are now free to welcome others, giving ourselves away as God gave Godself away for us, dying on the cross that we might have life, abundant life.
And all that sounds wonderful so long as God does not ask us to give up everything. Because if we give up everything, we will be one of those who are the least, at the mercy of others, dependent and powerless. At the end of the day we want to be spared from the indignity of being powerless and at the mercy of others to care for us.
We each have power - we can do and we can choose not to do. And most of the time you and I are pretty good about protecting ourselves, using the power God has given us to keep ourselves safe. We wish to avoid discomfort and the possibility that we might be humiliated, that others will laugh at us or scorn us. And, human nature being what it is, that probably will happen. We do not want others to know that we are not the strong, dependable and in control people we wish we were. We are pretty good at finding ways, in popular parlance, to “save face.”
We really do want to be God’s special favorite – we do not want to admit that we, just like every other human being, is needy, dependent and very limited. We do not want others to know when we are suffering because we are afraid of what others will think. Others can and often do, take advantage of our weaknesses. No one of us wants to be like a child with no power and no way to control what happens to us.
We do in our own ways want to be great when the reality is we are not and cannot be.
We prayed this morning in our opening collect, that God might grant us the grace of not being “anxious about earthly things.” We all are fairly well consumed with “earthly things,” with our desire to care for ourselves and with “saving face,” putting up a good front so that others will not know our angsts and our pains and our troubles. What we want is for God to spare us from the earthly reality that we are human and need others to help us. What we want is to take of care of ourselves and none of us can do that.
What the disciples need, I would say, is a dose of humility, to know that none of us – save one - is great in the eyes of God. But no sooner do I say this than I am reminded of the words of Frederich Buechner who writes:
Humility is often confused with the gentlemanly self-deprecation of saying you’re not much of a bridge player when you know perfectly well that you are. Conscious or otherwise, this kind of humility is a form of gamesmanship.
If you really aren’t much of a bridge player, you’re apt to be rather proud of yourself for admitting it so humbly. This kind of humility is a form of low comedy.
True humility doesn’t consist of thinking ill of yourself but of not thinking of yourself much differently from the way you’d be apt to think of anybody else. It is the capacity for being no more and no less pleased when you play your hand well than when your opponents do.
Playing our hands well is what God wants us to do. And playing our hands well means, as Buechner notes, not thinking of yourself much differently from the way you’d be apt to think of anybody else. All of us humans are in the same boat. We all have gifts and none of us have been given everything we need to live in this world. We all have something to give and something to receive. None of us are dispensable and none of us are all-knowing. Recognizing and sharing our gifts is one side of the coin whose flip side is knowing we need the gifts of others. Owning both sides of that coin is the challenge God has given to us.
The church is an odd place, as odd as the God we worship, a God who chose to save us by dying, to deliver us from death by giving Godself up to death. In the church we will meet folk who are easy to be with and other folk who are not so easy to be with. We will be glad that so-and-so is such-and-such and wish other so-and-so’s were different. We will, I pray, be inspired from time to time but we will, I also know, be disheartened from time to time. We will wish that God would simply do things our way because as we all want to believe, “Jesus loves you but I’m his special favorite.”
None of us are God’s special favorite and God does not do things our way. God has brought us into being and graced each of us with different gifts and graces. And God has given us one to another to be helpmates and partners.
“Peace be with you” we say to one another every Sunday. “Send us now into the world in peace, and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you,” we pray as we end our service of worship. “Go in peace” I say as we are dismissed. The disciples this morning are not at peace, wrestling as they are over who among them is the greatest. Making peace with ourselves – that we are both great and not so great, both graced and limited, both strong and weak – is the reality we must confront before we can go, in the words of the dismissal, “to love and serve the Lord.” God wants us to be at peace with ourselves, not for our sakes but for the sake of all those who God loves. God wants us to be at peace with ourselves so that we can be at peace with all who God has made.
The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost Job 1: 1; 2: 1 – 10
Sunday, October 7, 2012 Hebrews 1: 1 – 4; 2: 5 – 12
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 10: 2 – 16
Then Job’s wife said to Job, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.”
Job 2: 9
There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. So begins one of the most powerful and profound writings in the whole of the Old Testament. This morning we hear from the beginning of the book of Job, a book that was written relatively late as far as Old Testament writings go – five or six hundred years before the birth of Christ. The book is focused around a man named Job, a man who was, we hear in our reading, “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”
Job’s “blamelessness” or innocence receives the attention and praise of God, who we meet this morning as God is holding court in heaven with the heavenly beings, one of whom is Satan. Satan for our Old Testament ancestors was not God’s adversary but was rather God’s prosecutor; Satan’s role was to determine the truth of people’s hearts and whether they truly loved God or something else. Satan has been wandering the earth, presumably testing and trying folk, and God draws Satan’s attention to Job, a man who refuses to have anything to do with evil. Job seems beyond temptation, and God appears almost to brag upon Job, saying: “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.”
Satan has considered Job, however, and Satan believes Job’s heart can be turned away from God. So Satan makes a bet with God. Satan wagers that Job’s faith in God is predicated upon his comfortable life, a life filled with God’s blessings. Take away that comfortable life and Job will curse you, Satan says to God. And God agrees to the wager.
Our reading this morning skips most of the first chapter in the story of Job, moving from the first verse of the first chapter directly into chapter 2. What we learn in the verses we skipped is that Job was very rich, with many camels, sheep and donkeys, a large family and was “the greatest of all the people of the east.” We also learn that Job worshipped God, day and night.
One day, suddenly and unexpectedly, Job’s oxen and donkeys and camels are stolen, his servants are killed, his sheep are destroyed in a fire and his seven sons and three daughters perish when the house in which they are feasting together collapses. Upon hearing all of this horrific news, Job says: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job has been brought from riches to rags in one afternoon and the closing words of chapter one are: “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing.”
Our reading picks up just after these words as Satan now tells God that Job persists in his faithfulness because Job has not suffered the loss of his health. “Skin for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.” Job continues to love God so far as Satan is concerned, because Job has not suffered physically. And God says to Satan: “Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life.”
Now Job has lost all of his lands and animals and servants and children as well as his health for now Job is stricken with leprosy. He is no longer an esteemed member of his community but rather “sits among the ashes.” For our ancestors in the faith, sickness separated the afflicted from society, rendering you unclean and forcing you to live a apart from others until you were healed. Sickness, much like the loss of Job’s wealth and family, was understood to be the just judgment of God upon sin. And as the story of Job unfolds, Job’s friends, beginning with his wife, will try to convince Job that he is not blameless but rather has done something to merit God’s wrath.
All the while Job maintains his innocence. Job has done nothing to merit such suffering. And Job refuses to abandon his faith in God whose ways he cannot understand. Job is faithful in good times and in bad. Job is faithful and righteous and just both when his life is blessed and when his life is cursed. Job’s faith does not depend upon what Job receives from God’s hand.
Job trusts in the goodness of God even when God’s goodness is nowhere to be seen. And Job’s faithfulness stands in sharp contrast with that of his wife and friends whose faith in God depends upon believing God will reward us for good behavior and punish us for bad behavior. In other words, for Job’s wife and friends, faith is predicated upon believing God will reward the righteous and condemn the wicked.
The story of Job, in the words of biblical scholar James Crenshaw, is a story about “the possibility of disinterested righteousness.” “The author asks,” Crenshaw writes, “whether virtue depends on a universe that operates by the principle of reward and punishment.” Why be good if there is no reward for good behavior? And reward can be as simple as receiving the esteem of your friends and neighbors or as lofty as the hope of going to heaven when you die. In what way is our righteousness predicated upon some belief in a moral universe, in a God who rewards the good and punishes the bad just as we humans do?
Job’s faith in God is heedless, unconcerned, with the outcome of his faith. Job is faithful for “no reason” or “for nothing,” as our text reads. Job is not faithful because Job believes his faith will earn him a reward, a blessing from God. Job is faithful because Job can be faithful, at all times and in all places. God allows Satan to lead Job right into the valley of the shadow of death, leaving Job with absolutely no reason to trust in God’s goodness. And Job continues to trust without reason or, perhaps better said, Job’s trust transcends reason.
Job’s journey through suffering is undeserved and Job maintains his innocence throughout this epic drama, not stoically for sure. Job will rail and rant and demand that God explain God’s ways to him, which God does not do. But Job persists, trusting in the love of God when everything that has befallen him belies that belief.
When you and I suffer, we are often apt to blame ourselves, wondering what we did to deserve such calamity. And whereas we know if we smoke and are subsequently diagnosed with lung cancer, our diagnosis is probably the result of our behavior. If, on the other hand, you were a Jew living in Nazi Germany in the 1930’s and you were sent to the gas chambers, your death was the consequence of Hitler’s madness and had nothing to do with your righteousness or lack of it. Hitler made no distinction between good Jews and bad Jews; Hitler rounded up all Jews and put them in box cars and sent them to the gas chambers. We can and often do cause our own suffering; but much suffering is wholly undeserved. Keeping faith in the face of innocent and undeserved suffering is the challenge or, we might say, the demand that Job confronts.
You and I live in a world that does not always make sense, however much we wish it did. We cannot explain everything that happens to us and we cannot keep awful things from happening. And when awful things do happen, we often rush in with words much like Job’s friends will do, to explain or to justify or to rationalize the inexplicable and unjustifiable and non rational. In the face of innocent suffering we usually have only two options - keep silent before a mystery we cannot possibly understand or rant at a God who will always remain beyond our understanding. Job will do both. Job’s anger in the face of what he cannot understand is not faithlessness but rather the confidence that God will not throw Job off the face of the earth simply for asking to understand, because Job is human like all of us and seeks to understand because that is how God created us to be.
The God in whom Job trusts in these opening chapters of the book becomes over the next forty – two chapters a good bit more complicated and a little less easy to read. Job learns that any relationship we might have with this God, is like any relationship, filled with promise and uncertainty. What Job receives is not knowledge of God but an awareness of God’s presence. God is not going away and neither is Job. And that is the good news.
We will over the next four weeks hear more from Job. And I trust that what we hear from Job will inform not only our views about God and ourselves and the world in which we live but our presumptions about Christ. Job has often been understood to prefigure Christ, the Christ who cried out to God in the Garden of Gethsemane asking: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me,” and who on the cross spoke those chilling words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Jesus was, we affirm, fully human and in his humanity Jesus really died, died to any kind of a superficial belief that God would make all things turn out right. Jesus, in his humanity, handed himself over to the same God that brought Job to his knees. Jesus, like Job, was brought to the brink of faithlessness but never crossed over. You and I can only look and marvel.
Sunday, October 7, 2012 Hebrews 1: 1 – 4; 2: 5 – 12
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 10: 2 – 16
Then Job’s wife said to Job, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.”
Job 2: 9
There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. So begins one of the most powerful and profound writings in the whole of the Old Testament. This morning we hear from the beginning of the book of Job, a book that was written relatively late as far as Old Testament writings go – five or six hundred years before the birth of Christ. The book is focused around a man named Job, a man who was, we hear in our reading, “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.”
Job’s “blamelessness” or innocence receives the attention and praise of God, who we meet this morning as God is holding court in heaven with the heavenly beings, one of whom is Satan. Satan for our Old Testament ancestors was not God’s adversary but was rather God’s prosecutor; Satan’s role was to determine the truth of people’s hearts and whether they truly loved God or something else. Satan has been wandering the earth, presumably testing and trying folk, and God draws Satan’s attention to Job, a man who refuses to have anything to do with evil. Job seems beyond temptation, and God appears almost to brag upon Job, saying: “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.”
Satan has considered Job, however, and Satan believes Job’s heart can be turned away from God. So Satan makes a bet with God. Satan wagers that Job’s faith in God is predicated upon his comfortable life, a life filled with God’s blessings. Take away that comfortable life and Job will curse you, Satan says to God. And God agrees to the wager.
Our reading this morning skips most of the first chapter in the story of Job, moving from the first verse of the first chapter directly into chapter 2. What we learn in the verses we skipped is that Job was very rich, with many camels, sheep and donkeys, a large family and was “the greatest of all the people of the east.” We also learn that Job worshipped God, day and night.
One day, suddenly and unexpectedly, Job’s oxen and donkeys and camels are stolen, his servants are killed, his sheep are destroyed in a fire and his seven sons and three daughters perish when the house in which they are feasting together collapses. Upon hearing all of this horrific news, Job says: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job has been brought from riches to rags in one afternoon and the closing words of chapter one are: “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing.”
Our reading picks up just after these words as Satan now tells God that Job persists in his faithfulness because Job has not suffered the loss of his health. “Skin for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.” Job continues to love God so far as Satan is concerned, because Job has not suffered physically. And God says to Satan: “Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life.”
Now Job has lost all of his lands and animals and servants and children as well as his health for now Job is stricken with leprosy. He is no longer an esteemed member of his community but rather “sits among the ashes.” For our ancestors in the faith, sickness separated the afflicted from society, rendering you unclean and forcing you to live a apart from others until you were healed. Sickness, much like the loss of Job’s wealth and family, was understood to be the just judgment of God upon sin. And as the story of Job unfolds, Job’s friends, beginning with his wife, will try to convince Job that he is not blameless but rather has done something to merit God’s wrath.
All the while Job maintains his innocence. Job has done nothing to merit such suffering. And Job refuses to abandon his faith in God whose ways he cannot understand. Job is faithful in good times and in bad. Job is faithful and righteous and just both when his life is blessed and when his life is cursed. Job’s faith does not depend upon what Job receives from God’s hand.
Job trusts in the goodness of God even when God’s goodness is nowhere to be seen. And Job’s faithfulness stands in sharp contrast with that of his wife and friends whose faith in God depends upon believing God will reward us for good behavior and punish us for bad behavior. In other words, for Job’s wife and friends, faith is predicated upon believing God will reward the righteous and condemn the wicked.
The story of Job, in the words of biblical scholar James Crenshaw, is a story about “the possibility of disinterested righteousness.” “The author asks,” Crenshaw writes, “whether virtue depends on a universe that operates by the principle of reward and punishment.” Why be good if there is no reward for good behavior? And reward can be as simple as receiving the esteem of your friends and neighbors or as lofty as the hope of going to heaven when you die. In what way is our righteousness predicated upon some belief in a moral universe, in a God who rewards the good and punishes the bad just as we humans do?
Job’s faith in God is heedless, unconcerned, with the outcome of his faith. Job is faithful for “no reason” or “for nothing,” as our text reads. Job is not faithful because Job believes his faith will earn him a reward, a blessing from God. Job is faithful because Job can be faithful, at all times and in all places. God allows Satan to lead Job right into the valley of the shadow of death, leaving Job with absolutely no reason to trust in God’s goodness. And Job continues to trust without reason or, perhaps better said, Job’s trust transcends reason.
Job’s journey through suffering is undeserved and Job maintains his innocence throughout this epic drama, not stoically for sure. Job will rail and rant and demand that God explain God’s ways to him, which God does not do. But Job persists, trusting in the love of God when everything that has befallen him belies that belief.
When you and I suffer, we are often apt to blame ourselves, wondering what we did to deserve such calamity. And whereas we know if we smoke and are subsequently diagnosed with lung cancer, our diagnosis is probably the result of our behavior. If, on the other hand, you were a Jew living in Nazi Germany in the 1930’s and you were sent to the gas chambers, your death was the consequence of Hitler’s madness and had nothing to do with your righteousness or lack of it. Hitler made no distinction between good Jews and bad Jews; Hitler rounded up all Jews and put them in box cars and sent them to the gas chambers. We can and often do cause our own suffering; but much suffering is wholly undeserved. Keeping faith in the face of innocent and undeserved suffering is the challenge or, we might say, the demand that Job confronts.
You and I live in a world that does not always make sense, however much we wish it did. We cannot explain everything that happens to us and we cannot keep awful things from happening. And when awful things do happen, we often rush in with words much like Job’s friends will do, to explain or to justify or to rationalize the inexplicable and unjustifiable and non rational. In the face of innocent suffering we usually have only two options - keep silent before a mystery we cannot possibly understand or rant at a God who will always remain beyond our understanding. Job will do both. Job’s anger in the face of what he cannot understand is not faithlessness but rather the confidence that God will not throw Job off the face of the earth simply for asking to understand, because Job is human like all of us and seeks to understand because that is how God created us to be.
The God in whom Job trusts in these opening chapters of the book becomes over the next forty – two chapters a good bit more complicated and a little less easy to read. Job learns that any relationship we might have with this God, is like any relationship, filled with promise and uncertainty. What Job receives is not knowledge of God but an awareness of God’s presence. God is not going away and neither is Job. And that is the good news.
We will over the next four weeks hear more from Job. And I trust that what we hear from Job will inform not only our views about God and ourselves and the world in which we live but our presumptions about Christ. Job has often been understood to prefigure Christ, the Christ who cried out to God in the Garden of Gethsemane asking: “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me,” and who on the cross spoke those chilling words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Jesus was, we affirm, fully human and in his humanity Jesus really died, died to any kind of a superficial belief that God would make all things turn out right. Jesus, in his humanity, handed himself over to the same God that brought Job to his knees. Jesus, like Job, was brought to the brink of faithlessness but never crossed over. You and I can only look and marvel.
The Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost Job 23: 1 – 9, 16 – 17
Sunday, October 14, 2012 Hebrews 4: 12 – 16
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 10: 17 - 31
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money* to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’
Mark 10: 21
“As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus tells this man to “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor.” And the man “was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”
This morning we hear a difficult text from the gospel of Mark. A righteous man who has followed the commandments of God all of his life comes to Jesus wondering how he might enter the kingdom of God. This man has not committed adultery nor stolen nor born false witness nor defrauded anyone and has honored his mother and father. This man has lived an exemplary life. And this man is shocked when Jesus tells him to sell everything he owns and give the money to the poor.
And so are we. We could, I suppose, find some comfort in thinking that this man was very, very rich and not just an average hard working person like you and I. Or, I suppose, we could take comfort knowing that you and I are more enlightened in the ways of economics than were our first century brothers and sisters. We know that giving away everything we have will only make us dependent upon others to take care of us. And all of us, in our own ways, provide for others out of our resources. Certainly Jesus is not talking about us when he tells this man that in order to enter the kingdom of God, he must “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor.”
Maybe what Jesus means is that we ought not become obsessed by what we have, turning our possessions into idols which we falsely believe will somehow save us. We would be justified in taking such an approach; among the commandments that Jesus leaves out when he questions this man is the command not to worship anything but God alone. Perhaps this man has turned his wealth into an idol and so long as we do not do that we will not be like this man.
We can, in other words, seek to “justify” ourselves and escape the radical command Jesus makes to this man. And no sooner do we make our escape - seeking an interpretation of this text that justifies what we do with what we have - than do we become just like this man who justifies himself before Jesus this morning by acknowledging that he has kept all of the commandments and has lived a blameless life. Jesus makes an impossible demand of this man who goes away grieving. The demand to “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor” was as impossible for this man to fulfill as it is for us.
Even the disciples are shocked by what Jesus says. For the disciples, this man’s wealth was a sure sign of God’s favor toward him, the very blessings of God bestowed upon those who were righteous. Faithful Jews in the first century expected to receive God’s blessings in this life, not in some life after death. Large families and vast landholdings were a sign that one’s life was in accord with the commandments of God; to be destitute was, alternatively, a sure sign that you had transgressed the commandments.
But Jesus continues, saying “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” And so the disciples ask with surprise: “Then who can be saved?” If those who have been blessed cannot enter the kingdom of God, then to whom will God give the kingdom?
“For God all things are possible,” Jesus tells the disciples and us this morning. What is impossible for us is possible for God. Jesus invites the disciples to envision impossible possibilities, the impossible possibility that one day the world will not be divided between those who have and those who do not, between rich and poor, that one day we all will have what we need and no one will be in want.
We have not found a way to do that at present. We have not found a way to collapse the distinction between rich and poor and we continue to live with the reality that some of us are rich and some of us are poor, some of us have more than we need and some of us do not have enough, some of us eat three meals a day and some of us eat only one. And not for lack of trying. We have experimented with a variety of “systems” some of which have failed miserably but none of which to date has created the kingdom of God on earth. Perhaps the challenge of our text today is that we cannot rest satisfied in any of our economic systems until the impossible comes to pass and the words “rich” and “poor” are no longer a part of our vocabulary.
Our text this morning invites us to imagine the impossible and the possibility that God indeed can do what is not possible. This man goes away grieving and we never find out what he did. This man may have indeed one day sold everything that he had, given the money to the poor and still been able to care for himself. For us, of course, that sounds impossible, but not beyond imagining, however unreasonable. This man may yet find his way into the kingdom of God, no longer grieving but dancing for joy!
In this season of the church year when we begin to think about stewardship, our text today invites us to imagine the impossible possibilities of our life together in this parish. This parish has sustained a presence in Caroline County for well over two hundred years, having been established by the Virginia General Assembly in 1779. In part our presence has been sustained by folk who have been able to give substantial financial support. But that is not the whole story. No one can keep a church alive simply with money. Money will keep the lights and the heat on and the copier in ink but money will never bring us to life and make us an instrument of hope and peace and joy and justice. For that we need God. That this parish continues to be a presence in this community is less about money and much more about the impossible possibility that God might actually have brought us into being and graced us with resources knowing there is work to be done and hope to be given at this time and in this place.
Trusting in God to do the impossible means worrying a bit less about what we cannot do or cannot give and wondering more about what God might do with what we have. Can you imagine our choir giving a world class concert on a Sunday afternoon to a packed house or Bishop N.T. Wright coming to teach our adult education class one Sunday morning? Can you imagine the pavilion filled with children all throughout the summer, playing and learning together? Can we even begin to imagine serving free community suppers every day of the week and not just twice a month? And can you imagine having the space for a free clinic and rooms where folk might come for legal advice and job counseling? Can you imagine coming to church on a Sunday morning and sitting on a folding chair because the pews were filled?
We have everything God needs to do the impossible. I have often described St. Asaph’s as “the best kept secret in the diocese.” This parish has done amazing things – not the least of which was building an elevator – and is poised to do more amazing things. And the secret of this parish is not our wealth. The secret of this parish is the obvious delight that we take in one another, our desire to be with one another through thick and thin, not always agreeing with one another, but always willing to hang in there and never missing an opportunity to have fun together.
I am perhaps missing a good opportunity this morning, given our gospel reading, to exhort us to all to give everything we have to the church. But I do not intend to throw my wallet and my check book into the collection plate this morning and I presume none of you will do that either. I do intend to make my pledge in the coming weeks as I hope you all will, too. And when we offer our pledges, placing our pledge cards on the altar on November 4, we will see what God will do. We will offer up to God what we can give and see what happens. Every Sunday God turns bread and wine into “the holy food and drink of new and unending life” and we can only wonder what God might do with a bunch of pledge cards.
What I know and what I want to celebrate this day is the mystery of our common life – a life that has been sustained for two hundred years, that has been graced by any number of personalities, with crises and joys, with a deep desire to reach out to others and a willingness to share what we have in whatever way we can. And what I want us to remember this morning is that God is not finished with us. In the words from the gospel of Luke: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.” In the words of a song that was popular way back in the dark ages of the seventies and sung by a group who called themselves “The Carpenters”: “We have only just begun.”
Sunday, October 14, 2012 Hebrews 4: 12 – 16
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 10: 17 - 31
Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money* to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’
Mark 10: 21
“As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus tells this man to “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor.” And the man “was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions.”
This morning we hear a difficult text from the gospel of Mark. A righteous man who has followed the commandments of God all of his life comes to Jesus wondering how he might enter the kingdom of God. This man has not committed adultery nor stolen nor born false witness nor defrauded anyone and has honored his mother and father. This man has lived an exemplary life. And this man is shocked when Jesus tells him to sell everything he owns and give the money to the poor.
And so are we. We could, I suppose, find some comfort in thinking that this man was very, very rich and not just an average hard working person like you and I. Or, I suppose, we could take comfort knowing that you and I are more enlightened in the ways of economics than were our first century brothers and sisters. We know that giving away everything we have will only make us dependent upon others to take care of us. And all of us, in our own ways, provide for others out of our resources. Certainly Jesus is not talking about us when he tells this man that in order to enter the kingdom of God, he must “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor.”
Maybe what Jesus means is that we ought not become obsessed by what we have, turning our possessions into idols which we falsely believe will somehow save us. We would be justified in taking such an approach; among the commandments that Jesus leaves out when he questions this man is the command not to worship anything but God alone. Perhaps this man has turned his wealth into an idol and so long as we do not do that we will not be like this man.
We can, in other words, seek to “justify” ourselves and escape the radical command Jesus makes to this man. And no sooner do we make our escape - seeking an interpretation of this text that justifies what we do with what we have - than do we become just like this man who justifies himself before Jesus this morning by acknowledging that he has kept all of the commandments and has lived a blameless life. Jesus makes an impossible demand of this man who goes away grieving. The demand to “sell what you own, and give the money to the poor” was as impossible for this man to fulfill as it is for us.
Even the disciples are shocked by what Jesus says. For the disciples, this man’s wealth was a sure sign of God’s favor toward him, the very blessings of God bestowed upon those who were righteous. Faithful Jews in the first century expected to receive God’s blessings in this life, not in some life after death. Large families and vast landholdings were a sign that one’s life was in accord with the commandments of God; to be destitute was, alternatively, a sure sign that you had transgressed the commandments.
But Jesus continues, saying “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” And so the disciples ask with surprise: “Then who can be saved?” If those who have been blessed cannot enter the kingdom of God, then to whom will God give the kingdom?
“For God all things are possible,” Jesus tells the disciples and us this morning. What is impossible for us is possible for God. Jesus invites the disciples to envision impossible possibilities, the impossible possibility that one day the world will not be divided between those who have and those who do not, between rich and poor, that one day we all will have what we need and no one will be in want.
We have not found a way to do that at present. We have not found a way to collapse the distinction between rich and poor and we continue to live with the reality that some of us are rich and some of us are poor, some of us have more than we need and some of us do not have enough, some of us eat three meals a day and some of us eat only one. And not for lack of trying. We have experimented with a variety of “systems” some of which have failed miserably but none of which to date has created the kingdom of God on earth. Perhaps the challenge of our text today is that we cannot rest satisfied in any of our economic systems until the impossible comes to pass and the words “rich” and “poor” are no longer a part of our vocabulary.
Our text this morning invites us to imagine the impossible and the possibility that God indeed can do what is not possible. This man goes away grieving and we never find out what he did. This man may have indeed one day sold everything that he had, given the money to the poor and still been able to care for himself. For us, of course, that sounds impossible, but not beyond imagining, however unreasonable. This man may yet find his way into the kingdom of God, no longer grieving but dancing for joy!
In this season of the church year when we begin to think about stewardship, our text today invites us to imagine the impossible possibilities of our life together in this parish. This parish has sustained a presence in Caroline County for well over two hundred years, having been established by the Virginia General Assembly in 1779. In part our presence has been sustained by folk who have been able to give substantial financial support. But that is not the whole story. No one can keep a church alive simply with money. Money will keep the lights and the heat on and the copier in ink but money will never bring us to life and make us an instrument of hope and peace and joy and justice. For that we need God. That this parish continues to be a presence in this community is less about money and much more about the impossible possibility that God might actually have brought us into being and graced us with resources knowing there is work to be done and hope to be given at this time and in this place.
Trusting in God to do the impossible means worrying a bit less about what we cannot do or cannot give and wondering more about what God might do with what we have. Can you imagine our choir giving a world class concert on a Sunday afternoon to a packed house or Bishop N.T. Wright coming to teach our adult education class one Sunday morning? Can you imagine the pavilion filled with children all throughout the summer, playing and learning together? Can we even begin to imagine serving free community suppers every day of the week and not just twice a month? And can you imagine having the space for a free clinic and rooms where folk might come for legal advice and job counseling? Can you imagine coming to church on a Sunday morning and sitting on a folding chair because the pews were filled?
We have everything God needs to do the impossible. I have often described St. Asaph’s as “the best kept secret in the diocese.” This parish has done amazing things – not the least of which was building an elevator – and is poised to do more amazing things. And the secret of this parish is not our wealth. The secret of this parish is the obvious delight that we take in one another, our desire to be with one another through thick and thin, not always agreeing with one another, but always willing to hang in there and never missing an opportunity to have fun together.
I am perhaps missing a good opportunity this morning, given our gospel reading, to exhort us to all to give everything we have to the church. But I do not intend to throw my wallet and my check book into the collection plate this morning and I presume none of you will do that either. I do intend to make my pledge in the coming weeks as I hope you all will, too. And when we offer our pledges, placing our pledge cards on the altar on November 4, we will see what God will do. We will offer up to God what we can give and see what happens. Every Sunday God turns bread and wine into “the holy food and drink of new and unending life” and we can only wonder what God might do with a bunch of pledge cards.
What I know and what I want to celebrate this day is the mystery of our common life – a life that has been sustained for two hundred years, that has been graced by any number of personalities, with crises and joys, with a deep desire to reach out to others and a willingness to share what we have in whatever way we can. And what I want us to remember this morning is that God is not finished with us. In the words from the gospel of Luke: “From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.” In the words of a song that was popular way back in the dark ages of the seventies and sung by a group who called themselves “The Carpenters”: “We have only just begun.”
The Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost Job 38: 1 – 7, 34 – 41
Sunday, October 21, 2012 Hebrews 5: 1 – 10
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 10: 35 - 45
But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant,
Mark 10: 43
A couple of weeks ago, A.G. and I had an opportunity to visit with two of our granddaughters, Naomi and Miriam, ages four and two. Our son’s guest room is in the basement - a space used not only for a guestroom but also a space in which surplus toys are stored away and recycled as needed. Well, Naomi discovered a toy that she had not seen for awhile on a shelf as she accompanied us to our quarters in the basement and brought it upstairs.
Naomi was playing happily with her new found treasure when her sister Miriam surmised she, too, wanted to have it. And, at an opportune moment, Miriam, spirited the toy away. Naomi was undone and squealed and cried and said the toy was hers and tried mightily to wrest the toy away from her younger sister, who tried just as hard to keep the toy in her hands. All parental calls to share and to take turns were met with cries of injustice and Naomi’s demand: “Tell her to give it to me! Tell her to give it back!” As far as Naomi was concerned the toy belonged to her and she had been robbed by a little sister with no rights and no claim on this treasure.
What unfolded that day between a four year old and a two year old in my son’s living room was about as predictable as death and taxes. Indeed, had anything other than what happened taken place, I would have wondered about my granddaughters. Naomi knew “what’s mine is mine and what’s mine is not yours.” That Naomi would gladly relinquish her treasure to her younger sister without protest, was simply beyond imagining. Confonted with a hostile takeover, Naomi predictably used all of her four year old power to resist – stomping her feet, wailing loudly and demanding in all the ways she could that the toy be returned to her.
My grandchildren, for better and for worse, have an uncanny way of reminding me of my humanity and the picture is not always pretty! And what seems to be universally true of us humans is that we can get pretty indignant when someone tries to take something away from us, be it a toy or some other treasure such as our comfort, our security or our happiness. None of us likes to feel overpowered as if we were being held hostage by the power of someone else. When we feel overpowered, we, like Naomi usually react, using whatever power we have at our disposal to meet what we see as a threat to our well-being.
Which brings us to our gospel reading this morning.
In our gospel reading James and John look a bit childish as they ask Jesus: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And what they want is for Jesus to give them cabinet positions in the new administration. James and John understand that Jesus is launching a campaign to bring in the kingdom of God and presume Jesus will win. Clearly Jesus will need some top aides when Jesus comes into power and James and John would like to be seated on his left and on his right. James and John are looking ahead and making plans. In this season of presidential election, I daresay our reading is being played out a thousand different ways. James and John want authority and the power that comes with it, when Jesus is elected king over Israel.
Unfortunately, Jesus’ inauguration will be on the cross and those on his right and on his left will be criminals, suffering a painful and agonizing death. And Jesus tells them: “You do not know what you are asking.” But James and John are convinced they know what they are asking and can only see their new offices in the Executive Office Building with big windows, mahagony desks and leather chairs.
And predictably, the rest of the disciples react, becoming angry with James and John and their assumption that they should “rule over them.” Like kids playing “King of the Mountain,” none of the disciples “get it.” None of the disciples understand that authority and power in God’s kingdom comes through suffering and the keys of the kingdom are given to those who use their power to serve others.
We are able but most unwilling to give up what we perceive belongs to us. We all seek to maintain what we have and resist others taking anything from us. And when we come to the the words of Jesus this morning: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant,” we are left wanting, because we humans really want to be lords, to use our power in ways that dominate rather than serve.
Few of us will actually get into a tug of war such as Miriam and Naomi did. But most of us have ways of using our power to control and to dominate rather than to serve others. And we all have power. I have power because I wear a collar; our senior members have power because they have a corporate history; our vestry members have power because they ultimately decide what we will do with our money; those among us with advanced degrees have power because in our culture, education is valued; those who understand computers or who can play the piano or those who can prepare spreadsheets have power because some of us cannot; those of us who can change a tire or a fan belt or who are young and good looking or little and cute have power. Even those among us who are not so abled have power, if only by virtue of what we do not have. We all have power in all kinds of ways and we all can choose to use our power for good or for ill.
Using our power for good, given the witness of Jesus, is exercising our power so that others may be helped. Our power, in other words, can be used to keep ourselves safe and comfortable or to build up others, literally giving others power. Naomi used her power to protect herself and her toy. Naomi did what most of us do instinctively, using her power to keep herself and her world safe and intact and free from intrusions. Naomi could have used her power to help her sister but Naomi was more concerned about herself.
And so are we, for the most part. We are worried about keeping ourselves safe and comfortable and happy and usually use whatever power we have, to protect ourselves and our treasures, whatever they may be. We are on the one hand, oftentimes afraid to name and claim the power we do have, and, on the other hand, to use that power to serve others rather than ourselves. James and John already have power, as do the other disciples, and at the end of the day, when Jesus was faced with a trial and a sentence of death, all of the disciples jumped ship. Not one of the disciples used whatever power they had to help Jesus. They all sought to save their own skins.
That to me is not bad news but encouraging news as I remember that the disciples were not perfect but rather exquisitely human, as human as was the exchange between my granddaughters. Do I wish I were not human and subject to what seem to be the immutable laws of human nature? All the time.
But I have hope. And my hope comes from the past, from our sacred story and those who have reflected upon it. And I want to end this day with a story written by a rabbi, a Jew who knew something about God’s will and God’s ways.
Rabbi Haim of Romshishok [2] was an itinerant preacher. He traveled from town to town delivering religious sermons that stressed the importance of respect for one’s fellow man. He often began his talks with the following story:
"I once ascended to the firmaments. I first went to see Hell and the sight was horrifying. Row after row of tables were laden with platters of sumptuous food, yet the people seated around the tables were pale and emaciated, moaning in hunger. As I came closer, I understood their predicament.
"Every person held a full spoon, but both arms were splinted with wooden slats so he could not bend either elbow to bring the food to his mouth. It broke my heart to hear the tortured groans of these poor people as they held their food so near but could not consume it.
"Next I went to visit Heaven. I was surprised to see the same setting I had witnessed in Hell – row after row of long tables laden with food. But in contrast to Hell, the people here in Heaven were sitting contentedly talking with each other, obviously sated from their sumptuous meal.
"As I came closer, I was amazed to discover that here, too, each person had his arms splinted on wooden slats that prevented him from bending his elbows. How, then, did they manage to eat?
"As I watched, a man picked up his spoon and dug it into the dish before him. Then he stretched across the table and fed the person across from him! The recipient of this kindness thanked him and returned the favor by leaning across the table to feed his benefactor.
I suddenly understood. Heaven and Hell offer the same circumstances and conditions. The critical difference is in the way the people treat each other.
I ran back to Hell to share this solution with the poor souls trapped there. I whispered in the ear of one starving man, "You do not have to go hungry. Use your spoon to feed your neighbor, and he will surely return the favor and feed you."
"'You expect me to feed the detestable man sitting across the table?' said the man angrily. 'I would rather starve than give him the pleasure of eating!'
"I then understood God’s wisdom in choosing who is worthy to go to Heaven and who deserves to go to Hell." [3]
Sunday, October 21, 2012 Hebrews 5: 1 – 10
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 10: 35 - 45
But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant,
Mark 10: 43
A couple of weeks ago, A.G. and I had an opportunity to visit with two of our granddaughters, Naomi and Miriam, ages four and two. Our son’s guest room is in the basement - a space used not only for a guestroom but also a space in which surplus toys are stored away and recycled as needed. Well, Naomi discovered a toy that she had not seen for awhile on a shelf as she accompanied us to our quarters in the basement and brought it upstairs.
Naomi was playing happily with her new found treasure when her sister Miriam surmised she, too, wanted to have it. And, at an opportune moment, Miriam, spirited the toy away. Naomi was undone and squealed and cried and said the toy was hers and tried mightily to wrest the toy away from her younger sister, who tried just as hard to keep the toy in her hands. All parental calls to share and to take turns were met with cries of injustice and Naomi’s demand: “Tell her to give it to me! Tell her to give it back!” As far as Naomi was concerned the toy belonged to her and she had been robbed by a little sister with no rights and no claim on this treasure.
What unfolded that day between a four year old and a two year old in my son’s living room was about as predictable as death and taxes. Indeed, had anything other than what happened taken place, I would have wondered about my granddaughters. Naomi knew “what’s mine is mine and what’s mine is not yours.” That Naomi would gladly relinquish her treasure to her younger sister without protest, was simply beyond imagining. Confonted with a hostile takeover, Naomi predictably used all of her four year old power to resist – stomping her feet, wailing loudly and demanding in all the ways she could that the toy be returned to her.
My grandchildren, for better and for worse, have an uncanny way of reminding me of my humanity and the picture is not always pretty! And what seems to be universally true of us humans is that we can get pretty indignant when someone tries to take something away from us, be it a toy or some other treasure such as our comfort, our security or our happiness. None of us likes to feel overpowered as if we were being held hostage by the power of someone else. When we feel overpowered, we, like Naomi usually react, using whatever power we have at our disposal to meet what we see as a threat to our well-being.
Which brings us to our gospel reading this morning.
In our gospel reading James and John look a bit childish as they ask Jesus: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And what they want is for Jesus to give them cabinet positions in the new administration. James and John understand that Jesus is launching a campaign to bring in the kingdom of God and presume Jesus will win. Clearly Jesus will need some top aides when Jesus comes into power and James and John would like to be seated on his left and on his right. James and John are looking ahead and making plans. In this season of presidential election, I daresay our reading is being played out a thousand different ways. James and John want authority and the power that comes with it, when Jesus is elected king over Israel.
Unfortunately, Jesus’ inauguration will be on the cross and those on his right and on his left will be criminals, suffering a painful and agonizing death. And Jesus tells them: “You do not know what you are asking.” But James and John are convinced they know what they are asking and can only see their new offices in the Executive Office Building with big windows, mahagony desks and leather chairs.
And predictably, the rest of the disciples react, becoming angry with James and John and their assumption that they should “rule over them.” Like kids playing “King of the Mountain,” none of the disciples “get it.” None of the disciples understand that authority and power in God’s kingdom comes through suffering and the keys of the kingdom are given to those who use their power to serve others.
We are able but most unwilling to give up what we perceive belongs to us. We all seek to maintain what we have and resist others taking anything from us. And when we come to the the words of Jesus this morning: “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant,” we are left wanting, because we humans really want to be lords, to use our power in ways that dominate rather than serve.
Few of us will actually get into a tug of war such as Miriam and Naomi did. But most of us have ways of using our power to control and to dominate rather than to serve others. And we all have power. I have power because I wear a collar; our senior members have power because they have a corporate history; our vestry members have power because they ultimately decide what we will do with our money; those among us with advanced degrees have power because in our culture, education is valued; those who understand computers or who can play the piano or those who can prepare spreadsheets have power because some of us cannot; those of us who can change a tire or a fan belt or who are young and good looking or little and cute have power. Even those among us who are not so abled have power, if only by virtue of what we do not have. We all have power in all kinds of ways and we all can choose to use our power for good or for ill.
Using our power for good, given the witness of Jesus, is exercising our power so that others may be helped. Our power, in other words, can be used to keep ourselves safe and comfortable or to build up others, literally giving others power. Naomi used her power to protect herself and her toy. Naomi did what most of us do instinctively, using her power to keep herself and her world safe and intact and free from intrusions. Naomi could have used her power to help her sister but Naomi was more concerned about herself.
And so are we, for the most part. We are worried about keeping ourselves safe and comfortable and happy and usually use whatever power we have, to protect ourselves and our treasures, whatever they may be. We are on the one hand, oftentimes afraid to name and claim the power we do have, and, on the other hand, to use that power to serve others rather than ourselves. James and John already have power, as do the other disciples, and at the end of the day, when Jesus was faced with a trial and a sentence of death, all of the disciples jumped ship. Not one of the disciples used whatever power they had to help Jesus. They all sought to save their own skins.
That to me is not bad news but encouraging news as I remember that the disciples were not perfect but rather exquisitely human, as human as was the exchange between my granddaughters. Do I wish I were not human and subject to what seem to be the immutable laws of human nature? All the time.
But I have hope. And my hope comes from the past, from our sacred story and those who have reflected upon it. And I want to end this day with a story written by a rabbi, a Jew who knew something about God’s will and God’s ways.
Rabbi Haim of Romshishok [2] was an itinerant preacher. He traveled from town to town delivering religious sermons that stressed the importance of respect for one’s fellow man. He often began his talks with the following story:
"I once ascended to the firmaments. I first went to see Hell and the sight was horrifying. Row after row of tables were laden with platters of sumptuous food, yet the people seated around the tables were pale and emaciated, moaning in hunger. As I came closer, I understood their predicament.
"Every person held a full spoon, but both arms were splinted with wooden slats so he could not bend either elbow to bring the food to his mouth. It broke my heart to hear the tortured groans of these poor people as they held their food so near but could not consume it.
"Next I went to visit Heaven. I was surprised to see the same setting I had witnessed in Hell – row after row of long tables laden with food. But in contrast to Hell, the people here in Heaven were sitting contentedly talking with each other, obviously sated from their sumptuous meal.
"As I came closer, I was amazed to discover that here, too, each person had his arms splinted on wooden slats that prevented him from bending his elbows. How, then, did they manage to eat?
"As I watched, a man picked up his spoon and dug it into the dish before him. Then he stretched across the table and fed the person across from him! The recipient of this kindness thanked him and returned the favor by leaning across the table to feed his benefactor.
I suddenly understood. Heaven and Hell offer the same circumstances and conditions. The critical difference is in the way the people treat each other.
I ran back to Hell to share this solution with the poor souls trapped there. I whispered in the ear of one starving man, "You do not have to go hungry. Use your spoon to feed your neighbor, and he will surely return the favor and feed you."
"'You expect me to feed the detestable man sitting across the table?' said the man angrily. 'I would rather starve than give him the pleasure of eating!'
"I then understood God’s wisdom in choosing who is worthy to go to Heaven and who deserves to go to Hell." [3]
The Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost Job 42: 1 – 6, 10 – 17
Sunday, October 28, 2012 Hebrews 7: 23 – 28
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 10: 46 - 52
When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
Mark 10: 47
A blind beggar named Bartimaeus receives his sight this morning in our reading from the gospel of Mark. Bartimaeus is the last person in the gospel of Mark to be healed by Jesus. Immediately following this story of Bartimaeus, Mark begins his story of the Passion with Jesus’ triumphal and fated journey into Jerusalem.
Thus far, in the gospel of Mark, we have heard other healing stories and other miracles, but today, the story we hear about blind Bartimaeus, is different, different because this healing is the last one Jesus performs before he dies. And as Mark is forever tellling us, the first shall be last and the last shall be first. This is the last story Mark wants us to remember as we follow Jesus to the cross because Bartimaeus represents the way of discipleship as Bartimaeus moves from blindness to sight. This is the story Mark wants us to remember because we, like Bartimaeus, are groping in the dark, at the mercy of God to lead us.
From the beginning we humans have not liked groping in the dark and have wanted to know about this world in which we live – how it began, what keeps it going and where we are headed. The creation story in the book of Genesis was the way our ancestors in the faith answered those questions and the answers rested in the mercy of God and power of God who brought the world and everything in it and called it “very good.”
And the world would remain “very good” so long as we humans did not overreach our limits and eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which, unfortunately, Eve could not resist. And so began a long and painful journey to figure out what was good and what was not.
Thousands of years after the creation story was written, the people we call Greeks brought into being a highly sophisticated culture that sought answers to the same questions as did our Jewish ancestors. And folk like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, the great Greek philosophers, believed they could discern what was good from the order of nature and the good ordering that brought the sun up in the morning and the moon out at night, day after day, year after year. If we humans could find a way to live well-ordered lives in the way that nature was well-ordered, we would be able to live good lives.
You and I are heirs to Greek philosophy, whether we appreciate it or not, and still believe there is such a thing as the “good life” and that we know how to achieve it. Achieving the good life is at the heart of advertising which bids us to find a beach and a good beer because, “it just doesn’t get any better than this.” Achieving the good life is also at the heart of our political debates currently as each side proposes plans and programs to make our lives better while condemning those of their opponent. This debate over what constitutes the good life started a long time ago and will not end on November 6, no matter who wins.
Bartimaeus for all the world had a miserable life. He was blind and wholly dependent upon others for his well-being. Bartimaeus, because of his blindness, would have been ostracized in the first century. Bartimaeus’ blindness would have been understood as a curse from God. And, whereas we no longer subscribe to such beliefs, we cling to the belief that we know what is good and what is not and if we order our lives along those lines all will go well.
Bartimaeus was blind; Bartimaeus could not see. And that for our evangelist Mark is our fundamental condition. We simply cannot see and know the “good” as hard as we might try.
My father worked all of his life for the same company. My father took pride in his loyalty. When the time came for him to retire he was bitter about the way the company had treated him but looked forward in his words to “the golden years.” When my Mom died shortly after he retired, his notion of the “good life” was turned upside down.
I have a young friend who longed to be married and have children. She married but discovered she and her husband could not have children. And I have known others who have had a vision of a “good life” graced by children who would be able to walk and talk but gave birth to children who could do neither. I recently met an older woman who gave birth to two children, one who survived for days and the other for seven years. She lost her father to a train accident as an infant and her husband to Alzeihmer’s. She is still wondering what the “good life” looks like and is looking forward to dying and tasting the good life in heaven.
The good life eludes many of us and not because we have not somehow “followed the rules.” The “good life” eludes us because we all live and move and have our being at the mercy of God, and like Bartimaeus, are fundamentally groping in the dark. What separates us is that some of us are convinced we know the way forward and some of us know we have not a clue and are as blind as Bartimaeus.
Theologian Gordon Lathrop wants to suggest that Mark wrote his gospel to disturb our ways of seeing, to break open our neatly settled worlds and to open us to the reality that all of our notions of how to live well in this world are human constructs often adopted to make ourselves comfortable in a world in which many are not.
Gaining traction, if you will, in this world is far less about achieving the good life, whatever that looks like, and much more about sitting next to blind Bartimaeus as he calls out for mercy, or with someone in a nursing home that needs help to go to the bathroom but must wait for a half hour until someone answers their call bell or with a woman who has just spontaneously aborted and whose “child” is now “a product of conception” for medical purposes. Gaining traction in this world is about listening to the voices of those who do not choose to retire, but are rather asked to retire, and who no longer are deemed useful in a world that cares far less about people and much more about getting a job done. Gaining traction in this world is recognizing that the hope of joy that leads many to get married often turns into heartache and despair.
Our evangelist Mark is disturbing and as we have wrestled with Mark’s gospel in adult ed we have been profoundly unsettled, disturbed by his stories, trying mightily to find a way to honor the ways we live our lives in light of the way Jesus lived his. We have been challenged.
Blind Bartimaeus disturbs us because in the gospel of Mark, Bartimaeus first behaves in an unseemly fashion and is “sternly ordered” by the crowds to keep quiet. Bartimaeus is an embarrassment and none of us want to be embarrassments. And then, Bartimaeus throws off the only possession he has – his cloak – and follows Jesus and we are disturbed once more, because we have many possessions, and find it difficult to throw away anything, let alone everything.
We love what happens to Bartimaeus but we would never want to be poor blind Bartimaeus. And that is what our evangelist Mark wants us to do.
Lathrop speaks about God tearing “a hole in the heavens” in the life and death of Jesus. Jesus, in other words, pierced all notions of the good life, the well ordered life. And if indeed, in Jesus we come face to face with God, then we who follow, can expect to meet God in the holes that are torn in our neatly ordered lives, in those times when our lives are disrupted and our dreams of the “good life” come undone.
Those are the times all of us seek to avoid, times of uncertainty when the way forward is not clear. Those are the times when we, like Bartimaeus, are left with only one prayer: “Lord, have mercy on me!”
Bartimaeus ends up following “on the way,” we hear. Presumably Bartimaeus will see this man who gave him back his sight, crucified on a cross. Bartimaeus will remember what Jesus did for him and then watch as this man who saved him refuses to save himself. And just as Bartimaeus put himself at the mercy of Jesus, Jesus will put himself at the mercy of God, an innocent man crucified for crimes he did not commit.
The gospel of Mark ends with an empty tomb, with the mercy of God undoing the most basic fact of human existence – death itself. The empty tomb negates everything we know about this world – that we all die and do not leave the grave. The empty tomb is blinding, leaving all of our presumptions about this world and what constitutes the “good life” wanting, inadequate – partial truths given our limited vision.
What we want, like blind Bartimaeus, is to be able to see. And that for our evangelist Mark will only be given to us as we follow “on the way.”
Sunday, October 28, 2012 Hebrews 7: 23 – 28
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 10: 46 - 52
When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
Mark 10: 47
A blind beggar named Bartimaeus receives his sight this morning in our reading from the gospel of Mark. Bartimaeus is the last person in the gospel of Mark to be healed by Jesus. Immediately following this story of Bartimaeus, Mark begins his story of the Passion with Jesus’ triumphal and fated journey into Jerusalem.
Thus far, in the gospel of Mark, we have heard other healing stories and other miracles, but today, the story we hear about blind Bartimaeus, is different, different because this healing is the last one Jesus performs before he dies. And as Mark is forever tellling us, the first shall be last and the last shall be first. This is the last story Mark wants us to remember as we follow Jesus to the cross because Bartimaeus represents the way of discipleship as Bartimaeus moves from blindness to sight. This is the story Mark wants us to remember because we, like Bartimaeus, are groping in the dark, at the mercy of God to lead us.
From the beginning we humans have not liked groping in the dark and have wanted to know about this world in which we live – how it began, what keeps it going and where we are headed. The creation story in the book of Genesis was the way our ancestors in the faith answered those questions and the answers rested in the mercy of God and power of God who brought the world and everything in it and called it “very good.”
And the world would remain “very good” so long as we humans did not overreach our limits and eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which, unfortunately, Eve could not resist. And so began a long and painful journey to figure out what was good and what was not.
Thousands of years after the creation story was written, the people we call Greeks brought into being a highly sophisticated culture that sought answers to the same questions as did our Jewish ancestors. And folk like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, the great Greek philosophers, believed they could discern what was good from the order of nature and the good ordering that brought the sun up in the morning and the moon out at night, day after day, year after year. If we humans could find a way to live well-ordered lives in the way that nature was well-ordered, we would be able to live good lives.
You and I are heirs to Greek philosophy, whether we appreciate it or not, and still believe there is such a thing as the “good life” and that we know how to achieve it. Achieving the good life is at the heart of advertising which bids us to find a beach and a good beer because, “it just doesn’t get any better than this.” Achieving the good life is also at the heart of our political debates currently as each side proposes plans and programs to make our lives better while condemning those of their opponent. This debate over what constitutes the good life started a long time ago and will not end on November 6, no matter who wins.
Bartimaeus for all the world had a miserable life. He was blind and wholly dependent upon others for his well-being. Bartimaeus, because of his blindness, would have been ostracized in the first century. Bartimaeus’ blindness would have been understood as a curse from God. And, whereas we no longer subscribe to such beliefs, we cling to the belief that we know what is good and what is not and if we order our lives along those lines all will go well.
Bartimaeus was blind; Bartimaeus could not see. And that for our evangelist Mark is our fundamental condition. We simply cannot see and know the “good” as hard as we might try.
My father worked all of his life for the same company. My father took pride in his loyalty. When the time came for him to retire he was bitter about the way the company had treated him but looked forward in his words to “the golden years.” When my Mom died shortly after he retired, his notion of the “good life” was turned upside down.
I have a young friend who longed to be married and have children. She married but discovered she and her husband could not have children. And I have known others who have had a vision of a “good life” graced by children who would be able to walk and talk but gave birth to children who could do neither. I recently met an older woman who gave birth to two children, one who survived for days and the other for seven years. She lost her father to a train accident as an infant and her husband to Alzeihmer’s. She is still wondering what the “good life” looks like and is looking forward to dying and tasting the good life in heaven.
The good life eludes many of us and not because we have not somehow “followed the rules.” The “good life” eludes us because we all live and move and have our being at the mercy of God, and like Bartimaeus, are fundamentally groping in the dark. What separates us is that some of us are convinced we know the way forward and some of us know we have not a clue and are as blind as Bartimaeus.
Theologian Gordon Lathrop wants to suggest that Mark wrote his gospel to disturb our ways of seeing, to break open our neatly settled worlds and to open us to the reality that all of our notions of how to live well in this world are human constructs often adopted to make ourselves comfortable in a world in which many are not.
Gaining traction, if you will, in this world is far less about achieving the good life, whatever that looks like, and much more about sitting next to blind Bartimaeus as he calls out for mercy, or with someone in a nursing home that needs help to go to the bathroom but must wait for a half hour until someone answers their call bell or with a woman who has just spontaneously aborted and whose “child” is now “a product of conception” for medical purposes. Gaining traction in this world is about listening to the voices of those who do not choose to retire, but are rather asked to retire, and who no longer are deemed useful in a world that cares far less about people and much more about getting a job done. Gaining traction in this world is recognizing that the hope of joy that leads many to get married often turns into heartache and despair.
Our evangelist Mark is disturbing and as we have wrestled with Mark’s gospel in adult ed we have been profoundly unsettled, disturbed by his stories, trying mightily to find a way to honor the ways we live our lives in light of the way Jesus lived his. We have been challenged.
Blind Bartimaeus disturbs us because in the gospel of Mark, Bartimaeus first behaves in an unseemly fashion and is “sternly ordered” by the crowds to keep quiet. Bartimaeus is an embarrassment and none of us want to be embarrassments. And then, Bartimaeus throws off the only possession he has – his cloak – and follows Jesus and we are disturbed once more, because we have many possessions, and find it difficult to throw away anything, let alone everything.
We love what happens to Bartimaeus but we would never want to be poor blind Bartimaeus. And that is what our evangelist Mark wants us to do.
Lathrop speaks about God tearing “a hole in the heavens” in the life and death of Jesus. Jesus, in other words, pierced all notions of the good life, the well ordered life. And if indeed, in Jesus we come face to face with God, then we who follow, can expect to meet God in the holes that are torn in our neatly ordered lives, in those times when our lives are disrupted and our dreams of the “good life” come undone.
Those are the times all of us seek to avoid, times of uncertainty when the way forward is not clear. Those are the times when we, like Bartimaeus, are left with only one prayer: “Lord, have mercy on me!”
Bartimaeus ends up following “on the way,” we hear. Presumably Bartimaeus will see this man who gave him back his sight, crucified on a cross. Bartimaeus will remember what Jesus did for him and then watch as this man who saved him refuses to save himself. And just as Bartimaeus put himself at the mercy of Jesus, Jesus will put himself at the mercy of God, an innocent man crucified for crimes he did not commit.
The gospel of Mark ends with an empty tomb, with the mercy of God undoing the most basic fact of human existence – death itself. The empty tomb negates everything we know about this world – that we all die and do not leave the grave. The empty tomb is blinding, leaving all of our presumptions about this world and what constitutes the “good life” wanting, inadequate – partial truths given our limited vision.
What we want, like blind Bartimaeus, is to be able to see. And that for our evangelist Mark will only be given to us as we follow “on the way.”
The Twenty-Fourth Sunday After Pentecost Ruth 3: 1 – 5; 4: 13 – 17
Sunday, November 11, 2012 Hebrews 9: 24 – 28
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 12: 38 – 44
“For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
Mark 12: 44
She was stooped and clutching a purse. Her shoes were practical but wholly unfashionable. She was muttering to herself as she carefully counted out the exact amount of money to purchase a loaf of bread and a half gallon of milk at the local Kroeger grocery store. She seemed a bit angry as she voiced concerns to no one in particular about the price of milk. And then, having completed her transaction, she walked with a determined but slow step out of the store, clutching her groceries, passing others talking on cell phones, attractive young women with small children in tow and men in freshly pressed shirts and ties picking up a salad on their lunch hour.
She was a poor widow. She was alone, probably had no desire for a cell phone or a computer and nearing a time in life when her children were growing worried about her living alone. She would hear nothing about moving into some fancy “assisted” living facility. She had taken care of herself all of her life and she wasn’t about to stop now. She was quite capable of taking care of herself even though feeding herself now meant opening a can of soup rather than cooking a roast. And she always paid with cash – those damn credit cards only get you into trouble and, being a child of the depression, she did not put much stock in banks and checking accounts.
She looked like she knew exactly what she needed to do and she also looked like someone who did not much care about what others thought. And when she went to the grocery store, she went not to pick up a salad or kibbitz with friends she bumped into on the vegetable aisle or even to make pleasantries with the cashier. She went to the grocery story for the stuff she needed to keep herself alive and it was work - work she was able to do although with some effort.
Waiting behind her in the grocery line, I pulled out my credit card and my shopper’s card because I can get cheaper gas if I swipe that card, when my cell phone rang deep in the bowels of my purse. Rummaging around for my phone with one hand, my other hand was sorting through my purchases. Anxious not to forget anything while trying desperately to answer my phone, by the time I looked up, she was gone.
Jesus takes notice today of a poor widow. Jesus watches as this woman puts two small copper coins into the Temple treasury, saying she has “put in everything she had.” The woman now has nothing to live on. She came to the Temple a poor widow and leaves destitute. Had she kept just one of the copper coins for herself, she could have managed yet a little while longer. But now she has put both coins into the treasury and leaves the Temple with nothing.
Leaving Kroeger with nothing was exactly what the woman I stood behind was determined not to do. She knew exactly how much money she had in her wallet and precisely when her next social security check would arrive. And she was very careful not to give Kroeger one penny more than was necessary. She simply could not afford not to pay attention to what she had and what she did with it. She had “limited means” and if she wanted to keep body and soul together, she had to pay attention to every penny, every day, all the time.
The woman in Kroeger was wise; the poor widow in our story this morning was foolish, foolish enough to believe that by giving away all that she had, God would take care of her. The poor widow took to heart that she was a person of the Law and the Law commanded her people to care for the least and the most vulnerable and that included poor widows. The poor widow believed that God had given God’s people enough for all and now that she was utterly destitute, she would not starve.
We often praise this poor widow who gives away everything she has while condemning those pompous scribes who, we are told, “like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets.” The scribes seems to flaunt what they have while the poor widow gives away everything she has, expecting nothing in return save the mercy of others to take care of her.
And then we meet a real poor widow, struggling to take care of herself, honoring her thrift, her self-reliance and her desire to take care of herself. We meet a real poor widow who would never give away her last two coins no matter how good the cause because then she really would be poor, with nothing to live on. She might give away one coin, but never two.
What we meet this morning in our gospel reading is the poor widow in all of us who is afraid of having nothing or, perhaps, just not enough. What we meet this morning is the reality that none of us really want to be dependent upon others, that we all want to be able to take care of ourselves as long as we are able and that none of us much like thinking that we are at the mercy of others in order just to live. So long as we can take care of ourselves we have no need for the gifts that others may want to share with us.
And yet, God so created us that we all start off our life at the mercy of others to care for us and most of us will end our lives the same way, for better and for worse. We simply are not created to live from birth to death “independently.” We need others to care for us at the beginning and again at the end of our lives and in between, we live with the illusion that we can “take care of ourselves.” None of us can do that - not at the beginning of our lives and not in the middle of our lives and not at the end. We need one another in order to survive.
As I watched this woman make her way home I wondered if I should stop and offer her a ride. I had, you see, something to offer, something to give her, out of my “abundance.” As I pondered what to do, I realized that such an offer might be the last thing she would want. She struck me as a proud woman, a woman whose dignity lay in the reality that she was able to take care of herself. That day she was able to walk home; one day she probably will not be so able and when that day comes, God willing, she will have companions who will help her.
Our abundance is not rooted in our net worth but rather grows out of a desire to keep ourselves from needing others. We become impoverished when we fail to see what others, all others, have to give us. The scribes in our story this morning have everything they need and clearly have no need of a poor widow with two small copper coins. The scribes are so busy pontificating they miss what is happening, what only Jesus sees. Jesus sees an act of great faith and the scribes miss it altogether. This poor widow has something to give and she does and no one but Jesus takes notice.
Each of us has something to give and something to receive and when we cut ourselves off from others, we become the poorer. None of us are God and we simply are unable to live life in this world all by ourselves. And we do not get to choose the companions God gives us. Sometimes our companions will be folk we like and agree with but we will meet others who we do not like and with whom we do not agree. God knows what we need and, if the mystics are right, we probably learn more about ourselves from the difficult folk in our lives than we do from those who we find easy to be with.
What I learned from my Kroeger woman is that I have not a clue most of the time exactly how much money I have in my wallet. When I swipe my credit card, I do not have to know how much money I have in my wallet. What I learned from my Kroeger woman is that I am, at the moment, able to take of myself, and do not spend a lot of time thinking about what I will do when I am no longer able to do so. What I learned from my Kroeger woman is that I will in all probability give my children a fit when I am old and unable to do what I want, much like my independent father gave me. My Kroeger woman never knew how much she taught me about myself.
Jesus alone takes notice this day, observing the rich “putting in large sums” and this poor widow who puts in everything she has. Jesus alone gives this woman and what she does worth. Jesus takes note of someone we can presume, the disciples and the scribes and any one else in that crowd would have simply not seen. Who cares about a penny?
The woman in Kroeger cared about a penny. And when I think about my Dad I have to laugh. If I bought him a gallon of milk which cost $2. 92, he would give me $2.92 and not $3.00. Every penny counted for Dad and he was able, up until the day he died, to take care of himself. But, on the other hand, my Dad was not always an easy man to be with and to help.
You and I are not built to be either solely dependent or wholly independent. God has so created us to be interdependent, graced and limited, with something to give and something to receive. None of us are given everything and none of us is given nothing. And we need one another, all others, in order to live. I would love to think I could take care of myself until the day I die but the reality of modern medicine suggests otherwise. The day will come when most of us will return to the status of where we began, needing others to help us to live. That we might learn that truth now and not later is our task and our challenge.
Sunday, November 11, 2012 Hebrews 9: 24 – 28
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 12: 38 – 44
“For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.”
Mark 12: 44
She was stooped and clutching a purse. Her shoes were practical but wholly unfashionable. She was muttering to herself as she carefully counted out the exact amount of money to purchase a loaf of bread and a half gallon of milk at the local Kroeger grocery store. She seemed a bit angry as she voiced concerns to no one in particular about the price of milk. And then, having completed her transaction, she walked with a determined but slow step out of the store, clutching her groceries, passing others talking on cell phones, attractive young women with small children in tow and men in freshly pressed shirts and ties picking up a salad on their lunch hour.
She was a poor widow. She was alone, probably had no desire for a cell phone or a computer and nearing a time in life when her children were growing worried about her living alone. She would hear nothing about moving into some fancy “assisted” living facility. She had taken care of herself all of her life and she wasn’t about to stop now. She was quite capable of taking care of herself even though feeding herself now meant opening a can of soup rather than cooking a roast. And she always paid with cash – those damn credit cards only get you into trouble and, being a child of the depression, she did not put much stock in banks and checking accounts.
She looked like she knew exactly what she needed to do and she also looked like someone who did not much care about what others thought. And when she went to the grocery store, she went not to pick up a salad or kibbitz with friends she bumped into on the vegetable aisle or even to make pleasantries with the cashier. She went to the grocery story for the stuff she needed to keep herself alive and it was work - work she was able to do although with some effort.
Waiting behind her in the grocery line, I pulled out my credit card and my shopper’s card because I can get cheaper gas if I swipe that card, when my cell phone rang deep in the bowels of my purse. Rummaging around for my phone with one hand, my other hand was sorting through my purchases. Anxious not to forget anything while trying desperately to answer my phone, by the time I looked up, she was gone.
Jesus takes notice today of a poor widow. Jesus watches as this woman puts two small copper coins into the Temple treasury, saying she has “put in everything she had.” The woman now has nothing to live on. She came to the Temple a poor widow and leaves destitute. Had she kept just one of the copper coins for herself, she could have managed yet a little while longer. But now she has put both coins into the treasury and leaves the Temple with nothing.
Leaving Kroeger with nothing was exactly what the woman I stood behind was determined not to do. She knew exactly how much money she had in her wallet and precisely when her next social security check would arrive. And she was very careful not to give Kroeger one penny more than was necessary. She simply could not afford not to pay attention to what she had and what she did with it. She had “limited means” and if she wanted to keep body and soul together, she had to pay attention to every penny, every day, all the time.
The woman in Kroeger was wise; the poor widow in our story this morning was foolish, foolish enough to believe that by giving away all that she had, God would take care of her. The poor widow took to heart that she was a person of the Law and the Law commanded her people to care for the least and the most vulnerable and that included poor widows. The poor widow believed that God had given God’s people enough for all and now that she was utterly destitute, she would not starve.
We often praise this poor widow who gives away everything she has while condemning those pompous scribes who, we are told, “like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets.” The scribes seems to flaunt what they have while the poor widow gives away everything she has, expecting nothing in return save the mercy of others to take care of her.
And then we meet a real poor widow, struggling to take care of herself, honoring her thrift, her self-reliance and her desire to take care of herself. We meet a real poor widow who would never give away her last two coins no matter how good the cause because then she really would be poor, with nothing to live on. She might give away one coin, but never two.
What we meet this morning in our gospel reading is the poor widow in all of us who is afraid of having nothing or, perhaps, just not enough. What we meet this morning is the reality that none of us really want to be dependent upon others, that we all want to be able to take care of ourselves as long as we are able and that none of us much like thinking that we are at the mercy of others in order just to live. So long as we can take care of ourselves we have no need for the gifts that others may want to share with us.
And yet, God so created us that we all start off our life at the mercy of others to care for us and most of us will end our lives the same way, for better and for worse. We simply are not created to live from birth to death “independently.” We need others to care for us at the beginning and again at the end of our lives and in between, we live with the illusion that we can “take care of ourselves.” None of us can do that - not at the beginning of our lives and not in the middle of our lives and not at the end. We need one another in order to survive.
As I watched this woman make her way home I wondered if I should stop and offer her a ride. I had, you see, something to offer, something to give her, out of my “abundance.” As I pondered what to do, I realized that such an offer might be the last thing she would want. She struck me as a proud woman, a woman whose dignity lay in the reality that she was able to take care of herself. That day she was able to walk home; one day she probably will not be so able and when that day comes, God willing, she will have companions who will help her.
Our abundance is not rooted in our net worth but rather grows out of a desire to keep ourselves from needing others. We become impoverished when we fail to see what others, all others, have to give us. The scribes in our story this morning have everything they need and clearly have no need of a poor widow with two small copper coins. The scribes are so busy pontificating they miss what is happening, what only Jesus sees. Jesus sees an act of great faith and the scribes miss it altogether. This poor widow has something to give and she does and no one but Jesus takes notice.
Each of us has something to give and something to receive and when we cut ourselves off from others, we become the poorer. None of us are God and we simply are unable to live life in this world all by ourselves. And we do not get to choose the companions God gives us. Sometimes our companions will be folk we like and agree with but we will meet others who we do not like and with whom we do not agree. God knows what we need and, if the mystics are right, we probably learn more about ourselves from the difficult folk in our lives than we do from those who we find easy to be with.
What I learned from my Kroeger woman is that I have not a clue most of the time exactly how much money I have in my wallet. When I swipe my credit card, I do not have to know how much money I have in my wallet. What I learned from my Kroeger woman is that I am, at the moment, able to take of myself, and do not spend a lot of time thinking about what I will do when I am no longer able to do so. What I learned from my Kroeger woman is that I will in all probability give my children a fit when I am old and unable to do what I want, much like my independent father gave me. My Kroeger woman never knew how much she taught me about myself.
Jesus alone takes notice this day, observing the rich “putting in large sums” and this poor widow who puts in everything she has. Jesus alone gives this woman and what she does worth. Jesus takes note of someone we can presume, the disciples and the scribes and any one else in that crowd would have simply not seen. Who cares about a penny?
The woman in Kroeger cared about a penny. And when I think about my Dad I have to laugh. If I bought him a gallon of milk which cost $2. 92, he would give me $2.92 and not $3.00. Every penny counted for Dad and he was able, up until the day he died, to take care of himself. But, on the other hand, my Dad was not always an easy man to be with and to help.
You and I are not built to be either solely dependent or wholly independent. God has so created us to be interdependent, graced and limited, with something to give and something to receive. None of us are given everything and none of us is given nothing. And we need one another, all others, in order to live. I would love to think I could take care of myself until the day I die but the reality of modern medicine suggests otherwise. The day will come when most of us will return to the status of where we began, needing others to help us to live. That we might learn that truth now and not later is our task and our challenge.
The Twenty-Fifth Sunday After Pentecost I Samuel 1: 4 -20
Sunday, November 18, 2012 Hebrews 10: 11 – 25
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 13: 1 - 8
"For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs."
Mark 13: 8
In the month of July, 70 A.D., after seven long months under siege, the city of Jerusalem fell to Rome. The city was destroyed, survivors were taken into slavery and the glorious Jewish Temple was razed to the ground. After four years of war during which the Jews sought to be free from the oppression of their Roman overlords, the destruction of the Temple was a moment in Jewish history that continues to be remembered to this day and which, for the Jews, was the ultimate violation of their faith and practice. The Temple was the locus and assurance of God’s presence with them; in the Temple sacrifices were offered for sins and for thanksgiving; and three times a year, every faithful Jew was to come to the Temple to celebrate the great moments of their history with God – to remember the Exodus, their sojourn in the wilderness and the giving of the Law to Moses.
All that changed in July of 70 A.D. In the words of a Jewish commentator:
The fall of the Temple during the conquest of Jerusalem constituted a cataclysmic event in Jewish history. The loss of Jewish life has been estimated at one million, surpassed only by the Holocaust in the twentieth century. Judaism had to reorient itself.
And Judaism did, no longer organizing its life around the Temple but rather around the study of the Law in synagogues. The destruction of the Temple signified the end of an age and the beginning of a new one, one without the comfort of the Temple and all the assurance of God’s presence with the Jews that the Temple signified.
Today, in our reading from the gospel of Mark, the disciples marvel at the sight of the glorious Temple, its huge white stones gleaming in the sun. And Jesus then responds: “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” And that was exactly what happened. And Jesus says: “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”
Scholars are divided over whether the gospel of Mark was written just before or just after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. What we know is that the Jews revolted against their Roman overlords and the struggle continued for four years before Rome finally burned down the city of Jerusalem. What we know is that our evangelist Mark is writing in the midst of a world turned upside down to a community of folk who were Jewish and who believed Jesus was God’s promised Messiah.
And to this community in the midst of a nightmare, Jesus’ counsel is to stand fast. “Beware that no one leads you astray,” Jesus says. “Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray.” We can only wonder how many would-be Messiah’s showed up as Rome was pressing in upon Jerusalem. When folk believe the world is coming to an end, folk will follow most anyone who say they know a way to escape.
Some of those would-be Messiahs were folk who would rather die than see the destruction of the Temple. Their zeal for the Temple led them to accuse those who would not take up arms against Rome as traitors to the cause. Jesus’ followers would have suffered such insults. “Do not be alarmed,” Jesus says,” “This is bit the beginning of the birth pangs.”
Labor pains is most probably not the way most faithful Jews, including those who believed Jesus was the Messiah, would have understood what was happening. All anyone could see was death and destruction and calls to take up the sword against their oppressors. How could the destruction of something so beautiful and holy be the way into something even more wondrous?
“Do not be alarmed,” Jesus says. I, for one, got alarmed when I saw two planes within minutes of one another, on September 11, 2001, reduce the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City to rubble and ash. My father got alarmed when Japanese kamikaze pilots crashed their planes into our battleships stationed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, decimating our fleet and killing thousands of men and women. Many of us became alarmed in the fall of 2002, when snipers were randomly shooting folk in communities we thought were immune to such terror.
We become alarmed when our world is threatened and that can be as communal as 9-11 or as personal as a diagnosis of cancer or the loss of a job. Being alarmed is our very normal, natural, and appropriate response to anything that threatens our well-being. God has created us in such ways that we can experience fear and respond to that which threatens us. Fear alerts us to danger much like a fever alerts us to an infection somewhere in our bodies.
But like a fever, if our temperature goes up too high we become overwhelmed, no longer able to respond appropriately or thoughtfully. We can become paralyzed by our fear, seeing nothing but the darkness that surrounds us. Our fear can blind us to the truth of God’s presence with us and the possibility that on the far side of the darkness, there is a glory we have yet to behold and cannot even begin to imagine.
You and I cannot simply wave a magic wand and make our fears go away. And whenever and wherever and however we are thrown into a new world, a world we did not anticipate and may not want to inhabit, we become afraid, longing for what was but is no longer, able to see only where we have been and utterly unable to know what is to come. And we are not much comforted, I daresay, by trying to convince ourselves “things could be worse.” That’s a little like saying to man standing before a firing squad, “Look on the bright side – there are only three rifles aimed at you and not thirty-three.”
Not too many years ago, just about this time of year, a family from North Carolina was travelling to Maryland to be with family over Thanksgiving. As they were driving on I 95 through Richmond, Dad needed to consult his map. He used his knee to steady the steering wheel as he opened the map and in that nano second, his world changed forever. The car crashed; he was treated at MCV for cuts and bruises; his three year old daughter was admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit and his wife was declared brain dead three days later. Sobbing, he called his wife’s family, bearing more guilt than a human being can possibly bear, and, after ten days, left MCV, unshaven, staring blankly at those who had tried to help, huge dark circles under his eyes, holding the hand of his young daughter. No one at MCV – and there are a lot of talented folk at MCV – could make what had happened better in any way. Everyone at MCV was worried about this man, and wondered if he would survive.
I think about Victor as we come to this text because I do believe Victor would have done anything to get out of the place he was in. Victor was in hell and would have done anything to undo what had happened. The problem was no one could change what had happened. Victor would either make peace with what had happened or Victor would live in hell forever. What Victor needed was hope as he struggled to live in a strange new world, a world that looked nothing like the world he left behind when he took his hands off that steering wheel.
To a community of disciples, struggling to persist in the midst of war and confusion and fanatic zeal, Jesus says: “Do not be alarmed, do not be led astray, this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” We are here this morning because some of those disciples did just that, continuing to meet together, continuing, in the words of our baptismal covenant “in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers.” Those disciples, in imitation of the Lord they followed, looked with hope toward a future they could not see, trusting that God would be merciful, “raising the poor from the dust,” in the words of our canticle this morning, and “lifting the needy from the ash heap.” May we, who are the fruit of their hope, be bearers of hope in the midst of our world, a world that continues to be anxious and fearful, often despairing, remembering especially the people of Jerusalem and the people of the Gaza Strip, as violence erupted yet again this week. May we not be tempted toward cynicism or despair but continue to pray that one day God’s kingdom will come.
Sunday, November 18, 2012 Hebrews 10: 11 – 25
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 13: 1 - 8
"For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs."
Mark 13: 8
In the month of July, 70 A.D., after seven long months under siege, the city of Jerusalem fell to Rome. The city was destroyed, survivors were taken into slavery and the glorious Jewish Temple was razed to the ground. After four years of war during which the Jews sought to be free from the oppression of their Roman overlords, the destruction of the Temple was a moment in Jewish history that continues to be remembered to this day and which, for the Jews, was the ultimate violation of their faith and practice. The Temple was the locus and assurance of God’s presence with them; in the Temple sacrifices were offered for sins and for thanksgiving; and three times a year, every faithful Jew was to come to the Temple to celebrate the great moments of their history with God – to remember the Exodus, their sojourn in the wilderness and the giving of the Law to Moses.
All that changed in July of 70 A.D. In the words of a Jewish commentator:
The fall of the Temple during the conquest of Jerusalem constituted a cataclysmic event in Jewish history. The loss of Jewish life has been estimated at one million, surpassed only by the Holocaust in the twentieth century. Judaism had to reorient itself.
And Judaism did, no longer organizing its life around the Temple but rather around the study of the Law in synagogues. The destruction of the Temple signified the end of an age and the beginning of a new one, one without the comfort of the Temple and all the assurance of God’s presence with the Jews that the Temple signified.
Today, in our reading from the gospel of Mark, the disciples marvel at the sight of the glorious Temple, its huge white stones gleaming in the sun. And Jesus then responds: “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.” And that was exactly what happened. And Jesus says: “This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”
Scholars are divided over whether the gospel of Mark was written just before or just after the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. What we know is that the Jews revolted against their Roman overlords and the struggle continued for four years before Rome finally burned down the city of Jerusalem. What we know is that our evangelist Mark is writing in the midst of a world turned upside down to a community of folk who were Jewish and who believed Jesus was God’s promised Messiah.
And to this community in the midst of a nightmare, Jesus’ counsel is to stand fast. “Beware that no one leads you astray,” Jesus says. “Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray.” We can only wonder how many would-be Messiah’s showed up as Rome was pressing in upon Jerusalem. When folk believe the world is coming to an end, folk will follow most anyone who say they know a way to escape.
Some of those would-be Messiahs were folk who would rather die than see the destruction of the Temple. Their zeal for the Temple led them to accuse those who would not take up arms against Rome as traitors to the cause. Jesus’ followers would have suffered such insults. “Do not be alarmed,” Jesus says,” “This is bit the beginning of the birth pangs.”
Labor pains is most probably not the way most faithful Jews, including those who believed Jesus was the Messiah, would have understood what was happening. All anyone could see was death and destruction and calls to take up the sword against their oppressors. How could the destruction of something so beautiful and holy be the way into something even more wondrous?
“Do not be alarmed,” Jesus says. I, for one, got alarmed when I saw two planes within minutes of one another, on September 11, 2001, reduce the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City to rubble and ash. My father got alarmed when Japanese kamikaze pilots crashed their planes into our battleships stationed at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, decimating our fleet and killing thousands of men and women. Many of us became alarmed in the fall of 2002, when snipers were randomly shooting folk in communities we thought were immune to such terror.
We become alarmed when our world is threatened and that can be as communal as 9-11 or as personal as a diagnosis of cancer or the loss of a job. Being alarmed is our very normal, natural, and appropriate response to anything that threatens our well-being. God has created us in such ways that we can experience fear and respond to that which threatens us. Fear alerts us to danger much like a fever alerts us to an infection somewhere in our bodies.
But like a fever, if our temperature goes up too high we become overwhelmed, no longer able to respond appropriately or thoughtfully. We can become paralyzed by our fear, seeing nothing but the darkness that surrounds us. Our fear can blind us to the truth of God’s presence with us and the possibility that on the far side of the darkness, there is a glory we have yet to behold and cannot even begin to imagine.
You and I cannot simply wave a magic wand and make our fears go away. And whenever and wherever and however we are thrown into a new world, a world we did not anticipate and may not want to inhabit, we become afraid, longing for what was but is no longer, able to see only where we have been and utterly unable to know what is to come. And we are not much comforted, I daresay, by trying to convince ourselves “things could be worse.” That’s a little like saying to man standing before a firing squad, “Look on the bright side – there are only three rifles aimed at you and not thirty-three.”
Not too many years ago, just about this time of year, a family from North Carolina was travelling to Maryland to be with family over Thanksgiving. As they were driving on I 95 through Richmond, Dad needed to consult his map. He used his knee to steady the steering wheel as he opened the map and in that nano second, his world changed forever. The car crashed; he was treated at MCV for cuts and bruises; his three year old daughter was admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit and his wife was declared brain dead three days later. Sobbing, he called his wife’s family, bearing more guilt than a human being can possibly bear, and, after ten days, left MCV, unshaven, staring blankly at those who had tried to help, huge dark circles under his eyes, holding the hand of his young daughter. No one at MCV – and there are a lot of talented folk at MCV – could make what had happened better in any way. Everyone at MCV was worried about this man, and wondered if he would survive.
I think about Victor as we come to this text because I do believe Victor would have done anything to get out of the place he was in. Victor was in hell and would have done anything to undo what had happened. The problem was no one could change what had happened. Victor would either make peace with what had happened or Victor would live in hell forever. What Victor needed was hope as he struggled to live in a strange new world, a world that looked nothing like the world he left behind when he took his hands off that steering wheel.
To a community of disciples, struggling to persist in the midst of war and confusion and fanatic zeal, Jesus says: “Do not be alarmed, do not be led astray, this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” We are here this morning because some of those disciples did just that, continuing to meet together, continuing, in the words of our baptismal covenant “in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and in the prayers.” Those disciples, in imitation of the Lord they followed, looked with hope toward a future they could not see, trusting that God would be merciful, “raising the poor from the dust,” in the words of our canticle this morning, and “lifting the needy from the ash heap.” May we, who are the fruit of their hope, be bearers of hope in the midst of our world, a world that continues to be anxious and fearful, often despairing, remembering especially the people of Jerusalem and the people of the Gaza Strip, as violence erupted yet again this week. May we not be tempted toward cynicism or despair but continue to pray that one day God’s kingdom will come.
The Last Sunday after Pentecost 2 Samuel 23: 1 – 7
Sunday, November 25, 2012 Revelation 1: 4b - 8
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 18: 33 - 37
Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?”
John 18: 35
In 1996, seven Trappist monks living in a monastery in Algiers were beheaded, after becoming pawns between Islamist fundamentalists and the Algerian government. Their story is told in a movie entitled Of Gods and Men as well as in a book, The Monks of Tibhirine. Nine men, two of whom survived, had determined to live out their lives in the midst of a Muslim community, building friendships, offering medical care and participating in the life of a small Muslim village. When Islamic fundamentalists sought more control in Algiers, these monks became targets.
Their abbot was a man named Christian who was led to Algiers and this monastery in a Muslim village by way of a friendship he had had some time before with a Muslim named Mohammed in France. Years before, this friendship between Christian and Mohammed had provoked concern among other more conservative Muslims, who approached the pair on a street in France, wanting to kill Christian. Mohammed intervened and the following day Christian’s friend Mohammed was found assassinated. After the death of his Muslim friend who had saved his life, Christian went on to live and work in a monastery amidst the Muslims in Algiers, losing his life in 1996.
Two kings face off this morning in our gospel reading. One, Pontius Pilate, was not really a king, but rather a governor appointed by the Roman Emperor to oversee Palestine. Pilate, as the appointed authority of the state, held the power to crucify dissidents.
And across from Pilate stands Jesus, whose kingdom, he tells Pilate “is not from here.” And because Jesus’ kingdom is not an earthly kingdom, his followers will not fight to free him.
One king, Pilate, has the power to kill. The other king, Jesus, has the power to lay down his life. This is a recipe for disaster in our world. In the story I just shared with you, Mohammed used his power to literally stand between his Christian friend and his fundamentalist Muslim brethren. When he did, his fundamentalist Muslim brothers backed off, but he became a target and was killed. In this world, the power to kill can end just about everything, including a friendship between a Christian and a Muslim.
Two kingdoms clash this morning – a kingdom “of this world” and a kingdom “not of this world.” Two kings face off – a king with the power to kill and a king who refuses to kill. Jesus’ power is the power of self-giving love, a power that refuses to use worldly power against his adversaries and that power will cost him his life. Who is the real king in this exchange and whose power will triumph?
Today is the Last Sunday After Pentecost. Next Sunday is the First Sunday of Advent and the beginning of a new liturgical year. And as we end one year and begin a new one, we confess Jesus to be the King of Kings and Lord of lords, as we prayed in our opening collect. This morning we remember that we worship a King, whose kingdom “is not from this world” and whose power does not come by violence but rather is rooted in love.
As tensions rose in Algiers, the government asked the monks to leave, knowing they would not be able to protect them and also believing their presence would provoke the fundamentalist insurgents. Monks do not like being told what to do and so these nine men began a long and sometimes painful journey to determine what they would do. They all decided to stay. They all decided to stay, sharing their lives with others in that small Muslim village who were also living in fear and uncertainty, but who unlike the monks, had nowhere else to go. Each of the monks was acutely aware of the risk they were taking.
After their deaths, the seven who died were given a state funeral in recognition of their love for the Algerian people. And their deaths diminished much popular support for the insurgents’ cause. The monks had born witness to a power far greater than that of guns and violence.
The monks choose to stay in Algiers believing that was what God would have them do. They made their decision freely, refusing to be forced away either by the government or by the insurgents. Pilate as well was faced with making a decision and interrogates Jesus this morning in our reading in order to decide whether Jesus should live or die. Pilate determines that Jesus is innocent we learn later in the gospel and wants to set Jesus free. But the crowds insist that Jesus must die and Pilate is afraid the Jews will revolt if he does not comply. Pilate, as Rome’s authorized representative, is charged with keeping the peace. So, in spite of knowing the truth – that Jesus is innocent – Pilate, out of fear, orders Jesus to be crucified.
Pilate’s power is finally unmasked to be no power at all as Pilate succumbs to his fear of the crowds and retribution at the hands of Rome for not keeping the peace.
The monks of Tibhirine were not fearless but they were convicted by a deep desire to stay among the people they loved. Following that truth would be neither easy nor without risk. They were not naïve and they all knew that staying in that monastery might and probably would, cost them their lives. What they also knew is that the power of God was far greater than the power of the insurgents and their guns.
Crowning Jesus King of kings and Lord of lords does not mean we are called to abandon this world for some other more spiritual realm, dismissing the political realities of life in this world. Crowning Jesus King of kings and Lord of lords does mean, though, that we are called to follow the truth, not fearing where that road might take us.
At Virginia Seminary, inscribed on the façade of the library are the following words: "Seek the Truth, Come Whence It May, Cost What It Will." When I first started taking classes at the Seminary, I rather naively believed that somewhere in that vast collection of books, I would find The Answer to all my questions or at least the meaning of life and mine in particular. As the semesters came and went, I read many books and wrote many papers and learned many things. But my greatest awakening was the realization that no sooner did I get an answer to some conundrum than another question popped up. And always, there was another book to read, yet another idea to consider, a new perspective that challenged my previous ways of thinking about myself, the world and God. What I learned is that the truth is always just beyond our reach, beckoning us forward but never able to be grasped fully by our mortal minds.
“What have you done?” Pilate asks Jesus this morning. What Jesus did was turn the world as we know it upside down and inside out. Rather than fighting to save his life, Jesus gave up his life; rather than overpowering Pilate with twelve legions of angels, Jesus submits to the shame of crucifixion and the desertion of his followers. What Jesus did makes no sense in a world which is and always will be, threatened by violence and terror and the lust for power and control. So long as we live in this world, we sadly will not always be able to make peace with those who wish to do us and those we love, harm. In this world, unfortunately, our power to kill will always have the last word.
You and I live in this world which is not always loving and kind and good even as we seek after a world reigned over by the love of God, a world that will have no need of guns and no powers contending for control save the power of love. Until that day comes, we are given glimpses of God’s kingdom through the witness of folk like the monks of Tibhirine and others who have dared to follow the truth of God.
I pray that as we begin a new year together, we will show forth in our common life a desire to follow where God might lead us, not fearing the uncertainty that comes with this journey but embracing the truth of the glory of God, “whose power, working in us,” Saint Paul tells us, “can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.”
Sunday, November 25, 2012 Revelation 1: 4b - 8
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 18: 33 - 37
Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?”
John 18: 35
In 1996, seven Trappist monks living in a monastery in Algiers were beheaded, after becoming pawns between Islamist fundamentalists and the Algerian government. Their story is told in a movie entitled Of Gods and Men as well as in a book, The Monks of Tibhirine. Nine men, two of whom survived, had determined to live out their lives in the midst of a Muslim community, building friendships, offering medical care and participating in the life of a small Muslim village. When Islamic fundamentalists sought more control in Algiers, these monks became targets.
Their abbot was a man named Christian who was led to Algiers and this monastery in a Muslim village by way of a friendship he had had some time before with a Muslim named Mohammed in France. Years before, this friendship between Christian and Mohammed had provoked concern among other more conservative Muslims, who approached the pair on a street in France, wanting to kill Christian. Mohammed intervened and the following day Christian’s friend Mohammed was found assassinated. After the death of his Muslim friend who had saved his life, Christian went on to live and work in a monastery amidst the Muslims in Algiers, losing his life in 1996.
Two kings face off this morning in our gospel reading. One, Pontius Pilate, was not really a king, but rather a governor appointed by the Roman Emperor to oversee Palestine. Pilate, as the appointed authority of the state, held the power to crucify dissidents.
And across from Pilate stands Jesus, whose kingdom, he tells Pilate “is not from here.” And because Jesus’ kingdom is not an earthly kingdom, his followers will not fight to free him.
One king, Pilate, has the power to kill. The other king, Jesus, has the power to lay down his life. This is a recipe for disaster in our world. In the story I just shared with you, Mohammed used his power to literally stand between his Christian friend and his fundamentalist Muslim brethren. When he did, his fundamentalist Muslim brothers backed off, but he became a target and was killed. In this world, the power to kill can end just about everything, including a friendship between a Christian and a Muslim.
Two kingdoms clash this morning – a kingdom “of this world” and a kingdom “not of this world.” Two kings face off – a king with the power to kill and a king who refuses to kill. Jesus’ power is the power of self-giving love, a power that refuses to use worldly power against his adversaries and that power will cost him his life. Who is the real king in this exchange and whose power will triumph?
Today is the Last Sunday After Pentecost. Next Sunday is the First Sunday of Advent and the beginning of a new liturgical year. And as we end one year and begin a new one, we confess Jesus to be the King of Kings and Lord of lords, as we prayed in our opening collect. This morning we remember that we worship a King, whose kingdom “is not from this world” and whose power does not come by violence but rather is rooted in love.
As tensions rose in Algiers, the government asked the monks to leave, knowing they would not be able to protect them and also believing their presence would provoke the fundamentalist insurgents. Monks do not like being told what to do and so these nine men began a long and sometimes painful journey to determine what they would do. They all decided to stay. They all decided to stay, sharing their lives with others in that small Muslim village who were also living in fear and uncertainty, but who unlike the monks, had nowhere else to go. Each of the monks was acutely aware of the risk they were taking.
After their deaths, the seven who died were given a state funeral in recognition of their love for the Algerian people. And their deaths diminished much popular support for the insurgents’ cause. The monks had born witness to a power far greater than that of guns and violence.
The monks choose to stay in Algiers believing that was what God would have them do. They made their decision freely, refusing to be forced away either by the government or by the insurgents. Pilate as well was faced with making a decision and interrogates Jesus this morning in our reading in order to decide whether Jesus should live or die. Pilate determines that Jesus is innocent we learn later in the gospel and wants to set Jesus free. But the crowds insist that Jesus must die and Pilate is afraid the Jews will revolt if he does not comply. Pilate, as Rome’s authorized representative, is charged with keeping the peace. So, in spite of knowing the truth – that Jesus is innocent – Pilate, out of fear, orders Jesus to be crucified.
Pilate’s power is finally unmasked to be no power at all as Pilate succumbs to his fear of the crowds and retribution at the hands of Rome for not keeping the peace.
The monks of Tibhirine were not fearless but they were convicted by a deep desire to stay among the people they loved. Following that truth would be neither easy nor without risk. They were not naïve and they all knew that staying in that monastery might and probably would, cost them their lives. What they also knew is that the power of God was far greater than the power of the insurgents and their guns.
Crowning Jesus King of kings and Lord of lords does not mean we are called to abandon this world for some other more spiritual realm, dismissing the political realities of life in this world. Crowning Jesus King of kings and Lord of lords does mean, though, that we are called to follow the truth, not fearing where that road might take us.
At Virginia Seminary, inscribed on the façade of the library are the following words: "Seek the Truth, Come Whence It May, Cost What It Will." When I first started taking classes at the Seminary, I rather naively believed that somewhere in that vast collection of books, I would find The Answer to all my questions or at least the meaning of life and mine in particular. As the semesters came and went, I read many books and wrote many papers and learned many things. But my greatest awakening was the realization that no sooner did I get an answer to some conundrum than another question popped up. And always, there was another book to read, yet another idea to consider, a new perspective that challenged my previous ways of thinking about myself, the world and God. What I learned is that the truth is always just beyond our reach, beckoning us forward but never able to be grasped fully by our mortal minds.
“What have you done?” Pilate asks Jesus this morning. What Jesus did was turn the world as we know it upside down and inside out. Rather than fighting to save his life, Jesus gave up his life; rather than overpowering Pilate with twelve legions of angels, Jesus submits to the shame of crucifixion and the desertion of his followers. What Jesus did makes no sense in a world which is and always will be, threatened by violence and terror and the lust for power and control. So long as we live in this world, we sadly will not always be able to make peace with those who wish to do us and those we love, harm. In this world, unfortunately, our power to kill will always have the last word.
You and I live in this world which is not always loving and kind and good even as we seek after a world reigned over by the love of God, a world that will have no need of guns and no powers contending for control save the power of love. Until that day comes, we are given glimpses of God’s kingdom through the witness of folk like the monks of Tibhirine and others who have dared to follow the truth of God.
I pray that as we begin a new year together, we will show forth in our common life a desire to follow where God might lead us, not fearing the uncertainty that comes with this journey but embracing the truth of the glory of God, “whose power, working in us,” Saint Paul tells us, “can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.”
The First Sunday of Advent Jeremiah 33: 14 – 16
Sunday, December 2, 2012 I Thessalonians 3: 9 – 13
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 21: 25 – 36
Jesus said, “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”
Luke 21: 25 – 26
With Christmas just a few weeks away, the signs of the season surround us. Christmas trees are lined up like soldiers in front of grocery stores, shopping centers are festooned with lights and gaily colored banners, the red kettles of the Salvation Army are making their annual appearance and with each passing day, another front door is graced by a wreath. Christmas is coming and the signs are everywhere.
And every year on the First Sunday of Advent, our gospel reading tells us to expect signs, “signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.” But unlike the comforting glow of candles in the windows, these signs will make “26people faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” Advent in the Church always begins with a reading that anticipates terrible distress before the coming of the Son of Man “with power and great glory.” Christ will come again, but not before a time of tribulation.
Christmas is coming but during Advent we remember that we live between the times – between Christ’s first appearance and the time when Christ will come again. Advent is a season of waiting, waiting for the coming of Christ, the coming of the One who came and lived as one of us and who has promised to come again. Advent is a season of waiting and longing as we look forward to a time when, in the words of the book of Revelation, “God himself will be with us” and “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things will have passed away.”
For now, in this time between the times, you and I live in a world awash with “mourning and crying and pain.” For now, we live in a world in which all is not well, and look forward in hope to that day when God will make all things new. Advent bids us to be patient as we wait for God to complete God’s good purposes begun in Christ, that moment when God will come and be “with us” forever.
Our ancestors in the faith knew many times of tribulation, times of “fear and foreboding,” times when foreign nations invaded their land and their way of life, destroying their homes, desecrating their holy places and leading them away into exile as strangers in a strange land. And when their life as the chosen people seemed to be falling apart, prophets would arise in their midst reminding them what God had done in the past and would do again. God had called this people out of slavery in Egypt, led them into and out of exile, and God would come again.
And God did, taking on flesh in the person of Jesus, giving the disciples a glimpse of a world transformed by love. But the disciples also knew a time of tribulation as they watched this man whom they loved and followed, be arrested and tried for crimes he did not commit and hung on a cross. With fear and foreboding they buried their Lord, never anticipating the tomb would be empty three days later.
We, too, know times of fear and foreboding, times when the doctor tells us we have only a few months to live or our marriage of thirty years falls apart or we lose our homes because we cannot pay the mortgage. The world, our world, can quickly unravel and the powers of the heavens that kept our world in order can be shaken.
What we know is that we live in a world in which the people we love die, many of us must suffer the trauma of serious illness, few of us are spared the pain of a broken relationship, some of us endure the drudgery of working at a job we do not like, and the fear of not having enough money to feed ourselves and our families is a constant companion to folk in these difficult times. During Advent, we remember all is not well in this world and look forward in hope to that day when God will come and “be with us,” “wiping every tear from our eye,” as the author of Revelation tells us.
Christmas is coming but Christmas is not here yet.
Many years ago, about this time, I learned from my seven year old son that all he wanted for Christmas was an X Wing Star Wars fighter plane. No problem, I thought, as I made a note on my list. In the days that followed, I learned to my horror, that every seven year old in the country must have wanted an X Wing Star War fighter plane that year because I could not find one anywhere. This was before the days of on-line shopping and the week before Christmas I was left with only one option – order one from the Sears catalogue and hope that it would arrive on time. I was getting a bit desperate, not knowing what to say if Santa Claus was unable to bring something as simple as an X Wing Star War fighter plane. “We cannot guarantee the arrival of this shipment before Christmas. We’ll call you when it comes in,” the sales person at Sears told me when I finally placed my order. Great, I thought to myself. And all I could do was wait for the phone to ring.
The years have come and gone and that X Wing Star War fighter plane now abides in our attic with the rest of Andrew’s Star Wars stuff. Not sure if and when he might come and relieve us of these treasures but we do know he is not ready to part with those small figures of Luke Skywalker, R2-D2 and C-3PO. Santa pulled through that year thanks to Sears and Andrew was delighted.
Little did I know then what I know now and that the day would come when the Sears catalogue would not solve all the problems of the world. Little did I know then that some problems cannot be solved, but must be endured, abided with patience. Little did I know then that those few short days of waiting for an X Wing Star War fighter plane to arrive was God’s way of preparing me for things to come.
Holding on to hope in a world besieged on all fronts by things we cannot simply wish away is the challenge of Advent. We are a people of hope, and “most to be pitied,” in the words of Saint Paul if our hope is in vain. We look forward to a day when God will make all things new and many people in this world will accuse us of deluded thinking. The world is in a good bit of a mess and some would say we should stop looking for God to make good on God’s promises and learn to live with what is. What is, is often ugly, and this is the time of year many folk escape from the joylessness of their lives, putting up lights and wreaths and buying gifts and pretending that the world is other than it is and their lives are not as troubled as they really are.
We, in the Church, do not pretend. And Advent is a season in which we remember what is not right with the world in the hope of God’s coming and bringing this world to rights. We string lights and put up Christmas trees and put candles in the windows and buy gifts not to escape but to bear witness to a God who will make good on God’s promises. We, in the Church, are not anticipating a “Happy Holiday” but expecting a “Happy Holy Day” – that glad and glorious day when Christ will come again and God will be us forever and forevermore.
Our reading from Luke this morning was written after Jerusalem was destroyed and the Temple burned to the ground. Christians were being persecuted both by Jews and by Rome. To profess faith in a crucified and risen Messiah was at odds with the purposes of Rome and theologically at odds with the beliefs of Judaism. Holding on to that faith as Rome marched on Jerusalem and the Jews were throwing Christians out of the synagogues was nothing short of daring. But dared these folk did. And we are here because they did.
In hope, those early witnesses continued to meet together, often under the threat of death, persisting to believe that God had come in Christ and would come again. And they met together in the midst of a difficult world, a world of suffering made the more so by their faith. They had no national holiday in which to rest and to celebrate, but rather looked forward to their weekly gatherings to sustain their hope.
Our ancestors in the faith knew far better than we that this world can be cruel and harsh. But they had seen a great light and that light gave them hope, a hope they passed from one generation to the next. The world has not changed and continues to be a place of suffering. Our ancestors in the faith believed and passed on to us “good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” That is still good news of great joy, joy that we are now tasked to pass along.
Sunday, December 2, 2012 I Thessalonians 3: 9 – 13
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 21: 25 – 36
Jesus said, “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”
Luke 21: 25 – 26
With Christmas just a few weeks away, the signs of the season surround us. Christmas trees are lined up like soldiers in front of grocery stores, shopping centers are festooned with lights and gaily colored banners, the red kettles of the Salvation Army are making their annual appearance and with each passing day, another front door is graced by a wreath. Christmas is coming and the signs are everywhere.
And every year on the First Sunday of Advent, our gospel reading tells us to expect signs, “signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.” But unlike the comforting glow of candles in the windows, these signs will make “26people faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken.” Advent in the Church always begins with a reading that anticipates terrible distress before the coming of the Son of Man “with power and great glory.” Christ will come again, but not before a time of tribulation.
Christmas is coming but during Advent we remember that we live between the times – between Christ’s first appearance and the time when Christ will come again. Advent is a season of waiting, waiting for the coming of Christ, the coming of the One who came and lived as one of us and who has promised to come again. Advent is a season of waiting and longing as we look forward to a time when, in the words of the book of Revelation, “God himself will be with us” and “death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things will have passed away.”
For now, in this time between the times, you and I live in a world awash with “mourning and crying and pain.” For now, we live in a world in which all is not well, and look forward in hope to that day when God will make all things new. Advent bids us to be patient as we wait for God to complete God’s good purposes begun in Christ, that moment when God will come and be “with us” forever.
Our ancestors in the faith knew many times of tribulation, times of “fear and foreboding,” times when foreign nations invaded their land and their way of life, destroying their homes, desecrating their holy places and leading them away into exile as strangers in a strange land. And when their life as the chosen people seemed to be falling apart, prophets would arise in their midst reminding them what God had done in the past and would do again. God had called this people out of slavery in Egypt, led them into and out of exile, and God would come again.
And God did, taking on flesh in the person of Jesus, giving the disciples a glimpse of a world transformed by love. But the disciples also knew a time of tribulation as they watched this man whom they loved and followed, be arrested and tried for crimes he did not commit and hung on a cross. With fear and foreboding they buried their Lord, never anticipating the tomb would be empty three days later.
We, too, know times of fear and foreboding, times when the doctor tells us we have only a few months to live or our marriage of thirty years falls apart or we lose our homes because we cannot pay the mortgage. The world, our world, can quickly unravel and the powers of the heavens that kept our world in order can be shaken.
What we know is that we live in a world in which the people we love die, many of us must suffer the trauma of serious illness, few of us are spared the pain of a broken relationship, some of us endure the drudgery of working at a job we do not like, and the fear of not having enough money to feed ourselves and our families is a constant companion to folk in these difficult times. During Advent, we remember all is not well in this world and look forward in hope to that day when God will come and “be with us,” “wiping every tear from our eye,” as the author of Revelation tells us.
Christmas is coming but Christmas is not here yet.
Many years ago, about this time, I learned from my seven year old son that all he wanted for Christmas was an X Wing Star Wars fighter plane. No problem, I thought, as I made a note on my list. In the days that followed, I learned to my horror, that every seven year old in the country must have wanted an X Wing Star War fighter plane that year because I could not find one anywhere. This was before the days of on-line shopping and the week before Christmas I was left with only one option – order one from the Sears catalogue and hope that it would arrive on time. I was getting a bit desperate, not knowing what to say if Santa Claus was unable to bring something as simple as an X Wing Star War fighter plane. “We cannot guarantee the arrival of this shipment before Christmas. We’ll call you when it comes in,” the sales person at Sears told me when I finally placed my order. Great, I thought to myself. And all I could do was wait for the phone to ring.
The years have come and gone and that X Wing Star War fighter plane now abides in our attic with the rest of Andrew’s Star Wars stuff. Not sure if and when he might come and relieve us of these treasures but we do know he is not ready to part with those small figures of Luke Skywalker, R2-D2 and C-3PO. Santa pulled through that year thanks to Sears and Andrew was delighted.
Little did I know then what I know now and that the day would come when the Sears catalogue would not solve all the problems of the world. Little did I know then that some problems cannot be solved, but must be endured, abided with patience. Little did I know then that those few short days of waiting for an X Wing Star War fighter plane to arrive was God’s way of preparing me for things to come.
Holding on to hope in a world besieged on all fronts by things we cannot simply wish away is the challenge of Advent. We are a people of hope, and “most to be pitied,” in the words of Saint Paul if our hope is in vain. We look forward to a day when God will make all things new and many people in this world will accuse us of deluded thinking. The world is in a good bit of a mess and some would say we should stop looking for God to make good on God’s promises and learn to live with what is. What is, is often ugly, and this is the time of year many folk escape from the joylessness of their lives, putting up lights and wreaths and buying gifts and pretending that the world is other than it is and their lives are not as troubled as they really are.
We, in the Church, do not pretend. And Advent is a season in which we remember what is not right with the world in the hope of God’s coming and bringing this world to rights. We string lights and put up Christmas trees and put candles in the windows and buy gifts not to escape but to bear witness to a God who will make good on God’s promises. We, in the Church, are not anticipating a “Happy Holiday” but expecting a “Happy Holy Day” – that glad and glorious day when Christ will come again and God will be us forever and forevermore.
Our reading from Luke this morning was written after Jerusalem was destroyed and the Temple burned to the ground. Christians were being persecuted both by Jews and by Rome. To profess faith in a crucified and risen Messiah was at odds with the purposes of Rome and theologically at odds with the beliefs of Judaism. Holding on to that faith as Rome marched on Jerusalem and the Jews were throwing Christians out of the synagogues was nothing short of daring. But dared these folk did. And we are here because they did.
In hope, those early witnesses continued to meet together, often under the threat of death, persisting to believe that God had come in Christ and would come again. And they met together in the midst of a difficult world, a world of suffering made the more so by their faith. They had no national holiday in which to rest and to celebrate, but rather looked forward to their weekly gatherings to sustain their hope.
Our ancestors in the faith knew far better than we that this world can be cruel and harsh. But they had seen a great light and that light gave them hope, a hope they passed from one generation to the next. The world has not changed and continues to be a place of suffering. Our ancestors in the faith believed and passed on to us “good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” That is still good news of great joy, joy that we are now tasked to pass along.
The Second Sunday of Advent Baruch 5: 1 – 9
Sunday, December 9, 2012 Philippians 1: 3 – 11
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 3:1 – 6
5 “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; 6 and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” ’
Luke 3: 5 – 6
Most folk, whether or not they come to Church, know the story of Christmas. Christmas is the story of the birth of a baby named Jesus to a mother named Mary and a father named Joseph. Mary and Joseph were not married when Mary became pregnant and both she and Joseph were surprised, to say the least, at the news of the impending birth. When the time came for the child to be born, Mary and Joseph were forced to take lodging along with cattle and sheep and the child was born in a manger.
The story of Christmas is a most unlikely story – that the Son of God would be born to an unwed teenager in a stable. And many folk, I suspect, celebrate Christmas, even though they do not believe the story is true. Many folk have an easier time telling their children that Santa Claus rides a sleigh pulled by reindeer, landing on housetops and slipping down chimneys, rather than saying that God was born to an unwed mother and laid on a bed of straw. Those who find the story of Christmas hard to believe can find comfort in scholars who point out that only in two of our four gospels is the birth of Jesus narrated. Matthew and Luke alone tell us the story of the birth of Jesus; the story is absent in the gospels of Mark and John.
The story of the birth of Jesus is pretty incredible. And in our reading this morning from the gospel of Luke, we get a hint of this story’s incredibility. Luke begins our reading today noting who was Emperor of Rome and who was governor of Judea and who was ruler of Galilee and who were the high priests. Luke begins our reading naming some very powerful folk – names that would have resonated with Luke’s first audience as much as the names Donald Trump, John Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, George Bush, and Barak Obama, resonate with us. Luke begins by naming people with power, lots of power, folk who would have garnered headlines had there been newspapers at the time.
But the word of God came to none of them, Luke tells us. “The word of God came to John, son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” John the Baptist was a man who lived in the desert, on the fringes of civilized society and who, we know from the other gospels, wore clothing made of camel’s hair and ate locusts and wild honey. John the Baptist was a “voice crying in the wilderness” and not a voice the great and the powerful would find either trustworthy or credible. The voice of the Roman Emperor Tiberius or Pontius Pilate or Herod all would have carried much more weight than the voice of a crazed prophet preaching in the desert. The word of God, our evangelist Luke tells us, was given not to the rich and famous but to a wild man.
So we are not surprised to learn later in the gospel that neither Tiberius nor Pontius Pilate nor Herod rushed out into the wilderness to be baptized by John. What we learn is that Herod puts John the Baptist in prison and later beheads him. John the Baptist was not only not a credible witness, but was a trouble maker.
We haven’t gotten to Christmas yet, but already this story is bit peculiar. Who would believe some crazy fellow who eats locusts and wild honey and is dressed like an animal? John the Baptist has nothing to commend him, no resume, no credentials, nothing except the word of the Lord.
The same word that came to the prophet Isaiah six centuries before. “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,” the prophet Isaiah wrote to the Jews in Babylon as the end of their exile was approaching. The Jews had been living as exiles in Babylon for almost sixty years, when King Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem. Nine hundred miles lay between these Jews in exile in Babylon and their ancestral home in Jerusalem; going home was no small task.
Some made their way back and rebuilt Jerusalem and the Temple. Four centuries later the Temple was destroyed yet again and has never been rebuilt. Into this mix comes John the Baptist, proclaiming a new day, a day of release from the power brokers of the day – from the Roman emperor and the governor and the high priests. John the Baptist makes a dangerous proclamation, a proclamation that will get him killed.
The story of Christmas is an incredible story of the way of God, a way that reaches back through centuries, beginning with the great story of the Exodus and the incredible release from slavery of a bunch of no-name slaves. In the Exodus, God came with power to rescue those with no power, slaves who were unable to free themselves. And now John the Baptist comes again with a word, a word of good news to the poor and the powerless, to all those who cannot save themselves.
Maybe what is incredible about the story of Christmas is how this story has now become big business, creating an opportunity for a winter vacation and driving folk into stores to buy expensive gifts. Christmas is a retail dream and many families will decorate a tree and gather to open presents without giving a second thought to coming to church. What many folk really want at Christmas is a Santa Claus who will land on our rooftops with a sleigh full of gifts and not a prophet preaching repentance announcing the coming of a Savior, One who will lead us out of exile back home.
What is incredible is that for many folk in the world, this world and their lives are wholly comfortable and filled with good things. The story of Christmas is all about the giving and receiving of more good things and not the good news that God is coming to rescue us, to deliver us, to bring us home, to a place where “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
Christmas for many in this world will be spent working – those who work in hospitals or those who drive ambulances or fire trucks. Others will be staffing homeless shelters and keeping watch in jails and prisons. Many on Christmas Day will not wake up to the delighted shouts of children discovering what Santa has left them under the tree or the smell of a turkey roasting in an oven. Many in this world will wake on Christmas Day knowing Christmas will be like every other day, expecting no visits from family and anticipating no glad tidings. Many other folk will wake on Christmas glad the night passed without violence or the sound of missiles exploding overhead.
It is to those folk that the message of Christmas will sound incredible, unbelievable in a world that is not filled with good news and glad tidings. Those folk will find the message of John the Baptist – that God in the person of Jesus is coming to lead us out of exile back home, to be nothing more than wishful thinking. They live in a world where keeping their lights on is a challenge, where fathers leave their children without support, where a sudden illness can cause the loss of their home, and where, for reasons we are still trying to figure out, some folk keep making bad decisions.
If the story of Christmas does not sound incredible to you then maybe we are not rubbing shoulders with the right folk – all those folk in this world for whom this world and their lives are in mess, a mess so bad they can do nothing to save themselves. That was the predicament of those slaves in Egypt and those exiles in Babylon. What God gave those slaves and those exiles was not a self-book or a better system of education. What God gave those slaves and those exiles was a way out, a way enfleshed in the person of Jesus who says, later in the gospel of Luke: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.”
The story of Christmas is incredible, incredibly good news for folk whose lives are in a mess and who have no power to change. The story of Christmas tells us that God has not abandoned us – any of us - and longs to be with us. So long as we believe we have the power to make our lives and our families and our world, a better placer, we will have no need for the story of Christmas, just maybe a Santa Claus dropping in once a year.
Sunday, December 9, 2012 Philippians 1: 3 – 11
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 3:1 – 6
5 “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; 6 and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” ’
Luke 3: 5 – 6
Most folk, whether or not they come to Church, know the story of Christmas. Christmas is the story of the birth of a baby named Jesus to a mother named Mary and a father named Joseph. Mary and Joseph were not married when Mary became pregnant and both she and Joseph were surprised, to say the least, at the news of the impending birth. When the time came for the child to be born, Mary and Joseph were forced to take lodging along with cattle and sheep and the child was born in a manger.
The story of Christmas is a most unlikely story – that the Son of God would be born to an unwed teenager in a stable. And many folk, I suspect, celebrate Christmas, even though they do not believe the story is true. Many folk have an easier time telling their children that Santa Claus rides a sleigh pulled by reindeer, landing on housetops and slipping down chimneys, rather than saying that God was born to an unwed mother and laid on a bed of straw. Those who find the story of Christmas hard to believe can find comfort in scholars who point out that only in two of our four gospels is the birth of Jesus narrated. Matthew and Luke alone tell us the story of the birth of Jesus; the story is absent in the gospels of Mark and John.
The story of the birth of Jesus is pretty incredible. And in our reading this morning from the gospel of Luke, we get a hint of this story’s incredibility. Luke begins our reading today noting who was Emperor of Rome and who was governor of Judea and who was ruler of Galilee and who were the high priests. Luke begins our reading naming some very powerful folk – names that would have resonated with Luke’s first audience as much as the names Donald Trump, John Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, George Bush, and Barak Obama, resonate with us. Luke begins by naming people with power, lots of power, folk who would have garnered headlines had there been newspapers at the time.
But the word of God came to none of them, Luke tells us. “The word of God came to John, son of Zechariah in the wilderness.” John the Baptist was a man who lived in the desert, on the fringes of civilized society and who, we know from the other gospels, wore clothing made of camel’s hair and ate locusts and wild honey. John the Baptist was a “voice crying in the wilderness” and not a voice the great and the powerful would find either trustworthy or credible. The voice of the Roman Emperor Tiberius or Pontius Pilate or Herod all would have carried much more weight than the voice of a crazed prophet preaching in the desert. The word of God, our evangelist Luke tells us, was given not to the rich and famous but to a wild man.
So we are not surprised to learn later in the gospel that neither Tiberius nor Pontius Pilate nor Herod rushed out into the wilderness to be baptized by John. What we learn is that Herod puts John the Baptist in prison and later beheads him. John the Baptist was not only not a credible witness, but was a trouble maker.
We haven’t gotten to Christmas yet, but already this story is bit peculiar. Who would believe some crazy fellow who eats locusts and wild honey and is dressed like an animal? John the Baptist has nothing to commend him, no resume, no credentials, nothing except the word of the Lord.
The same word that came to the prophet Isaiah six centuries before. “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,” the prophet Isaiah wrote to the Jews in Babylon as the end of their exile was approaching. The Jews had been living as exiles in Babylon for almost sixty years, when King Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon and allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem. Nine hundred miles lay between these Jews in exile in Babylon and their ancestral home in Jerusalem; going home was no small task.
Some made their way back and rebuilt Jerusalem and the Temple. Four centuries later the Temple was destroyed yet again and has never been rebuilt. Into this mix comes John the Baptist, proclaiming a new day, a day of release from the power brokers of the day – from the Roman emperor and the governor and the high priests. John the Baptist makes a dangerous proclamation, a proclamation that will get him killed.
The story of Christmas is an incredible story of the way of God, a way that reaches back through centuries, beginning with the great story of the Exodus and the incredible release from slavery of a bunch of no-name slaves. In the Exodus, God came with power to rescue those with no power, slaves who were unable to free themselves. And now John the Baptist comes again with a word, a word of good news to the poor and the powerless, to all those who cannot save themselves.
Maybe what is incredible about the story of Christmas is how this story has now become big business, creating an opportunity for a winter vacation and driving folk into stores to buy expensive gifts. Christmas is a retail dream and many families will decorate a tree and gather to open presents without giving a second thought to coming to church. What many folk really want at Christmas is a Santa Claus who will land on our rooftops with a sleigh full of gifts and not a prophet preaching repentance announcing the coming of a Savior, One who will lead us out of exile back home.
What is incredible is that for many folk in the world, this world and their lives are wholly comfortable and filled with good things. The story of Christmas is all about the giving and receiving of more good things and not the good news that God is coming to rescue us, to deliver us, to bring us home, to a place where “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”
Christmas for many in this world will be spent working – those who work in hospitals or those who drive ambulances or fire trucks. Others will be staffing homeless shelters and keeping watch in jails and prisons. Many on Christmas Day will not wake up to the delighted shouts of children discovering what Santa has left them under the tree or the smell of a turkey roasting in an oven. Many in this world will wake on Christmas Day knowing Christmas will be like every other day, expecting no visits from family and anticipating no glad tidings. Many other folk will wake on Christmas glad the night passed without violence or the sound of missiles exploding overhead.
It is to those folk that the message of Christmas will sound incredible, unbelievable in a world that is not filled with good news and glad tidings. Those folk will find the message of John the Baptist – that God in the person of Jesus is coming to lead us out of exile back home, to be nothing more than wishful thinking. They live in a world where keeping their lights on is a challenge, where fathers leave their children without support, where a sudden illness can cause the loss of their home, and where, for reasons we are still trying to figure out, some folk keep making bad decisions.
If the story of Christmas does not sound incredible to you then maybe we are not rubbing shoulders with the right folk – all those folk in this world for whom this world and their lives are in mess, a mess so bad they can do nothing to save themselves. That was the predicament of those slaves in Egypt and those exiles in Babylon. What God gave those slaves and those exiles was not a self-book or a better system of education. What God gave those slaves and those exiles was a way out, a way enfleshed in the person of Jesus who says, later in the gospel of Luke: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.”
The story of Christmas is incredible, incredibly good news for folk whose lives are in a mess and who have no power to change. The story of Christmas tells us that God has not abandoned us – any of us - and longs to be with us. So long as we believe we have the power to make our lives and our families and our world, a better placer, we will have no need for the story of Christmas, just maybe a Santa Claus dropping in once a year.
The Third Sunday of Advent Zephaniah 3: 14 – 20
Sunday, December 16, 2012 Philippians 4: 4 – 7
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 3: 7 - 18
John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
Luke 3: 7
“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” With Christmas just a little over a week away, John the Baptist makes one last dramatic Advent appearance this morning, calling those who have come out to be baptized by him in the Jordan River, a bunch of snakes. His words sound harsh, demeaning and judgmental and probably would not play well to the crowds shopping this week at Short Pump Town Centre. This week most of us are busy trying to make Christmas wishes come true for those we love; snakes slithering away from a conflagration is hardly the way I perceive our last minute efforts to make this Christmas a Christmas to remember.
John the Baptist apparently sees things a bit differently. John the Baptist first showed up last Sunday, announcing that God was coming and we needed “to prepare the way of the Lord.” His message was good news to the Jews who had long awaited the coming of the Lord, the promised Messiah who would set the Jews free from the oppression of their Roman overlords. But now, John the Baptist calls these same Jews to be baptized and “to bear fruits worthy of repentance.”
Baptism, though, was not required of someone born to a Jewish mother. Anyone born to a Jewish mother was a Jew. The only folk who needed to be baptized were gentiles desiring to become Jews. If your mother was not Jewish and you wanted to become Jewish, you had to be baptized. Otherwise, if you were born by a Jewish mother, you were a Jew, and you did not need to be baptized. Baptism was required for those outside the covenant – those who were not born Jews.
John the Baptist, though, is now calling all Jews to be baptized – a little like saying your passport has expired and unless you get a new one, you will not be able to take that trip to Europe you had hoped to take. And, amazingly, many Jews took John up on his offer and submitted to baptism, humbling themselves as a gentile would, in order to become a Jew.
“What then should we do?” these folk ask John. If my passport has expired how do I get it renewed? And much like getting a passport in the first place, what these folk need to do is to establish proof of residency – where were your born and what country is your home? In whose kingdom do you live?
The Jews lived in a kingdom reigned over by God and in which God had created enough for everyone, enough food and enough clothing and enough sun and rain. In the kingdom of God no one was to be in want, not the Jew nor the foreigner who came among them. So John tells these folk applying for a new passport – if you have two coats, you have one coat to share; and if you have two gallons of milk, you have one gallon to give away. And if you happen to be an I.R.S. agent, you have a job to do and must not cheat. And if you carry a gun or a sword, you are tasked to keep the peace not threaten those you meet. If you want to be a Jew, John says, abide by the covenant God gave you.
When I was about seven, my sister who is two years younger than me, got the Christmas spirit. My sister decided she wanted to give me and our older brother gifts for Christmas. My sister said nothing to anyone including my parents and determined to wrap up several old games and toys she no longer wanted, placing them carefully under the Christmas tree. On Christmas morning, my brother and myself, not yet of an age when we watched our words, were bemused to say the least, to discover we had just received our baby sister’s left-over toys. We were not kind, I have to admit, and I suspect my sister was hurt.
When I was seven, Santa Claus was real and left cool stuff, new stuff, stuff I wanted. My kid sister’s old tattered games were just not in the plan. That my sister was learning something about sharing was wholly lost on me. And nothing I appreciated. When I was seven, Christmas was all about me.
Christmas is not about us, but rather about the kind of world God created this world to be. That was the message of John the Baptist and why John the Baptist accuses the crowds of trying to save their skins. The Messiah was not coming to reward the Jews for good behavior but to put this world to rights. If the Jews were colluding with evil, they too would be judged, just like everyone else.
On Friday, as I was writing this sermon, a disturbed young man walked into an elementary school in Connecticut and killed twenty children. Such violence is hard to understand at any time but is especially heartbreaking in these days just before Christmas. No one knows for certain what precipitated this carnage, except to say this young man perhaps suffered what psychologists call “a personality disorder.” In the face of such horror, we want to know why this happened and what we can do to keep such violence from being unleashed again.
The Associated Press described this young man as living in a “prosperous” and “well-to-do” neighborhood and who was an honors student. His neighborhood was “well tended” and was home to folk who worked for “General Electric, Pepsi and IBM,” the article noted, and where “Some are doctors, and his next door neighbor is a bank CEO.” Apparently for the press, this horror is all the more unbelievable because it happened on the “right” side of the tracks and not in the slums of Harlem.
Violence and evil, unfortunately, have no pride of place or person and infect this world in which we live in ways we cannot overpower. We live in the midst of a fallen world and for the authors of the New Testament, none of us are immune from the power of evil. Evil gains power when we arrogantly presume we are not subject to the power of evil, that we can free ourselves from sin or maybe just keep ourselves from committing, what our Catholic brothers and sisters might call, “mortal sins.” You and I cannot free ourselves from evil which is precisely why we are preparing to celebrate the birth of the One who, in the words of our Eucharistic Prayer, “has delivered us from evil,” making us worthy to stand before God.
Friday’s tragedy at the Sandy Hook Elementary School has elicited renewed concerns about keeping our children safe at school. And we may find ways in the months to come to limit the chances that this horror will be repeated in some other school. What we will not be able to do, however, is eliminate violence and the power of evil to work havoc in this world. We can, though, recognize the many ways we collude with the powers of this world, those “powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God,” in the words of our baptismal covenant.
We can heed the words of John the Baptist this morning who tells the crowds to share their extra coats and bread with those who have none, who tells tax collectors not to collect more money than they are paid to do their job, and soldiers not to exhort money from others by threats. In a world very much like ours, in which folk could be exploited by others with more power, John the Baptist calls for an ethic of mutual concern and consideration, urging folk to resist using the power they have to “get ahead.” John the Baptist seems to have had a crazy notion that when salvation comes, salvation will either come to all of us or to none of us.
I suspect we will never know what provoked Adam Lanza to kill his mother, twenty small children, six teachers and administrators and then himself. Nor will we ever know why God placed a snake in the Garden of Eden or fashioned us in such a way that we, like Cain, can get very angry when the world does not turn according to our desires. What we do know is that you and I and all of humanity is capable of great violence, violence that seeks to get rid of whatever gets between us and what we want. We may not pull a trigger but we may gossip or privilege our views and our ways in ways that demean others who do not think or act like us.
May we be grieved this day, grieved for those many families in Connecticut whose Christmas has been irrevocably shattered. And grieved for Adam’s brother Ryan whose life has been changed forever. Ryan is now and maybe will be forever, the brother of the man who killed his mother and massacred twenty children the week before Christmas. I do have to wonder where Ryan will be spending Christmas.
Sunday, December 16, 2012 Philippians 4: 4 – 7
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 3: 7 - 18
John said to the crowds that came out to be baptized by him, ‘You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?
Luke 3: 7
“You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” With Christmas just a little over a week away, John the Baptist makes one last dramatic Advent appearance this morning, calling those who have come out to be baptized by him in the Jordan River, a bunch of snakes. His words sound harsh, demeaning and judgmental and probably would not play well to the crowds shopping this week at Short Pump Town Centre. This week most of us are busy trying to make Christmas wishes come true for those we love; snakes slithering away from a conflagration is hardly the way I perceive our last minute efforts to make this Christmas a Christmas to remember.
John the Baptist apparently sees things a bit differently. John the Baptist first showed up last Sunday, announcing that God was coming and we needed “to prepare the way of the Lord.” His message was good news to the Jews who had long awaited the coming of the Lord, the promised Messiah who would set the Jews free from the oppression of their Roman overlords. But now, John the Baptist calls these same Jews to be baptized and “to bear fruits worthy of repentance.”
Baptism, though, was not required of someone born to a Jewish mother. Anyone born to a Jewish mother was a Jew. The only folk who needed to be baptized were gentiles desiring to become Jews. If your mother was not Jewish and you wanted to become Jewish, you had to be baptized. Otherwise, if you were born by a Jewish mother, you were a Jew, and you did not need to be baptized. Baptism was required for those outside the covenant – those who were not born Jews.
John the Baptist, though, is now calling all Jews to be baptized – a little like saying your passport has expired and unless you get a new one, you will not be able to take that trip to Europe you had hoped to take. And, amazingly, many Jews took John up on his offer and submitted to baptism, humbling themselves as a gentile would, in order to become a Jew.
“What then should we do?” these folk ask John. If my passport has expired how do I get it renewed? And much like getting a passport in the first place, what these folk need to do is to establish proof of residency – where were your born and what country is your home? In whose kingdom do you live?
The Jews lived in a kingdom reigned over by God and in which God had created enough for everyone, enough food and enough clothing and enough sun and rain. In the kingdom of God no one was to be in want, not the Jew nor the foreigner who came among them. So John tells these folk applying for a new passport – if you have two coats, you have one coat to share; and if you have two gallons of milk, you have one gallon to give away. And if you happen to be an I.R.S. agent, you have a job to do and must not cheat. And if you carry a gun or a sword, you are tasked to keep the peace not threaten those you meet. If you want to be a Jew, John says, abide by the covenant God gave you.
When I was about seven, my sister who is two years younger than me, got the Christmas spirit. My sister decided she wanted to give me and our older brother gifts for Christmas. My sister said nothing to anyone including my parents and determined to wrap up several old games and toys she no longer wanted, placing them carefully under the Christmas tree. On Christmas morning, my brother and myself, not yet of an age when we watched our words, were bemused to say the least, to discover we had just received our baby sister’s left-over toys. We were not kind, I have to admit, and I suspect my sister was hurt.
When I was seven, Santa Claus was real and left cool stuff, new stuff, stuff I wanted. My kid sister’s old tattered games were just not in the plan. That my sister was learning something about sharing was wholly lost on me. And nothing I appreciated. When I was seven, Christmas was all about me.
Christmas is not about us, but rather about the kind of world God created this world to be. That was the message of John the Baptist and why John the Baptist accuses the crowds of trying to save their skins. The Messiah was not coming to reward the Jews for good behavior but to put this world to rights. If the Jews were colluding with evil, they too would be judged, just like everyone else.
On Friday, as I was writing this sermon, a disturbed young man walked into an elementary school in Connecticut and killed twenty children. Such violence is hard to understand at any time but is especially heartbreaking in these days just before Christmas. No one knows for certain what precipitated this carnage, except to say this young man perhaps suffered what psychologists call “a personality disorder.” In the face of such horror, we want to know why this happened and what we can do to keep such violence from being unleashed again.
The Associated Press described this young man as living in a “prosperous” and “well-to-do” neighborhood and who was an honors student. His neighborhood was “well tended” and was home to folk who worked for “General Electric, Pepsi and IBM,” the article noted, and where “Some are doctors, and his next door neighbor is a bank CEO.” Apparently for the press, this horror is all the more unbelievable because it happened on the “right” side of the tracks and not in the slums of Harlem.
Violence and evil, unfortunately, have no pride of place or person and infect this world in which we live in ways we cannot overpower. We live in the midst of a fallen world and for the authors of the New Testament, none of us are immune from the power of evil. Evil gains power when we arrogantly presume we are not subject to the power of evil, that we can free ourselves from sin or maybe just keep ourselves from committing, what our Catholic brothers and sisters might call, “mortal sins.” You and I cannot free ourselves from evil which is precisely why we are preparing to celebrate the birth of the One who, in the words of our Eucharistic Prayer, “has delivered us from evil,” making us worthy to stand before God.
Friday’s tragedy at the Sandy Hook Elementary School has elicited renewed concerns about keeping our children safe at school. And we may find ways in the months to come to limit the chances that this horror will be repeated in some other school. What we will not be able to do, however, is eliminate violence and the power of evil to work havoc in this world. We can, though, recognize the many ways we collude with the powers of this world, those “powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God,” in the words of our baptismal covenant.
We can heed the words of John the Baptist this morning who tells the crowds to share their extra coats and bread with those who have none, who tells tax collectors not to collect more money than they are paid to do their job, and soldiers not to exhort money from others by threats. In a world very much like ours, in which folk could be exploited by others with more power, John the Baptist calls for an ethic of mutual concern and consideration, urging folk to resist using the power they have to “get ahead.” John the Baptist seems to have had a crazy notion that when salvation comes, salvation will either come to all of us or to none of us.
I suspect we will never know what provoked Adam Lanza to kill his mother, twenty small children, six teachers and administrators and then himself. Nor will we ever know why God placed a snake in the Garden of Eden or fashioned us in such a way that we, like Cain, can get very angry when the world does not turn according to our desires. What we do know is that you and I and all of humanity is capable of great violence, violence that seeks to get rid of whatever gets between us and what we want. We may not pull a trigger but we may gossip or privilege our views and our ways in ways that demean others who do not think or act like us.
May we be grieved this day, grieved for those many families in Connecticut whose Christmas has been irrevocably shattered. And grieved for Adam’s brother Ryan whose life has been changed forever. Ryan is now and maybe will be forever, the brother of the man who killed his mother and massacred twenty children the week before Christmas. I do have to wonder where Ryan will be spending Christmas.
The Fourth Sunday of Advent Micah 5: 2 – 5a
Sunday, December 23, 2012 Hebrews 10: 5- 19
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 1: 39 - 55
And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,”
Luke 1: 46 – 47
Advent comes to a close this morning with the beautiful words of the Magnificat, also known as the Song of Mary. After four weeks of Advent waiting and longing, Mary bursts forth in song today, “proclaiming the greatness of the Lord.” With some of most powerful poetry in the whole of the Bible, Mary “rejoices in God,” her savior. Mary, a virgin engaged to Joseph, has heard from the angel Gabriel that she will conceive and bear a son and now Mary’s cousin Elizabeth confirms this glad news with a blessing, saying: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Mary’s joy cannot be contained as she exults in the goodness of God who “has looked with favor on his lowly servant.”
Mary was indeed a lowly servant, a young woman pregnant out of wedlock, threatened with being dismissed by her husband-to-be Joseph and stoned to death for what would surely be perceived as an illicit sexual liaison. Mary knew she had been visited by an angel and Mary knew she was pregnant. Not until this visit to her cousin Elizabeth, though, has anyone other than Mary known the truth, a truth that even Mary seems to have found hard to believe.
“The Almighty has done great things for me,” Mary sings, “and holy is his Name.” Mary is suddenly very aware of the mercy of God, a mercy that has blessed her and not condemned her. The child in her womb is the Lord, the promised Messiah, the fulfillment of every longing of her people, the people of Israel. Mary is not a young woman pregnant out of wedlock but is rather, in the words of the Eastern Church “the mother of God.”
Every year about this time, I marvel anew at the incredibility of the claim we Christians make. In both the gospel of Mathew and the gospel of Luke, what we learn is that God was born into this world by a woman who was a virgin. That God would take on human flesh was and remains, a claim that Jews cannot acknowledge; that God was born to a virgin is a claim even faithful Christians have trouble swallowing. Our ancestors in the faith knew as well as we do how babies are born and quite intentionally laid claim to a story that was simply, beyond imagining. The story of Mary is unbelievable and so, too, is the vision of a world made new by the mercy of God which Mary celebrates in the Magnificat.
The proud are scattered, the mighty removed from their thrones of power, and the rich are sent away empty handed. The lowly are lifted up and the hungry poor are fed as the mercy of God is poured out upon all those who suffer in a world in which the “lowly” are often ignored, sometimes exploited and rarely seen as anything but objects of pity. Mary is giving voice to a brave new world, a world in which a pregnant unmarried young woman would not be vulnerable to social ostracism and maybe even death. God is giving birth to a new day and Mary’s spirit is rejoicing.
Mary does not rejoice, though, until she visits her cousin Elizabeth. The angel Gabriel has told Mary that not only is Mary to bear a son but so will her cousin Elizabeth who is older and has been barren up until now. And while we do not know why Mary “sets out with haste” to visit Elizabeth now pregnant with John the Baptist, what we do know is that immediately after the angel Gabriel visits Mary, Mary leaves to go and see Elizabeth. Upon seeing one another, Elizabeth blesses Mary and the child in her womb, prompting Mary to burst out in song. Elizabeth has acted as a midwife for Mary’s joy.
This is the only recorded story we have of Elizabeth who fades quietly away after this momentous encounter with Mary. John the Baptist and subsequently Jesus take center stage from here on and Mary abides, garnering much devotion in the Church in the centuries following the crucifixion and resurrection. Elizabeth, though, while known as the mother of John the Baptist, never achieves the distinction of being a midwife of joy, which Elizabeth clearly was when Mary came knocking on her door. Elizabeth gave Mary an opportunity to rejoice, and Mary did, in the soaring words of the Magnificat.
Births are spiritually complicated affairs. Biologically a birth is reasonably straightforward affair but ask any woman who has given birth and you will hear a far more complicated story. Labor pains are very real and very painful. Not too long ago, many women died in childbirth. Many women miscarry and their child is never given a name or a proper burial. Some women discover they are pregnant and wish they were not; others long to be pregnant and cannot conceive. Oftentimes, women worry if the child in their belly will be healthy and strong or will suffer from some abnormality. And if you happen to be like Mary – pregnant and not married – a woman can become consumed wondering what her future and that of their child will look like. Pregnancy is always a complicated affair.
Elizabeth gave Mary and Mary’s child a blessing. Elizabeth was a midwife to joy. What we know is that when the angel Gabriel told Mary she would be “overshadowed by the power of the Holy Spirit” and would conceive and bear a son who would be the Son of the Most High,” Mary answered humbly “Let it be with me according to your word.” Only now, after Elizabeth’s blessing, does Mary rejoice, rejoice from the depths of her being for this unbelievable gift from God.
“At heart, giving a blessing is really quite simple,” writes author and teacher David Spangler in his book aptly titled Blessing.
We innately know how to do it, precisely because it comers from the heart, from a sense of caring and helpfulness. Every time you create safety and reassurance where before there was fear, you are giving a blessing. Every time you perform an act of kindness, providing money where there was poverty, shelter where there was vulnerability, food where there was hunger, love where there was loneliness, comfort and encouragement where there was despair and depression, you are being a blessing. There is no special technique other than having an open, generous heart and a loving, aware mind.
For Spangler, we are created to be blessings to others, much like Elizabeth was a blessing to Mary.
To be blessed is to be, as Mary sings this morning in the Magnificat, “favored by God,” graced with a gift you neither earned nor deserved. To receive a blessing is to know that you are dearly beloved by God, this God who created you and all that is and who wishes you to be well and to rejoice. And when we know ourselves to be blessed, we then can be blessings to others. Elizabeth, an old and barren woman, knows she has been blessed by her unexpected pregnancy and so can now offer a blessing to Mary.
The people of Israel knew they had been blessed by God, favored when God freed them slavery in Egypt. And God blessed this people so that they might be a blessing to the world. Israel’s vocation to be a blessing to the world, “a light to the nations,” is now being realized in the person of Jesus who is the very blessing of God, the fulfillment of the “promise God made to our fathers, to Abraham and his children forever,” as Mary sings.
In the words of the Christmas hymn, O little town of Bethlehem, Mary rejoices this morning because “The hopes and fears of all the years” are about to come true. The promised mercy of God is about to be ours. As we look forward to the blessing that is Christmas, may we remember that the gift that is Christmas is not given to us to keep but to give away, shared with a world that longs to know the grace, mercy and peace of God. May we each know this day that we are blessed, blessed by God to be a blessing to others, all others, not just on Christmas but every day of the year.
Sunday, December 23, 2012 Hebrews 10: 5- 19
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 1: 39 - 55
And Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,”
Luke 1: 46 – 47
Advent comes to a close this morning with the beautiful words of the Magnificat, also known as the Song of Mary. After four weeks of Advent waiting and longing, Mary bursts forth in song today, “proclaiming the greatness of the Lord.” With some of most powerful poetry in the whole of the Bible, Mary “rejoices in God,” her savior. Mary, a virgin engaged to Joseph, has heard from the angel Gabriel that she will conceive and bear a son and now Mary’s cousin Elizabeth confirms this glad news with a blessing, saying: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Mary’s joy cannot be contained as she exults in the goodness of God who “has looked with favor on his lowly servant.”
Mary was indeed a lowly servant, a young woman pregnant out of wedlock, threatened with being dismissed by her husband-to-be Joseph and stoned to death for what would surely be perceived as an illicit sexual liaison. Mary knew she had been visited by an angel and Mary knew she was pregnant. Not until this visit to her cousin Elizabeth, though, has anyone other than Mary known the truth, a truth that even Mary seems to have found hard to believe.
“The Almighty has done great things for me,” Mary sings, “and holy is his Name.” Mary is suddenly very aware of the mercy of God, a mercy that has blessed her and not condemned her. The child in her womb is the Lord, the promised Messiah, the fulfillment of every longing of her people, the people of Israel. Mary is not a young woman pregnant out of wedlock but is rather, in the words of the Eastern Church “the mother of God.”
Every year about this time, I marvel anew at the incredibility of the claim we Christians make. In both the gospel of Mathew and the gospel of Luke, what we learn is that God was born into this world by a woman who was a virgin. That God would take on human flesh was and remains, a claim that Jews cannot acknowledge; that God was born to a virgin is a claim even faithful Christians have trouble swallowing. Our ancestors in the faith knew as well as we do how babies are born and quite intentionally laid claim to a story that was simply, beyond imagining. The story of Mary is unbelievable and so, too, is the vision of a world made new by the mercy of God which Mary celebrates in the Magnificat.
The proud are scattered, the mighty removed from their thrones of power, and the rich are sent away empty handed. The lowly are lifted up and the hungry poor are fed as the mercy of God is poured out upon all those who suffer in a world in which the “lowly” are often ignored, sometimes exploited and rarely seen as anything but objects of pity. Mary is giving voice to a brave new world, a world in which a pregnant unmarried young woman would not be vulnerable to social ostracism and maybe even death. God is giving birth to a new day and Mary’s spirit is rejoicing.
Mary does not rejoice, though, until she visits her cousin Elizabeth. The angel Gabriel has told Mary that not only is Mary to bear a son but so will her cousin Elizabeth who is older and has been barren up until now. And while we do not know why Mary “sets out with haste” to visit Elizabeth now pregnant with John the Baptist, what we do know is that immediately after the angel Gabriel visits Mary, Mary leaves to go and see Elizabeth. Upon seeing one another, Elizabeth blesses Mary and the child in her womb, prompting Mary to burst out in song. Elizabeth has acted as a midwife for Mary’s joy.
This is the only recorded story we have of Elizabeth who fades quietly away after this momentous encounter with Mary. John the Baptist and subsequently Jesus take center stage from here on and Mary abides, garnering much devotion in the Church in the centuries following the crucifixion and resurrection. Elizabeth, though, while known as the mother of John the Baptist, never achieves the distinction of being a midwife of joy, which Elizabeth clearly was when Mary came knocking on her door. Elizabeth gave Mary an opportunity to rejoice, and Mary did, in the soaring words of the Magnificat.
Births are spiritually complicated affairs. Biologically a birth is reasonably straightforward affair but ask any woman who has given birth and you will hear a far more complicated story. Labor pains are very real and very painful. Not too long ago, many women died in childbirth. Many women miscarry and their child is never given a name or a proper burial. Some women discover they are pregnant and wish they were not; others long to be pregnant and cannot conceive. Oftentimes, women worry if the child in their belly will be healthy and strong or will suffer from some abnormality. And if you happen to be like Mary – pregnant and not married – a woman can become consumed wondering what her future and that of their child will look like. Pregnancy is always a complicated affair.
Elizabeth gave Mary and Mary’s child a blessing. Elizabeth was a midwife to joy. What we know is that when the angel Gabriel told Mary she would be “overshadowed by the power of the Holy Spirit” and would conceive and bear a son who would be the Son of the Most High,” Mary answered humbly “Let it be with me according to your word.” Only now, after Elizabeth’s blessing, does Mary rejoice, rejoice from the depths of her being for this unbelievable gift from God.
“At heart, giving a blessing is really quite simple,” writes author and teacher David Spangler in his book aptly titled Blessing.
We innately know how to do it, precisely because it comers from the heart, from a sense of caring and helpfulness. Every time you create safety and reassurance where before there was fear, you are giving a blessing. Every time you perform an act of kindness, providing money where there was poverty, shelter where there was vulnerability, food where there was hunger, love where there was loneliness, comfort and encouragement where there was despair and depression, you are being a blessing. There is no special technique other than having an open, generous heart and a loving, aware mind.
For Spangler, we are created to be blessings to others, much like Elizabeth was a blessing to Mary.
To be blessed is to be, as Mary sings this morning in the Magnificat, “favored by God,” graced with a gift you neither earned nor deserved. To receive a blessing is to know that you are dearly beloved by God, this God who created you and all that is and who wishes you to be well and to rejoice. And when we know ourselves to be blessed, we then can be blessings to others. Elizabeth, an old and barren woman, knows she has been blessed by her unexpected pregnancy and so can now offer a blessing to Mary.
The people of Israel knew they had been blessed by God, favored when God freed them slavery in Egypt. And God blessed this people so that they might be a blessing to the world. Israel’s vocation to be a blessing to the world, “a light to the nations,” is now being realized in the person of Jesus who is the very blessing of God, the fulfillment of the “promise God made to our fathers, to Abraham and his children forever,” as Mary sings.
In the words of the Christmas hymn, O little town of Bethlehem, Mary rejoices this morning because “The hopes and fears of all the years” are about to come true. The promised mercy of God is about to be ours. As we look forward to the blessing that is Christmas, may we remember that the gift that is Christmas is not given to us to keep but to give away, shared with a world that longs to know the grace, mercy and peace of God. May we each know this day that we are blessed, blessed by God to be a blessing to others, all others, not just on Christmas but every day of the year.
The Nativity of Our Lord Isaiah 9: 2 – 7
Monday, December 24, 2012 Titus 2: 11 – 14
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 2: 1 – 20
Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.
Luke 2: 9
We hear a message from an angel tonight, an angel who says to shepherds keeping watch over their flocks: “Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” People all over this world, in every language under heaven, are hearing this same angelic proclamation on this holy night: “Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.” In great cathedrals, in simple New England churches, in prisons and hospitals, orphanages and homeless shelters, to young and old, rich and poor, weak and strong, the angel announces to all of us this night: “Do not be afraid - I am bringing you good news of great joy.”
To the parents who buried their young children this past week in Newtown, Connecticut, and to folk who lost their homes during hurricane Sandy in New York, and to the family of a teenager in Spotsylvania who jumped off of a bridge onto I95 ten days ago, the angel says: “Do not be afraid - I am bringing you good news of great joy.”
Into a weary world, an angel comes this night announcing “good news.” And the heavenly host bursts forth “praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom God favors!’” Tonight we come together to hear once more and to celebrate the good news that a child has been born in the city of David, a child who is God’s promised Messiah, the savior of the world. And we hear this good news in the midst of a world in which many are grieving this night and not rejoicing.
But rejoice we do this night, with the glow of candles and the beauty of poinsettias, with glorious music and with friends and family. Tonight we rejoice because an angel long ago said to shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night: “Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” The Lord has come and that is good news indeed.
We rejoice this night not blind to the suffering of this world but rather in the midst of that suffering, not forgetting those who this night are weeping but celebrating the truth that God has come among us, that God is with us, and in ways beyond our knowing, is even now, lifting up the lowly and binding up the broken- hearted. We rejoice this night not because all is right with this world but rather because God has come as God promised long ago, to bring this world back round right and make this world once again, “very good indeed.”
The message of the angel we hear tonight is given to shepherds living in the fields. Shepherds in the first century were not the sweet children who often take the part of shepherds in Christmas pageants. Shepherds in the first century were rough characters who lived away from polite society and who often were not deemed especially trustworthy. Shepherds lived on the margins, sleeping outside in the fields with their sheep. The first folk who heard the message of the angel were neither prosperous nor perhaps even welcome in the homes of “good” folk. The first folk who heard this “good news” were numbered among the least and the most lowly. The kingdom of God has come and the first to hear this glad news are folk who others probably would have shunned.
The shepherds are terrified we hear, as well we might be were an angel of God to suddenly appear here before us. But the angel tells them not to be afraid and the shepherds leave their flocks to “go and see this thing that has taken place.” And the shepherds become the first visitors of the Christ child, the first to see God’s promised Messiah after Mary and Joseph. The kingdom of God has come and the first to “see” the kingdom are lowly shepherds, folk forgotten and dismissed by others as unworthy. To folk whose lives were not filled with “good things,” an angel from God comes announcing good news. Perhaps, the joy of this holy night can only be experienced by those who have known the joylessness and despair of other nights and other days.
The joy of this night comes to us in the midst of a world that continues to suffer. And many will look at our celebration this night and wonder why we are rejoicing at the birth of a child who heralded the advent of the kingdom of God but left us in a world that so often looks God-forsaken. If God has come, then why do young children die, teenagers lose hope and hurricanes destroy homes, wrecking havoc on major cities? Why do violence and war and bloodshed continue to threaten our very existence? How can we rejoice in the midst of a world that is still so troubled, so full of grief and sadness?
We rejoice this night because God has come, taking on our human flesh and becoming one of us. We rejoice this night because God knows far better than we what it means to be human in an inhuman world. We rejoice this night because in the midst of this fallen and often dark world, we see the goodness and glory of God – in the beauty of nature and the mystery of love, in the glow of candles at midnight and the majestic music we share together this night. We rejoice this night because we know God has not forsaken this world that God lovingly created nor any one of us.
The message of the angel this holy night, first given to lowly shepherds, is now given to us. But we need to have ears to hear and eyes to see. Unless our ears are open to the cries of the poor, the anguish of those who come to this night mourning the death of those they love, and those who will suffer through this night without the many creature comforts you and I enjoy, we will not be able to hear the message of the angel. Unless our eyes are open to those who lay dying this night or those struggling with despair this night, we will not be able to see this Christ child and the glory that broke upon those poor shepherds in the field. The glory of this night did not dawn upon the rich and the powerful but rather the glory of this night dawned upon poor shepherds, folk who knew better than we what life looks like from the bottom of the heap.
This child whose birth we celebrate this holy night took up with prostitutes and tax collectors, with lepers and all those with no hope. This child healed the sick, gave sight to the blind and made the lame to leap. This child sought fellowship with all those who others dismissed or who, some said, suffered by their own hand and through their own fault. This child showed mercy, an amazing and abundant mercy that made no distinctions, brokered no compromise and knew no bounds. And yes, this child whose birth we celebrate this night will get killed. Mercy has its price.
But tonight, on this glorious and lovely night, we come together in the dead of night to celebrate, lighting candles, singing hymns and hearing a story that is being told all over the world this night. The rich are hearing this story and the poor are hearing this story; the sick are hearing this story as are those who are well; the young are hearing this story and so too, are those who might be hearing this story for the last time. Tonight we hear a story that was first told to poor shepherds. I am not sure we can hear this story unless we can take our place in a world that suffers and suffers mightily.
I wish with all my heart that each of you will know and will have a very merry Christmas. But remember the angel does not wish these shepherds abiding in the field a “Merry Christmas.” What the angel says is: “Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” More than a “merry Christmas” I wish that you might find a way to share these tidings of joy with someone who needs “good news,” to know that God loves them and that on this most holy of nights, God has come.
Monday, December 24, 2012 Titus 2: 11 – 14
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 2: 1 – 20
Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.
Luke 2: 9
We hear a message from an angel tonight, an angel who says to shepherds keeping watch over their flocks: “Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” People all over this world, in every language under heaven, are hearing this same angelic proclamation on this holy night: “Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.” In great cathedrals, in simple New England churches, in prisons and hospitals, orphanages and homeless shelters, to young and old, rich and poor, weak and strong, the angel announces to all of us this night: “Do not be afraid - I am bringing you good news of great joy.”
To the parents who buried their young children this past week in Newtown, Connecticut, and to folk who lost their homes during hurricane Sandy in New York, and to the family of a teenager in Spotsylvania who jumped off of a bridge onto I95 ten days ago, the angel says: “Do not be afraid - I am bringing you good news of great joy.”
Into a weary world, an angel comes this night announcing “good news.” And the heavenly host bursts forth “praising God and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom God favors!’” Tonight we come together to hear once more and to celebrate the good news that a child has been born in the city of David, a child who is God’s promised Messiah, the savior of the world. And we hear this good news in the midst of a world in which many are grieving this night and not rejoicing.
But rejoice we do this night, with the glow of candles and the beauty of poinsettias, with glorious music and with friends and family. Tonight we rejoice because an angel long ago said to shepherds keeping watch over their flocks by night: “Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” The Lord has come and that is good news indeed.
We rejoice this night not blind to the suffering of this world but rather in the midst of that suffering, not forgetting those who this night are weeping but celebrating the truth that God has come among us, that God is with us, and in ways beyond our knowing, is even now, lifting up the lowly and binding up the broken- hearted. We rejoice this night not because all is right with this world but rather because God has come as God promised long ago, to bring this world back round right and make this world once again, “very good indeed.”
The message of the angel we hear tonight is given to shepherds living in the fields. Shepherds in the first century were not the sweet children who often take the part of shepherds in Christmas pageants. Shepherds in the first century were rough characters who lived away from polite society and who often were not deemed especially trustworthy. Shepherds lived on the margins, sleeping outside in the fields with their sheep. The first folk who heard the message of the angel were neither prosperous nor perhaps even welcome in the homes of “good” folk. The first folk who heard this “good news” were numbered among the least and the most lowly. The kingdom of God has come and the first to hear this glad news are folk who others probably would have shunned.
The shepherds are terrified we hear, as well we might be were an angel of God to suddenly appear here before us. But the angel tells them not to be afraid and the shepherds leave their flocks to “go and see this thing that has taken place.” And the shepherds become the first visitors of the Christ child, the first to see God’s promised Messiah after Mary and Joseph. The kingdom of God has come and the first to “see” the kingdom are lowly shepherds, folk forgotten and dismissed by others as unworthy. To folk whose lives were not filled with “good things,” an angel from God comes announcing good news. Perhaps, the joy of this holy night can only be experienced by those who have known the joylessness and despair of other nights and other days.
The joy of this night comes to us in the midst of a world that continues to suffer. And many will look at our celebration this night and wonder why we are rejoicing at the birth of a child who heralded the advent of the kingdom of God but left us in a world that so often looks God-forsaken. If God has come, then why do young children die, teenagers lose hope and hurricanes destroy homes, wrecking havoc on major cities? Why do violence and war and bloodshed continue to threaten our very existence? How can we rejoice in the midst of a world that is still so troubled, so full of grief and sadness?
We rejoice this night because God has come, taking on our human flesh and becoming one of us. We rejoice this night because God knows far better than we what it means to be human in an inhuman world. We rejoice this night because in the midst of this fallen and often dark world, we see the goodness and glory of God – in the beauty of nature and the mystery of love, in the glow of candles at midnight and the majestic music we share together this night. We rejoice this night because we know God has not forsaken this world that God lovingly created nor any one of us.
The message of the angel this holy night, first given to lowly shepherds, is now given to us. But we need to have ears to hear and eyes to see. Unless our ears are open to the cries of the poor, the anguish of those who come to this night mourning the death of those they love, and those who will suffer through this night without the many creature comforts you and I enjoy, we will not be able to hear the message of the angel. Unless our eyes are open to those who lay dying this night or those struggling with despair this night, we will not be able to see this Christ child and the glory that broke upon those poor shepherds in the field. The glory of this night did not dawn upon the rich and the powerful but rather the glory of this night dawned upon poor shepherds, folk who knew better than we what life looks like from the bottom of the heap.
This child whose birth we celebrate this holy night took up with prostitutes and tax collectors, with lepers and all those with no hope. This child healed the sick, gave sight to the blind and made the lame to leap. This child sought fellowship with all those who others dismissed or who, some said, suffered by their own hand and through their own fault. This child showed mercy, an amazing and abundant mercy that made no distinctions, brokered no compromise and knew no bounds. And yes, this child whose birth we celebrate this night will get killed. Mercy has its price.
But tonight, on this glorious and lovely night, we come together in the dead of night to celebrate, lighting candles, singing hymns and hearing a story that is being told all over the world this night. The rich are hearing this story and the poor are hearing this story; the sick are hearing this story as are those who are well; the young are hearing this story and so too, are those who might be hearing this story for the last time. Tonight we hear a story that was first told to poor shepherds. I am not sure we can hear this story unless we can take our place in a world that suffers and suffers mightily.
I wish with all my heart that each of you will know and will have a very merry Christmas. But remember the angel does not wish these shepherds abiding in the field a “Merry Christmas.” What the angel says is: “Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” More than a “merry Christmas” I wish that you might find a way to share these tidings of joy with someone who needs “good news,” to know that God loves them and that on this most holy of nights, God has come.
