Sermon January 15, 2012

1 Samuel 3:1-10 [11-20] Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18 
1 Corinthians 6:12-20 John 1:43-51 

 
"Called and Recalled”

¹ O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
² You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
   you discern my thoughts from far away.

Some folks, and occasionally I may be one of them, find this a very scary thought—knowing very clearly that God knows us inside and out and then being reminded of it very clearly. It's a little disconcerting, in my case, not because I necessarily have that much to hide, but that idea that someone has such intimate knowledge of my most private thoughts and feelings. God knows me better than I know myself—and knows what makes me tick. That kind of self-knowledge is a lifetime's work—and most of us will never know all there is about our own bodies, let alone our minds and souls.

And yet God knows and always has known. God stands outside of space and time and within space and time and sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches . . . moving within us, knowing us and our motivations and our fears.

Some folks, and sometimes I am also one of them, find this to be very comforting that God knows me better than I know myself. And so God understands me and loves me more than I could ever imagine. In God's eyes and heart, I am realized as the full and healthy human being that God has made me to be and through the desires of God's heart, I am called to be exactly that, not perfect, but whole and healthy. And in God's eyes and heart, you are realized, each one of you, as the full and healthy human being that God has made you to be and in the desires of God's heart, you are called to be exactly that whole and healthy person, too. We are called to do the will of God because God's hand has touched each one of us with life and our living, and our true selves want nothing more than to move closer to God with each choice that we make.

Whether we fear or love the idea that God knows us inside and out—and we probably feel a combination of both sometimes—that means that God knows our capabilities and our choices and our fears when we are presented with opportunities for ministry. God knows how we are able to respond when presented with a need from another person and God knows, too, how we are likely to respond despite our capabilities.

The texts today describe people being called to serve God in some way, from prophecy to discipleship to apostleship, in a child prophet, and unknown poet, a young adult disciple to apostle to an aging priest and leader. All of them struggle with the voice of God, which is variously: unfamiliar, awe-inspiring, absent or mysterious. The voice of God can contain difficult messages to share. In 1 Samuel, in the verses that follow what we read this morning. God gives Samuel a hard message about Eli and his sons because of what his sons had done and he had let them get away with. “the Lord said to Samuel, ‘See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle. ¹²On that day I will fulfill against Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end. ¹³For I have told him that I am about to punish his house for ever, for the iniquity that he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them. ¹⁴Therefore I swear to the house of Eli that the iniquity of Eli’s house shall not be expiated by sacrifice or offering for ever.’¹

Samuel was a young boy, probably under 10 years of age, was to give his mentor, the high priest Eli, the message that the consequences of his sons' actions would never end. As priests they were entitled to meat and other food given to the temple, but instead of taking their share, they stole from God's portion. And God told Samuel to give this message of judgment to Eli—a very tough message and the first of many that Samuel would deliver. But Eli understood that the message was from God. So Samuel became trusted as a prophet because he spoke the truth that God had given him to speak.

Eli was old enough and wise enough to know that we can't escape the consequences of our choices—or the consequences of the choices that those closest to us make. What our friends and family do often cause us pain and suffering and make it hard for us to believe in the blessings of grace and forgiveness. And though we often can't escape the consequences of our actions, in God's love, we can be forgiven and choose to live better, more just, more righteous and more loving lives.

This weekend we also celebrate a prophet and preacher of our own age—though he died almost 44 years ago, Martin Luther King's message from the voice of God to a generation of people in this nation and elsewhere lives on. He preached a message of justice that many people did not want to hear and yet his message was embedded deeply in God's voice of justice that echoes throughout the prophets of the First Testament of the Bible.

When he led the bus boycott, to desegregate public transportation in Birmingham, Alabama, pastors in white churches urged him to be more cautious and slow down. In response, he wrote a letter from the Birmingham jail. I'll read a portion of this letter, including the beginning, but then I will highlight those parts which express his disappointment at religious people content with the status quo of systemic racism and racial segregation.

MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. . . .But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statements in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate . . who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; . . .who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; . . .Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception . . . that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills.

Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. . . .I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother."

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

Martin Luther King, Jr. ²

He addressed the religious leadership of the day for their desire to protect what was, even though he had a message of transformation, justice and freedom that came directly from God's word, God voice to the generations, to the entire world. It was not a cheerful message to the preachers and teachers of that day and time—God's voice is often a difficult sound to hear and often carries a hard message of confession, repentance and transformation from who we are to who God wants us to be. And the message is to be received and make changes in all lives—even those lives which change for the better may grieve the losses that are inevitable.

The Disciples Women Book Club just finished The Help and one example of the pain of change is in one of the final scenes of the book describing how one of the black maids had to leave behind the white family's small children, who she had loved and treated with more affection than their own parents. The civil rights movement was producing a world changed for the better, but that change produced trauma even in those people who benefited most. The word of change is hard to hear and change itself is even harder to live through and understand. And yet, in God's message to Samuel, to the word of the Psalmist and the experience of the disciples and those sent out to share the word that Jesus gave them to preach—confession, repentance, and the consequences of evil choices and even the grace God offers to the people who hurt others most—are messages that are hard to preach and hard to hear and even harder, sometimes to live.

And we are called to live those difficult lives and proclaim those difficult messages with the choices that we make and the words that we use. We are called to realize that God knows we are capable of living just and good lives—and calls us to do so. We have and are called to share a message of salvation which does not just affect the soul of a human being, but concerns the whole person. Jesus' message relations to bodies, too, the totality of what makes a person a real person, body and soul. The message is about changing the conditions and behaviors that made people blind, deaf, bowed down, paralyzed and possessed. The message isn't just about curing the disease, but stopping the causes of it. It is working toward the just world of God's vision for human beings—body and soul, mind and heart, for now and for all of eternity. That is what we are called to do—from the earliest hearer of God's voice to now. Let us carry out the message, in words if we must, but in lifetime's choices and in each stage of life.

To God's glory, in the present and in all of time and beyond. Amen.

11 Samuel 3:11-14

2http://abacus.bates.edu/admin/offices/dos/mlk/letter.html (I edited this excerpt for this sermon, but you can read the whole letter at this website. I have always been impressed by the scholarship evident in the letter, not to mention the incredible theology.)

Sermon January 8, 2012

Genesis 1:1-5 
Psalm 29 
Acts 19:1-7 

 Mark 1:4-11 

“New Beginnings”

After reading Eric's sermon of last week, I laughed a little because I, too, am coming to you to talk of new beginnings. And I believe that's appropriate because if Christianity is about nothing else, it's about beginning . . . again and again and again and repenting, again and again and again. Each beginning is new because each time, God wipes the slate clean and we start fresh.

And yet, and yet . . . what we do also has consequences in our lives and in the lives of others. God does not hold our sins against us—grace reigns supreme—but our lives and the lives of others are forever changed by the deeds that we do, the good and the bad; the beautiful and the ugly.

Mark's gospel begins decades after Matthew's and Luke's gospel—Mark begins by describing John's presence as forerunner of the Messiah and with Jesus' baptism. The gospel of Mark is the oldest gospel and the most direct. He wrote it about 30 years after Jesus' life had been lived on the earth. If you read it in the Greek, it would sound hurried and not very poetic. His grammar was rough and his transitions are rougher. He was just getting the story down, it seems.

Mark's work was even the beginning of a new kind of literature—a gospel, something that had never been written before. A gospel isn't a history or a biography, though some might argue that. A gospel is a written story that seeks to reveal Jesus through a message about his death, resurrection and return. They draw on oral sources, collections of Jesus' parables and stories of his birth and childhood and his death and resurrection. A gospel is different from Paul's letters because it tells the message through narrative rather than by presenting evidence and logic like Paul often does.

So new beginnings abound again this morning. We also begin a new season—though I've asked us to leave up the trappings of the old because I want us to remember this transition. Today we enter into ordinary time—and yet it is the time and season where the scriptures encourage us to look for the revelation of Christ in the world, a decidedly less than ordinary task. So lets look—lets look for the light, the revelation, the glory of God in the ordinary things.

Our first testament text tells us of the earliest of beginnings, the time before time itself began when God started time up—by creating light, the way that we gauge time. And as we remember God's voice echoing out over creation—the psalmist celebrates that creation of time and that time of creation with poetry.

¹ Ascribe to Yahweh, O heavenly beings,
   ascribe to Yahweh glory and strength.
² Ascribe to Yahweh the glory of God's name;
   worship Yahweh in holy splendour.

³ The voice of Yahweh is over the waters;
   the God of glory thunders,
   Yahweh, over mighty waters.
⁴ The voice of Yahweh is powerful;
   the voice of Yahweh is full of majesty.¹

When I hear that God's voice broke out over the waters, I picture so many things. I picture God breath stirring what the ancient peoples thought of as the waters of chaos, beginning a call and response of praise that continues with every breath we take from the first painful breath to the last one as we slip into the arms of God. I picture the power of God that stirs us toward fair treatment, first as children when we notice that some of us have lots to eat and wear and share and some of us have almost nothing. I feel that passion for justice rising, like it did first for myself and then for a friends of mine who sometimes suffered quietly and other times with tears or anger. That power rising inside—that reminds me of God's passionate love for us.

⁵ The voice of Yahweh breaks the cedars;
   Yahweh breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
⁶ God makes Lebanon skip like a calf,
   and Sirion like a young wild ox.

⁷ The voice of Yahweh flashes forth flames of fire.
⁸ The voice of Yahweh shakes the wilderness;
   Yahweh shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.²

While this sounds very exciting—in many ways—it is also a little scary and sounds suspiciously like a tornado and an earthquake, all wrapped up in one. Or, as they called it this summer in Oklahoma—a quakenado.

The movement that God brings can be pretty earthshaking. Jesus went to the Jordan river to be baptized by John, who was known as the baptizer, appropriately enough. He was probably a member of a group of Jewish men and women known as the Essenes who practiced baptism as a rite of purification to show repentance from sins. It was a ritual for those who needed to turn their lives around—and yet this gospel tells us that Jesus came as the one who would—in baptism—receive and then share the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit—also known as the breath of God—the wind that blew from the power of God into all of creation from the first moment of time. This power was present that day, fanning fire, shaking up the world in a very ordinary moment during a very common ritual for the day.

Baptism was a pretty common practice—gentiles who became Jews were baptized to symbolize their rebirth into a new way of living. Even today, many Jewish converts have a ritual washing in a mikveh or bath used for ritual purposes. And some Jewish people use a mikveh daily for purposes of purification. For the Jewish people, immersion wasn't uncommon for reasons of faith, but this one is different according to Mark.

⁹ The voice of Yahweh causes the oaks to whirl,
   and strips the forest bare;
   and in his temple all say, ‘Glory!’

¹⁰ Yahweh sits enthroned over the flood;
   Yahweh sits enthroned as king for ever.
¹¹ May Yahweh give strength to his people!
   May Yahweh bless his people with peace!³

God's voice is in this baptism—this drenching of the Holy Spirit. Jesus' person was infused and inspired by this act of unity with God's purpose for him. Some call it obedience, but I think that it's more than going along with God's command. It was a coming together and a drawing in of God's realm or kingdom within himself.

Madelein L'Engle draws this picture with words. “Everything we do either draws the Kingdom of love closer, or pushes it further off. That is a fearful responsibility, but when God made “[human beings] in our image, male and female,” responsibility went with it. Too often we want to let somebody else do it, the preach, or the teacher, or the government agency. But if we are to continue to grow in God's image, [Or as God's beloved sons and daughters], then we have to accept the responsibility.”⁴

In our baptisms—by water in any amount or by spirit and always by the very power of God—we were called and proclaimed to carry on this ministry. If it happened decades ago or moments, this is the beginning of Christ's ministry in your life as it exists today. And it begins again tomorrow, always new and as ancient as God's breath stirring up creation.

And so through this baptism and through our own, we are called to begin again the ministry, to continue again the work, to reveal anew and as always, the strength, the blessing and the glory of God within us all. Amen.

1Psalm 29.1-4, NRSV, alt.

2Psalm 29.5-8, NRSV, alt.

3Psalm 29.9-11, NRSV, alt.

4Madeleine L'Engle, And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings, etc. in Resources for Preaching and Worship Year B. p. 43

Sermon December 18, 2011

2 Samuel 7:1–11, 16

Luke 1:47–55

Romans 16:25–27

Luke 1:26–38

“God with Us”

During the Advent Season and during our celebration of Christmas, we can be convinced that the miracles of God are so overwhelming and extraordinary that we should celebrate them with grandiose gestures and extravagance. Yet what made the story of Jesus' birth unique in the ancient world and hopefully in our own, is the miracle of the ordinary.There were already stories of how emperors became sons of God born of virgins in grandiose settings, but this one changes the rules.

Christmas is not about extraordinariness. On the contrary if it is about any [one] thing, it’s about the power of the ordinary to effect God’s purposes. Mary was not chosen to be the mother of Jesus because she was special. She was chosen because she was the epitome of ordinary. A young girl of marriageable age, living an ordinary life in an ordinary town in an ordinary country. There were probably hundreds of other girls who could easily have taken Mary’s place. The fact that God chose her probably had more to do with factors beyond her control – being engaged to a descendant of David, having relatives who were old and barren and of a priestly family – than with any special qualities that she possessed.

This ordinariness is, however, what makes the Christmas story so extraordinary. How could a commoner like this give birth to a child that would be both the fulfillment of God’s promise of an eternal dynasty to David, and God’s Son?¹

About fifteen years ago, Joan Osborne recorded song called “One of Us.”

The words of the chorus:

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us?
Just a stranger on a bus, trying to make his
way home... ²

And that's the message of love this morning, that God becomes one of us—God lives in and with us through the ordinary miracle of conception, gestation and birth, a human being just like we are, like you are, like I am. And through the life of Jesus, is in each one of our lives like never before. And God works through us as ordinary human beings, not because we are unusually talented, graceful or important, but God works through us in ordinary ways.

God came to us in love, through the acceptance of a call by Mary, his mother and through the acceptance of Joseph, her betrothed husband who agreed to take her as his wife. Joseph goes against accepted custom and tradition as well. He stood with Mary, but that day, when Gabriel brought her the news, it seems that it was all up to her. God's messenger, in Greek—angel, came to her and offered her this purpose and mission for her life.

'There is a legend that Mary was not the first young woman to whom the angel came. But she was the first one to say yes.

And how unsurprising it would be for a fourteen-year-old girl to refuse the angel. To be disbelieving. Or to say:

“Are you sure you mean—

but I'm unworthy—

I couldn't anyhow—

I'd be afraid. No, no

it's inconceivable, you can't be asking me—

I know it's a great honour

but would it upset them all,

both our families?

They're very proper you see.

Do I have to answer now?

I don't want to say no—

it's what every girl hopes for

even if she won't admit it.

But I can't commit myself to anything

this important without turning it over

in my mind for a while

and I should ask my parents

and I should ask my—

Let me have a few days to think it over.”

Sorrowfully, although he was not surprised

to have it happen again,

the angel returned to heaven.'³

When the angel, God's messenger, came to Mary, her answer was shorter and much more accepting, but it was risky and made in in credible faith. “Then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ Then the angel departed from her.”⁴

God is with us in our yeses and in our acceptance of God's vision for us. God is with us when we trust that the decisions we make together are God's will and when we recognize that God is accomplishing a new thing in the world today and every day.

In Mary's world and in Mary's time, the people of Israel had been seeking God's acts of change and renewal for awhile. And from time to time, the people found the strength to shout God's word of freedom and God's presence to the oppressor. At this time of year, the Jewish people also celebrate the festival of lights or Hanukkah when the Temple in Jerusalem was liberated from the Greeks who had polluted it. They rededicated the Holy place by burning a lamp for 8 days as the law required, though they had only 1 day's worth of oil. Over and over again, the people had had to take back what had been taken from them, from the Babylonians, from the Greeks and now they were occupied by the world power of the time, the Romans who allowed them to worship, but often used their own leaders to keep them powerless. It is into this world that the angel Gabriel brings the good news to Mary. When she knew that she would give birth to the one that will free them, she accepted the mission because that's what her people had been waiting for. Her people were the powerless of the land, the poor, the nameless and the ordinary.

It is theologically and spiritually significant that the Incarnation came to our poorest streets. That Jesus was born poor, later announces his mission at Nazareth as “bringing good news to the poor,” and finally tells us that how we treat “the least of these” is his measure of how we treat him and how he will judge us as the Son of God, radically defines the social context and meaning of the Incarnation of God in Christ. And it clearly reveals the real meaning of Christmas.

The other explicit message of the Incarnation is that Jesus the Christ’s arrival will mean “peace on earth, good will toward men.” He is “the mighty God, the everlasting Father, and the Prince of Peace.” Jesus later calls on his disciples to turn the other cheek, practice humility, walk the extra mile, put away their swords, love their neighbors — and even their enemies — and says that in his kingdom, it is the peacemakers who will be called the children of God. Christ will end our warring ways, bringing reconciliation to God and to one another.⁵

It is in the poor, the nameless and through the ordinary that God's vision was not lost or watered down as it had been in the relatively powerful who had more to lose. Mary isn't just at the prospect of becoming a mother—she is aware of God's continuing love for her people because God is finally sending—according to this messenger—the one for whom they have waited.

And the angel tells her that her kinswoman Elizabeth was also having a child, a son who would be the forerunner of the Messiah—also a part of the good news. It is when she sees Elizabeth's pregnancy and hears Elizabeth's words of blessing that she sings of God's work in her life—which is for all of her people. She has accepted the mission and in these words we hear what that mission will accomplish, what God with us will do with her “yes”.

God has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
God has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
   and lifted up the lowly;
God has filled the hungry with good things,
   and sent the rich away empty.
God has helped God's servant Israel,
   in remembrance of God's mercy,
according to the promise God made to our ancestors,
   to Abraham and to his descendants for ever.’⁶

She sings, not of a cute and cuddly babe, but of God's work being accomplished and God's life taking form in the world through her son by way of her acceptance of God's will for her life.

[This story is] filled with ordinary people who recognised what God was doing and joined the movement. If we will count ourselves among them, God’s Reign will be manifest that little bit more in our world – and all of those little bits will add up to a truly extraordinary change.⁷

That's what it takes—ordinary people doing bits and pieces, doing what God's messengers reveal in the vision God has given us. Let us follow Mary's example—accepting the mission and purpose we are given—with hope, in peace, with joy and knowing through it all that we are loved.

To the glory of God and the growing of God's holy realm. Amen.

1http://sacredise.com/blog/?p=1096

2“One of Us” Words and Music by Eric Bazilian

3Madeleine L'Engle, And It Was Good: Reflections on Beginnings (Wheaton Ill: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1983) pp. 250-51. Copyright © Crosswicks, 1983, Used by permission of WaterBrook Press, Colorado Springs, CO All rights reserved. In Resources for Preaching and Worship, Year B ed. by Hannah Ward and Jennifer Wild.

4Luke 1:38

5http://sojo.net/blogs/2011/12/15/real-war-christmas-fox-news#.TupVp-DjtHx.facebook

6Luke 1:51b-55

7http://sacredise.com/blog/?p=1096

Sermon December 11, 2011

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11

Psalm 126

1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

John 1:6-8, 19-28

“Hope Restored”

What do we know about faith until we find doubt? How can we answer the pain, sorrow or doubts that plague us until we realize that God is who is there in the need and the desire? How do we dream of the realm of God until we understand that all we desire here and now will fall through our hands and only the love we share with all of creation by the grace of God will last?

The bible was written in an arid land where the return of the wet season meant that flowers would bloom and crops could be grown. People could then count on food to be grown for another season or year. So, in Psalm 126, when the psalmist describes good fortune restored as “ like the watercourses in the Negeb” it can be hard to imagine in a place where overflowing rivers and floods are a bigger problem most years than regular times of drought. We are called to remember that one person's curse maybe another's blessing—and vice versa.

[In South Africa,] “the train which travels from Pretoria to Cape Town takes one through a desert region which can seem very barren. In the spring, however, when the land has been moistened with rain, the landscape changes. Beautiful, brightly coloured flowers cover the round like a mat – an image of abundance, and an image of the metaphor of Psalm 126 – seeds sown in arid soil and watered with tears.”¹

And because it is metaphor, we can understand that times of tears water the soil of our lives and reveal more pleasant times, times of joy. It is not, as some say, that God will not give us more than we can handle—many people have received more than they could handle—but that God's hope is in the everlasting promise of renewal and new life in the face of death and barrenness.

But if good begins to be seen in the midst of the tears, in the seat of sadness, sometimes the joy is hard to imagine. The psalmist begins, “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.” Last week I described how the people of Judea—of Judah and Israel—had been in exile when Isaiah wrote of God's comfort and peace for them upon their return. In the psalm for today, several years after that return, after the joy of going home and rebuilding their cities and lives, they are told to recall that joy in circumstances of loss and sorrow. Remember, the psalmist sang, “We were so happy that we couldn't believe it—it was like a dream.” Remember, the psalmist sang, too, “Our mouths were full of laughter and joy!” Though they had been in exile for years beyond just consequence—according to God—they were returning home with incredible joy and justification. They were happy, full of joy and their restored lives were testimony to God's actions in their lives once again. Once again, they could say, look at the good that God does. Once again they could say, God is good and really believe it.

The psalmist writes this reminder, “We rejoiced,” then, remember. And continues to talk to God directly, “Restore, like a flood in the dry waterway.” It's been so long, God, restore us. Remind us, that if we sow tears, we will reap laughter and joy. We must sow who it is that we are today to reap God's gift of tomorrow and all of the coming tomorrows.

Like before in their life as a nation and in their lives as tribes and communities, horrible awful things had happened and God had restored them, again and again.

Much of the biblical story is spent telling us the same thing over and over again. The bible reminds us in different circumstances and with different words of God's never-ending, constant and insistent movement toward our redemption (salvation from some sort of slavery or oppression) and our happiness and joy (which in its purity comes in our relationship with God.)

In the biblical story, humanity is pursued by God so that our lives can be redeemed from slavery and oppression. And in the biblical story, the oppressor was the one who changed—Israel stayed the same: human, flawed and ever in need and God remained constant: ready to discipline, love and redeem. So slavery and oppression was the evil from which God's people needed rescue.

Where do evil events and systems come from in today's world? Every time I begin to contemplate the existence of evil in the world, I can't help but go back to a couple of sentences I first read a few years ago, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”²

I do believe that humanity is redeemable through the power and grace of God—but we cannot keep pointing fingers at the violent destructive oppression of other people or nations when violence destructive oppression comes from the choices we make, too. Even when we do not intend it, systems that benefit our ways of living cause others pain. And when the responsibility for recognizing the injustice in the world is in large part ours, the mantle is heavy and difficult. “To those whom much is given,” Jesus said, “much is expected.”

This week I read, “When I die and stand before God, I believe I will rail again him for allowing so much suffering and pain, so much injustice and inequality. Like the author of Lamentations, I will ask: “How?” “How could you allow so much pain and inequality.” Only to hear God reply: “How could you?”³

We are given an opportunity to experience the joy that comes from the kind of freedom and restoration the psalmist describes and we do that as we participate in the life and ministry of Christ. When Luke told how Jesus described his own anointed ministry he used part of the text from Isaiah today, bind up the broken-hearted, proclaim liberty to the captive, release to the prisoner, etc. and Isaiah continued, “provide a mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit.”

This mantle of praise reminds us that the responsibility of Jesus' ministry is also our own, brought into our lives through the baptism that we share with him—and shared among all who also share the spirit of Christ in their lives. This is our sharing in the joy of the freedom and restoration for people here and everywhere.

God is at work in every human endeavor that strives for peace and wholeness, even if that peace is partial and that wholeness only glimpsed. [Whatever tiny step we take to make the world more just and whole is all that we need to do. We can't feed the whole world, but we can help a few in this country and also reach out into lands and peoples who don't have this country's resources.] We are leaning toward that day when all things will be whole, not just restored but made new. And this promise isn't for just one nation but for all of God's children; one commentator reminds us that God made promises to Abraham and Sarah about being a blessing to "all the families of the earth" (Genesis 12:1-3). So the healing and compassion will encompass all those who suffer, and the rebuilding will make our social systems as just as our bridges will be made sturdy.⁴

The joy we experience in God's restoration, God's justice, God's wholeness and peace are incredible, but we all know that we cannot accomplish anything alone—not without God and not without our sisters and brothers in Christ and truly, not without the willingness to recognize all people as God's children.

The mantle of praise sound wonderful and exciting, but every mantle that is given by God requires our willingness to wear it with sincerity and with hope—to carry it so that it is not just our own, but it is a gift for all the world.

To God's glory and wearing our mantle of sincere and joyful praise. Amen.

1Seasons of the Spirit Fusion, December 11 Biblical Background.

2 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago

3http://adventretreat.org/

4http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/december-11-2011-third-sunday.html Commentator, Dennis Olson

Sermon December 4, 2011

Isaiah 40:1–11

Psalm 85:1–2, 8–13

2 Peter 3:8–15a

Mark 1:1–8

“Words of Comfort”

There are times in life when what we need is comfort. And then there are times in life where God's comfort may be less comforting than we'd really like.

Imagine, if you will, that you've lived in the same place for about 60 years. Your children were born in the same house you still live in—or just down the road. Your grandchildren were born here, too. You were just a child when you came to live here. Two or three generations of your family have called this place home.

But in addition to this, imagine, too, that your parents came here by force. They were from some distance away and their enemies took them prisoner and that's why you live where you live. This is a little harder to imagine for most of us in this time and place. Maybe it's easier to imagine that they came here because they needed a job or a safer place to live for their family. It may not have completely been their choice, but this place you have called home was where they landed.

And now God is calling you back to the place where your parents were born. You want to go home and be a real people again, practicing a faith that you had to leave behind. On the other hand, you'll have to pack up a lifetime and leave the only home you really remember. After 60 years in exile, your people can go back to the homeland. Are you going to pack up your life and go? Your children and children's children . . . Will they uproot their lives and move back?

Isaiah's words of comfort were written to those people—though they had lived in exile for at least one generation, Jerusalem was still the center of their identity. Isaiah described an incredible vision of home and God was offering it to them—many miles from where they lived. And not surprisingly, many in Babylon refused to move back. They chose to stay where they were, working their jobs, raising their families and living the lives they had always known. They stuck to the status quo—the relative comfort of a known situation. God wanted to give them more than the comfort of what they already knew—what kind of comfort comes through change? Where can comfort come when we are embracing a new vision of life with God and all that God has in store for us and for all people?

We are aware that people in exile, under the boot of an oppressor do look for freedom from that oppression—and that freedom comes at a cost. The oppressor must give up the power to oppress, by force or willingly, and the powerless have to take up the responsibility of power. This prophet writer, in Second Isaiah, reassures the people that though their lives had to change radically—which was what they wanted in some ways—their lives would be changed by a God who was powerful as he wrote in verses 9 and 10.

“Here is your God!’
See, the Lord God comes with might,
   and his arm rules for him”

And God was also gentle, carrying for the smallest and most vulnerable:

“he will gather the lambs in his arms,
and carry them in his bosom,
   and gently lead the mother sheep” (v. 11-12)

And so the prophet emphasized that however the freedom would happen, the people should know that God was the source of their freedom. In the long run, there was no comfort, no safety, no faith and hope without God's actions and work in their lives—and this action and work meant their return to Jerusalem because God was reclaiming them from their time of exile and punishment. Their salvation meant great upheaval and change for them—so you can understand why Isaiah wanted them to know that this was comfort, comfort straight from God's own hand. And this comfort, this security and safety came only from knowing that in the midst of all the confusion and mess, that God was there and God's love and God's word were eternal and forever.

This is the good news from God by way of Isaiah, “Shout it from the mountain top and cry out in the city streets, 'God's people are coming home!” And God's people are coming home because God has forgiven them for their unfaithfulness and their injustices committed against each other. God has forgiven the rulers for taking advantage of the ruled; God has forgiven the priests for thinking only of protecting the livelihood of the temple structure; God had forgiven the merchants and sellers of cheating the poor. God had forgiven all who had taken advantage of anyone who they saw as powerless. These were the transgressions that the writer of the first part of Isaiah and other prophets described as reasons for Israel's exile. This is good news, that though the people were inconstant, God was constant, eternal and forever full of good news and comfort.

The poet-prophet describes a changed landscape, an altering of what is familiar. While the people of God, then and now, were given comfort in the face of radical change and shifting from lives of oppression to lives of relative freedom, they were also reminded that the way of the Lord required their continued and continuing participation in the lives that God would have them live. The valleys lifted, the mountains razed, the rocky places made level, so that God's way of living could be seen and God's way of living be a witness to glorify God everywhere.

Today, God's comfort and God's people are spread throughout the world—so comfort to God's people (all people?) means that somehow this good news of change and transformation (the glory of the Lord) was not limited to one group, but that all people shall see it together. And soon this season we'll read how Jesus' advent into the world was, “good news of great joy for all the people.”¹ The good news of great joy—the glory of the God—these are revealed by the sharing of God's word and by our living out the ways of justice and mercy in the lives of all people

The prophet speaks to the people of God returning from exile. The prophet's message can be taken into our understanding as we seek God's message for this congregation and for this time of history. We seek God's comfort as we understand that God's vision means change—allowing God to move us to the new and old homeland that we scarcely remember anymore. And that new and old place will look very different than we will remember—if we remember it at all. The church of Jesus Christ exists in a different world today than in any time in the past. The God we worship is constant, the world to whom we proclaim the good news changes daily.

As the people of Israel discovered when they went back to a place now called Judea, under their Persian rulers, Jerusalem had to be completely built from scratch—a new city in a land that was not longer very familiar. Their world had changed in their absence. We, too, are called upon to bring Christ with us into a world that no longer just accepts us and trusts us because we claim to be Christians. Our Christianity must be (now more than ever) a sincere witness to the Christ that we welcome into our hearts and lives. Our lives have to match the message of love, justice and mercy that we see in God throughout the life of Jesus. And though Isaiah's witness to humanity admits that we tend to be very fallible—we carry an everlasting message.

All people are grass,
   their constancy is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
   when the breath of the Lord blows upon it;
   surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades;
   but the word of our God will stand for ever. (v. 6b, 7-8)

God is destined to succeed, yes, and we are invited to be a part of the glory that God will bring into the world and to all peoples. No one, not one will be excluded in the invitation—no matter what our feelings may be.

The testimony of Israel, Brueggemann writes, remembers "a past that is saturated with life-giving miracles, not a past filled with self-sufficient achievement," and looks forward to "a future of complete shalom that is free of violence, brutality, competitiveness, and scarcity, a new governance that displaces that of empire." But today matters, too, because "[t]his testimony offers a present tense filled with neighbors to whom we are bound in fidelity, in obligation, and in mutual caring," in justice for all, including "those that the empire finds objectionable and unproductive." So it does matter how we organize our shared life, even in the face of the empires of materialism and militarism that surround us: "It matters if life-giving miracles are scuttled for the sake of can-do achievements....if circumstance-defying promises are silenced for the sake of winning at all costs....if bonded neighbors are excommunicated in a passion for private shalom" (Deep Memory, Exuberant Hope: Contested Truth in a Post-Christian World).

This text is about evangelism, about preaching [and living] the good news of God's love and faithfulness. Knowing what we know about the Jesus for whom we wait, we can agree with Brueggemann that "it is no wonder that part of this poem is quoted in all four Gospels, a text that voices the radical newness that is to be initiated in the story of Jesus" (Texts for Preaching Year B).²

The comfort that God brings may indeed make us uncomfortable—and radical hospitality and widespread transformation will mean unfathomable change—yet our comfort comes in the faith that God's gentle presence is now and forever, always with us and all of God's people.

To the glory of God, witnessed by all people. Amen.

1Luke 2:10b

2http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/december-4-2011-secone-sunday.html