Sermon for Sunday, January 20, 2013 John 2:1-11 “Things we never say in a sermon”

Poor Jesus. His mother dragged him along to a family wedding, some cousin he barely knew, so he dragged along the disciples. If he had to suffer, so did they. And no sooner than they had arrived than his mother came up alongside of him and said, “Son, they have a problem. The wine has run out.” And he sighed and said, “This is not my problem.”

His mother, being a good Jewish mother, knew that he would do something. So instead of pestering him, she went to the servants and said, “Do whatever he tells you to do.” Sneaky! But it played out as she anticipated. He meandered over to the servants, and with a deep sigh, said, “You see those big water jugs over there? Fill them with water.” Then he said, “Take a little out and bring it to the head waiter.” And they did, and the guy was blown away by the quality of the wine. The wine that only a few seconds earlier had been water.

Jesus the pastor shared a lot of the same challenges that any pastor faces. People asking you to do things when it doesn’t feel like the right time to do them. Folks looking for hand-holding when they should be able to figure it out themselves. Relatives who have their own view of what being a pastor should look like. You get the picture.

A couple of weeks ago, a pastor published a blog post that listed “Secrets Your Pastor Can’t Share in a Sermon.” He listed things like “your offering is not a tip for services rendered,” and “I usually work 60 hours a week, but you assume I only work 1, because that is all the time we spend together,” and “Getting hung up on ‘the way we do things around here ‘ is getting in the way of being a growing community of faith,” and ”if you tell me something as I greet you leaving the Sunday service, I’ll probably forget it” and “I work for God, not  the Bishop, not the Vestry, not the Personnel Committee.” It sounds sort of mean-spirited, listed that way, but in fact this is a very loving list of the challenges and confusion around being a pastor. This guy clearly loves his parish, accepts that neither he nor they will be perfect, and works hard.

But the fact remains that pastoring is hard work. And Jesus shows that in this story of the wedding feast.

He is not ready to start his active ministry. He’s just gotten the disciples together, and is doing some preliminary teaching. He knows that performing a miracle will “out” him, and he wants to get things ready first. But his mother presses him. She presses him gently, but she still presses him, because to her this is a crisis for the family, a crisis of hospitality.

And like all pastors who receive a crisis phone call at 2 in the morning, Jesus responds. He takes care of the problem. Because that is what he is called to do.

It is just the beginning of his journey to fully serve his people.

He will come up against other challenges as he serves his people. When he heals on the Sabbath, someone will say that’s breaking the rules…just as pastors who have helped out people who were not of their denomination or who weren’t even Christians have been chastised as breakers of rules.

When he teaches a new, more loving and expansive understanding of the relationship between God and God’s people, he will earn the wrath of the religious leadership, just as pastors who have argued for full inclusion of gay and lesbian people or undocumented immigrants have drawn the wrath of those who choose to read the Bible (or, for that matter, the Constitution) extremely narrowly.

When he dines with the lowest sort of people, he will be accused of being unclean…just as pastors who have worked with those in prison, or who are homeless, or who are addicted, are accused of being naïve and of wasting the resources of the church on those who don’t deserve it.  

It reminds me of a great quote from the marvelous Anglican theologian William Temple, who said "The Church is the only society on earth that exists for the benefit of non-members."

Preach it, Bishop Temple! But back in Jesus’ day, and sometimes in today’s world, pastoring is hard work, precisely because we are a society that exists for the benefit of non-members. That’s countercultural both in the world and in the present day institution of the church!  A society that exists for the benefit of non-members: not in the sense of handing out largesse to the ignorant masses, but in the sense of welcoming them into the knowledge of the love of Christ and the love of this faith community.

So as I read that blog post about things that this particular pastor wouldn’t say in a sermon, I was saddened that he felt he couldn’t share those things with his people, because much of it was really, really good theology.

So in the interest of not being that guy, here’s my list. I’m sharing it with you, because I love you, and I am no good at keeping things secret.

1.            I work long hours. Some of you already know that. For others, it’s not so evident. That’s okay, because I’m going to tell you about it now. Sometimes those long hours are here at church. Sometimes they are at someone’s bedside, or at a nursing home, or in a meeting, or at home. I usually write my sermons sitting on my couch at home, because it’s the quietest place I know. And I need quiet to do a decent job of crafting words that will speak to you. So if I am not in the office, it doesn’t mean that I’m out playing in the park somewhere. You know how you can reach me – my cellphone number is printed all over the place. The cellphone with me 24-7. Call me if it is an emergency. If it can wait for the next morning, I’d appreciate it if you wait until 8 am, because sometimes the days and occasionally the nights are long.

2.            I’ll echo what my colleague in ministry said in his list: if you tell me something as you exit the service on Sunday, I will most likely forget it. Twelve other people have also told me stuff. I try to remember, but if you want to make really sure that I remember something, call me on Monday morning or email me when you get home. I do respond quickly.

3.            Let’s distinguish between opinions and theology. When I preach something or teach something, it is usually based on serious study. It is based on the Bible, and on the teachings of the Church Fathers, and on our tradition, and on the best of contemporary theology. We will not always agree on things – that’s just fine. But if you want to arm-wrestle about theology and what God expects of us, do not cite Rush Limbaugh, Rachel Maddow, Joel Osteen, or Bill Maher. Do not cite entertainers or quote politicians on either side of the aisle. That’s opinion, not theology.

4.            On my day off – this is a corollary to number 1 – I really do try to take a day off. It’s Friday. That said, if you have an emergency, PLEASE call me even if it’s Friday. If you have a question or a situation that is not an emergency, please do NOT call me on Friday. Even God took a day off after he finished with Creation, and I don’t have anywhere near God’s strength or skills. Even Jesus took a nap in the boat sometimes, but when the storm hit, he woke up and fixed it.

5.            About social events (and this includes ShrineMont). I love you all. I enjoy being a part of the social and fellowship events that are a part of our common life together. But when I am at these events, it is not a relaxed social function as it is for you, because often we have conversations that are deep and meaningful and pastoral in nature. I am “on” just like I am “on” on Sunday mornings. I am “on” as my colleagues The Rev. Laurie Brock and the Rev. Mary Koppel describe as “Beyoncé at a concert on.” Just because the collar isn’t on doesn’t mean that I am not working, so don’t be surprised if I’m tired after ShrineMont or if I don’t always have the energy to come to dinner with you. I love you, but sometimes I need to recharge my batteries.

Here is the heart of all this: I love you and I love my work. Like all pastors, I try to do it the best that I can. It is inevitable that sometimes you will feel that I have failed you, because, like all pastors, I am human and I make mistakes as much as I try not to. It is inevitable that sometimes we will disagree, and one of us will be unhappy with the end result of a disagreement. This does not make us unchristian. What can threaten our status as followers of Christ, though, is if we allow it to get in the way of loving each other. Your pastor tries to serve you as Jesus served you, even when the call comes at 3 a.m., even when the person who says the angry words isn’t a regular attender, even when the argument is not about the stated problem, but about some deeper grief. Remember Mary’s movement in this story. She asks, and then she steps back. And Jesus responds, as she knows that he will.

Pastors will do what those who love them ask of them, in the right time and in the right way, we pray…and do pray, for me and for all who serve God’s people. It’s wonderful work, but it’s difficult work, and it is best when we do it together.

Amen.

Sermon for Epiphany 2013, 8:15 Service Matthew 2:1-12 “The True Epiphany”

It’s time to put some old myths about this Epiphany feast to rest. We talk about the wise men as if they were kings, come to pay homage to a newborn king that they had foreseen in the stars, but the truth is actually a little bit different. They were, in fact, astronomers, and they didn’t travel alone. Any group of people of any status traveling a long distance would have had a retinue of workers, most likely slaves, who took care of the animals, preparation of meals, and such on a long journey. It is unlikely that they came on Christmas night – the fact that Herod issued his murderous order against all children 2 or younger meant that some time had passed until the magi arrived in Judea. They probably came from Babylon, the place where astronomy reached its highest expression.

Their notation of what was happening in the skies was a surprise to Herod, who didn’t notice anything special happening in the skies. His response was to assemble the Sanhedrin, and to ask them “have you heard of any ‘King of the Jews’ being born? For him, this was a political problem, since he was certainly not a well-liked king himself, as a pawn of the Romans, and he always worried about an uprising against him.

And then the magi left, with instructions from Herod to return and tell him what they found.

When they got to Bethlehem and the child, they were overcome with joy when they saw the star there – most likely because they hadn’t seen it when they were in Jerusalem. Seeing it again confirmed that their understanding of this astronomical occurrence was correct.

And so they found the child and gave their gifts. They were the standard gifts brought on important occasions – they are referred to in both Isaiah and Song of Songs.

So if we take away the romantic understanding of three kings coming to worship another king, arriving on that cold night (which probably was not in December, by the way) hard on the heels of the shepherds, bringing kingly gifts, what are we left with?

Something remarkable. Something that previews what the very end of Matthew’s gospel will announce: this is someone who came for Jews AND Gentiles, for all the nations, not just the home team.

It’s an eye-opener, isn’t it? And isn’t that precisely what we think of when we hear the word “epiphany?” Eye-opener! In Greek, epiphaneia means a manifestation or a revelation. We use the word the same way when we have a sudden “aha” moment, a new idea, the lightbulb going off! There’s a famous picture of Arthur Fry, the inventor of the Post-It note, with one of those ubiquitous yellow notes on his forehead with a lightbulb drawn on it.  

And there is certainly an ‘aha’ moment here.

We might want to ask the question “Why does Matthew think that this story is important?” It would make more sense appearing in Luke’s gospel, where the inclusion of non-Jews is taken as a given, but here it is in the midst of Matthew’s very Jewish gospel, which is all about showing how Jesus is the fulfillment of the ancient Hebrew prophecies.

But here it is in Matthew, because it is, in fact, the fulfillment of a Jewish prophecy. It not only fulfills Micah 5:2, which says “But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days,”  it also fulfills Isaiah 66:18 : "And I, because of their actions and their imaginations, am about to come and gather all nations and tongues, and they will come and see my glory."

The magi are the first Gentiles to recognize who this child is. They see it before many of the Jews do. They have their “aha” moment and it teaches us something…

…because it raises the question “are WE open to the ‘aha’ moment? Are we ready to feel the power of this Christ in our lives?”

Sometimes we may feel that these are all stories from long ago, stories that don’t happen now. But what if that weren’t the case? Where might our epiphanies come from? An interaction at the Farmer’s market? A conversation with our child? A smile returned by a homeless man begging on the corner? An unexpected gift from someone we least expected to present it?

Those moments that happen in our lives – and they do happen, don’t they? – are our own epiphanies, our own lightbulbs on the forehead.

And they are something else as well, the most remarkable of gifts. They are the ongoing revelation of the Word made flesh. They are Christ made incarnate, 2013 years after he was born, still fresh, still new, still making us sit up and take notice. There may not be stars or scary kings on a dark cold night, but there is the best of it distilled into what we really need: Aha! He is here, present, moving among us and changing us.

Amen.

Sermon for Sunday, December 30, 2012 John 1:1-18 “The King’s Speech”

In 2010, the movie “The King’s Speech” made a powerful impression on moviegoers. It told the story of King George VI, the father of the current Queen Elizabeth. He was never intended to be king: this was what his brother Edward was to do. But when Edward abdicated the throne to marry Wallis Simpson. George had to step up and be King.

There was one problem: George had a terrible stutter. He could barely get a full sentence out. And as war in Europe threatened England’s existence, the King needed to speak. It was necessary that his steadfast vision of a free England be conveyed to his people over the radio. And for that to happen, the King needed to speak fluently and powerfully. His wife, Queen Mary, found a very unconventional speech therapist to help her husband overcome his problem, because she too recognized that the King’s speech was a necessary part of who he was and how he would govern as sovereign in wartime.

We find a parallel about the power of speech in today’s gospel. John tells us that it is God’s Word that is sent to earth in human form. God’s Word. God’s speech, if you will.  If we had any doubt as to why God saw fit to send his Son in human form to earth, this reading from John’s gospel makes it very clear: it is so we, his children on earth, can understand who God is. It is only through God’s own speech that we can understand this God whom we worship.

John gives poetic voice to the problem. God is out there, not in a form we can recognize, but as pure power/spirit/voice. God is no more or less than the eternal energy that creates and powers the world that we know. Not an old guy in a flowing robe, with a white beard, sort of a cosmic Dumbledore but with more overt spiritual language. Not a person at all, but a being. Eternal.

That’s a little hard to imagine, isn’t it? And we human beings feel compelled to try and translate God into something we can understand, something more like us…which means a creature who is limited, as we are limited. And that shortchanges God, makes God into something smaller than God truly is. God becomes more accessible if we can fit him into our own perceptions of what a God might be like, but it leaves us with an unfinished portrait. It is not so much God’s Speech but a mere rough sketch of a speech, not the full power of it.

Well, John isn’t satisfied with that, and God most certainly is not, so they paint a different picture. Imagine, then, that cosmic God, so difficult to visualize or understand. Imagine that God is around forever, eternally, a time concept that is difficult for us to imagine as well. And God knows we cannot wrap our little human brains around these images. Imagine God has present with him and in him, through all of time, eternally, something that is the expression of who God is, a Word that shows all that is God. We might think it would take many books of words to describe God – certainly many theologians have tried to do that with mixed success – but God says no. There is simply a word that embodies all that is who God is.

We humans don’t really know the word, so we try to make pictures or stories or rulebooks that shape our understanding of who God is and how God expects us to relate to him. And God says, wait a minute. You’ve got it wrong, and it’s getting in the way of you knowing me as I know you.

Now, teachers know that you always start to teach, to explain a concept, by starting with what the learner already knows. You go from the known to the unknown. God, the first and best teacher, decides to follow this plan as well.

He says, “I love you. I want us to be together. I want you to understand who I am. You know about other people, right? That’s something you understand? Well, I will send you a person to help you understand me. I will make myself human in form so that you can see through this human form to see what I am about. I will send a son to earth to live among you who is me, in human form. I will send the Word, my own Speech, that one speech that expresses all that I am, that has been a part of me for all eternity, and the Word will come to you in a shape that you will understand. The Word will come to you and speak language that you will understand. The Word will not stop being Me, in all my divinity, but will be wrapped in human flesh and blood. That might make it a little easier to understand who I am and how very, very much I love you.”

This is why we received the gift of a human baby who did all that he could to show us who God is. God loves us. God wants us to love him, not because He needs our love, but because he knows that such love completes and perfects us.

In a way, these first few verses of John’s Gospel are a love song from God to God’s people. He is reaching out in love to us, who sometimes seem to understand him not at all. He is giving us the best resource he can to draw us in toward him. He wants us to know him through God’s speech, as King George wanted the British people to know him through his own speech.

If, in the first verses of Genesis, the story of the earth’s beginnings, we see God’s loving shaping of our world into a place where light warms and sparks new life, and darkness shelters and provides rest, in John’s gospel, this Word-who-is-light serves a new purpose: as a beacon to a world which had forgotten that first gift of light, for whom darkness was not rest and shelter but the absence of life. Jesus, the Word now in the world, tells who God is, what God has done, and what God will continue to do, to make the light the source of life and vanquish a death-dealing darkness.

John is clear: not everyone will accept this new light, this speech, this Word made flesh. Some will try to destroy the light. But for those of us who believe, this tiny vulnerable baby grows into a powerful vision-caster, a beautifully rendered Speech that shows us all Godliness. This Jesus describes the God who loves his people so much that he is willing to start at what his people know by becoming human, before taking them to a deeper understanding as he sheds his human form and his divinity is revealed.

This is it in a nutshell: the ancient word Emmanuel translates as “God with us.” God chooses not to keep himself apart from us, even though we seem to make mistake after mistake in trying to comprehend him. God chooses instead to make it impossible for us NOT to know him. He sends himself in human form, simply because he loves us. Simply because he knows we can do better and be better when we know him. Simply because this is what God is about, not about his own glory, which is awe-inspiring, not about his own power, which is unimaginable, not about his creativity, which is endless. Simply because God loves us.

That is the gift we receive. Simply a Word. But what King’s Speech Jesus is!

Amen.

Sermon for Christmas Eve 2012 Luke 2:1-20 “A New Kind of Time”

The church is in the business of getting us to pay attention to time. Think about it: it was Pope Gregory the XIII, in 1582, who created a new calendar, called the Gregorian calendar, of course. It was meant to correct errors in the old Julian calendar, because it was important to have the dates of big feasts of the church right. Pope Gregory issued a formal church document, a papal bull, to make the new calendar both the legal and religious law controlling time.

Or think about this: one of the first big controversies in the Christian church was an argument over when Easter should be. You recall that Easter is on different dates each year.  The eastern churches first tied the date of Easter to the Jewish Passover, meaning that it might not occur on a Sunday, and then calculated it based on the old Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian one. The western churches said it was to be on the first Sunday after the full moon after the spring equinox. This disagreement was one element that led to the split between the eastern and western branches of Christianity. Church leaders in both places were sure that they had the right understanding of time, and how it was to be treated in the church and in the world.

Popes and patriarchs argued about time. It was important: people’s lives were ruled by time, by the seasons, by the harvests…and time was ruled not by papal edicts, but by the stars. The measurement of the passage of time and the seasons was done by watching the predictable pattern of the movement of the stars in the skies.

Now you may have been wondering what all this talk about time has to do with Christmas, with the exception of wondering how quickly I will get to the heart of the matter so we can have communion and go home and get some sleep. But here is the spot where it all comes together: time and stars.

Time…we know that Mary’s time has come. The gospel says so: the time came for her to deliver her child. We have a physical marker in the form of Mary coming to term. This happened in a very particular time: Luke has given us some important historical markers by telling us this tax census that caused Mary and Joseph to head to Bethlehem occurred when Augustus was the emperor and Quirinius was governor of Syria. So now we’ve got a historical marker of time as well. But something else happens: an astronomical event, which, as those old Popes reckoned, is also a critical marker of time, since all the calendars are tied to the movement of the stars.

Time matters. We measure so many parts of our lives and our stories by means of time. We know that December 24^th is Christmas Eve, as sure as I know that May 9th is my daughter’s birthday and July 4^th is Independence Day.

But what happens when time is twisted and reshaped into something new? What happens when heaven breaks in to our world and remolds it?

The first sign of that bend and crinkle in the fabric of time in the tale of Christ’s birth comes when shepherds are minding their sheep on the hillside. It is a dark, cold night. They are dozing, but keeping an ear out for predators. Suddenly, they hear something – music, but music stranger and more beautiful than anything they have ever heard before. It is an angel singing: heaven breaking through the dome of the sky. And no sooner than they realize this is an angel, there are many of them, all singing that wild glorious song of praise: “Glory to God in the Highest! On earth, peace on those whom God favors!”  

It is the same imagery that CS Lewis uses when he tells the story of the genesis of Narnia: ““Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn’t come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out – single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing.”

That second wonder: the stars…heaven breaks through, with song and with light. Those stars, thousands upon thousands of them, something that did not match any of the charts of the ancient astronomers. Those markers of time, behaving in ways that didn’t fit the predictable march of stars across the sky through the seasons, visible proof that something wild and ecstatic and new was happening in heaven and on earth.

And it generates other strange events: shepherds go into town, even though they would never have done so because it would have disturbed their flocks, to share the news of what they had learned. A trio of men who had never been in Israel before are tramping across the desert, following a moving star, not a comet or shooting star, not a supernova, but a steadily moving star that feels to them like a beacon. A baby in a manger who has the aura of royalty despite the rude stable where he rests.

Heaven breaks through, and breaks into human time. Doesn’t the angel say it? “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” On this day, a very different flavor of time than the one spoken of at the beginning of the story “in those days.” On “this day”, in this time, something happens that puts aside “those days.” It restarts time in a new way. Heaven breaks through and presses a cosmic reset button, and on this day, we get a new beginning. A new beginning, in the form of the one who redefines what kingship means. A new beginning, in a tiny baby in a backwater town in a lean-to shack that sheltered livestock. A new beginning, and the final message that we take with us as we move into this new time, and these new rules, is the one the angels sing: “Be not afraid! Heaven has broken through. Time is reframed. A King is among you, not the King you thought you would get, but the one you truly need. Be not afraid! Your heaven is here in this baby. Glory to the God who rules in heaven…and sleeps in his mother’s arms in this place!”

Amen.

The Meandering Sheep

It is a commonplace of children's Christmas pageants that toddlers get dressed in lamb costumes because it is just so darned cute. Invariably, the lambies don't follow directions very well and sort of wander around the sanctuary aimlessly, despite the attempts of the 8 year old shepherds to herd them up to the creche.

My friend Diana has chronicled this in a rather unusual way. She and her husband John, a bike-riding buddy of my husband's, have a tiny plastic Nativity set in their bathroom. One of the sheep has this habit of meandering all over the bathroom. They take turns putting the sheep in unlikely places, and it has reached epic levels of creativity. (The sheep watching their border collie, Lacey, for example.)

If you want to see the travels of the sheep, check then out here. Even grown-us can have fun with Christmas, especially grown-ups with as well-developed a sense of the playful as these two do!