Perhaps the flowers only know that it is high spring in the northern hemisphere. If so, that’s quite enough. They still echo the new life of the Resurrection:
Cymbidiums
Ranunculus 
EASTER FLOWERS IN THE GARDEN
The Christian Year
THORNS
Thorns mockingly crown you—
blossom with your blood,
a presage of
the Spirit’s
holy
fire.
ANOTHER STORY
We’ve just heard a long and demanding story [Mark 15], one that looks deeply into human evil and God’s self-giving love of humanity and the ways those two collide. It’s a story that’s hard to add anything to by way of preaching, but, this year, I’m going to offer you an alternate story, one that turns out quite differently but may give us some help in understanding the one we just heard a little better.
The story comes from a Czech poet of the last century, Milovan Bureš, and it begins in a village church, where:
The gentle Mother,
complaining in the darkness of the church,
descended from the altar and passed through candle light.
Like thrifty peasants do,
she took off her sandals
when she came to the edge of the village.
In that country of rocks and rivulets,
where the azure was cut up by swallows’ wings,
she met her son there in the field.
The blood on his hips had long gone rusty,
and the wounds by thorns pierced the mother’s heart.
Without the aureole, her face a little wrinkled,
between the creases of her dress the fragrance
of the glades,
in the shade of the cross, the widow was seated.
“Sweet son of mine,
they jailed my heart in stone,
and I would like to live again.
Why ever is your and my plight
so often engraved in stone,
and at my feet cold candlesticks placed?
I wish I were like other women,
with joy as part of me, not only suffering.
Bare-footed, I would like to step on the primrose.”
“Sweet mother of mine,
I wish that not my bood but love would save humankind.
For is it not enough
that in their hands grain waits for salvation,
and that its blossom bears the whole heaven’s weight?
May this mouldering stone fall off our shoulders,
and towards blue skies the captive heart be set free.
May all the statues come out of the dark
and may all the saints be changed to people
from that land of butterflies and forget-me-nots.
The pious villagers discover that their Virgin has gone missing and rush out to look for her.
Meanwhile, she, in a robe of ripening rye,
her hair uncombed, unwashed,
after the simple village people’s habit,
rushes toward the brook, its waters chilly in the morning.
In her fingers she holds wind, like a comb,
running it through her long hair. . . . .
They did not recognize her as they rushed past,
they saw only their meadows and their fields,
and by the brook, a peasant maid—
a peasant maid who can hardly say Lord’s Prayer and Ave. . . .
They did not recognize her.
At length, the searchers return without success, but news spreads that
Some lads who grazed goats on the slopes,
as it were, found Mother of God.
She was well and in good health.
They tell their story to the doubting elders:
“Well, as we grazed our goats there in the fields,
there she was, sitting amidst the farmhands relishing buttermilk.
Each of them shared his bit with her.
Like on the altar, her hair was of gold,
only in place of the halo she wore a flowered scarf,
and she was wiping sweat off her brow,
as if she’d been with us for ages.”
All the elders can do is mourn over what they have lost. But the story concludes:
Mother of God, cousin of rowan-tree, clear as a flame,
has found her Christ
in these lads full of life and strength.
What use would she have for the dark church
with its candles’ tears,
if now all around she saw the sunflowers agleam.
The good mother of springs and light,
without whom, it’s said, not even daises will reach bloom,
lives on in our midst, eternal.
It’s a happier ending, isn’t it? And it’s an attractive story. The saints, for a moment, become people and simple working folk become saints. We go out of the church to a warm spring day. And we humans are at peace not only with one another but with the whole world—the goats, the sunflowers, the primroses, the daisies, the cold water from the brook, the wind. Mary is as close to us as nature itself.
But right at the heart of it all is that question Mary asks Jesus, “Why ever is it that your and my plight is engraved in stone?” And Jesus’ answer: “I wish that not my blood but love would save humankind.” Yes, how deeply we wish that. What attracts us in this story is a kind of picture of heaven, where harm and hatred and cruelty and suffering and alienation are things of the past.
I believe we were starting to think, not so long ago, that we ourselves were coming within sight of such a world. A world of democracy, respecting the sacredness of human rights, discovering a new sense of justice toward the creation as well as toward one another. The whole world has had a rude awakening from that dream. Not that the dream is dead, not that it is no longer worth working toward. It is still the goal of every loving heart. But we see now that the path will be more rugged and perilous than we had thought.
And God, confronted with this reality, does what? This is what the Passion Story today has been telling us. It’s not enough for God to join us only in the moments of sunshine and flowers and butterflies. If God is going to be with us in our world, God has to be with us even in the worst that our world deals out. If God is to be with us in such a way, the Passion story becomes inevitable.
The other story that I set alongside it, the one that ends with Mary watching over our human life and joy—there is no direct path that can lead us, once for all, to that one. But hang onto it, anyway. It is an image of heaven, an image of the life Jesus wants to invite us into even as he walks the Way of the Cross. The goal of the Passion Story is not the cross, but life lived in the power of God’s love.
This sermon was preached on Palm Sunday, 2019 at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California. It draws heavily on Milovan Bureš’s poem translated by Hilda Hearne as “The Legend of the Smoke from Potato Tops.” I have taken it from the booklet to the Supraphon CD of Cantatas by Bohuslav Martinů, performed by the Prague Philharmonic Choir under the leadership of Lukáš Vasilek. Copyrights by Ms. Hearne (2016) and Supraphon (1993).
Incidentally, Martinů’s music for this piece is wonderful! I highly recommend this recording.
JESUS—WITH FIVE SAINTS
A SERMON FOR THE LAST SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY, 2018
Mark 9:2-9
We hear this story of how Jesus became transfigured by dazzling light every year on this Sunday right before the beginning of Lent. That means it’s grown familiar for us. And, as often happens with familiar things, we no longer notice how unusual it is. Well, to be sure, shining with a dazzling light is pretty unusual. But there are other things to notice as well, things you don’t find elsewhere in the Bible.
For one, who else in the Bible lights up like this? The only example would be Moses, whose face glowed with light after all the time he spent with God on Mt. Sinai. It gave the Israelites a proper fright, and he had to wear a veil before they’d get close enough to listen to him. (Exodus 34)
And where else in the Bible do departed saints volunteer to make conversation with the living? The closest thing (though definitely not voluntary) would be the story about the witch of Endor: King Saul forced her on threat of death to call up the shade of Samuel from Sheol. Samuel was not at all happy about it. And, far from giving Saul the comfort Saul was looking for, he just tells him he’s doomed. He actually seems to take a certain vengeful pleasure in delivering that message. (1 Samuel 28).
But the thing that interests me particularly this morning is that the Transfiguration is so different from the other key events in Jesus’ story. In all the rest, Jesus is essentially alone. At his baptism, nobody but John recognizes what’s going on. At his temptation, he’s on his own. In Gethsemane, the disciples are all asleep. At his trial, the only people around are enemies. At the crucifixion, a few supporters are present, but unable to help. And the resurrection has no witnesses but the guards—and they seem to have fainted. This event is different. The story of the Transfiguration has a bigger cast—Jesus plus five saints. And with two of them, he’s in intimate conversation.
What do you suppose they were talking about? Mark, whose account we read this morning, doesn’t tell us, but Luke gives us a hint. He says “they were talking with him about his departure which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem.” (Lk 9:31) His “departure in Jerusalem”—it must certainly mean his death. Now, Jesus has already told his disciples to expect this; but they refused to believe it. Peter even protested that it couldn’t possibly happen. (Mk. 8:31-33) Maybe Moses and Elijah were the only people who could possibly have anything to say to Jesus on this particular occasion. It’s often said that the two were there to represent the Law and the Prophets—in other words the deep, scriptural background of Jesus’ ministry. True enough, but there’s more to it than that.
Think for a bit about these two old men. Moses we know. He started off in a persecuted minority and became an adopted child of the persecuting majority. He couldn’t live with that tension and one day when he saw a guard beating an Israelite slave, he killed him.Then he had to run for his life. When God confronted him years later in the burning bush and told him to go back to Egypt and lead the people out, he knew it was a crazy project. He’d been there! Still, he did it and it worked. But he spent the next forty years problem-solving for a big crowd of people wandering around in the wilderness—while also serving as God’s messenger to give them a new identity, a new law, a new religion. The people sometimes agreed to it all but, according the Biblical account, mostly they complained and occasionally they rebelled. Moses got precious little thanks for all his work. And then, at the end of his life, he didn’t even get to enter the Promised Land. He died in sight of it, in Moab, and was buried there—in a grave whose location was promptly forgotten (Deut. 34:6).
Elijah, too, had a difficult time of it. He was a passionate advocate of the God of Israel, and he spent his life fighting the king’s efforts to blend the religion of Israel, with its focus on justice, into the fertility cults of Israel’s neighbors—all for the sake of enhancing royal power. Elijah had such a rough time of it that, at one point, he complained that he was the only faithful person left. God promptly disabused him of that rather egotistical notion, but it tells you what he was going through. And, perhaps because of his immense frustration, he wholeheartedly embraced violence as a way of forcing people to be faithful: he slaughtered the priests of Baal and brought a devastating drought down on the whole country—a drought that sent thousands of Israelites as well as Gentiles to death by starvation. St. Romanos, in the sixth century, speculated that God sent the fiery chariot for Elijah because, in his zeal for God, Elijah had forgotten that God actually loves human beings, even in our imperfection. The only way to save the people who were left was to yank Elijah off the stage.
So Elijah and Moses had both known struggle, opposition, disappointment, the futility of violence, the difficulty of getting their message across, the willingness of people to trade their principles for what looked like an easier path. Moses died in Exile; Elijah was translated to the heavens by fiery chariot. But both knew about struggle and suffering, and each had had to leave a lot of unfinished business behind him.
Jesus, at the moment of the Transfiguration, is about to turn toward Jerusalem—in full awareness of what lies ahead. And I can’t imagine any two people better suited to talk with him about it. His disciples are busy arguing about which of them will get to be prime minister in Jesus’ new kingdom. They’re listening to him, but they’re not getting much of it. And they’re the ones he will leave to carry on his work.
We know that he’s afraid of what is to come. He never says it to to his followers, but it comes out in the words he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane—a prayer that they, of course, slept through. But the fear is there. And so he turns to the two people who have been through some of this already, the two who can reassure him that a work that feels unfinished isn’t necessarily altogether lost, the two who can tell him that it is worthwhile to go on with his mission no matter how daunting the challenges.
After Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, angels came to minister to him (Mark1:13). But there are some things that no angel could tell him. No angel could tell him what it was like to live with human uncertainties, with the incomprehension and wavering of human followers, with the difficulty of seeing beyond the next step, the next moment. He needed a couple of wise old folk—wise because of long experience, wise because of their own sufferings and failures.
But, of course, they’re not the only ones present, are they? Jesus could have had a conversation with Moses and Elijah without bringing Peter and James and John along (though I guess there’s no way we would ever have heard about it). But here they are, and they must have a role to play, too. What is it?
I suppose they’re there partly because they needed to be overwhelmed again by God’s beauty and power and get a renewed sense of their own puniness in comparison. They played that role pretty well. But they didn’t like it at all. Peter’s instinctive response was to try to take charge. If things like this were going to happen, well, somebody needed see to that they were properly noted, commemorated, categorized, institutionalized, and generally taken care of. So I guess they were also there so that they could make some mistakes on behalf of the rest of us.
And I suppose they were also there to be reminded of how much they didn’t understand. Afterwards, as they head back down the mountain, Jesus goes back to talking about his death and resurrection again. And, once again, they can’t figure out what he’s getting at. So, if Moses and Elijah are there to help, Peter and James and John are there to make mistakes and to misunderstand. They’re there to confirm that our inexperience and foolishness have a place here, too.
And, finally, there is yet a further dimension to all this of immediate importance to us. We have, in the Transfiguration, a picture of the church—helpful at any time but perhaps particularly as we step into Lent. Jesus stands in the center, the Word who brings Good News, gleaming with the beauty of God’s inexhaustible love for humankind. Gathered as church, we hear him in the scriptures and sing the good news in hymns and respond in prayer. The old wise folk, who have seen it all, survived disappointment and suffering and still have hope—they can stand alongside Jesus in communion and understanding. The three newbies, the disciples, cower down below, shielding their eyes, still trying to figure out what this is all about.
It reminds us that understanding life and God isn’t a solitary business; we need one another for it. At one moment you may find yourself flailing away with the neophyte disciples. At another, you may discover you are one of the wise elders who can draw hope out of your own experience to sustain someone else. There’s something of Moses and Elijah in each one of us—and something of Peter, James, and John. And the three callow disciples, remember, will grow into the next generation of Moseses and Elijahs.
And whether we find ourselves nodding our heads and thinking, “Oh yes, I’ve been there; it can be very difficult,” or whether we just feel confused and uncertain, the light of God keeps on shining on all of us just as it did on the Mountain of Transfiguration. And we all have parts to play and, together, we can all increase in understanding and in love.
A LITTLE CHRISTMAS GIFT
Here is the Sermon I would have preached on Christmas Eve had I not come down with a nasty cold and, in the interests of public health, stayed home instead:
WHAT WERE THEY REALLY THINKING?
That’s a beautiful story we just heard from the Gospel of Luke (2:1-20). But, as so often, the Scriptures don’t offer to tell us much about people’s thoughts. We wind up filling those in for ourselves. I’m going to give it a try for a few of tonight’s players.
Picture, if you will, the old shepherd at the rear of the group, as they walk back into the hills to look after their sheep again. What’s he thinking?
“Well, that were a surprise. I didn’t think angels still came calling these days like they did back in Bible times. But we all seen it and we all heard it; so it musta happened. And when we got to that cowshed they sent us to, ’twasn’t all that much to see. Just a baby and a new mother, tired and excited the way they are, and a dad looking kind of frazzled. Was nothing grand about it—nothing like the show those angels put on. No. Now, you did get a feeling there—like somethin’ new was startin’ up—a feeling that maybe, just maybe after all this time something might go right with the world after all. A feeling that God was up to somethin’. I think we caught it from Mary and Joseph. Even in such a hard spot, they seemed hopeful and trusting and friendly and, unlike a lot of townsfolk, they made us welcome. But, really, you know? I don’t see how it’ll ever work.”
Or picture Melchior on camelback—a middle-aged Professor of Theological Astronomy on his way back to the University of Central Asia. What is he thinking?
“What was that all about? The signs seemed clear enough. And I thought the local people would have been right on top of it all, making observations and going to pay their respects. It should have been easy for us to find the child. But they acted as if we’d taken them by surprise when we arrived. Hmm! Probably a good thing, actually. I wouldn’t trust King Herod any further than I could throw him. Not far, I’d say, judging by all the gold he was wearing. We did find the child, yes, and we brought our gifts and we felt there was indeed a mystery there—a mystery worthy of being announced in the stars. There was a great sense of the presence of God surrounding and pervading that poor family. One almost dared hope that God might be about to do something useful in this crazy world. But, really, you know? I don’t see how it’ll ever work.”
And I wonder if you noticed, in the third row of the angelic chorus, that sort of middle-rank angel who seemed to be having a particularly fine time singing. What is that angel thinking?
“Wow! That was really thrilling. We’ve never done a better job, not even around the divine throne in heaven itself. But what, exactly, is God up to? And is it wise? I know I wouldn’t want to get this entangled with those problematic humans. It’s one thing to go distract a child so she doesn’t cross a collapsing bridge. I like the “guardian angel” gig. But becoming human—getting involved in actual human flesh and blood? They’re a dangerous race, you know. They can be cruel. They won’t take kindly to this, I’m afraid. I hope God has a Plan B—or C or H or Q or whatever it is at this point—because, really, you know? I don’t see how it’ll ever work.”
And what about Mary and Joseph? Luke actually does tell us something about Mary’s thoughts: “she treasured all these words [of the shepherds] and pondered them in her heart.” She had made her leap of faith nine months before. Joseph made it along with her. And their faith, intertwined with hope and love, buoyed them up through their long trek and the birth of their child. And yet, they didn’t know exactly what God was doing or what further part they might be called on to play. Instead, they pondered, they hoped, they loved. And they wondered, “How will this ever work out?
And what about God? What is God thinking at this moment in Bethlehem? That’s tricky to imagine because God’s relationship to time and space isn’t like ours. But we have hints scattered all through holy scripture. Maybe we can risk it. God is thinking:
“This isn’t all going to be pretty. The angels think I should give up on these human beings. What they don’t get is that I love them even with all their problems. The humans don’t get it either. First they tried to confuse me with the forces of nature. They credited me for good harvests and blamed me for hurricanes and earthquakes. Then they tried to commandeer me to take responsibility for their cities and religions and wars and got upset when I didn’t help them. I keep trying to get them to see me as a lover. I even sang love songs to them. But mostly they just ignore me except when they’re in trouble. And then they come and quake before me as if punishing them were my favorite thing to do.
“Well yes, it isn’t going to be pretty. But there’s some comfort in being able to see the whole story already. I can see that some people will start catching the invitation to love—that young fellow John who’s going to be a disciple, Mary from Magdala who’ll be first to figure out what’s really going on and, above all this Mary here and her Joseph, who’ve consented to be my partners in what sounds, admittedly, like a crazy scheme. And, really, you know, I think, in the long run, it’ll work.”
FACING JUDGEMENT
A sermon preached at Good Shepherd Episcopal Church, Berkeley, California on November 19, 2017
Proper 28A: Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18 w. Ps. 90:1-8(9-11)12; 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30
Every year, right before Advent, we hear readings about the Day of the Lord, the End of the World, the Last Judgement. Most Episcopalians don’t really greet these topics with much enthusiasm—and there’s a good reason for that. People who do wax enthusiastic about judgement usually seem to treat it as a threat to other folk. They think they have their feet firmly planted on the safe track to heaven, and they get some enjoyment from shaking the warning finger at everybody else. It is, to put it bluntly, not very Christian.
So. . . the Day of the Lord—there’s our topic for today. And just to make it worse, we also wind up with one of most awkward of gospel readings, the parable of the Talents with its violent and punitive central character. Is Jesus telling us that God is like this? eager to find fault and to throw people into the outer darkness to weep and gnash their teeth? I’ll tell you in advance that the answer is “No.” But first we need to set the stage for this passage.
So lets begin with the easy part: judgement or, to use the term Zephaniah and Paul preferred, the Day of the Lord. It’s an odd phrase with two meanings that, at first, seem diametrically opposed to each other. On the one hand, the Day of the Lord is a feast day, just as Christians’ sometimes refer to Sunday as “the Lord’s Day.” On the other, it is the time of judgement. One is a celebration of God’s love, the other of God’s justice. And yet, the two things do belong together. It is God’s love that calls forth God’s justice.
The simple truth is that the world is full of evils that cry out for judgement.. We’ve had a rash of multiple killings in the news lately. Hate crimes are up in the US—as witness the Transgender Day of Remembrance that we’re observing today. Jesus told us that the central truth of all human morality is the commandment to love—love both God and our neighbors. Everything else, he said, depends on that. And it gets violated right and left these days, at every level of our American society. And there are other parts of the world even worse off than we. Yes, there is plenty of occasion for judgement. It’s God’s love for this world that makes judgement necessary.
That’s what the prophet Zephaniah was talking about in our reading this morning. “The Day of the Lord is at hand,” he begins. And at first he makes it sound like a feast day: “the Lord has prepared a sacrifice, he has consecrated his guests.” Well, yes, that’s what God wants to do. God loves us. But this God who loves humanity also judges humanity—judges us by the criterion of how well we love. And so the prophet continues:
The great day of the Lord is near,
near and hastening fast;
the sound of the day of the Lord is bitter,
[even] the warrior cries aloud there.
This feast isn’t going to come to a happy conclusion.
And just few decades later, the Chaldeans completely destroyed Jerusalem, which certainly helped imprint Zephaniah’s warnings on people’s minds. That’s how the dominant idea of the “Day of the Lord” went from being a hopeful one to a fearsome occasion of judgement.
Paul’s audience in 1 Thessalonians, also thinks it in terms of judgement. Paul is actually trying to recall them to the message that the Day of the Lord is also an expression of love. It judges only what is unloving in us. And it’s also the vindication of our efforts, however imperfect, to live by love. As we grow in trust for God’s love, we also grow in confidence. We begin to recognize that love as not just a demand, it’s the ultimate truth. In the long run, there is no power that can contend with love, for, as another New Testament writer tells us, “God is love.” We exist only because of that love. And we have chosen to live on the basis of love—not any of the alternatives so readily available in our world, not the basis of trying to grab as much for me and mine as I can and to hell with the rest of the world, not the basis of competitive consumerism, not the basis of hatred for people different from me, not the basis of arrogance and contempt for others, but the basis of love.
It’s not that we’re so perfect that we have nothing to be judged for. Paul would never suggest that! In fact, he always has quite a lot to say about all the stuff his converts have got wrong. But we have opened up to God’s love, we trust that God’s love will never—indeed, can never—betray us. God doesn’t judge us to destroy us, but to save us.
So let’s turn now to the parable of the Talents. A certain slave master with the temper of a Mafia don hands out stacks of money, big stacks of money to three of his slaves. Then he rewards the two wheeler dealers who made more piles of money to stack on top of it and punishes one timid slave who at least didn’t fritter his stack of money away. Wait a minute! Didn’t Jesus, earlier in the Gospel of Matthew, say “Blessed are the poor in spirit” and “Blessed are the meek?” What is he up to here?
Let me, for a start, point out an important element here that we tend to miss: this is a parable of the Kingdom of Heaven, the reign of God. Jesus starts the discourse in chapter 25 off by saying, “The kingdom of heaven will be like this. . . ,” and then gives us three rather alarming parables. The first is the parable of the Wise and Foolish Virgins, which Sophia sagely interpreted for us last week as a warning that the kingdom requires our participation. “Check your oil,” she reminded us. “Stay lit.” Yes, love becomes meaningful only as we respond to it. It’s the only way to become a part of it. God’s love cannot transform us until our love begins to answer it.
Then our passage today begins with the words “For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves . . . ” In other words, we’re still on the topic of the kingdom—or more exactly the topic of how the Kingdom of heaven can come into being within us. And this, of course, is exactly what Jesus told us to pray for. We pray: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.” What are we praying for when we use these words? God’s “kingdom” is a metaphor for the kind of life that God lives and also seeks for the world at large. It’s a life characterized by love and justice and peace, by generosity and hope and courage, and by the kind of genuine community in which no one is scorned or pushed aside or treated as unworthy.
This kingdom can’t come on earth without our involvement. It can’t just happen around us. If it could somehow, it wouldn’t do us any good. We’d be totally unprepared for it. In fact, we might not like it much. What good is it to me if all the rest of the world is caught up in love and I’m still a prisoner of my angers, my resentments, my hatreds, my fears? I’d still be trying to live in my old ways in a world where they no longer make any sense at all. Imagine a Hitler in heaven, surrounded by all the people he hates and wants to destroy—and completely unable to do them even the least bit of harm. It may be Heaven for them. It would be Hell for him.
So this is a parable of the kingdom, about entering the kingdom, not a story about God. God isn’t a testy bridegroom who locks foolish virgins out. God isn’t a Mafia don who flips out into a state of rage at timid subordinates. God doesn’t work that way. These parables of the kingdom are about us and our difficulties. What threatens to keep us out of the kingdom that we pray for?
Well, what did keep the third slave out of the kingdom? All three slaves are presumed to have similar abilities. What held him back? It was fear. Fear was the motivation by which he lived his life, and it paralyzed him. He couldn’t even think clearly enough to put the money into a savings account. (“What if there’s a crash? what if the bank goes under? What if the FDIC can’t fulfill its promises? What if . . . . “) So he opts for what seems like the safe thing: bury it in the garden!
Jesus spent so much of his ministry trying to convince us that we don’t have to lead frightened lives. “Do not worry, saying ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ . . . Your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.” (Matt. 6:30-32) Or again, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” (Matt. 7:7) After all, God “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (5:45) He wasn’t counseling us to become lazy layabouts, hoping that God would drop peeled grapes in our mouths. He was counseling us to give up fear and anxiety.
You may well be thinking, “There are some things in life we do well to be afraid of.” That’s true—let’s say a falling tree, for example. But Jesus wasn’t talking about fear as a response to immediate danger. He was talking about the kind of fear that can become a guiding principle in our lives. Jesus wants us to jettison it and live out of love instead. And love and fear don’t coexist well with each other. In fact, “Perfect love casts out fear.” (1 John 5:18) The third slave’s fear means always trying to find perfect safety. He has imprisoned himself inside that search. His anxiety can’t help him become a part of the kingdom. It cannot open the gates of the kingdom. And yet, the kingdom is so near to him that if he could only come to a moment of new perspective—could only begin to love instead of fear—he would become a new person and find himself within the gates.
Does God demand justice? Yes. Because God loves this world that God has made and the people in it, including you and me. Yes. Because God is love. Not the sappy kind of love that says to us, “Okay I’ll let you off this time. But don’t do it again.” No, it’s the intense and purposeful and realistic kind of love that says, “You have to get a new grip on your life, you know. Your fear can only destroy you. But love can make you whole. It can bring you into the kingdom.”
READING MATTHEW 2: FAMILY WITH NEW BABY VISITED BY PAGAN PRIESTS, FORCED TO FLEE
Why does Matthew have only bits and pieces of the familiar Christmas story?
The story as we tell it each Christmas is a blend of elements from Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels. It’s possible that each writer had a rather different tradition and simply retold what he knew. But, as we’ve already seen, Matthew has some points to make about the nature of tradition and of God’s work in the world. It’s likely that, in chapter 2, he’s not only repeating what he’s heard, but using these stories to communicate with us about how God accomplishes things in our world.
Who were these “wise men from the East”? And what are they doing in the story?
The people our English translations call “wise men” Matthew calls Magoi. These were not generalized sages, but priests of the Persian religious tradition we call “Zoroastrian.” This religion has taken on a variety of forms, and we can’t be sure precisely what the theology of the Magi was. But since Matthew tells us that they discovered Jesus’ birth by reading the stars. we can assume that they were astronomers and astrologers. The two disciplines were not distinct from each other at the time, and the idea that the heavenly bodies influence events on earth was widely accepted. And Matthew seems quite comfortable here with the possibility that a “science” could bring people to an encounter with Jesus.
The fact that Joseph could claim descent from King David didn’t mean that he was wealthy or prominent; in fact, he and Mary seem to have been people of modest means. There would have been no news reports headed “Heir Born to Davidic Royal Line.” But the Magi saw things in the heavens that, according to their theories, meant a significant change of authority in the Jewish nation. Since most Magi lived in the Persian Empire, their trip meant crossing a heavily fortified border between two mutually hostile powers and poking their noses into the politics of a nation within the rival Roman Empire. They were thus complete strangers—neither Jewish nor Roman—when they came to honor the new child; and they would have been objects of curiosity and probably of some suspicion. But when they reached Judea, they recognized that their astrological knowledge was not sufficient to the task. They had to find out what the local Israelite tradition (yes, tradition again!) said about this new king, and they went to Jerusalem to consult the authorities. But, of course, the existing Jewish king, Herod, had a vested interest in making sure that no new claimant rose to claim his throne. And their visit, as a side-effect, set off a disastrous chain of events leading to the massacre of a large number of young children and forcing Joseph, Mary, and Jesus to become refugees.
Ah, there’s another question. What is a grim story like that doing here?
Well, modern Christians don’t like to dwell on it. Our forebears, however, honored the child victims on the Feast of the Holy Innocents (Dec. 28), also known as Childermass. And perhaps that feast day is newly relevant in an age when so many children are dying of war and hunger. The same applies to the plight of the Holy Family as refugees, fleeing to—or all places—Egypt. The country where there ancestors had been slaves was willing to be the place that saved their lives.
Both raise the question of how God can tolerate, much less work in the context of such evil. Matthew doesn’t try to answer that question. Maybe he even makes it seem worse when he says that Jeremiah foresaw the horror at Bethlehem (2:17-18); this, too, was in the tradition. And he argues that the prophets predicted that the family would Have to live for a time in Egypt (2:15) and then resettle at Nazareth (2:23). Sufferings is a known part of the tradition. The angels who keep stepping in and out of the picture to encourage, warn, or direct make it clear that God is still at work, even in the midst of all this horror. God doesn’t cause human evils, but God refuses to be excluded from human history by them. God can even create something out of human wrongs, if no better way is to b found.
And are the Magi in the tradition?
No, they’re another kind of problem because they’re not in the tradition. No one predicted them. We’re told nothing of their having any divine or angelic inspiration, except at the end of the story where they’re warned in a dream to sneak out of the country without Herod’s knowing. The point seems to be that they are simply and purely the wrong people to have here as principal celebrants of Jesus’ birth. Their only qualification for being present at this holy occasion (aside from their ability to scrutinize the stars) was their complete lack of qualifications. They’re the wrong ethnicity, the wrong religion, the wrong visitors. But, then, we’ve already seen that Jesus’ genealogy included some people who seemed equally out of place. Matthew is making a point here. The tradition can admit people most of us usually think should be quite firmly excluded from it.
The people who, according to the tradition, should have been celebrating are all missing from this occasion. The Jerusalem sages aren’t interested enough to accompany the Magi to Bethlehem. And Herod actually tries to kill the child. The Magi, by contrast, are drawn to Jesus without any advance qualifications.
The wonderful thing about the story is that, whether you see yourself more as an outsider like them or more as a religious insider, Matthew is saying there is room for you. But in some cases, it may be easier for outsiders to grasp the value and importance of Jesus than for insiders. Perhaps we who are insiders have to rediscover our outsiderness in order to be present at the wonder of Jesus’ birth.
Next up: SNEAKING A LOOK AT THE END OF THE STORY
EASTER: THE MAGDALENE SPEAKS TO THE BELOVED DISCIPLE
(with thanks to Grace Cathedral, San Francisco)
IT WAS A DARK TIME, AN UNCERTAIN TIME. . . .
CHRISTMAS EVE 2016
Isaiah 9:2-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-14, (15-20)
It was a dark time, an uncertain time. The rich were getting richer, the poor poorer. The people were deeply divided about public issues, some favoring the government of Rome because it had brought peace, others calling for revolution. The religious were at odds with the less pious. Everybody resented the taxes except the people who were collecting them.
And one Galilean couple was dislodged from their familiar surroundings to make the long trek to Bethlehem so that they could sign a government register and pay a government duty. There was no place in town to stay but the stable behind one of the inns. And there Mary realized that she was going into labor.
Joseph ran quickly to find the local midwife. He had already built a fire to keep her warm. Now he was heating water on it and doing all the midwife’s bidding. Poor Mary! None of her more experienced female relatives there to help and reassure her—just the midwife and Joseph.
But the child got born and the mother was doing fine. The midwife bathed and swaddled the infant. Joseph could breathe again. And the midwife left with a promise to return in the morning.
They had barely settled in for the night when they heard a rustling and some hushed voices outside and then a quiet knock on the stable door. Joseph got up and, not inclined to take strangers in the middle of the night lightly, he picked up his staff before he went to the door and raised the latch. He opened the door a crack to see a small huddle of rather dirty and nervous looking shepherds with a lantern.
After a bit of shoving and jostling, they pushed an old man forward to be their representative. “Sir,” he said—and fell into an embarrassed silence. This was more than a little odd. Joseph wasn’t used to being addressed as “sir.”
After a moment, the old man tried again: “Your excellency,” he said this time. Joseph’s brow furrowed and his eyes crossed a bit at this compounding of excess. But after clearing his throat rather noisily, the old man went on.
“Your excellency, we was directed here by a certain personage—a knowledgeable personage, I think—what told us that we should come straight here and pay our respects to the new baby what he went so far as to say is the Savior, the Messiah. We be most sorry to disturb you so late in the night, but the, uh, personage was most insistent and specific and said to come right here and no place else.”
This was all very odd, but then odd things had been happening to Mary and to Joseph, too. And, since the little huddle of shepherds really didn’t look threatening, he invited them in.
He began at once rifling through his saddle bag to find some little refreshment he could offer them. One couldn’t have guests, even uninvited guests, without offering refreshments. But the shepherds would have none of it. They had brought gifts for Mary and Joseph instead: good cheese, some hard bread, a bit of wine (not so good) and some spring water (quite refreshing). And they laid these out on a cloth as an offering to the new parents.
The old man began again. “It’s a strange tale—nothing like it in my time, though I’ve heard stories from long ago. It was like a person made of fire—lit the place up like broad daylight. We all ducked, of course—afraid of getting singed. But he said, the way those, uh, personages do: ” No need to be afraid. I’ve got good news.” And he sent us off here straightaway.
“We’d have been too blinded by it all to find the track down the hill, but then the whole sky lit up and we heard music coming at us from all sides. I never heard such music! And found our way down the mountain and into the town, and here we are. And here you are. And we brung the baby a wool blanket to keep him warm—here, it’s pretty clean; almost new.”
And it was still a dark time, still an uncertain time. Indeed, it seemed to be getting darker. The rich went on getting richer, the poor poorer. The people were still deeply divided about public issues. The religious were still at odds with those who were less pious. Everybody resented the taxes except the people who were collecting them.
But something was unleashed on the world there in Bethlehem that is still making trouble for the oppressors and giving hope to the poor, that’s still offering hope in troubled times, still proclaiming that love is more important than rigorous piety. It is the astonishing news that “Immanuel” is here. God is truly living alongside us—weak as a baby and yet strong enough to change the world in and with and for us.
The greatest of transformations springs from the humblest of beginnings. We are here with the shepherds to witness it again in awe and wonder—and to be filled again with the courage to live faithfully even in dark and uncertain times.
FROM JUDGEMENT TO BETHLEHEM
Bill Countryman
ADVENT SUNDAY, 2016
Sermon for St. James’ Cathedral, Chicago, Illinois
Year A: Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122, Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:36-44
This time of year, I always feel as if I’m caught between two different calendars, grinding against each other like two tectonic plates moving in opposite directions. One is the public calendar that’s hustling us from Thanksgiving to Christmas. It’s very goal-oriented. The tension of preparing for the great day builds and builds—until !boom! it’s all over in just a matter of hours. I confess I’ve come to hate that calendar for cramming way too much into one great climax and consigning the remaining 12 days of the feast to weariness and oblivion.
The church calendar version of this season carries us on a very different time scheme. Advent, too, is pointing us toward December 25th. But instead of plunging us into a goal-oriented scramble, it starts with a strange reverse flow of time. Advent begins far, far in the future with the End of All Things before drawing our minds and hearts back to an event now thousands of years to the past, the birth of Jesus. Luckily, Advent takes its time about this maneuver; otherwise, we’d all have whiplash. But why? Understanding this strange calendar of ours can give us some help and guidance for how to pray and live the four weeks ahead of us.
We begin, as I say, at the End of the World, at the Last Judgement. Jesus, in Matthew’s Gospel, tells us about it. It is unforeseen and unpredictable, he says; “about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.” It’s unpredictable and it is sudden, he says, like the flood that swept people away in the time of Noah. It’s unpredictable; it’s sudden; and it is seemingly random. “Two will be in the field; one will be taken and one will be left. Two will be grinding meal together; one will be taken and one will be left.”
It sounds like a summary of our worst fears. And all Jesus tells us here, in the face of it, is “Keep awake.” That’s where Advent starts—with the unknown, the daunting, the uncertain, and the advice to stay alert.
Some years it’s been hard to take all this too seriously. Life was sailing along on an even keel, and apocalypse seemed no more than a topic for the movies—scary, but potentially entertaining. Not so much this year, following an angry and disturbing electoral campaign and during the first weeks of a transition in government that seems to many dauntingly uncertain. And this is not even to mention Syria, the Brexit, global warming, and all the other upheavals in the world around us.
The Last Judgement suddenly sounds more relevant, doesn’t it?
But what, after all, is it intended to accomplish? Our usual reflex answer would probably be “punishment.” But that’s wrong. Contrary to the libelous claims made by generations of religious zealots, God actually takes no delight in punishing. If the Last Judgement occasions suffering, that is a byproduct of its true goal.
The true goal is a very simple thing, really: the ultimate unveiling of all hearts. What God already knows about us, we, too, shall learn in that opening of souls. We shall know it for ourselves and know it inescapably. And it will be unpredictable. It will be sudden. It may well seem, to our eyes, random. What distinguishes that man taken out of the field from the one who is left? this woman taken while grinding grain from the one who is left?
Still, it all seems quite daunting. What ancient bishop or monk, we might well ask, had the perverse sense of humor to put something like this into the calendar a scant four Sundays before Christmas? But there’s more to it. The Judgement is not an end in itself.
We heard about it from the prophet Isaiah this morning:
In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest of the mountains. . . ;
all the nations shall stream to it.
It was not in some happy, peaceful, safe era that Isaiah uttered this prophecy of hope. It was in a time of multiple threats, a time of change and uncertainty—a time like ours.
And then Isaiah reveals God’s purpose in this hope filled future:
[God] shall judge between the nations,
and shall arbitrate for many peoples;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither shall they learn war any more.
I
Isaiah and Jesus are not in conflict here. God’s goal, the goal of the New Jerusalem, even in judgement, is to see all nations beating our armaments into tools that will sustain human life and the world around us.
The Last Judgement, whenever and however it comes, comes to show us who we truly are. Parts of that revelation may be painful; parts of it may be occasions of joy and thanksgiving. But whatever the Judgement shows us, it is granted to us precisely so that we can wake up and become part of the cloud of witnesses, the saints of this world, who are building the Holy City for everyone, transforming our thirst for enmity and destruction into love—love for God and God’s world and one another. The Judgement by which we see ourselves as we are frees us to join in God’s great work of creation and restoration.
And, yet, as we know, we live now in the in-between time. The Judgement is not yet. We are still trying to figure out where we can get the strength, the hope, the love to live through the present time. And that is where we turn from the Judgement and the New Jerusalem to another much humbler time and place—Bethlehem. No, it wasn’t mentioned in the readings. Those cranky old bishops and monks were too clever for that. Don’t show your hand all at once. Build up the tension before you get to the heart of the story. But they knew what lies four weeks off. And they knew that we would know, too.
This is really all about Bethlehem.
BETHLEHEM
Here comes to birth
the One who birthed us all.
Here lies the Upholder of all,
too weak to raise his head,
God, choosing helplessness instead,
has left the throne of deep tranquillity
to live in human poverty—
Has come to earth.
We speak today about the Last Judgement and the New Jerusalem in order to say that this is a world God has risked entering into. God has not sat back in the throne room of the universe, looking on while we struggle with fear and hope, blessings and disasters, failure and success. God has chosen to experience all this with us, alongside us.
I suppose God had the same thought that occurred more recently to the songwriter Eric Bazilian: “What if God was one of us?” “Risky,” God must have thought, “but worth the danger and the sacrifice. That’s what I choose to do.”
Our times are difficult. We find ourselves caught in deep national conflict, in a changing world order, in a crisis of ecology, and in a time when religion has again become, as it has sometimes been in the past, a stimulus to violence. We also find ourselves uncertain of our direction. Perhaps that’s why we follow the public calendar of feasts so intently: we find the distraction comforting.
The sacred calendar is trying to help us find our footing. If we start with acknowledging who we are, both our failures and our hopes, our weaknesses and our gifts—in other words, with the Judgement—we shall also begin to see ways, large and small, in which we can contribute to the New Jerusalem and grow into our citizenship there—citizenship in the city of peace.
Yes, there’s much to be done in the next four weeks as we prepare to greet the infant of Bethlehem again. But the great truth we encounter there is that God has already come more than halfway to meet us: “has left the throne of deep tranquillity/to live in human poverty.” And the God who was willing to take that risk that will stand with us in our time of struggle here and now.