The view from up here

a Sermon for Epiphany 4C
Text: Luke 4:21-30

Please Pray with me: God of Hope and Wonder, we long to be part of your vision for the
world; help us to see you at work in the world and within us. Amen.

Remember, this story is about the cliff.

We came to church this morning feeling that this was an ordinary Sunday. We thought that some semblance of normal was being restored to the world and we could begin to go about our lives as normal. And our first two readings might even seem to reinforce that thinking. And then we get to the gospel.

The Gospel itself looks straightforward or simple enough. Jesus says something, people get excited, then Jesus makes the people mad, so they try to kill him. We might even think that Jesus himself gives us the message of this story: “no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” OK. You can’t go home again. Got it. Time to move on!

Except that we can’t move on. Moving on would mean that we ignore the real cause for the outrage. It would mean that the reason for collective violence would be swept under the carpet. That isn’t the gospel. So what caused these family friends, this home congregation, to not only get upset at Jesus, but cause the collective body to intend to murder him?

He told them that they don’t get to be first. That God likes some other people better. And that many of those people would gain power and influence at the expense of the faithful. He put the mirror up to the people and said, in essence:

“When I read from Isaiah these words:

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

I didn’t mean that you are the captives or the blind or the oppressed, but that you get the short end of the stick.”

And when Jesus said this, the crowd was going to kill him as a blasphemer by stoning him to death in a way—by throwing him off of the cliff and onto the stones below.

The key, of course was his choice of examples. As long as the poor, the blind, and the oppressed are nameless, “we’re all good”. But when he names gentiles that were given favor over Jewish people in the same boat, they became outraged.

It seems as if we have a hard time with this notion, too. We like the idea of “bringing good news to the poor” as long as we still get to be wealthy (or at least middle-class—which is wealthy by international standards). We like the idea of releasing captives—if they haven’t done anything to us or aren’t considered our property. We like the idea of giving sight to the blind—as long as they don’t see something we’ve overlooked. We like the idea of letting the oppressed go free—as long as they don’t have it as good as we have it. We like to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor—except that we don’t actually want that to happen, because then we all get to move to the back of the line. And after a while, our feet start to hurt because that line looks really long from back here. It seems as if, deep down, we believe that we’re the ones who are oppressed and need saving from the current state of affairs. So when Jesus’s words are only words, we feel good. But when we are asked to live them as the oppressor, we balk.

The truth is that Jesus could walk into most any church in America and grab a Bible, read that passage and say that the people chosen for salvation and authority in the new age aren’t Christian, but are homeless or displaced, are hungry and malnourished, haven’t had access to safe drinking water or doctor care in who knows how long. And the people would be furious. He’d be called a false prophet and run out of town. He’d hear the people shout “That isn’t Biblical” as they drive him away.

But remember, the story is about the cliff.

The location for the story is “the brow of the hill on which their town was built”. Luke gives us an image of a people who live on a hill. This would no doubt be the scene of some wonderful childhood stories of Jesus running through the meadows down in the valley, of clothes hung on lines in the breeze of the hilltop. The town itself could be seen from some distance away—a vision that might cause a weary traveler to want to set down some roots in this beautiful location. From the hilltop itself, an observer could get a wider view of the countryside than anywhere else. Even in military terms, the elevated location would serve as a tactical advantage. In every way, this town is in an idyllic spot.

But this hill also has a cliff—a source of danger for children running around and a temptation for the town’s more malicious members. The cliff may be the hill’s darker side—the drawback for the benefits the people get in living there.

For Luke, the location is the visual and most explanatory part of the story, because Jesus comes up from lower ground and tells the people that they’ve got a great view, that they are great people, but their position also gives them blindspots. That they can’t see everything from this hill. That this hill doesn’t help them see themselves any better or one another any better. The outrage didn’t come out because Jesus said good things about Gentiles, but that Gentiles, even Gentiles that had oppressed Jews, could better know the mind of their God.

That message is Good News, isn’t it? Jesus tells us that God’s vision for the world is bigger than we are. That to be a part of the vision doesn’t require joining an exclusive club with membership dues, name tags, or offices to be held. It merely requires relationship and participation with the vision.

It also means that we don’t have to have all of the answers—and even better—that we don’t! That we can learn from other people and other cultures. That we can gain insight from people that we don’t even know. That we aren’t all that there is, and we aren’t “the best”.

Most important, though, is that it sheds light on the inner darkness. That we like feeling special. We like knowing that someday we’ll each get a chance to give Jesus a hi-five. And we like knowing that our hard work will pay off in some way. That we like being different and we’re worried that if the outsider can have what we have, it won’t be as good.

For us, in this Epiphanytide, the cliff is the source of our great vision and our great hubris. It is the place in which we endanger our own understanding of God by squeezing it too tightly and dashing others to the rocks. But it is also the place in which we can realize that problem—our hard hearts transformed into forgiveness by the grace of God. It is the place of the revelation made blind by our own insecurity—the place in which our innersight may be restored to match or even better our physical site.

May you find yourself awakened and given new sight this day by a God that longs for your collaboration in vision and may that cliff be the site of your greatest triumph.

Being called through signs

a Sermon for Epiphany (C)
Text: Matthew 2:1-12

God of Hope and Wonder, as you gave these Magi signs, you give us signs that we might follow. We will listen as you keep calling us to service. Amen.

I have to confess that I always assumed that I would be watching cartoons as an adult. Since most of us love them as children, I assumed that would continue, and thanks to the Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, adults can like cartoons. What I didn’t expect is that I would spend 30 minutes every evening watching Nick Jr., the cartoon network for preschoolers. Over the last couple of weeks, they have been advertising a new Dora the Explorer episode: “Dora Saves Three Kings Day”. Now, I’m not a big Dora fan, and I didn’t watch this particular episode, but the title points out how we often envision the day. Three kings, travel from the Orient, carrying gifts solemnly to be delivered to the baby born 12 days earlier. A fascinating story, if not altogether accurate.

Much of the story, as we remember it, has the spaces filled in by tradition. Matthew doesn’t say how many Magi there are, but we think of three—one for each gift given. The word magi has the same root as magician, but we take these individuals as men and as royalty, naming them kings. A more accurate title might be stargazer or astrologer. They are also likely to have come from Babylon, not the Orient. In other words, Three Kings Day this is not.

So let us instead consider what the original version of the story might mean for us. The word magi in other parts of scripture is actually derogatory and suggests a charlatan, like a snake-oil salesman. That Herod would enlist such a group is interesting. They were already tracking an astrological event and were looking for something or someone, the new king of Israel. Whatever the case, these were a collection of people covering a long distance with attendants and a caravan following them, traveling a long way to visit God’s son. The Jewish authorities just down the road didn’t make the trip, but people from a foreign land did.

And they came because of a prediction. They saw a sign in the place they look for signs—the sky, and specifically among the stars, it took the form of a single star.

We tend to think that signs come to us like a paddle upside the head or a loud booming voice from the heavens—kind of like the one Jesus gets at his baptism. Something big and bold and flashy. We think that is how it all works. But signs can be much more personal and elusive. They come in the places you look, but not necessarily the form you expect. This is more like the form of God’s messenging service than direct visits from angels or in natural disasters.

This morning, we celebrate the Epiphany, derived from the Greek epiphaneia which means ‘manifestation’. In common terms, we think of having an epiphany—a moment of realization or clarity—or perhaps more literally, the manifestation of incredible insight. Considering that definition, we might be tempted to go back to Dora’s ‘Three Kings Day’ and call it good. But for us, epiphany isn’t simply about the visit from the magi. The other gospel reading for today is the baptism of Jesus. Next week is the wedding at Canna and so on, concluding with the Transfiguration. These passages cover not only the beginning of Jesus’s earthly ministry, but include actual manifestations of the Spirit and a new vision of things to come.

And because of all of the fireworks in these passages, we might overlook one simple truth: God spoke. And he directed the Magi to the Son.

We’re often challenged by God’s speaking in our lives. Sometimes we don’t like the timing. Sometimes we don’t like the challenge given us. Sometimes we don’t think we’re worthy. But we’re all here today because, in some way, we were called to be here, coming from all over the place. It is all the more special because we are about to demonstrate our faith and commission some wonderful people to service, to respond to the call that God has given to them. Today, one of the traditional days for baptism, we will have two, Alexander and Francesca. We will commission them to lifelong service and witness of God’s love. And we will all swear to lift both of them up and raise them in a healthy and spiritual way. In this way, we are all called to this service, not only as witnesses, but as guides and supporters of a new life in faith.

We also will commission our new vestry. These leaders, called from within the church will be given responsibility for much more than the financial health of the parish, but the direction and leadership of our ministries and our future. God has touched each of them for leadership at St. Paul’s and in the Diocese of Atlanta.

It may be easy to see these baptisms and the vestry commissioning as simply public acts—things done in front of the community. In this view, the gathered people are passively witnessing the events as they unfold. But for us, and for our theology, these are powerful moments, representing the collective voice of the congregation. WE are baptizing these two beautiful Christians and vowing to stand with them and hold them up. WE are commissioning this vestry to serve this year with dignity and honor. WE are responsible for helping these magi find God’s son, in a strange town, in a strange place, by the light of a brilliant star. This is our calling today. Let us follow Him.

Rejoice in repentance

a Sermon for Advent 3C
Text: Luke 3:7-18

Let’s begin this morning looking back 20 years. It was a particularly memorable Christmas for me. We had extended family around, including cousins, which was unusual. And on the morning of Christmas Eve, I came down stairs to find a big box under the tree with my name on it.

As every 10 or 11 year-old knows, the hardest thing about seeing a big box for you under the tree before Christmas morning is having to wait all day, staring at it. It was like a beacon, calling out to me. “Drew! Here I am! Open me!” And I could hardly resist. I couldn’t stay in the same room with it.

Making matters worse was this was 1988/89 and my Christmas list contained only one item. Normally the list was full: GI Joe, Transformers: but not this year. This year contained just this: The Nintendo Entertainment System.

I had been bugging my parents for months and talked about it constantly. We had inherited an Atari 2600 the year before, but this was evolution! This was proof of progress! This was countless hours of entertainment and fascination! Well, when I saw that box, I became convinced that what was inside was the NES with its two controllers, the light gun, and Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt. I could hardly wait to finally make that game mine.

The next morning, the first thing I race for was that big box, and when it was my turn to open a present, I ripped the paper off of the front and inside was a big model of the space shuttle. I was heart-broken. And I’ll admit it—my expectations kept me from appreciating the present that was given to me. More tragic is that my Dad had bought this model to build with me and my 10 year-old self couldn’t get that. I was focused on other things.

In many ways, our expectations get mixed up in the “holiday season”. We’ve had some challenging readings here in Advent so far, and this morning’s is no exception. We’re all looking ahead to Christmas with its carols and its egg nog and its presents and its fellowship. The season is naturally pregnant with expectation. At the same time, that expectation leads us to ignore the signs around us. Just as my 10 year-old self knew that the box was the wrong shape—hours spent staring at the NES box behind the counter in KB Toys told me that—we look at life, and the season, through expectant eyes, not eyes of observation.

This morning, we finally get to hear that grating and persistent message of John the Baptizer’s that we talked about last week. We get to hear the jarring language (“You brood of vipers!”) and the threats (“but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire”) that we might be quite tempted to overlook—to ignore in our attempt to get happy about Christmas. To be joyful at the coming of Jesus.

We know John comes to prepare the way for Jesus. And talking about John at the beginning of the church year is appropriate. It makes chronological sense. It makes theological sense. But I wonder if we take seriously the notion that he came to prepare the way for Jesus…to lead us on the way. That the Good News is first revealed by John and begins here.

John has this big crowd of followers who are all wondering if he is the long-expected Messiah. He looks like what they expect the Messiah to look like, and he talks like what they expect the Messiah to talk like, and he behaves like what they expect the Messiah to behave like…but they still aren’t sure. That’s interesting, isn’t it? So this disparate group has just been put in their place by this potential Messiah and they still ask “What then should we do?” John responds by telling them to be generous and fair with what they have. If you have two coats and you see somebody without one, give it to him. Pretty simple. Then the tax collectors ask what they should do, and John tells them not to cheat people. Take only what you are instructed to take. And the soldiers are told to be happy with the wages they receive, and not bully others and take from them. John’s instructions come to us as no-brainers, don’t they? Especially in light of what we know our faith to be about. But let’s pause at this window for a minute. If we look inside, we see a culture in which safety and security required that you look after yourself first. Having two coats meant you had a spare in case something happened to the first one. It meant having coats for different kinds of weather. It might have even meant that it was the only luxury you had. As for the tax collectors, most of their income came from collecting more than was prescribed—marking up the taxes. Like a merchant that sells goods from a manufacturer to a store, the income has to come from somewhere. And for the soldier, brutal treatment and extortion was a means of keeping the peace. John’s teaching isn’t so common sense in that context—and can seem eerily similar to our own world.

But John’s teachings here are about fairness. We should read them in the way that our guts tell us to. Despite the expectations the world has for us, we should be fair and generous to others, collecting only what is needed, while taking nothing for ourselves. That’s a pretty solid way of operating. But I think it does more than that—I think it gets our focus off of ourselves and onto other people. It isn’t what I can do for them, but for what can be done for them. See the difference? Just take the ‘I’ out.

John is preparing the way for Jesus, not physically: scuffing the ground from Bethlehem to Jerusalem or sweeping the dust off of the road: and not emotionally as a pre-Messiah herald because people couldn’t figure it out. John prepares the way by helping people let go of themselves. Letting go of self-sufficiency. Letting go of personal consumption. This is repentance. This is John’s preparation. For us to see Jesus as the Messiah, we must first repent and give up that devotion to self and materialism and macho bravado and ladder-climbing and all of that stuff. So we can just let it go. Hand it over.Because that understanding of expectation, that sense of ‘what I’m going to get’ keeps us from understanding Jesus as the Christ. John prepares Jesus’s way by altering our expectations of the Messiah.

This morning, we celebrate Gaudete, as is traditionally symbolized with a pink candle in the advent wreathe and is an ancient practice that is being renewed in the church. The word gaudete is Latin for “rejoice” and has been used to infuse some joy into an otherwise penitential season. I’ll admit that I had a hard time seeing the joy in this reading when I started. The others, I definitely could. But this Gospel lesson is about joy. John reveals the Good News that will be brought to new life in Jesus. That is joyous. That our calling is to give to others what is missing in their lives is joyous. That our calling is to not take from others and to treat them honestly and fairly is joyous. And most of all, that we can give away the pressure and the anxiety of self-sufficiency to our Messiah so that we might live our lives in joy and generosity—that is joyous.

Today, we can rejoice in our new expectations for the coming of our Lord. May his name be praised forever.

Stand up and raise your heads

a Sermon for Advent 1C
Text: Luke 21:25-36


We have a promise that God is with us, that we have a teacher and a guide. We have a promise that dreams can be fulfilled and that tomorrow can and will be a better place. We have opportunity and responsibility in our hands. We have the time and the place for this action: today, right here: to prepare ourselves. And we have one instruction: “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

So here we are, at the end of Jesus’s ministry. On the first day of Advent. New Year’s Day in the Christian Calendar. New year, new gospel, so we dive into Luke; and in the gospel, we’re starting toward the end in chapter 21. This is one of the strange components of a Lectionary in which we don’t actually tell the story in order. We begin the year with Jesus telling us how it’s all going to end, and then we jump back to the beginning. And in the Spring, we have Lent, which hits the Temptations, and then jumps to Jesus’s final days. Then there’s Easter and Pentecost, which are chronologically sound, following Jesus’s death and resurrection, but then we get into the Season of Pentecost, where we rewind and go through Jesus’s actual teachings. All of which lead up to this one. At the beginning.

The teaching itself is a prophecy, not unlike the one from two weeks ago about the Temple. This one is bigger, though. This involves not just human stuff, but cosmological stuff: “the sun, the moon, and the stars”. And the global human response is distress—everywhere. The phrasing is truly appropriate for us as we deal with current warming trends in the oceans and news reports of icebergs that broke from the Antarctic ice shelf and are now drifting north toward New Zealand, while our region is still recovering from hurricanes and flooding: “The roaring of the sea and the waves” indeed!

I’m mindful of the fact that we don’t really know how we ought to take this type of talk. Some look at the Scriptures as something to decode. As if the secret to the end times is hidden within the text even though Jesus himself tells us that we won’t know “when the master of the house will come”. This is a cottage industry within Christianity, peaking of course with the Left Behind books. But this thinking has been with us for a long time—each time disproven by the world’s existence past the predicted date.

Another response that many have taken is to ignore this talk, either confining it to its time and place or by ignoring the graphic imagery. In either case, the purpose is to desensitize the scripture to something more palatable and less strident; depriving it of its power to affect us and make us feel a certain way. This seems just as harmful to the Scripture.

We seem to be less afraid of the details of the Scripture itself than we are about discussing what the end actually looks like. About what it means to stop being…us.

It is said that we have an obsession in our culture with youth. I think a more accurate expression of this is that we have an obsession with avoiding aging. We don’t want to be young, we just don’t want to be old. The now common practices of cosmetic surgery and taking pills to stave off the outward effects of aging serve as obvious proof of this. The issue isn’t about becoming children again (though for some, that may actually be the case), but something more elemental: our understanding of youth is that in youth, our sites are set on tomorrow. Youth is about promise and expectation and hope and anticipation. It is about what is coming in the future.

Middle age, then, comes to represent the potential realization of those dreams and hopes and expectations. It is the time in which we embody the future in a present. We then take on a caretaker roll—maintaining the world, the institutions, the practices of a person of a certain age. Our prescription for middle age is to live in the present.

This leaves our senior time as representing the past. Our bodies prevent us from doing the things that we did when we were younger and our appearance changes.

But the truth is that we prefer to think about what could be to what is and certainly prefer it to what was. We catalog aging as a process of losing hope and optimism, as we are overtaken by pessimism and “realistic” thinking. We fight idealism because our own lives have seen things that have brought anger into our hearts and tears to our eyes.

In the middle of this talk of destruction, confusion, and conflict, Jesus tells his disciples this: “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” Jesus talks about the end of things, not as a source of destruction and devastation, but of fulfillment of expectations, of hopes, and of dreams. A time of the old becoming new. In death, we are born anew. We talked about this two weeks ago when we tackled the “mini apocalypse” in Mark—the destruction of the Temple and the birthpangs—but in this one, Jesus gives his disciples instructions: to hold up their heads and stand tall.

This isn’t about arrogance, indignation, or confrontation. This isn’t about feeling special or chosen. This isn’t even about feeling righteous. This is about believing. Believing that hardship leads to reward. Believing that we have somebody that is there for us when we feel all alone. Believing that, in spite of today, tomorrow will be better.

When Jesus tells his disciples to be ready, he doesn’t couple that with “because tomorrow the world will end,” but with “so that your hearts may not be weighed down”.

As is often the case, Jesus may as well be speaking right to us. This may as well be a direct line to our own time. Because sometimes we feel bad, our hearts feel pretty heavy. We look at tomorrow, not with hope and optimism, but with anxiety: because we fear loss; that something will be stripped from us. For some, this is the fear of having the car keys taken by a son or daughter—that tomorrow might be the day.

But Jesus tells us not to fear: not to be afraid of tomorrow. That we must hold our heads up to the light and see the world as it truly is. What we long for about youth is that freedom to not fear tomorrow, to not worry about what will happen this time next year or the year after that, and to not worry about loss. But who says that we don’t all have that freedom? Who says that we have to look at tomorrow with death-colored glasses? Who says that we can’t be hopeful dreamers?

We have a promise that God is with us, that we have a teacher and a guide. We have a promise that dreams can be fulfilled and that tomorrow can and will be a better place. We have opportunity and responsibility in our hands. We have the time and the place for this action: today, right here: to prepare ourselves. And we have one instruction: “stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”