Caught up in new life

Isaiah 6:1-8; Luke 5:1-11

Allison and Jared welcomed Julian, their second child, on December 17. Caitie and Doug welcomed their first child, Grace, on October 11. Abi and Quentin are expecting their first child—and “expecting” is an interesting way to speak of awaiting the birth of a little person, of witnessing a baby’s hidden growth and first movements, of swinging wildly from kinda knowing what to expect to feeling utterly clueless. And “expecting” only hints at the marvel of it all—the joy, the wonder, and the worries.

“Can we do this?” is one big question the parents ask one another. Can we be for him what he needs? Can we prepare her for the life that awaits her? What’s the world going to be like when they get older? What will become of our country? What will become of the oceans and the forests? What will become of us? Jesus teaches us,

Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing.[1]

I hear you, Jesus, I really do, but I wonder if you know what it’s like to hold an infant in your arms, when suddenly the realization washes over you like a long wave that from now on this little person is your responsibility. It’s hard not to worry when you love. When things get difficult, or when we imagine them getting difficult one day, it’s not ourselves so much that we’re worried about, it’s the ones we have let ourselves be bound to in love—but you know that, of course… you know exactly what it’s like to bind yourself in love to all of us.

Simon and his partners, James and John, worried a little every time they pulled away from the shore in their boats, “Will we catch enough?” Enough to feed our families and take some of the catch to market? Enough to make boat payments and replace worn out nets? Enough to cover Rome’s fishery tax that will be due whether we catch anything or not? For them, every day, the big question was, “Will there be enough?” And that one we all know, don’t we? Will there be enough to pay the bills? Enough to stay in school? Enough to pay back the loan? It’s easy to see ourselves in one of those boats, pulling away from shore, gazing across the water, some of us wondering, others worrying, “Will there be enough?” And it’s not hard at all to see ourselves in that same boat, rowing back to shore after a long night of working and hoping, with little or nothing to show for it. We drop the little sail, we pull the boat up on the beach, and we begin cleaning the nets. And how’s that for a sad joke: we didn’t catch a single fish all night, but plenty of trash. You almost want to laugh, but you’re playing the scene in your mind of you coming home and telling your spouse and your kids that last night’s work wouldn’t put any food on the table. You hope that tomorrow will be better—and if it won’t, how will you make ends meet?

Luke tells us that Jesus was there, teaching the crowd, and that they were pressing in on him to hear the word of God. They were drawn to Jesus because he brought good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed. They were drawn to him because wherever he went, life began to shine when he spoke and when he touched the sick and healed them. Jesus got into Simon’s boat, asked him to put out a little way from the shore, and then he sat down and taught. And while Luke doesn’t tell us a single word of what Jesus taught that day by the lake, he makes sure we know exactly what he told Simon, just one sentence: “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”

Now you and I, we’ve been in that boat. We’ve tossed out the net and pulled it in empty, again and again, and again. We’ve rowed out on the lake with expectation and after a long night rowed back to shore with nothing but wet nets and sore arms. Frankly, we don’t know where Simon finds the grace to respond, “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”

We don’t know where Simon Peter found the grace in that moment to respond with such trust and obedience, but he and those with him did let down the nets and pulled in the biggest catch ever, more fish than the nets and the boats could possibly hold. Now we can see why Luke didn’t write down a single word of Jesus’ teaching from the boat: because this is the message; this net-breaking, boat sinking catch, this abundance is the good news of great joy for all the people.

Peter falls down at Jesus’ knees, knowing that he is in the presence of God, fearful that the fire of holiness might consume him. “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man,” he says. And the Lord replies, “Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people.” There is no explicit call like, “Come, and follow me;” there’s only this assurance and Simon Peter’s trust in Jesus, his simple obedience to Jesus, and a wondrous eruption of fullness.

“Will there be enough?” is no longer the big question. There is more than enough. What, then, is the big question? You may say to yourself, “Wow, that’s a lot of fish,” and your first question is, “Should I can it or freeze it?” Maybe I should get a bigger boat and some stronger nets, expand the business, you know? Perhaps a partnership? Simon & Jesus—Deep Water Fishing has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

We all know that’s not it. The gospel isn’t about inviting Jesus into your boat and enjoying a life of net-breaking and boat-sinking fishing trips. The gospel is about Jesus pulling us into his boat and taking us to vocational school for kingdom workers. The real catch that day wasn’t fish. Jesus speaks of “catching people” and that image is troubling; it smacks of entrapment. But in Luke’s story it’s the fishermen who are the ones being caught, and not in cleverly set traps or in cunningly designed nets. They get caught up in the vision of life that Jesus embodies. In the very waters we have fished all night without catching anything, waters we thought we knew like the back of our hands, there, right under the surface, in the deep, is a fullness we can barely imagine—and Jesus has the power to bring it out, to bring it up.

The crowds came to the lakeshore to hear the word of God, and hear it they did, but then they got to taste the Jesus vision of life at the all-you-can-eat grilled-fish picnic on the beach. So many people, and all of them ate, and not one of them worried if there would be enough.

Not all of them left everything and followed Jesus. But Peter, James and John did, and soon Mary, Joanna, and Susanna did, and soon many more. For them, the big question was, “How do we live fearlessly into the nearness of God’s reign? How do we live the life we have found in the presence of Jesus?”

It is easy for us to see ourselves in that boat, worrying about tomorrow after working all night without catching anything. But then there is that moment when Jesus is done teaching and he challenges us to lower our nets one more time. That moment when Peter decides, we don’t know how, in circumstances far from promising, to simply do what Jesus said.

The only reason we know this story and continue to tell it, is that those first followers trusted Jesus and found something more powerful than their fear or their worries, something more powerful than their failures and betrayals. They found life. They caught the vision of life Jesus embodied, and they lived it in the power of the Spirit.

I still worry sometimes—every day, to be honest. I wonder what life will be like when my kids will be grandparents, and it worries me how long it’s taking us to stop heating the planet. I wonder what will become of our democratic institutions and democracy itself in this age of social media, big data, and big lies, and it worries me that a so many people in this country—the children and grandchildren of the generation that fought fascism in the name of democracy and freedom—that so many of them are busy flirting with white nationalism and autocratic leadership. I wonder what will become of us, and I do worry.

But I believe in Jesus. I’m caught up in the vision of life he embodies—a life of deep compassion, faithful prayer, forgiveness, attention given to the ones habitually overlooked, simplicity and generosity, and in all things, the pulse of divine love.

Jesus has made us his own. He has bound himself to us in love. We belong to him, and through him to each other. We forget it all the time, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t so. We belong to him and to each other, and Luke’s story of the miraculous catch invites us to do what the first disciples did: do what Jesus says, even in the face of unpromising circumstances, and let ourselves be awesomely surprised.

[1] Luke 12:22-23

The traveling mindset

20220130 E4C - Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 4:21-30 - The traveling mindset

“Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor,” wrote Abraham Heschel.

God is raging in the prophet’s words. In speaking, the prophet reveals God. This is the marvel of a prophet’s work: in his words, the invisible God becomes audible. Divine power bursts in his words. The authority of the prophet is in the Presence his words reveal.[1]

The prophets, all of them, it seems, aren’t eager to take the call, they resist the divine Presence that takes over their voice, their life. “Who am I that I should go to Pharao?” said Moses. “I have never been eloquent… I am slow of speech and slow of tongue… please send someone else,” he begged.[2] “Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy,” we hear Jeremiah protest, no doubt with trembling in his voice. And the Lord replies, “Do not be afraid of them,” confirming without any subtlety that there would be “they” to be afraid of, and promising, “I am with you to deliver you.”[3]

No prophet wants to be a prophet. The mission is God’s initiative, and the call is inescapable. Jeremiah groans, “If I say, ‘I will not mention [the Lord], or speak any more in [God’s] name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”[4]Silence becomes fire in the bones and speaking means giving voice to what few are eager to hear and what some clearly do not want to be audible at all. Jeremiah would speak in the name of God, and after a few episodes he would be prohibited from entering the temple, and he would tell his friend Baruch to write his words on a scroll and read them to the people coming to the temple, and a group of officials would confiscate the scroll and take it to King Jehoiakim, and the king would have the scroll read to him, and pen knife in hand, he would cut the scroll column by column and toss it into the fire.[5] Enough of that nonsense.

The invisible God who wants to become audible can count on the prophet’s dogged determination, but not on hearts even half as willing to listen as the prophet is willing to speak. Heschel wrote,

The prophet faces a coalition of callousness and established authority and undertakes to stop a mighty stream with mere words.[6]

Now let’s turn to Nazareth. Jesus had returned from the wilderness to Galilee, filled with the Holy Spirit, and he began to teach. He was praised by everyone, we read in Luke. His were words people wanted to hear. His were words people ate up like bread. His were words in which the invisible God became audible; his proclamation, some would soon begin to say, made the invisible God visible and tangible. His authority wasn’t based on credentials, it came from the Presence he revealed.

Jesus came to Nazareth, and on the Sabbath day he went to the synagogue and taught. He read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, beautiful words about being anointed and sent to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind and the year of the Lord’s favor—and Jesus let the Lord’s favor be the last word: he didn’t read the conclusion of the passage that announces the day of God’s vengeance. And for those with ears to hear, what he didn’t say was just as important as what he said. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And that was all he could say for a while, because the people in the synagogue were busy talking with each other about the gracious words that came from his mouth.

“Today,” he said, “fulfilled.” The good people of Nazareth loved Jesus’ proclamation of good news to the poor because they were poor, and they had waited so long for redemption and release—and there he sat, Joseph’s boy, speaking of fulfillment, announcing an end to their captivity and oppression. What a happy Sabbath it was in Nazareth! Not for long, though. With every additional word that came from his mouth, Jesus antagonized his audience. “Doubtless you will quote to me…” He talked about the proverbial doctor and their expectation that he do in his hometown the things they had heard he’d done in Capernaum. Those things, healings presumably, and perhaps even greater things since this was his home after all, they were his people, weren’t they?

But he was no doctor, he was the prophet who proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor. He briefly mentioned a couple of stories they knew, stories about two of the great prophets of old.

There were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.

There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.

That was all he said, but it stung. The stories of God’s prophets bringing bread and hope to a widow across the border, and, in the case of Naaman, healing and new life to an enemy general—the stories didn’t stir up joy, but resentment and rage. The good people of Nazareth thought that when he spoke of fulfillment “today” it meant that “their day” had finally come, and they couldn’t bear the thought that on this day of fulfillment, their town wasn’t God’s hometown any more than the rest of the world. Filled with amazement when Jesus began his sermon, they were filled with rage when they violently ended his teaching, driving him out of the town, ready to kill him. But Jesus passed through the midst of them and went on his way, Luke tells us.

Jesus didn’t go on his way because the people of Nazareth rejected him—it was rather the other way round: they rejected him because he refused to let himself be defined by their expectations; they rejected him because he insisted on his way of fulfillment. In a way the scene foreshadows the entirety of Jesus’ proclamation of God’s gracious reign. One moment we are amazed at the gracious words he speaks, and then we’re ready to silence him, whatever it may take, because we can’t handle the freedom of his sovereign grace and the wide expanse of his boundless mercy. We’re no less tempted than the good people of Nazareth to think of ourselves as God’s own hometown. Peter Marty writes in the Christian Century,

I’m troubled by the sharp rise of White grievance and resentment in America. It doesn’t take much to spot the politicians and pundits who use coded language, dog whistles, and conspiratorial tweets to fuel this resentment.

And for far too many, grievance and resentment have shifted to “a fear-based panic that typically involves some form of rage.” Marty writes,

It’s no easy task to propose a change of mind to aggrieved White folks. What seem to me like obvious Christian impulses for inspiring a more gracious embrace of human diversity end up having little impact on resentment-filled White people.

Sitting with that helplessness, Marty remembered a conversation he had with travel host Rick Steves. “Travel is a way to broaden perspective,” Steves said with his usual cheerfulness. “It makes us more tolerant. It challenges our ethnocentricity. It inspires us to celebrate diversity.” And then he dug a little deeper into the crisis of people scared by growing diversity and other demographic changes in our society, saying,

Fear, to me, is for people who don’t get out very much. If you take the most frightened people we know in our communities, I bet they’re the people who travel the least. They’re not interested in enlarging their understanding of others. They don’t know what it means to be surrounded by other people who look and think differently.

Steves didn’t quote Mark Twain then, but it would have been a perfect fit. Twain famously wrote in Innocents Abroad,

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of [people] and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.

Talking with Marty, Steves acknowledged that, “not everybody can travel, of course. But,” he added, “there are a thousand ways to have a traveling mindset.”[7]

We aren’t so different from the good people of Nazareth. We have a deep-seated desire for Jesus to come to our hometown and do here the things we heard he has done elsewhere, but he comes to us, again and again, to invite us to be on the way with him—to bless us with the traveling mindset of those who follow him.

“Let there be a grain of prophet in everyone!” wrote Heschel. “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” cried Moses on the long journey to the land of promise.[8] And according to the prophet Joel, God declared,

I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female slaves, in those days, I will pour out my spirit.[9]

Jesus’ Spirit-driven proclamation of God’s gracious reign continues with those on whom God has poured out the power from on high; it continues with the multi-ethnic, polyglot, and cross-cultural traveling assembly we know as the church. Inspired to dream and empowered to serve, we are called to be on the way with Jesus.

________________

[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel: Essential Writings; quote from a review by John Dear at http://ncronline.org/blogs/road-peace/abraham-heschels-prophetic-judaism

[2] Exodus 3:11; 4:10,13

[3] Jeremiah 1:6, 8

[4] Jeremiah 20:9

[5] Jeremiah 36

[6] Heschel; see note above.

[7] Peter W. Marty, “White Fear,” The Christian Century, January 26, 2022; online at https://www.christiancentury.org/article/editorpublisher/there-antidote-white-grievance

[8] Numbers 11:29

[9] Joel 2:28-29

Anointed and sent

In the gospel of Luke, the Spirit of God drives the plot. The story begins with the births of John and Jesus. John, we’re told, would be filled with the Holy Spirit while still in his mother’s womb (1:15). Jesus’ mom would give birth to a holy child, because the Holy Spirit would come upon her (1:35). When the two mothers meet, John leaps in his mother’s womb and she is filled with the Holy Spirit (1:41). Then his father is filled with the Holy Spirit and prophesies (1:67). Then we meet old Simeon to whom the Holy Spirit had revealed that he would see the Lord’s Anointed before his death; and guided by the Spirit he comes to the temple when Mary and Joseph bring their child (2:25-27). Soon Jesus comes to the Jordan to be baptized by John and the Holy Spirit descends upon him, and led by the Spirit, Jesus enters the wilderness where he is tempted by the devil (3:22; 4:1). Then, as we heard again this morning, Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, where he began to teach in the synagogues and was praised by everyone (4:14-15). Women and men, the old and the young, entrust themselves to God’s presence and direction through the Spirit, and that is how the good news unfolds—scene by scene, generation by generation.

Jesus has returned to Nazareth where they’ve known him all his life and where they’ve heard stories, bits and pieces, about his teachings and other wondrous things he’s done down in Capernaum and other places near the lake.It’s the  Sabbath, and he’s in the synagogue, and handing him the scroll of Isaiah, they invite him to do the second reading and teach. He opens the scroll. He finds the passage he wants to read. It’s like all the movement in the opening chapters— the back and forth from Nazareth to Bethlehem, back to Nazareth and down to Jerusalem, to the Jordan and into the wilderness and back to Galilee— it’s like all the movement slows down to this moment: Jesus reads from Isaiah.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. 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.

Jesus reads the ancient words of promise and hope, and then he sits down to teach. The eyes of all in the synagogue are fixed on him, Luke tells us; he wants us to notice the expectation in the room. Everybody wants to know what Jesus has to say. They are hungry for a teaching, for a word to assure them that the ancient promise is still theirs and firm, a word of encouragement not to give up hope that the day of release would come; that captivity and oppression would come to an end one blessed day, and God’s people would live in freedom.

When Jesus speaks, the first word out of his mouth is “today”— not some day or some day soon, but today. He identifies himself with this Spirit-bearer, anointed and sent to bring good news to the poor, to the captives, the blind, and the oppressed. Jesus wasn’t merely reading, it turns out, he was giving his inaugural address. This is who I am. This is what I’m about. This is my mission: Good news for the poor. Release for the captives. Sight for the blind. Freedom for the oppressed.

His Sabbath talk is short because his whole life is the teaching, because all he is and says and does and suffers is the embodiment of who God is for us, and who we are, who we are made to be as creatures made in the image and likeness of God, for a life of unending communion with God and all that God has made.

In the gospel according to Luke, the Spirit drives the plot, and in the second part of Luke’s work, the book of Acts, the Spirit is poured out, continuing to inspire and empower people from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, for God’s mission. Baptized into Christ, immersed into his death and resurrection, and filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, the church is called, anointed and sent to be the proclamation of good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed — the church is called, anointed and sent to embody the life of Christ.

Good news for the poor — that is as simple as Room in the Inn, as simple as making a bed in fellowship hall, so a veteran who can’t escape the ghosts of war can escape the cold and find rest for a night. Good news for the poor is as simple as the Little Pantry That Could, as simple as pushing back against the harsh logic of the marketplace with the bold witness to the abundance received and shared in the household of God. Good news for the poor is as simple as a little store where the lady behind the counter tells you to take what you need. Good news for the poor is as simple as food for the hungry, shelter for the unhoused, and a couple of nights at the inn for the man who was beaten and left for dead by the side of the Jericho road. But it doesn’t end there; it can’t end there, because the Spirit of the Lord who is driving the plot, is the Spirit of life that is nothing but life, fullness of life, for all.

When Jesus said, “Today” he meant that very day, and when we hear him say, “Today” he still means today. He’s addressing our captivity, our impaired vision, our entanglement in oppression, and he invites us to let him break our chains, open our eyes, and lead us out. Jesus invites us to let his life of profound trust in God and deep compassion for others be our life, to find fullness of life in his company.

Commenting on Psalm 19, April Berends writes,

Creation bears witness to God’s glory by living out its created goodness, each element giving praise by being what God made it to be. So it is with God’s people. Living according to God’s [torah] enables us to live as God made us to live, taking our place in the created order with eyes opened to God’s glory.[1]

The heavens are telling the glory of God, and so are we when we let the life of Christ be our life. I remember a cold fall morning, a few years ago, when the sky hung low like a grey blanket. We were driving to Chattanooga, on to Cleveland, and up the Hiwassee, all the way waiting for the sun to rise. Eventually we put in our kayaks, pulled away from the bank, and started paddling down the river— and with every paddle stroke, it was as though the clouds were thinning a little more, until suddenly the sky was bluer than anything anyone could ever dream up or find words to describe, and the light awakened the colors all around us: specks of yellow and red in the trees on the banks, hues of silver and copper on ancient rock faces, bright green meadows of eelgrass in the water just below us, and on a small patch of dry, rocky ground in the middle of the rapid flow, the bravest, brightest little flower blooming impossibly red. The rising sun had kissed the world awake and everything was singing. We were paddling down the river surrounded by an anthem of praise— but there was no speech, no words, only the lovely sound life makes when it is very good.

Kathleen Norris taught creative writing for a while at an elementary school in Dakota. She met a little girl who had recently moved there from Louisiana, and who wrote what Norris says is “the best description I know of the Dakota sky”: The sky is full of blue / and full of the mind of God.[2]

The psalmist knows what it is like when we see more than we can say, when we marvel at one glorious moment and wait for words to rise to give voice to our wonder. In the psalm we heard, the sun rises like a groom coming out of his honeymoon suite, and it runs its course like a champion, shining its light on all things under heaven. And from that lovely scene the psalmist pivots to praise with equal exuberance the perfection of God’s word which gives life, makes wise, gladdens the heart, and enlightens. God’s word instructs us to perceive the wisdom in which all parts of creation are knit together in mutual belonging. Wendell Berry writes,

We are holy creatures living among other holy creatures in a world that is holy. Some people know this, and some do not. Nobody, of course, knows it all the time.[3]

We are forgetful, easily distracted, fickle, and notoriously bad at distinguishing the living God from more convenient idols. But Jesus isn’t—forgetful, easily distracted, fickle, and prone to idolatrous confusion. And so it doesn’t end with amnesia, blindness, captivity, and oppression, because the Spirit of the risen Lord who is driving the plot, is the Spirit of life that is nothing but life, fullness of life, for all.

And so we gather again and again to listen for the word of God in the words of the witnesses. And we let the word do its work in our stubborn hearts, and we entrust ourselves to the Spirit’s guidance until with all of creation we declare the glory of God, with all that we are and all that we do.

[1] April Berends, Feasting, Year C, 275.

[2] Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 21.

[3] Wendell Berry, “Christianity and The Survival of Creation,” Cross Currents, 1993, Vol. 43, Issue 2.

Two kings

It was a kind of reversal of gazing at the stars. On Christmas Eve 1968, the astronauts of Apollo 8—Frank Bormann, Bill Anders, and James Lovell, Jr.—were busy scouting landing spots on the surface of the moon for a future mission when they suddenly witnessed a spectacular moment: over the ash-colored lunar mountains, against the black backdrop of space, they saw the Earth rising like a shining, blue marble. As one writer put it,

Major Anders had the job of photographing the lunar landscape. When Earth rose, a robot would have kept on clicking off pictures of the craters. Indeed the astronauts briefly joked about whether they should break off and aim their cameras up. “Hey don’t take that, it’s not scheduled,” Commander Borman said. Then, like good humans, they grabbed cameras and clicked away.

“Earthrise” became an iconic image, something of an epiphany: Sent to examine the Moon, Major Anders later said, humans instead discovered Earth. Apollo 8’s greatest legacy turned out to be a single photograph of home, glorious and beautiful, “fragile and miraculous as a soap bubble.”[1] Over fifty years later, we know a lot more about just how fragile our planet is, and we’re still far from knowing how to be at home here, together.

Matthew tells us that in the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem. We don’t know much about them, these sky-gazing travelers from far away lands who came to Jerusalem guided by a star to pay homage to the newborn king of the Jews. And because we know almost nothing about them, we have long let our imaginations soar.

Matthew gave us an almost blank canvas, and we have gladly filled it with rich, colorful detail. First we looked at the map, and we started listing all the lands East of Jerusalem—Arabia, Babylon, Persia, India, China—from how far East did they come, these wise ones? Then we looked at the gifts they brought—gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Very expensive gifts, not the kind of stuff you can pick up at the corner market on your way to the birthday party—but hadn’t Isaiah mentioned gold and frankincense, and hadn’t he written about kings? That was when, in our imagination, they began to look like kings, royal visitors bearing royal gifts, and because three gifts are mentioned, we determined that there must have been three of them. And so we began singing songs like We Three Kings From Orient Are, but our hunger for detail wasn’t satisfied yet. How did they get from the East to Jerusalem? Certainly they did not walk all the way — but wait, hadn’t Isaiah mentioned a multitude of camels? Sometime in the Middle Ages, we named the three Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, and we saw them riding high on their camels, with more camels carrying their treasure chests.

With passing centuries, the stories of the wise men from the East became ever more colorful and elaborate — and all because of the child whose star they had observed and followed. This child arouses in us a holy extravagance of story, image, song, and gift, because in this baby and the man he became, we see the face of God. The nations are coming to the light that has dawned, and in Mathew’s story, these travelers from the East represent all of the nations, they are the first in a long procession—we come from Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, and the Americas, we all come: the whole world is gathering to pay homage to the newborn king. Matthew gives us but a hint or two, and we let our imagination run, because this child is the good king, born to bring us all together in the city of God, born to show us how to be at home, together.

What about the other king? Imagine King Herod’s face when his staff informed him that visitors of considerable wealth and status were entering the city. He was very fond of hearing his underlings refer to him as Herod the Great, but imagine the satisfaction in his eyes, imagine the regal pace with which he made his way to the palace window to see his own majesty and greatness reflected in the very important visitors from far away. They had come from distant lands to meet him and, no doubt, pay him homage, to admire the magnificent building projects under way in the city, especially the temple—he was Herod the Great, King of the Jews, the most important person in the realm, was he not? Then the foreign visitors entered and asked him where they might find the newborn king of the Jews—imagine his face now.

We hang a star in the baptistry window during Advent and Christmas. It’s beautiful, especially when it gets to shine in the darkness. You can’t miss it when you come into the sanctuary at night. It’s supposed to stand out. We hang it in the window to focus our attention on the one who was born under its light. It’s like the ancient version of a pin dropped on the map of the sky to mark our destination.

In Matthew’s story, only the stargazers from the East notice the one star among the countless others visible on a clear night. Herod doesn’t see what they see; nor do the scribes and scholars whom he consults. They talk about Bethlehem, but they can’t see the star, they can’t see the house, they can’t see God’s presence in this child, Emmanuel, God with us. Epiphany means manifestation, appearance, showing forth — but Matthew wants us to see how God slips into the world by way of a poor family in a one-light town.

“Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.” Matthew knows the words from Isaiah by heart, and he wants us to see that the glory of God has risen, but not upon Herod’s palace or his spectacular temple, but a little ways to the south, upon a dusty hill town called Bethlehem. “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn,” the prophet declared, and Matthew shows us the nations coming to the light. “They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord” — and they do, but all Herod can see is a threat to his own reign. And as they get to represent the nations of the world, drawn to the light of Christ, Herod gets to represent the kings who aren’t exactly drawn to this light, but rather alarmed by it—we hear echoes of Pharaoh in the story, echoes of powerful men who have no use for a glory they cannot grab to polish their own. As Rome’s puppet king and client of the emperor, Herod’s task was to foster loyalty to Rome. He presided over a political system that benefited a small elite while depriving many of their daily bread. Describing Herod’s cruelty, the Roman writer Macrobius penned the memorable line that it was “better to be Herod’s pig than his wife or son.”[2] He was used to getting rid of people who didn’t serve his ambition. He had ten wives and ordered multiple assassinations, including the murder of some of his own sons to make sure the one of his choosing would take his throne when he died. No epiphany for Herod, no star-light, only fear and cunning and ruthless determination.

So Matthew’s story really is not about three kings, but about two, Herod and Jesus. The contrast between their kingdoms runs through the whole gospel, and through the long history of the kingdom of God disrupting our dreams of empire, and all the way to this moment and to us: do we see the glory of the Lord that has risen upon us? Do we see the the glory of God in the face of Mary’s boy, and do we let him dismantle our stubborn dreams of empire, or do we put the vision away together with the star and the rest of the Christmas decorations?

The background against which Isaiah calls the city to arise and shine, is ancient and disturbingly familiar: “Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands at a distance; for truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter.”[3] Truth stumbles in the public square – I can’t think of a better line to describe the web of lies that’s strangling our public discourse in the name of power.

[Woe to] you who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter!
[Woe to] you who are wise in your own eyes,
and shrewd in your own sight!
[Woe to] you who are heroes in drinking wine
and valiant at mixing drink,
who acquit the guilty for a bribe,
and deprive the innocent of their rights![4]

Isaiah knows our corruptions. Isaiah knows we have become experts at Herod’s game, whether we have power, privilege and prestige or seek them. Isaiah’s own vision is not immune to the temptations of empire. Walter Brueggemann writes,

In the past, Jerusalem has been subordinate to the nations. [But now] we are about to witness a great inversion… When Jerusalem looks around, what it sees is a great caravan of the nations, all coming to the recovering city. The nations have heavy cargo for Jerusalem… We are not told if they bring [tribute] gladly or under coercion. What matters is that … for as long as anyone can remember, Israel had paid imperial tribute to other nations — the Assyrians, the Babyonians, the Persians — all money going out. Now the process is reversed.[5]

Now the process is reversed, but the great reversal doesn’t change the underlying logic of domination and exploitation. “In its worst moments,” writes Michael Chan, “this [passage from Isaiah] is a revenge fantasy that longs for one’s oppressors to be the oppressed, for the masters to be the servants, and for the system of economic oppression to be tilted in favor of the victims.”[6] Reversal is not enough when justice is at stake. It’s like we need to remember Isaiah against Isaiah’s own imperial dreams; Isaiah who gave voice to God’s promise that they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. [7]

That is why we go to Bethlehem to greet the new-born king. That is why we worship him and not our own twisted fantasies of domination. For our own sake and for the sake of the earth, fragile and miraculous as a soap bubble, and soon, we pray, full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/science/earthrise-moon-apollo-nasa.html

[2] Warren Carter, “Between text and sermon: Matthew 2:1-12,” Interpretation 67, no. 1 (January 2013), 64-65.

[3] Isaiah 59:14

[4] Isaiah 5:20-23

[5] Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 40-66 (Louisville: Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, 1998), 204-05.

[6] Michael Chan https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/epiphany-of-our-lord/commentary-on-isaiah-601-6-3

[7] Isaiah 11:9

Little like us

We have heard the story—and what a wondrous story it is of God and the baby. We have sung the carols, muffled by masks, yes, but we sang them nevertheless, with a touch of defiance of omicron’s demand to be the story; we sang them reminding ourselves and each other of the bigger story, the wondrous story of God and the baby, the story of Jesus’ birth and the life that is nothing but life, the story we continue to tell with our lives.

Her name was Sharon, John Shea tells us.

She was five, sure of the facts, and recited them with slow solemnity, convinced every word was revelation. She said, “They were so poor they had only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat and they went a long way from home without getting lost. The lady rode a donkey, the man walked, and the baby was inside the lady. They had to stay in a stable with an ox and an ass … but the Three Rich Men found them because a star lighted the roof. Shepherds came and you could pet the sheep but not feed them. Then the baby was borned. And do you know who he was?” Her quarter eyes inflated to silver dollars. “The baby was God.” And she jumped in the air, whirled around, dove into the sofa and buried her head under the cushion, which is the only proper response to the Good News of the Incarnation.[1]

Incarnation is a big word Sharon didn’t need in order to speak eloquently of the baby embodying God in the flesh, but the magnitude of what she had just said demanded some jumping and whirling around, and then some sofa-diving and cushion-digging. At five years old she knew what an awesome thing it is to say, “The baby was God.” Saying, “The baby was God” means that heaven and earth have not merely touched for an instant, but have come together in a human being. Saying, “The baby was God” radically changes how we conceive of and speak about God, and how we speak about and treat each other. The Word became flesh and lived among us and we have seen his glory, and he has changed everything.

The Christmas hymn, “Once in Royal David’s City,” contains the stanza,

Jesus is our childhood’s pattern,
Day by day like us he grew.
He was little, weak and helpless,
Tears and smiles like us he knew.
Thus he feels for all our sadness,
And he shares in all our gladness.[2]

We can assume that the infant Jesus was weak and helpless, and that “like us” he grew from infancy and childhood to adolescence and adulthood, with the full range of experiences, thoughts, feelings, and reactions that are part of growing up. But the biblical gospels are almost silent on those years. And that silence was a motivating factor in the emergence of Christian writings dedicated to Jesus’ childhood years. In one of them, Jesus was Sharon’s age, five years old, when he was playing by a brook. From soft clay, he shaped twelve sparrows. It was the Sabbath when he did this, and somebody went and told his dad about it. Joseph scolded him, “Why are you doing this on the Sabbath, which is not lawful to do?” But little Jesus clapped his muddy hands and said to the sparrows, “Go!” and they flew away chirping.[3]

The writer clearly wanted to show that conflicts over Sabbath laws in Jesus’ ministry were foreshadowed when he was but a little child—a child, however, resembling a young superhero from a comic strip rather than one who, “day by day like us he grew.”

Luke’s story of the 12-year-old Jesus in the temple is the only incident in the biblical gospels about the life of Jesus between infancy and the beginning of his ministry as an adult. Luke resists the temptation to paint young Jesus as “superboy”,[4] but the scene is similar to childhood stories found in ancient biographies of famous figures. “Jesus is twelve years old, a signal to the original audience,” writes Wesley Allen, “that he is on the cusp of adulthood as defined in the ancient world … His actions on this occasion, then, foreshadow his ministry and especially his relationship with God.”[5] Just as the adult Jesus will make one trip to Jerusalem on Passover, where he will encounter the teachers in the temple and finally give his life in obedience to the Father’s will, so the boy Jesus, near the end of his childhood, makes one trip to the temple, on Passover, where he encounters the teachers. To his family, he appears to be lost, but he knows he is exactly where he needs to be.

"Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" he says to his parents, sounding a little like a sassy pre-teen, while at the same time stating very clearly to them, to himself, and to us that his life would be about the household of God and the relationships defining it.

"Why were you searching for me? Did you not know …?” These are the first words Jesus utters in Luke’s narration of the gospel. They don’t sound like Christmas, do they? But they spell out why we celebrate Christmas.

Before I get to that, let me tell you that I do not own a Christmas sweater or a Santa Claus tie. Several years ago, though, I picked up a pair of Christmas socks at Target. Black, with little green Christmas trees and a jolly, fat Santa. Every year, I wear them once, and then they go in the laundry basket and eventually back in the drawer until next year.

Why am I talking about Christmas socks? Because the wonderful passage from Colossians for today talks about getting dressed. The baby was God. The Word became flesh. We have seen the glory of God in the face of Jesus. Now what?

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

The baby was God, and with Sharon’s Three Rich Men we come to adore him and to offer our gifts—only to realize, be it suddenly or gradually, that Christmas is a reverse baby shower: new clothes for us. We’re invited to let ourselves be wrapped snuggly in layer after layer of all that Jesus embodies—compassion, kindness, humility, patience, forgiveness, peace.

We will soon put away the Christmas socks and sweaters until next year, together with the left-over wrapping paper and all the decorations. But the birth of Jesus isn’t about decoration, it’s about incarnation: the complete embodiment of the divine in a human being.

We know he didn’t come so we could have a day or two of merriment and nostalgia—beautiful and life-giving as such days are. He came to reclaim and fulfill all our days. He came to free us and to bind us together for good in the love of God.

[1] John Shea, The Hour of the Unexpected (Allan, TX: Argus Communications, 1977), 68.

[2] Cecil F. Alexander, “Once in David’s Royal City,” Chalice Hymnal No. 165.

[3] ​​Infancy Gospel of Thomas 2:1-4; text available at http://gnosis.org/library/inftoma.htm and elsewhere online.

[4] Eugene Boring and Fred Craddock, The People’s New Testament Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 184.

[5] O. Wesley Allen Jr. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-of-christmas-3/commentary-on-luke-241-52-5

God's magnifying gaze

Mary sings, and we just got to join in.

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior,
for you have looked with favor on the lowliness of your servant.

Mary sings, I’m convinced of it, though Luke doesn’t give it to me in writing. Even when merely spoken, her words easily fall into rhythm and make the whole body search for a tune to go with her confident posture.

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior,
for you have looked with favor on the lowliness of your servant.

Mary sings of the magnifying gaze of God. She sings of the Holy One of Israel who looks with favor on what is small in our eyes, on what we dismiss as insignificant, on what is often overlooked or ignored—lowliness. Mary sings of God’s magnifying gaze that has changed her life and the course of the world.

We’re told an angel came to her; she would get pregnant and give birth to a boy, the angel said, and that she would name him Jesus. And that was only the beginning of the angelic announcement; the divine surprise was still unfolding. God would give to her boy the throne of David, and of his kingdom there would be no end. And this child of hers would be called the Son of the Most High.

After dropping the news, the angel lingered a little, didn’t just return to heaven, having delivered the life-changing message. The angel waited. Clearly this pregnancy was not just a matter of divine fiat. The angel waited to hear what Mary would have to say. The angel waited because the good news for all people does not press us into service or coerce us. God speaks and awaits our response, awaits our consent to let our lives serve God’s saving purpose. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord,” Mary said. “Let it be with me according to your word.” Fully seen in our dignity as creatures made in the image of God, none of us are treated as mere means for God’s ends; we are partners whose consent God awaits and honors. Advent is a time of expectant waiting, and not just for us, but for God and whole host of heaven

“Let it be with me according to your word,” Mary said. Then the angel departed, and Mary departed as well, with haste, to go and see Elizabeth down south, in the hill country. It’s with Elizabeth, that Mary finds words beyond her courageous, “Let it be.”

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.

“The confession ‘Savior’ expresses the desperate need of the lowly, the poor, the oppressed, and the hungry,” writes Alan Culpepper.

Those who have power and means, privilege and position have no need sufficient to lead them to voice such a term that is itself a plea for help. ‘Savior’ gives evidence of one’s sense of need greater than one’s strength. The proud are thereby excluded from the beginning from the confession that leads to joy and salvation.[1]

The confession “Savior” expresses the desperate need of the lowly, but also their confident hope in the God who sees them and looks on them with favor. Mary glorifies God her Savior, because the Mighty One of Israel doesn’t act like the mighty ones of the world. Mary sings, because God’s magnifying gaze renders the overlooked visible, making seemingly insignificant people greater in status and importance, moving them from the margins to the center. Mary sings, because her life matters, her consent matters, her voice matters. She sings, because God chose her to participate in the great work of salvation. “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed,” she declares, moving quickly from the very personal to the vast horizon of God’s promise to Abraham: all generations will call her blessed, and in the end all the families of the earth will be blessed because God is faithful.[2]

God’s magnifying gaze is by no means a new thing, it simply is the way God looks at the world. “You, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah,” the prophet Micah declared, “you who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel… He shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, … he shall be great to the ends of the earth; and he shall be the one of peace.”[3] Of all the towns and clans of Judah, God chose Bethlehem. Of all the sons of Jesse, God chose David. Of all the nations, God chose Israel. Of all the women, God chose Mary, a teenager from some town called Nazareth that nobody had ever heard of. Under the magnifying gaze of God, the people and needs we all too easily overlook or ignore, or are prone to dismiss as marginal or insignificant, are fully seen and recognized, and therefore honored.

Wendy Farley writes,

When we expect the power of redemption to mimic the power we see around us every day in fathers, judges, rulers, warriors, or captains of industry, it is because we have not been able to digest the shocking images of power we celebrate every Christmas and Easter. … Christ has always been a terribly offensive icon of the Holy, not least because he is perhaps the poorest display of power one sees in any of the world’s religions. In him, we see immortal, invisible God birthed into this world through an impoverished and nearly outcast young woman. We watch Jesus wander around a little rag-tag occupied country for a while and then leave it by one of Rome’s most hideous methods of execution. Although we love these stories and tell them over and over again, they capture something about divine power that [many of us] often find indigestible. Our love of power finds little satisfaction in Jesus. [4]

And perhaps because our love of power finds little satisfaction in Jesus, we are tempted, forever tempted, it seems, to fashion God for us in the image of an autocratic ruler. Yet for centuries, Christians have recited Mary’s confident and exuberant words in their evening prayers, with the desire to join her praise of God’s world-flipping redemption, and hopefully with the desire to have our own views of people and needs adjusted by God’s magnifying gaze.  

For you, God, have scattered the proud in their conceit,
casting down the mighty from their thrones,
and lifting up the lowly.
You have filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
You have come to the aid of your servant Israel,
to remember the promise of mercy,
the promise you made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and his children for ever.

Mary’s words reach far into the past, into the time of promise, and they reach deep into the time of fulfillment, even as the promise fulfilled reaches into the present with the birth of her child. We join Mary in her praise because the Spirit who came upon her has been poured out on us. We sing with her, because the God she birthed into this world is faithfully moving the whole creation toward its consummation in Christ. We sing Mary’s words of confidence and courage, because as we sing, our own hearts become a little more courageous and willing to follow Jesus on the way. We sing justice. We sing redemption. We sing the end of hunger and war. We sing the resurrection. We sing the power of love overcoming the love of power, and we say with her, “Let it be with me according to your word.”

During the years of military rule and civil war in Guatemala and El Salvador, those in power banned the public reading of Mary’s canticle of praise—they recognized it as subversive. When Martin Luther first translated the Bible into German, a number of German princes gladly supported him in his struggles with the Holy Roman Empire. But when they considered their own peasants singing along with mother Mary about the God who casts down the mighty from their thrones, they got nervous. And Luther, convinced that he needed the princes’ support, revised his German translation of the New Testament: he left Mary’s song in Latin.

Only that kind of maneuvering by those in power did not then nor will it ever prevent God’s merciful gaze from lifting up the lowly. In the late 80’s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Christians in Leipzig gathered on Monday evenings in and around St. Nikolai church to pray for peace and to sing. They lit candles, week after week, singing songs of hope, and their numbers grew from a few dozen to more than a thousand and eventually to more than three hundred thousand men, women, and children. After the fall of the Wall, a reporter asked an officer of the Stasi, the dreaded secret police, why they did not crush this protest like they had so many others. And the officer replied, “We had no contingency plan for song.”[5]

In the deep shadows of injustice and despair, we light the candles of Advent. In the thick darkness of the world’s sinful, loveless ways, we raise up our heads and hum along with Mary’s song—already a little more confident than we thought possible; a little more courageous than we imagined. We sing the birth of Jesus. We go to Bethlehem to see what God has done for us. We will enter the house where the promise of God is fulfilled and new life comes into the world. We will kneel next to the manger, and all that is proud and powerful in us will be brought down and scattered. And all that is lowly and poor, humble and hungry in us will be lifted up and strengthened and filled. And the hungry will eat. And those who flee for their lives will find refuge and home. And those who thirst for righteousness will drink. And we will all know and live the good news of great joy.

[1] Culpepper, Luke (NIB), 56.

[2] See Genesis 12:3

[3] Micah 5:2-5

[4] Wendy Farley, The Wounding and Healing of Desire. Weaving Heaven and Earth (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 29, 96; my italics.

[5] David Lose http://www.davidlose.net/2015/12/advent-4-c-singing-as-an-act-of-resistance/

The coat in your closet

A few weeks ago, I drove the van to pick up a group of guests from the Room in the Inn campus down on Drexel Street. When I got there, the line was short, so I pulled right up and got out of the van. I saw a man who looked very familiar, despite the mask covering much of his face.

“Charlie, is it you? I haven’t seen you in what feels like ages! I’m Thomas from Vine Street. It’s so good to see you! How are you?” Even in the dark, I could see Charlie Strobel’s eyes light up with a smile. He told me how he was, mentioned his health problems, but that wasn’t what he wanted to chat about. He couldn’t stand staying at home, he told me, he needed to be where he was, at the campus, with the people who didn’t have housing, people he knew as siblings and friends. “The real problem,” he said, and I’m paraphrasing, “the real problem is private property. There’s nothing wrong with owning things, but the way I understand Jesus, he tells us, ‘This is yours, enjoy it. It’s yours until someone else needs it.’”

I laughed and said, “That’ll preach, Charlie!” In the van, on the way back to the church, I kept thinking, who but this man would skip the chit-chat about the weather or the Titans and go right to the heart of the matter? A lifetime of prayer and loving service condensed into a simple, incredibly challenging statement, offered with humility and the warmest smile: The way I understand Jesus, he tells us, “This is yours, enjoy it. It’s yours until someone else needs it.”

“Love your neighbor” is not a religious way to spell charity; it’s the most challenging way to spell justice. It is the challenge to take the needs of our neighbor as seriously as we take our own. In the fourth century, Bishop Basil of Caesarea, said in a homily, “When someone steals another’s clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not?” And the bishop continued,

The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help.

In the Gospel of Luke, John the Baptist is presented as a preacher of repentance. “You brood of vipers” he addresses the crowds—not a way to capture your audience’s friendly attention, not in any compendium of rhetoric, not in any culture. “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” He sounds like one of the prophets of old: fiery, single-minded, borderline obsessive. The people are there to receive his baptism, but he won’t let them get away with thinking that the water ritual would make them presentable on judgment day, or that some other symbolic action like donning sackcloth and ashes would do, or that they could always fall back on having Abraham as their ancestor, Abraham with whom God had made the covenant that included all his descendants. John slams all those exit doors shut until it is just the people and the urgent demand to repent. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance.”

And the crowds don’t get mad and they don’t leave to find a more accommodating prophet—they get it. “What then are we to do?” they ask.

Repentance is about more than feeling sorry with an added layer of religious overtones. The Hebrew term literally means return, as in returning to the ways of God. And the Greek term means change of mind, indicating a revolution in one’s thinking that effects a change of direction in one’s life. I don’t know if there’s a term in Greek for a revolution in one’s acting that effects a change of direction in one’s thinking. But you and I know there’s a need for such a term, because some of us think our way into new ways of acting, while others act our way into new ways of thinking. What all this is to say is that repentance is more than a mindset or an intention; it is a fundamental reorientation of one’s life, a reorientation that becomes visible, observable, tangible.

“What then are we to do?” they ask.

“Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none,” says John; “and whoever has food must do likewise.” It doesn’t get any more everyday than the clothes on your back and the food on your plate. Bearing good fruit, it turns out, is neither spectacular nor heroic, but rather ordinary and mundane. John counsels that if I have more than I need to sustain my life, the neighbor who does not have such abundance has a claim on it. Or as Charlie paraphrased Jesus’ teaching, “This is yours, enjoy it. It’s yours until someone else needs it.” Or as Basil put it, “The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it.” Or the book of James, If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.[1] And the First Letter of John, How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?[2] Love of neighbor is a golden thread woven into text after text. It doesn’t get any more everyday than the clothes on your back and the food on your plate. And it doesn’t get any more challenging than what you do with the clothes in your closet and the food in your pantry.

We collect a special offering of socks today, and like so much we do in worship it is a way of practicing new life habits. Little we do in this gathering is designed with global, systemic change in mind, but we trust that practicing new habits like confession and forgiveness, gratitude and giving, serving and praising changes us, and that through these habits we are indeed becoming, by the grace of God, the change we wish to see in the world. In giving a pair of socks, we get a little closer to becoming a people who care as much about our neighbors’ needs as we do about our own.

The tax-collectors in the crowd ask John, “What are we to do?” and he doesn’t tell them to sever relations with the occupying power, because the system of taxation is corrupt and unjust. He does tell them, though, not to take more than they are authorized to take. And John doesn’t tell the soldiers in the crowd to abandon their jobs, because they are collaborating with an unjust and corrupt system. He does tell them, though, not to extort money from anyone through threats or false accusations. Again, nothing heroic, nothing spectacular, just a commitment to act with justice within the social structure, to let love of neighbor become visible and tangible in everyday situations.

John tells the people of the coming one who is more powerful than he, who will baptize them with the Holy Spirit and with fire. “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” John has just talked about trees that don’t bear good fruit getting cut down and thrown into the fire, so it’s quite understandable when some folks wonder if wheat and chaff represent groups of people—perhaps those who bear the fruit God expects to find and those who don’t?

No. The point is rather that until harvest time, every grain of wheat is wrapped in a husk. Only after threshing are there wheat berries and a dusty mess of husk parts called chaff. And to this day, farmers around the world make use of the wind to separate the chaff from the grain—a small portion of the messy mix is tossed up into the air, the chaff is blown away some distance, and the wheat berries fall back onto the ground. And the point, of course, is to save every grain, not merely some. The image suggests a view of judgment that is liberating rather than punishing: We experience life as a mix of good and evil impulses and actions; they aren’t always neatly separable, often frustratingly intermingled; combinations of good intentions and bad outcomes; poor judgments we can’t forget and compromises that haunt us; too many choices where the best option seems to be the lesser of two evils—and the judgment John announces as the work of the coming one is a judgment, but not one of division, but of cleansing and gathering. What is carried away by the wind and burned in the fire are all the bits that keep us from being who we were made to be, the bits that embody apathy and selfishness, rather than love and communion.

I want to end with a story I’ve told before, but good stories get retold again and again for a reason. This story tells us about being generous with what is ours, and about the Spirit who brings such generosity to life.

It was Christmas Eve and the pews at New York City’s Riverside Church were packed. The Christmas pageant was underway and had come to the point at which the innkeeper was to turn away Mary and Joseph with the resounding line, “There’s no room at the inn!”

The innkeeper was played by Tim, an earnest youth of the congregation with Down syndrome. Only one line to remember: “There’s no room at the inn!” He had practiced it again and again with his parents and the pageant director and seemed to have mastered it.

So Tim stood at the altar, bathrobe costume firmly belted over his stomach, as Mary and Joseph made their way down the center aisle. They approached him, said their lines as rehearsed, and waited for his reply. Tim’s parents, the pageant director, and the whole congregation almost leaned forward in the pews as if willing him to remember his line.

“There’s no room at the inn!” Tim boomed out, just as rehearsed. But then, as Mary and Joseph turned on cue to travel further, Tim suddenly yelled “Wait!”

They turned back, startled, and looked at him in surprise.

“You can stay at my house!”

And Bill Coffin, the preacher, stood up in the pulpit and said, “Amen”—and that was the sermon.

[1] James 2:15-17

[2] 1 John 3:17

Dig a little

When you were little, how did you count the years? From birthday to birthday or from Christmas to Christmas? And when you were a little older, how did you count them then? From one first day of school to the next or from summer to summer? We all count the years in different ways — children, teachers, couples, sports fans — we have so many ways to count the earth’s journeys around the sun.

The church counts time from Advent to Advent. One could argue that the church year should begin on Christmas, with the birth of Christ, or on Easter, with his resurrection from the dead, or on Pentecost, when God began to pour out the Holy Spirit on that small band of disciples in Jerusalem. But there is great wisdom in starting the year with Advent.

We begin with our eyes on the horizon. We begin with expectant hope. We look to the future God has promised and prepared for us. We practice living into this future not bound by the past. We remember that the present is always open, always, to genuine newness brought forth by our God who is making all things new. And so we live in Advent remembering the birth of Jesus and confident that the one who began a good work among us will bring it to completion, as Paul wrote with joy from his prison cell.[1]

I wonder about that confidence of Paul’s — was it simply a given for him, a gift of the Spirit, or did he have to strain at times to hold on to it, did he have to find ways to cling to it by his nails, against the pull of his own heart, against the weight of soul-crushing circumstances?

The shooting on Tuesday afternoon at Oxford High School in suburban Detroit was the nation’s deadliest school shooting in three years. The youngest victim, Hana St. Juliana, was 14 when she died. Tate Myre was 16. Justin Shilling was 17. Madisyn Baldwin was 17. Seven other people were wounded. The boy who shot them is 15. The gun was an early Christmas gift from his parents: a semiautomatic 9-mm Sig Sauer handgun. “My new beauty,” he called it. The day after Thanksgiving, he and his father had gone together to a Michigan gun shop to buy it. He and his mother spent a day testing out the gun, which was stored unlocked in the parents’ bedroom. On Monday, when a teacher reported seeing their son searching online for ammunition, his mother did not seem alarmed. “LOL I’m not mad at you,” she texted her son. “You have to learn not to get caught.” A day later, the authorities say he fatally shot four fellow students in the halls of their school, using the handgun his parents had bought for him for Christmas.[2]

There hasn’t been a year without a school shooting since I came to this country, and most years had multiple ones.

1994 Ryly High School, Union, KY

1995 Richland High School, Lynville, TN

1996 Frontier Middle School, Moses Lake, WA

1997 Pearl High School, Pearl, MS

1998 Westside Middle School, Jonesboro, AR

1999 Columbine High School, Littleton, CO

2000 Bidwell Porter Elementary, Bidwell, OH

2001 Santana High School, Santee, CA[3]

And the list goes on, but I don’t want to count the years by school shootings. It was during Advent, on December 14, 2012 when a 20-year-old man killed 20 children between six and seven years old, and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary, Newtown, CT. Certainly, I remember thinking, certainly this will change how people think and vote about semi-automatic firearms and large-capacity magazines. It did not.

On February 14, 2018, a 19-year-old man killed 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, wounding another 17, just weeks after mass shootings in Paradise, NV and in Sutherland Springs, TX, in October and November 2017. Certainly, I remember thinking, certainly this will change how people think and vote. Some people may have changed their minds, but pride is not so easily shaken. The idols of weapons worship stand firm on their pedestals, wrapped in the sacred cloth of liberty.

Shaken by disbelief, gripped by anger, and drained by sadness I keep returning to the prophet Isaiah, whose words continue to be a gift from one mourner to another.

The way of peace they do not know,
and there is no justice in their paths.
Their roads they have made crooked;
no one who walks in them knows peace.
Therefore justice is far from us,
and righteousness does not reach us;
we wait for light, and lo! there is darkness;
and for brightness, but we walk in gloom.
We grope like the blind along a wall,
groping like those who have no eyes.[4]

Groping like the blind along a wall, we wait for light. And in the darkness, old man Zechariah sings. And lighting a candle against the thick darkness, last Sunday we sang with him,

Blessed the God of Israel, who comes to set us free,
who visits and redeems us and grants us liberty.
The prophets spoke of mercy, of freedom and release;
God shall fulfill the promise to bring our people peace.

In Luke, Zechariah’s canticle ends with the words,

By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.[5]

I could quote the statistics for gun violence. I could read the list of reasonable gun control proposals law enforcement officials across the nation have endorsed. I could mention that it’s easier to purchase a semi-automatic weapon than to get a driver’s license. And I could again lament the corrosive influence of NRA money on our politics. But that’s not really the point. There’s just so much fear in all of it, so much fear and false pride, and so little courage, so little hope.

We live in Advent time, gratefully singing of the light that has come and eagerly waiting for the dawn to become the day without end. We sing of Advent so we become brave enough to stop groping like the blind along the same old walls, and to stand up and raise our heads, because our redemption is drawing near. Living in Advent is about leaning into the dawn from on high and living in ways that reflect that light into the everyday dark places. Living in Advent is about lighting candles and becoming candles whose flickering lights proclaim the good news of God’s tender mercy.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Animal Dreams, set in the early 1980s, a young woman named Hallie has gone off to Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution, when the war with the Contras is in full swing; despite the danger,  she’s there to support the revolution by helping to improve crop yields. Hallie is a horticulturist who knows her way around plants and soil and bugs. In a letter to her sister Codi back home in the States, Hallie writes:

You’re thinking of revolution as a great all-or-nothing. I think of it as one more morning in a muggy cotton field, checking the undersides of leaves to see what’s been there, figuring out what to do that won’t clear a path for worse problems next week. Right now that’s what I do. You ask why I’m not afraid of loving and losing, and that’s my answer. Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work—that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children’s bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don’t get lost. Codi, here’s what I’ve decided: the very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I’m living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides. I cannot tell you how good it feels. I wish you knew. … I wish you knew how to squander yourself.[6]

The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed is no small thing. It’s Hallie’s hope. It’s every prophet’s song. It’s the promise of God. It’s why we count the years from Advent to Advent. We begin, again and again, with a hope that’s big enough to live in and close enough to the ground so we remember that the daily work adds up and good things don’t get lost.

Such hope is not something we simply have or produce at will. It is a gift from God who is committed to the flourishing of creation and its consummation in peace. It is a gift nourished in the community drawn together by the gentle power of God’s Holy Spirit who inspires courage. It is the gift of the One born among us who squandered himself for the sake of God’s reign and our belonging in it.

On Christmas we don’t celebrate that the Lord came to visit us in our exile to make it a bit more bearable. We celebrate that the Lord is come to set us free. We celebrate that we are called to follow Jesus on the way to true freedom, to the harvest of righteousness, to peace. We celebrate that Jesus has come to us to be for us the way into God’s future, and to be with us on the way.

So when John, the son of old Zechariah and Elizabeth, when John instructs us to prepare the way of the Lord, he’s not talking about a seasonal exercise. He calls us to live in the light of dawn. He urges us to remember every morning whose coming we await and where we’re going. And he wants us to see in that light the valleys that need lifting up and the mountains that need lowering — whether that’s in our own attitudes and habits, or in the disparities among us and around us, or in whatever seems insurmountable.

Dig, for every shovel of dirt lowers a mountain and exalts a valley. Dig a little, for daily work adds up and good things don’t get lost. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make a way in the wilderness. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed is no small thing. You gotta prepare the way of the Lord—for hope’s sake, for love’s sake, for life’s sake.

[1] Philippians 1:6

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/us/crumbley-parents-charged-michigan-shooting.html

[3] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_week/2012/12/sandy_hook_a_chart_of_all_196_fatal_school_shootings_since_1980_map.html

[4] Isaiah 59:8-10

[5] Luke 1:68-79

[6] Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (New York: HarperCollins, 1990) 299; my italics.

Dreams of domination

A trial is a formal meeting in a law court, at which a judge and jury listen to evidence and decide whether a person is guilty of a crime. Those who are called to testify are asked to “affirm that all the testimony they are about to give in the case now before the court will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Typically the truth at stake is solely about the facts of the case, but sometimes a trial reveals a larger truth.

On Friday the news broke that Kyle Rittenhouse had been acquitted on all charges in the shooting deaths of two men and wounding of a third at a Wisconsin protest against racial injustice last year. The truth all of us are facing after this trial is that in this country a young white man can carry an assault weapon into a situation rife with tension, shoot three persons, killing two, and the people won’t hold him accountable because he hasn’t broken any laws. We have to live with that hard truth, and with the fact that some of us are actually celebrating while others are in mourning and worried sick. And I will continue to live with the troubling conviction that if Rittenhouse were Black, “acquitted on all counts” would not have been Friday’s headline.

In 1967, a group of Black Panthers demonstrated at the California Statehouse in Sacramento carrying loaded rifles and shotguns. Ronald Reagan was governor and he said of the Panthers’ action at the time, “I don’t think that loaded guns is the way to solve a problem that should be solved between people of good will. And anyone who would approve of this kind of demonstration must be out of their mind.” The California legislature passed and Reagan signed the Mulford Act, which banned the open carry of firearms in the state. The NRA supported the measure. The bill’s author, Don Mulford, said at the time, “We’ve got to protect society from nuts with guns.”[1] It appears we have changed our minds about nuts with guns; the NRA certainly has.

Today is the last Sunday of the church year. The readings for this Sunday in the ecumenical lectionary invite us to reflect on the consummation of Christ’s reign—something that may feel like an escape, welcome or not, to some of you, but it actually takes us to the heart of the matter.

The psalm sings of the Lord’s majesty and everlasting throne, and in the Gospel reading, John takes us to phase two of a trial. Jesus has been arrested by a detachment of soldiers and temple police. After an interrogation by the chief priest, they have taken him to the headquarters of Pilate, with the goal to get him sentenced to death.

Pontius Pilate had been appointed governor over Judea just a few years before; Judea was a remote but strategically important corner of the Roman empire. Fully aware that he represented the greatest power in the mediterranean world, Pilate ruled the province with an iron fist.  A contemporary of his described him as “rigid and stubbornly harsh, wrathful and of spiteful disposition,” and that his rule was marked by corruption and “ceaseless and most grievous brutality.”[2] Whoever raised their head too high or their voice too confidently, risked being disposed of as a threat to Roman dominance. Pilate had heard about Jesus, he had received preliminary intelligence reports about a Galilean whom the crowd had greeted at the city gate as king of Israel.[3] “Are you the king of the Jews?” he asked Jesus. Pilate was neither a prosecutor nor a judge, but that mattered little; those were just formalities: he represented the power of the Roman empire. He looked at the man before him the way he looked at everything and everyone: through the eyes of those above him, those who would decide whether to advance his career or terminate it. As governor, he played the empire’s game, and he knew that if he didn’t handle matters in Jerusalem to the emperor’s liking, his next appointment would definitely not be a move up.

“Are you the king of the Jews?” Pilate asks Jesus rather routinely, to see if this Galilean peasant might have insurgency on his mind. But John uses this trial scene to help us see a larger truth. Pilate may think that Jesus is the one being interrogated here. The temple authorities may think Jesus is the one on trial here. But Jesus turns the tables on them and becomes the interrogator. “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” he asks Pilate. Whose questions are you asking? Do you want to know who I am?

The issue of Jesus’ kingship had been raised before. He had fed thousands by the lake up in Galilee, and when he realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he went away.[4] The empire, of course, excels at controlling the masses with bread and circuses, but Jesus has no dreams of empire. He won’t command an army to put himself in power. He doesn’t want to live in a palace behind high walls and guarded gates. He has no ambition to sit on Caesar’s throne, as unimaginable as that may be to a man like Pilate. This king knelt to wash the feet of his friends. This king told his companion who still carried a sword to put it back into its sheath. This king insists that should any blood be shed, it would be his own.

“What have you done?” Pilate asks. And Jesus continues to testify, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Jesus’ kingship is not from this world, not based on this world’s ambitions and assumptions, not established with this world’s methods. Jesus’ kingship doesn’t fit into the world’s power patterns, but it is for the world and exercised in the world, for the life of the world.

“So you are a king?” Pilate asks, and Jesus still won’t give him a simple yes or no answer. Jesus is testifying, and he tells Pilate and all who are overhearing this interrogation that his entire life has been a testimony to the truth. “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

John uses this trial scene to show us a larger truth: it may look like the temple authorities and Pilate, driven by political expedience, have put Jesus on trial, seeking to convict, sentence and execute him; it may look like the world has put Jesus on trial, but in condemning him, the world is  condemning itself. Jesus’ entire life is a testimony to the truth, but the world can neither hear nor see him. He doesn’t fit the patterns of perception of the powerful. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice,” says Jesus. “Truth? What is that?” says Pilate.

To belong to the truth is to see in Jesus the fullness of God revealed and to hear the words of God in Jesus’ voice. To know the truth is not a matter of having been told all the relevant facts, but a matter of encounter and relationship, a matter of belonging. Pilate assumes that truth is a “what”—a concept, an idea, a set of facts—but in the Gospel according to John, where truth is mentioned at least three times more than in all the other gospels combinded, Jesus is never said to teach the truth, and the disciples are never said to have to truth; and Jesus doesn’t give us great truths to live by—he gives himself. He himself is the truth of God. In the Fourth Gospel, truth is not a “what” but a “who,” a person, a king who isn’t a king and yet the only one worthy to reign over God’s creation.

One who rules over people justly,
ruling in the fear of God,
is like the light of the morning,
like the sun rising on a cloudless morning,
gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.[5]

The longing for one who rules over people justly goes back as far as ancient songs and poetry can take us. The hope for one who rules in the fear of God is as old as the persistent reality of rulers and princes and judges who don’t. The testimony of Jesus reveals love as the power at the heart of the universe, love that calls and invites, love that serves and never overwhelms. The truth about God is God’s love for the world, and the truth about the world is God’s love for it. The truth is Jesus.

In Gian-Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors”, one of the three kings says,

The child we seek doesn’t need our gold.
On love, on love alone he will build his kingdom.
His pierced hand will hold no scepter.
His haloed head will wear no crown.
His might will not be built on your toil.
Swifter than lightning
he will soon walk among us.
He will bring us new life
and receive our death,
and the keys to his city belong to the poor. [6]

“Jesus’ kingship … can be difficult to see, for it is manifest in crucifixion rather than in political dominance,” writes Susan Hylen.[7] Jesus’ kingship rests not on bribe and coercion but on self-giving love—something that cannot be legislated or decreed or enforced, only received. And those who know themselves to be recipients of this love no longer dream of domination. The good-shepherd king who lays down his life for those he loves—he has no subjects, only friends who see him and know his voice and follow him on the way to the fullness of God’s reign. May we be among them.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/opinion/gun-control-and-white-terror.html

[2] Philo of Alexandria, Legatio ad Gaium, 33.

[3] John 12:13

[4] John 6:1-15

[5] 2 Samuel 23:3-4

[6] https://www.opera-arias.com/menotti/amahl-and-the-nightvisitors/libretto/

[7] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/christ-the-king-2/commentary-on-john-1833-37-3

Steadfast anchor of the soul

There is a story about New College, Oxford, that I’ve come across here and there; I really like it, and I’ve retold it a few times. According to this story, it was discovered in the 1860s that the long oak beams holding up the roof of the ancient dining hall were in bad shape and needed replacing. Nobody knew where they might find such huge timbers, though, and back then they didn’t call it supply chain issues. Then the college woodsman reminded the building committee that when the hall was built in the fourteenth century, the college’s founder William of Wykeham had a grove of oaks planted that were expressly reserved for one day replacing the beams. And so, thanks to Bishop Wykeham’s wise stewardship, 500 years later the college had the timbers it needed for the job, and the fellows and students have been happily dining under the replacement beams ever since.

“It’s a wonderful story,” writes Roman Krznaric in his latest book. “The only problem is that it isn’t true.” He talked with Jennifer Thorp, who oversees the New College archives, and he learned that the oaks for the beams came from a woodland that wasn’t purchased by the college until decades after the original hall had been built, and they had never been kept in reserve for roof restoration. Bishop William of Wykeham had not been so far-sighted after all.

My heart broke a little when I read that. But then the author goes on to point out that “the popularity of this story shows just how much we want to believe in the human capacity for long-term planning. A tale about planting trees for the benefit of people half a millennium in the future feels like the perfect antidote to our age of pathological short-termism.”[1]

We want to believe in our capacity to care about our neighbors not only in distant lands, but also in distant centuries. We want to believe in our capacity to extend the reach of the command to love our neighbor like ourselves to generations far into the future.

Jonas Salk wrote in 1992, “We have so altered the conditions of life on the planet, human and non-human, as to become the co-authors of our destiny. … Will we have the wisdom to perceive the long as well as short-term advantages in the choices we make?” The title of his article is a question, “Are we being good ancestors?”[2] It’s a terrific question. Hard to answer, yes, hard to live with, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep asking it. Robert Macfarlane said, “To be a good ancestor is to bear responsibility for a future you will never know, for people you will never know, even for species you will never know. To extend care forwards in deep time to what Rebecca Solnit has memorably called the ‘ghostly billions.’”[3]

This week the UN climate conference in Glasgow, COP 26, went into overtime to finish work on a final draft document, and there was plenty of last-minute watering-down. It was a step, not the leap forward many hoped for. The governments of the world’s nations are trying to hammer out a difficult agreement with tremendous impact on this generation and generations to come, human and non-human. We want to believe in our capacity to cooperate, to compromise, and to co-author a better path forward. But we’re not certain. We’re not so sure of ourselves, not so sure about each other’s motives and dependability.

In today’s passage from Hebrews, we encounter a very different voice. It’s a voice brimming with confidence, confidence in what God has done in Jesus Christ. Christ has effected forgiveness of sin, once and for all. The affirmation is strong, because the audience is uncertain. One commentator suggests that “the entire sermon addresses a particular congregation’s exhaustion” and “weariness.”[4] There has been a noticeable decline in attendance at its assemblies. The reasons aren’t stated, but the context suggests fear of public ridicule and persecution, leadership tensions, and discouragement over the delay of Christ’s return. In the verses following our passage, the preacher tells the congregation,

Recall those earlier days when, after you had been enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to abuse and persecution, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion for those who were in prison, and you cheerfully accepted the plundering of your possessions, knowing that you yourselves possessed something better and more lasting. Do not, therefore, abandon that confidence of yours; it brings a great reward.[5]

“Confidence” is the keynote here. In Greek, the word connotes frankness, openness to public scrutiny, courage, boldness, fearlessness, and joy. It is a characteristic of free citizens who may hold their heads up without shame or fear, looking others directly in the eye. In Roman society, it belonged to the free members of the household, but not to slaves. In Hebrews, it characterizes all members of the household of God, in their relationship with God as well as in all their relationships with each other and the community at large.[6]

Confident in God’s forgiveness, we follow Christ into the heart of holiness, the very presence of God. “We have this hope,” says the preacher, “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered.”[7] Because of him, we may “approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”[8] Grace to be honest with ourselves about the burdens of guilt and shame we bear—and to let God take them. Grace to be kind to each other, knowing that we all carry such burdens. And grace to be bold in our witness, particularly in the face of hostility.

Through forgiveness we are drawn into a transformative relationship with God, a relationship that frees us to love, to live fully in the love of God. We become conduits through which God’s unceasing love flows to revive the parched places in the lives of others. We become who we were made to be.

Many generations ago, the preacher of Hebrews addressed the weariness and exhaustion of a particular congregation, but his or her words and the Spirit who inspired them continue to move us closer to God, closer to each other, closer to our own true selves. Let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us embrace this moment of freedom and new beginning, and since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.[9]

When we ask ourselves, “Are we being good ancestors?” we remember those who have been good ancestors to us, who chose the path of love when the highway of convenience was wide open, who chose faithfulness over fear, and hope for the sake of the hopeless. So let us hold fast to the confession of our hope, let us hold fast to the sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, not because our track record of not wavering is so impressive, but because the one who has promised is faithful.

The preacher of Hebrews walks us all the way into the holy of holies where in the company of Jesus our whole being becomes praise, and then we follow the stream of words back to Monday morning when lofty phrases have little chance of being ruminated, but another work week begins, another school week, another week of daily routines. And that, of course, is when the holding fast and the running with perseverance become complicated and challenging and urgent. Now the preacher of Hebrews speaks with rare simplicity: Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds. And let us not neglect to meet together, as is the habit of some. We can’t provoke one another to love and good deeds with a bunch of unread emails piling up in our inboxes. We can’t encourage one another to move from apathy and fear to love with inspirational memes endlessly shared on social media. And we can’t ask ourselves if we are being good ancestors without getting on each other’s nerves with our half-baked ideas and our tired clichés and our wildest dreams—and loving each other anyway. We can’t be who we are without each other, from the 93-year-olds and up to the 3-year-olds and down, to the saints who have gone before. Let us not neglect to meet together, because the challenges we face demand the best we have to offer.

What would it take for us to love life, not as a commodity to be consumed, but as a gift we share with all generations of creation? Let us meet together. Let us bring our imagination, wisdom, and creativity, and let us consider how to provoke one another to love, to the glory of God.

[1] Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription For Long-term Thinking (New York: The Experiment, 2020), 92.

[2] Jonas Salk, “Are We Being Good Ancestors?” World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues 1, no. 2 (1992): 16–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45064193.

[3] https://lafayettestudentnews.com/114337/arts/robert-macfarlane/

[4] Elizabeth Felicetti, Connections, 482.

[5] Hebrews 10:32-35

[6] See Susan Eastman https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-33-2/commentary-on-hebrews-1011-14-15-18-19-25-2

[7] Hebrews 6:19-20

[8] Hebrews 4:16

[9] Hebrews 12:1-2