Sermon by Carrie Eikler
Isaiah 60:1-5, Matthew 2:1-12
Celebration of Epiphany
A couple of weeks have gone by since the Winter Solstice and the Longest Night. Believe it or not, the days are actually getting longer. Gradually, you can almost hear the creaking of the returning sun breaking through the darkness.
And if you are inclined to skywatching or star-gazing, you will know that this Solstice was special because for the first time in almost 400 years a full lunar eclipse took place on the Winter Solstice.
This is what we know about this eclipse: A lunar eclipse has not fallen on the Winter solstice since 1638. Think about it, the last time this occurred Galileo himself may have likely watched the phenomenon…perhaps from a window in his villa, where he was on house arrest for heresy.
We also know the moon on this Solstice was called a super moon, which means the moon was the closest to the earth as it will ever be. It appeared absolutely huge. And if you are interested in what some astrologers and astronomers have to say, on this particular night the earth was aligned with the Milky Way’s Galactic Center, the place where the galaxy gives birth to stars.
Now, I don’t know how many of you, like me, crept out of bed early in the morning of December 21st to get a glimpse of this historic event. I figured, I’m usually up at some point between 1:30 and 3:30 in the morning for some night time child tending, so this would give me a nice reward. After all, when we went to bed, the sky was clear, the moon full and bright, the stars just waiting in anticipation for the light of the moon to dim so they could really show off.
So as I crept around in the middle of the night, you can imagine how I felt as I looked out the window, then stuck my head out the door, then ran outside—if only so briefly. Nothin. Lots of clouds, no moon and earth-shadow dancing.
So Morgantown wasn’t so lucky to see the eclipse. Millions of people, avid skywatchers or no, were drawn to the sky that early, early morning. Even the possibility of seeing such a historic, cosmic event, was enough for many to at least try to catch a glimpse of the moon turn blood red as the sun slipped behind the earth.
And whether or not they saw it, if they were like me, we were at least satisfied knowing that we that something was happening. And in some way, we were part of witnessing it. Even if we didn’t see it.
[pause]
And hey, if it didn’t make for an awesome entre into the Christmas story, especially as we lay the foundation for some of the most fascinating characters. Today we celebrate Epiphany, when we celebrate Christ being revealed to the whole world. The Magi, those Sojourners from the East symbolize this. They seek, recognize, and adore the child Jesus as the Christ.
The story of the Magi is unique to Matthew. It does not appear in any other of the gospels depicting Jesus’ births. Somehow we’ve condensed all the different gospel stories of Jesus’ birth into one, making a nice menagerie of sheep and cattle, and lowly shepherds and opulent kings kneeling before the newborn baby in a feeding trough. No gospel story has all of these things.
And Matthew’s depiction of Christ’s birth is as far as you can get from the lowly stable, and the child born to a poor carpenter’s family. Matthew’s story takes place in regal courts, with chief priests and royal foreigners. The story doesn’t so much foretell of the servant who will wash the feet of the poor, but the Messiah who will reign in earth as in heaven. It’s an epic story, completing the line begun with Abraham, this child will save the people.
Our text from Isaiah fits nicely with Matthew’s story. Now Isaiah’s prophecy and wolf and lamb lying down together, that’s a good one for Luke’s story of shepherds and poor wanders. But Matthew…with the Magi, and the royal antagonist, and fear of the people, it’s almost a continuation of Isaiah’s words: “lift up your eyes and look around, they all gather together, they come to you, your sons shall come from far away, and your daughters shall be carried on their nurses’ arms. Then you shall see and be radiant; your heart shall thrill and rejoice”.
The one is born who brings the people to him. He is who they have been seeking for. He is the one getting them out of bed, to run barefoot into the night air turning their heads to the sky. From the far corners they come. His light will shine and we, in turn, will shine as well.
But the Magi are mysterious characters, aren’t they. There’s not much that we know about them. In fact, it is what we don’t know about them that make them such a riveting addition to our nativity scene.
So, this is what we don’t know about them and their journey.
One - The Gospel of Matthew doesn’t say how many Magi there were. Three became the most popular answer because of the three gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But some paintings in Christian catacombs have two or four, some early non-Biblical writings have a list of twelve Magi with names, and some imagine an entire army of Magi, more like what we witness going on in Isaiah 60.
Two- Early Christians didn’t agree on where the Magi were from. The most popular answer was Persia (modern Iran), but others thought they were from Babylon or Arabia. Some believe they came from a land called Shir, which is probably equivalent to China. But we don’t know where they are from.
Three - Nobody knows what the Star of Bethlehem really was. Some early Christians thought it was an angel or the Holy Spirit, and more recent theories include a comet or a supernova. Some early writings lead us to believe that some understood the star to be none other than Christ himself in celestial form.
Four - We don’t know how long it took the Magi to reach Jesus. Based on Herod’s asking of Magi when the star appeared, followed by his command to kill all male infants under the age of two, many Christians thought it took them two years. Some imagined a much faster journey of twelve days, based on the “twelve days of Christmas” between December 25th and the celebration of Epiphany on January 6th. Some early Christian stories even said that the star “carried” the Magi to Bethlehem in the blink of an eye.
Five - We don’t know how the Magi knew that a star signified the birth of the King of the Jews Many Christians thought that the Magi must have known some prophecies that that “a star shall come out of Jacob.” [Numbers 24] In the some ancient writings the Magi are believed to be descendants of Seth, who learned about the prophecy of the star from his father Adam and that the same star used to stand over the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden.
There you have it. Five things we don’t know. And there’s a lot more we don’t know as well. The Magi are a mystery. But we do know one thing. We know they sought the Christ. They streamed over the hills to the light they had seen. With hopes of clear skies and an honest king to give them directions (who we know turns out to be a hypocrite), they stepped into the unknown to follow the star to the Christ.
In the midst of everything we don’t know, we know that they sought him.
There are lots of “who” and “what” and “from where” questions in this story. And there are lots of “whys” as well. If the one thing we know is that the Magi were motivated to find him, the next logical question is “why”? Why did all these people seek the Christ child? Magi, King Herod, the Jewish populace…
Why did they seek him?
Well for the Magi, it simply states they came to pay him homage. However they heard about him, wherever they were from, whatever they hoped to get out of it, they came to honor him…at least honor a moment, and experience that they knew had cosmic repercussions, an event they would never again see in their lifetime.
King Herod, of course, sought him for less noble reasons. Can’t you imagine the hair on the back of his neck prickling up when tehse strangers come asking for the King of the Jews, and it was clear they did not mean him. He may have first written them off as strange, foreign, stargazers, but wait…is that gold I see in your satchel?
Not to mention the problems this could stir up among the Jewish people who had been waiting for a King with Jewish blood, just waiting for the royal descendent they heard about in the synagogues, around the fire, maybe even told to children as bedtime stories…stories about the kingdom of Israel and how a king, like them, would come again.
[pause]
And what about you?
You are here.
In some way, you are seeking the Christ.
For some reason, you are wondering, looking for the meaning of this event.
And there are lots of reasons people seek the Christ, aren’t there? To save you, to motivate you, to guide your decisions, to empower us, to be with us.
If you’re here, you’re seeking him. Enthusiastically or skeptically. Maybe for less than noble reasons, like to appease someone, or to appease yourself. Maybe to help you see the light that can help you, and the world, become radiant-through compassion, justice, and grace. Or maybe you’ve forgotten there is something worth searching for.
Like the Magi, we don’t have to have all the answers, even of ourselves. But we know that we are seeking the Christ, and it is the perfect time of year to ask yourself “why”?
Why do you seek the Christ?
Benediction-
A poem, by Ann Weems, called The World Still Knows
The night is still dark
And a procession of Herods still terrorize the earth,
Killing the children to stay in power.
The world still knows its HErods,
But it also still knows men and women
Who pack their dreams safely in their hearts
And set off toward Bethlehem,
Faithful against all odds,
Undeterred by fatigue or rejection,
To kneel to a child.
And the world still knows those persons
Wise enough
To follow a star,
Those who do not consider themselves too intelligent
Too powerful
Too wealthy
To kneel to a child.
And the world still knows those hearts so humble
That they’re ready
To hear the word of a song
And to leave what they have to go
To kneel to a child
The night is still dark,
But by the light of the star
Even today
We can still see
To kneel to a child.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Sunday, December 19, 2010
The Gifts of Imagination
four small sermons by Carrie Eikler
Matthew 1:18-25, Isaiah 7:10-16
Fourth Sunday in Advent
One
Last week Torin told you about a new billboard that went up just around Thanksgiving outside the Lincoln Tunnel in New York. Above an outline of the 3 magi on their way to the stable, reads the words “You know it’s a myth. This season celebrate reason.” It was put up by the organization called American Atheists. You may be relieved, or humored to know, that a few days after that billboard was put up the Catholic League put up its own sign saying: “You know it’s real. This season celebrate Jesus.”
I have followed some of the dialogue going on about these billboard wars and it is interesting to see how people feel: at least those who blog, tweet, and comment on articles about the signs. Of course, some were furious with the atheists’ billboards and were relieved to see the pro-Christmas sign. Supporters of the pro-reason board laugh at the pro-Christmas billboard but under much of the poking fun, one can sense a seething frustration at misguided and righteous Christians. But a surprising number of people had messages like “I’m a Christian, but the reason sign doesn’t bother me” or “I’m an atheist, but am not offended by the Christian holiday. I say live and let live.” Or “It seems to me this tit for tat is completely against what Christmas is supposed to be about: about love, hope, and generosity.”
While there are a good number of loud voices rallying around each of their signs, it seems, like is often the case, many of the people are stuck somewhere in the tunnel, just wanting to get home to families, or get to work on time, or find some quiet from the all the noise the world throws at them: job layoffs, divorce, unplanned pregnancies...
choir sings "The angel Gabriel"
Two
Signs – "that by which anything is made known or represented; that which furnishes evidence; a mark; a token; an indication; a proof."
Our scriptures are laden with sign imagery. King Ahaz is the king of Judah. Threatened with invasion, the prophet Isaiah tells him to for a sign from God. And he refuses. Why would he refuse? Was he so faithful that he wouldn’t ask that of God? He had a lot to lose, so maybe he is taking the easy way out: “What I don’t know can’t hurt me.”
But Isaiah gives him a sign anyway, at least, a prophecy. And a strange one at that. In Hebrew the translation reads: “Look, the young marriageable woman pregnant, and will bear a son” Before that happens, his kingdom would be spared from invasion. What was this about? Was it to be a messianic prophecy, like Matthew later points back to? Was it simply to be a political prediction? It is not clear, but we can imagine. We can imagine…
Joseph didn’t request a sign. But he got an indication of what was to come. He had a lot to lose. Reputation, respect, honor. He could have her stoned to death, but he chooses to dismiss her. “Quietly” it says. Discreetly. Hush-hush. Maybe the neighbors won’t see. And then it comes. A sign, in the form of an angel. “It can be different than what you expect, Joseph” the angel whispers. “How?” he muses. We might ask the same. How can a baby coming be different than what we expect? We can imagine…
Three
Signs – "that by which anything is made known or represented; that which furnishes evidence; a mark; a token; an indication; a proof."
Christopher Hitchens is one of the most popular atheist thinkers of our time. In his 2007 book called God is Not Great: How religion poisons everything, he wrote “Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important.”
Religion no longer offers an explanation of anything important. What do you think about this statement?
Hitchens argues that the only signs we need to look for are those found in the material world. They only things worth explaining are things that can be explained through reason.
I appreciated what some of the contributors to the Mennonite Church Leader magazine had to say about this dualistic debate. Here are some of their thoughts. “Unfortunately, this brand of debate between since and religion, fact and revelation, faith and reason portrays the [conversation] as an either/or [debate]. [It oversimplifies] complex issues and [leaves] us with answers that do not satisfy. Yet the truth is that science and faith have something significant in common: [that is] their shared passion for mystery. Both religion and science seek to open up Mystery, understand it, know it, and in some form integrate it into the meaning of our lives. And both science and religion must at some point make a leap of the imagination to connect Mystery either to reason or to faith.”
Imagination – "Ability to form mental images, sensations, and concepts in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing, or other senses. The work of the mind that helps create."
“Imagination in the hands of science opens up new avenues of knowledge. [says the authors in "The Leader"] "Imagination in the hands of religion opens up new avenues of hope. ‘Immanuel, God with us’ is more than a neatly packaged theological insight; it is an imaginative leap on the part of humanity and God both.”
The power of imagination, whether through science or religion, is that it opens up new and beautiful vistas of what it means to be human. And discovering new ways to be human, it seems to me, is at the heart of the mystery of Advent.
Four
Last Saturday, Lois Harder, a member of our congregation, took Torin and me to a concert of the Renaissance City Choir in Pittsburgh. And while the voices were enough to draw my eyes closed and send me into the heavens, I found myself wide awake, staring at one person on stage. Not one of the singers, but an important member of the choir, nonetheless: the sign language interpreter.
And at first I thought, how funny, that people who couldn’t hear, or at least who had difficulty hearing, would want to come to a choral concert. I quickly admonished my thought, recognizing that there are those who use sign language who can still hear the music, but can’t hear the words clearly. But maybe even those who were totally deaf could relate to what was going on through the signs.
But why? I thought? If they couldn’t hear the music, why come? If they couldn’t experience it like the rest of us, to experience the audible sound of a 1oo-person choir, how could they experience the beauty?
And I kept watching her—the sign interpreter. I watched how her body moved with the rhythm of the song. How her facial expressions mimicked the tone of the story within the songs.
I watched how there was a wide space of imagination created to connect the signs of her hands to the spirit of the choir’s singing. But I also recognized how that wide space of imagination allowed for an entirely new experience—while I accessed the beauty through my hearing, the signs, and the body, and the expression…the imagination allowed for another way of relating to beauty for the deaf and hard of hearing.
In this wide space of imagination, I realized that two people can come to the same beauty in different ways. And strangely, it was through the signs that I couldn’t understand…that I understood.
Advent is the time to cultivate the imagination. Not to put aside reason in order to blindly believe in a virgin birth or stories of angels. But to imagine about the possibilities. To open up to the mystery and encounter beautiful vistas of what it means to be human. Imagination is sacred because it opens us up to see the sign of God’s advent in our midst.
Where is your imagination being stretched this Advent to see the sign?
Matthew 1:18-25, Isaiah 7:10-16
Fourth Sunday in Advent
One
Last week Torin told you about a new billboard that went up just around Thanksgiving outside the Lincoln Tunnel in New York. Above an outline of the 3 magi on their way to the stable, reads the words “You know it’s a myth. This season celebrate reason.” It was put up by the organization called American Atheists. You may be relieved, or humored to know, that a few days after that billboard was put up the Catholic League put up its own sign saying: “You know it’s real. This season celebrate Jesus.”
I have followed some of the dialogue going on about these billboard wars and it is interesting to see how people feel: at least those who blog, tweet, and comment on articles about the signs. Of course, some were furious with the atheists’ billboards and were relieved to see the pro-Christmas sign. Supporters of the pro-reason board laugh at the pro-Christmas billboard but under much of the poking fun, one can sense a seething frustration at misguided and righteous Christians. But a surprising number of people had messages like “I’m a Christian, but the reason sign doesn’t bother me” or “I’m an atheist, but am not offended by the Christian holiday. I say live and let live.” Or “It seems to me this tit for tat is completely against what Christmas is supposed to be about: about love, hope, and generosity.”
While there are a good number of loud voices rallying around each of their signs, it seems, like is often the case, many of the people are stuck somewhere in the tunnel, just wanting to get home to families, or get to work on time, or find some quiet from the all the noise the world throws at them: job layoffs, divorce, unplanned pregnancies...
choir sings "The angel Gabriel"
Two
Signs – "that by which anything is made known or represented; that which furnishes evidence; a mark; a token; an indication; a proof."
Our scriptures are laden with sign imagery. King Ahaz is the king of Judah. Threatened with invasion, the prophet Isaiah tells him to for a sign from God. And he refuses. Why would he refuse? Was he so faithful that he wouldn’t ask that of God? He had a lot to lose, so maybe he is taking the easy way out: “What I don’t know can’t hurt me.”
But Isaiah gives him a sign anyway, at least, a prophecy. And a strange one at that. In Hebrew the translation reads: “Look, the young marriageable woman pregnant, and will bear a son” Before that happens, his kingdom would be spared from invasion. What was this about? Was it to be a messianic prophecy, like Matthew later points back to? Was it simply to be a political prediction? It is not clear, but we can imagine. We can imagine…
Joseph didn’t request a sign. But he got an indication of what was to come. He had a lot to lose. Reputation, respect, honor. He could have her stoned to death, but he chooses to dismiss her. “Quietly” it says. Discreetly. Hush-hush. Maybe the neighbors won’t see. And then it comes. A sign, in the form of an angel. “It can be different than what you expect, Joseph” the angel whispers. “How?” he muses. We might ask the same. How can a baby coming be different than what we expect? We can imagine…
Three
Signs – "that by which anything is made known or represented; that which furnishes evidence; a mark; a token; an indication; a proof."
Christopher Hitchens is one of the most popular atheist thinkers of our time. In his 2007 book called God is Not Great: How religion poisons everything, he wrote “Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important.”
Religion no longer offers an explanation of anything important. What do you think about this statement?
Hitchens argues that the only signs we need to look for are those found in the material world. They only things worth explaining are things that can be explained through reason.
I appreciated what some of the contributors to the Mennonite Church Leader magazine had to say about this dualistic debate. Here are some of their thoughts. “Unfortunately, this brand of debate between since and religion, fact and revelation, faith and reason portrays the [conversation] as an either/or [debate]. [It oversimplifies] complex issues and [leaves] us with answers that do not satisfy. Yet the truth is that science and faith have something significant in common: [that is] their shared passion for mystery. Both religion and science seek to open up Mystery, understand it, know it, and in some form integrate it into the meaning of our lives. And both science and religion must at some point make a leap of the imagination to connect Mystery either to reason or to faith.”
Imagination – "Ability to form mental images, sensations, and concepts in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing, or other senses. The work of the mind that helps create."
“Imagination in the hands of science opens up new avenues of knowledge. [says the authors in "The Leader"] "Imagination in the hands of religion opens up new avenues of hope. ‘Immanuel, God with us’ is more than a neatly packaged theological insight; it is an imaginative leap on the part of humanity and God both.”
The power of imagination, whether through science or religion, is that it opens up new and beautiful vistas of what it means to be human. And discovering new ways to be human, it seems to me, is at the heart of the mystery of Advent.
Four
Last Saturday, Lois Harder, a member of our congregation, took Torin and me to a concert of the Renaissance City Choir in Pittsburgh. And while the voices were enough to draw my eyes closed and send me into the heavens, I found myself wide awake, staring at one person on stage. Not one of the singers, but an important member of the choir, nonetheless: the sign language interpreter.
And at first I thought, how funny, that people who couldn’t hear, or at least who had difficulty hearing, would want to come to a choral concert. I quickly admonished my thought, recognizing that there are those who use sign language who can still hear the music, but can’t hear the words clearly. But maybe even those who were totally deaf could relate to what was going on through the signs.
But why? I thought? If they couldn’t hear the music, why come? If they couldn’t experience it like the rest of us, to experience the audible sound of a 1oo-person choir, how could they experience the beauty?
And I kept watching her—the sign interpreter. I watched how her body moved with the rhythm of the song. How her facial expressions mimicked the tone of the story within the songs.
I watched how there was a wide space of imagination created to connect the signs of her hands to the spirit of the choir’s singing. But I also recognized how that wide space of imagination allowed for an entirely new experience—while I accessed the beauty through my hearing, the signs, and the body, and the expression…the imagination allowed for another way of relating to beauty for the deaf and hard of hearing.
In this wide space of imagination, I realized that two people can come to the same beauty in different ways. And strangely, it was through the signs that I couldn’t understand…that I understood.
Advent is the time to cultivate the imagination. Not to put aside reason in order to blindly believe in a virgin birth or stories of angels. But to imagine about the possibilities. To open up to the mystery and encounter beautiful vistas of what it means to be human. Imagination is sacred because it opens us up to see the sign of God’s advent in our midst.
Where is your imagination being stretched this Advent to see the sign?
Hope, Doubt and Expectation
sermon by Torin Eikler
Isaiah 35:1-10 Matthew 11:2-11
Patience and I have had a long and strange relationship. When I was a child, I thought like a child. When I wanted something I wanted it, and I wanted it right now. But I was the oldest, and it didn’t take long for me to begin to learn how to wait. That began my long struggle to learn about patience – a journey punctuated by failures and moments of recommitment, and up till just a few years ago, people would have commented regularly on how understanding and tolerant I was … in my work … in my relationships … with my children. That was a matter of pride for me since I had been cultivating a laid-back approach most of my life.
These days, though, I find that I am easily goaded into irrational and even vindictive responses. Sometimes the littlest things (a small foot touching my leg under the table, for instance) spark a dark look or a snappish, “stop it now!” Sometimes my anger nearly gets free, and my voice takes on a life of its own, thundering things that I never expected to come out of my mouth at people who really don’t deserve the stormy response they are getting. If patience is a cardinal virtue than I have most certainly fallen from grace as I suspect we all have from time to time.
Patience doesn’t seem to have been an issue for John the Baptist, though – mostly because he doesn’t seem to have had much to begin with. From the beginning he shouted out his angry frustrations in tirades laced with threats and epithets, preaching fire and brimstone and the judgment to come. Strangely, his angry rants seem to have drawn crowds of people. Some came just for the show. Others took his message to heart and left with new resolution to change their lives. Eventually his critiques got the attention of the rich and powerful landing him in prison, and this man of the wilderness found himself in a dark cell, locked away from the freedom he had known.
I think it must have been hard for him to sit there day after day. No sunlight to order the rhythm of his life. None of the honey he was used to eating (though I suspect he might have appreciated exchanging bread for the locust that had been his mainstay). No one to talk to but the guards and an occasional visitor. If he didn’t know patience before, he must have learned a measure of it there as he waited for the Messiah to fulfill the promises of Isaiah and set the prisoners free.
But time wore on, and the prophesies that John had made did not come to pass. He began to wonder, and his patience wore thin. And that was reason enough for John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus who had jumped for joy when he recognized the messiah while the two were still in the womb, to begin to doubt.
Doubt may seem like a strange theme to bring into Advent with its promises of joy and love and peace for all humanity, but I think it has a place here. There are surveys that suggest that anywhere from 15-30% of people in attendance at any given church service (clergy and laity alike) would say that they don’t really believe in everything the church teaches about Christ: angelic visitors, virgin births, kings following a star to visit a baby god on the strength of a dream. There is a billboard that just went up at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel in New York that pretty well sums it up for many people. It has the well-known Christmas card scene of men on camels headed toward a stable with a star overhead, and it reads, “You KNOW it’s a MYTH. This season celebrate REASON!”
You may or may not be part of the 15-30%, but I think it’s probably safe to say that most of us have our doubts about the story of the nativity, about many of the stories in the Bible, and even (or maybe especially) the some of the teachings of the church. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Doubt is a part of faith. There are some who even say that those of us who experience doubts are closer to the Kingdom than those who are absolutely certain about their beliefs. Doubts drive us back to God, asking again and again: “Is this for real? Are you really that kind of God? Is your love so great that you would actually become human and die for us?” “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” And the same doubts leave us questioning ourselves too. What do we believe? Does it matter what we believe? Should it really change how we live? If it is all true – if Christ really did become human to bring us salvation, what does God expect of us in return?
Expectation … now there’s an idea we are more comfortable with. We’re all about expectation in Advent. We expect snow and cold. We expect crowds of people shopping for the gifts that are expected under the tree on Christmas morning. We expect warmth and holiday cheer in those we meet (though we don’t always find that at the mall). We expect to hear the story of how God came to live among us as a helpless baby in a lowly stable.
But things don’t always meet our expectations. They fall short, or they go beyond. Sometimes events just go in an entirely different direction than we imagined. That shakes us up, gets us out of sorts. I think that’s part of my struggle with patience. My children – other events and other people too, but mostly my children don’t live up to my expectations. They don’t always eat the food we have lovingly prepared. Sometimes they throw it on the floor. They don’t always play nicely together. They hit each other, and they won’t share toys. They don’t always listen to me (that’s a big one). They are generally lovely and well-behaved boys for everyone else, but they just aren’t for me, and somehow that seems to be reason enough for me to get … shall we say “frustrated.”
“Frustrated” might be a good word for John’s response when Jesus didn’t fulfill his hopes. There he was in prison for taking on Herod – for starting the revolution that he expected Jesus to lead and Jesus was healing people, raising them from the dead, and … teaching them. This was not the Messiah that John envisioned. Where was the righteous cleansing? Where were the winnowing fork and the burning chaff? Where was the ax laying waste to the forest of corruption that had so fueled his anger? If this was the one anointed to bring redemption to the Jews, then that redemption was totally different than he had expected.
But God … God is not bound by our expectations, and as maddening as that may be, it’s a good thing. If things always went according to human expectations, who knows what kind of mess we would have made of the world by now. None of us would have envisioned the god-baby Jesus. None of us could have predicted the depth of divine love and mercy. None of us would have framed redemption in terms of the reconciling grace brought by Christ.
In an email discussion this week, one of my colleagues described Mary’s Magnificat as a song of revolt – a song that rejoiced in the promise of change – of human vision broken open by the power of divine love. The Messiah she proclaims would not be what … would not be who people expected. He would come scattering the proud-hearted, bringing down the powerful, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry, and sending the rich away hungry. He would not lead a grand rebellion overthrowing the Roman authorities and gathering the people once more into a great nation. His revolution would change the world in a different way: bringing sight to the blind, healing the lame, cleansing the leprous, raising the dead. Restoring the outcast to society and reconciling humanity to God, he would change the world one person at a time.
It’s a revolution that is still going on. One person at a time, the Child of Hope bring healing and reconciliation. One person at a time, the Prince of Peace brings love and peace into the world. One person at a time – one you and one me – Christ comes into the world, and the promise of the babe in the manger is born.
In little ways – little unexpected ways, the Kingdom of God is coming near. That is reason enough for hope. That is reason enough for faith in the face of doubt. That is reason enough for joy in the midst of our waiting.
Isaiah 35:1-10 Matthew 11:2-11
Patience and I have had a long and strange relationship. When I was a child, I thought like a child. When I wanted something I wanted it, and I wanted it right now. But I was the oldest, and it didn’t take long for me to begin to learn how to wait. That began my long struggle to learn about patience – a journey punctuated by failures and moments of recommitment, and up till just a few years ago, people would have commented regularly on how understanding and tolerant I was … in my work … in my relationships … with my children. That was a matter of pride for me since I had been cultivating a laid-back approach most of my life.
These days, though, I find that I am easily goaded into irrational and even vindictive responses. Sometimes the littlest things (a small foot touching my leg under the table, for instance) spark a dark look or a snappish, “stop it now!” Sometimes my anger nearly gets free, and my voice takes on a life of its own, thundering things that I never expected to come out of my mouth at people who really don’t deserve the stormy response they are getting. If patience is a cardinal virtue than I have most certainly fallen from grace as I suspect we all have from time to time.
Patience doesn’t seem to have been an issue for John the Baptist, though – mostly because he doesn’t seem to have had much to begin with. From the beginning he shouted out his angry frustrations in tirades laced with threats and epithets, preaching fire and brimstone and the judgment to come. Strangely, his angry rants seem to have drawn crowds of people. Some came just for the show. Others took his message to heart and left with new resolution to change their lives. Eventually his critiques got the attention of the rich and powerful landing him in prison, and this man of the wilderness found himself in a dark cell, locked away from the freedom he had known.
I think it must have been hard for him to sit there day after day. No sunlight to order the rhythm of his life. None of the honey he was used to eating (though I suspect he might have appreciated exchanging bread for the locust that had been his mainstay). No one to talk to but the guards and an occasional visitor. If he didn’t know patience before, he must have learned a measure of it there as he waited for the Messiah to fulfill the promises of Isaiah and set the prisoners free.
But time wore on, and the prophesies that John had made did not come to pass. He began to wonder, and his patience wore thin. And that was reason enough for John the Baptist, the cousin of Jesus who had jumped for joy when he recognized the messiah while the two were still in the womb, to begin to doubt.
Doubt may seem like a strange theme to bring into Advent with its promises of joy and love and peace for all humanity, but I think it has a place here. There are surveys that suggest that anywhere from 15-30% of people in attendance at any given church service (clergy and laity alike) would say that they don’t really believe in everything the church teaches about Christ: angelic visitors, virgin births, kings following a star to visit a baby god on the strength of a dream. There is a billboard that just went up at the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel in New York that pretty well sums it up for many people. It has the well-known Christmas card scene of men on camels headed toward a stable with a star overhead, and it reads, “You KNOW it’s a MYTH. This season celebrate REASON!”
You may or may not be part of the 15-30%, but I think it’s probably safe to say that most of us have our doubts about the story of the nativity, about many of the stories in the Bible, and even (or maybe especially) the some of the teachings of the church. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Doubt is a part of faith. There are some who even say that those of us who experience doubts are closer to the Kingdom than those who are absolutely certain about their beliefs. Doubts drive us back to God, asking again and again: “Is this for real? Are you really that kind of God? Is your love so great that you would actually become human and die for us?” “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” And the same doubts leave us questioning ourselves too. What do we believe? Does it matter what we believe? Should it really change how we live? If it is all true – if Christ really did become human to bring us salvation, what does God expect of us in return?
Expectation … now there’s an idea we are more comfortable with. We’re all about expectation in Advent. We expect snow and cold. We expect crowds of people shopping for the gifts that are expected under the tree on Christmas morning. We expect warmth and holiday cheer in those we meet (though we don’t always find that at the mall). We expect to hear the story of how God came to live among us as a helpless baby in a lowly stable.
But things don’t always meet our expectations. They fall short, or they go beyond. Sometimes events just go in an entirely different direction than we imagined. That shakes us up, gets us out of sorts. I think that’s part of my struggle with patience. My children – other events and other people too, but mostly my children don’t live up to my expectations. They don’t always eat the food we have lovingly prepared. Sometimes they throw it on the floor. They don’t always play nicely together. They hit each other, and they won’t share toys. They don’t always listen to me (that’s a big one). They are generally lovely and well-behaved boys for everyone else, but they just aren’t for me, and somehow that seems to be reason enough for me to get … shall we say “frustrated.”
“Frustrated” might be a good word for John’s response when Jesus didn’t fulfill his hopes. There he was in prison for taking on Herod – for starting the revolution that he expected Jesus to lead and Jesus was healing people, raising them from the dead, and … teaching them. This was not the Messiah that John envisioned. Where was the righteous cleansing? Where were the winnowing fork and the burning chaff? Where was the ax laying waste to the forest of corruption that had so fueled his anger? If this was the one anointed to bring redemption to the Jews, then that redemption was totally different than he had expected.
But God … God is not bound by our expectations, and as maddening as that may be, it’s a good thing. If things always went according to human expectations, who knows what kind of mess we would have made of the world by now. None of us would have envisioned the god-baby Jesus. None of us could have predicted the depth of divine love and mercy. None of us would have framed redemption in terms of the reconciling grace brought by Christ.
In an email discussion this week, one of my colleagues described Mary’s Magnificat as a song of revolt – a song that rejoiced in the promise of change – of human vision broken open by the power of divine love. The Messiah she proclaims would not be what … would not be who people expected. He would come scattering the proud-hearted, bringing down the powerful, lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry, and sending the rich away hungry. He would not lead a grand rebellion overthrowing the Roman authorities and gathering the people once more into a great nation. His revolution would change the world in a different way: bringing sight to the blind, healing the lame, cleansing the leprous, raising the dead. Restoring the outcast to society and reconciling humanity to God, he would change the world one person at a time.
It’s a revolution that is still going on. One person at a time, the Child of Hope bring healing and reconciliation. One person at a time, the Prince of Peace brings love and peace into the world. One person at a time – one you and one me – Christ comes into the world, and the promise of the babe in the manger is born.
In little ways – little unexpected ways, the Kingdom of God is coming near. That is reason enough for hope. That is reason enough for faith in the face of doubt. That is reason enough for joy in the midst of our waiting.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
The Gift of Repentance
Sermon by Carrie Eikler
Isaiah, 10:33-11:9, Matthew 3:1-12
Second Sunday in Advent
I think that each generation has a crisis that defines them Actually most generations have a multitude of crises. For people my age, 9-11 was decisive, but we were adults in our early 20s. We analyzed, criticized, pointed fingers with the rest of the adult world we were growing into.
I’d venture to say that for people my age, a critical moment of our childhood was in January 1986 when millions of school children gathered around televisions sets to watch the first public school teacher fly into outer space.
As you know, Christa McAuliff and the rest of the crew of the Challenger never made it. The Challenger exploded in the first few minutes of take off, leaving this eight-year old, and other eight-year olds at the time, forming a critique of technology’s limits because of what we witnessed, because of the fear it caused us.
For my mother, it was the death of John Kennedy. She remembers crying in her cafeteria when she heard the news. And yet for others, in the year before that event, what was going on south of Florida, in Cuba, that shaped the tenor of their fear. In 1962 the Cuban missile crisis brought the threat of nuclear war, literally, to our back door. A new crisis was born in the lives of Americans.
Some of you remember this time. Some of you were children. Some of you feared for your children. The future, undoubtedly, seemed a fragile hope.
It was this fear that prompted the songwriters Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne Baker to write a peace hymn, which became a beloved Christmas song. You probably know it “Said the night wind to the little lamb ‘Do you see what I see?”. This song has been recorded by over 100 different artists.
If you know it well, you likely have the cool crooning of Bing Crosby in your mind, singing one of the most familiar recordings of the song—a version that, ironically, was recorded on the day Kennedy was assassinated.
But as many times as it’s been reinterpreted and recorded, it has at its core an unwavering message: “I am amazed that people think they know the song” said the song’s author Noel Regney, “and not know it was a prayer for peace.”
But more than the images it evokes of shepherd boys and night winds and mighty kings, we are left with a question: do you? Do you see what I see? Do you hear what I hear? Do you know what I know?
Do you?
Do you see the possibility of predators protecting their prey? Of coal companies healing the mountains? Of people actually restraining their consumptive habits? Do you see the possibility of Christians transforming their good intentions into radical acts of faith?
Do you see what God sees?
Do you see the possibility of living without shame? Of bedding down your envy with your potential? Do you see the possibility of living in peace, with yourself?
It’s a sweet, perhaps too sweet, vision, isn’t it?
So it is with questions like this that we cross the threshold into the season of Advent. And like honey dripping off a prophet’s lip we encounter, not a polite invitation, but an urgent demand.
Prepare. Get ready to see what God sees because you’re going to see God. It’s all going to be clear.
Those things you’ve hidden from yourself, you’re gonna see them.
Those things you’ve denied about yourself or the world around you, you’re gonna have to deal with them.
The potential you’ve neglected, the purpose you’ve pushed aside, the blind eye you’ve given to the world’s misery—all of it is going to be crystal clear to you…and where will you be then?
What will you construct to protect yourself when you’re seeing what God’s seeing?
Do you really think you’ll be spared this new sight?
Who warned you to flee the wrath to come?
[pause]
Now I don’t know if this was the most effective way for John the Baptist to proclaim the coming of Jesus. Generally, fear tactics have initial success but don’t really give long term payoffs. But who am I to judge his PR skills? We have to assume that his audience was receptive, at least in part, because their spirits longed for such an invitation, albeit a scary one.
Though, honestly, I can appreciate the invitation to prepare. It assumes some measure of time involved, a process, an orderly sequence of events.
But while we often say that John’s message is about preparation, if we look closely at the text, he does not say “prepare”. The author of Matthew describes this wild-eyed prophet by quoting Isaiah saying this is the one Isaiah spoke about, a “voice of one crying out I the wilderness; ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”
No, John himself does not say "prepare." John says "repent."
That’s a whole another thing, in our minds.
Preparation probably means you know what to expect.
Repentance means anything could happen.
Preparing is logical.
Repenting is messy.
Repentance is not something we think of when we enter into Advent. And it is here that I think we have let the consumer calendar overshadow the church’s calendar. The commercials will tell you that Christmas celebration begins around Thanksgiving, or earlier.
But the church reminds us that to get to that celebration (which begins on Christmas) we move through Advent. A time of waiting. Of preparing our hearts. It is not a time of making orderly lists of gifts, but entering the messy tangle of repentance.
Which is probably what John would say is the best way to prepare ourselves. Like the saying “honesty is the best policy”, John the Baptist tells us “repentance is the best preparation.”
But there is a problem, I think. Most of us don’t like the word repentance. As I forced myself to encounter my hangups about repentance this is what I came up with in some of my writing earlier this week: “Repentance seems like an unobtainable demand , and I am set up for failure. There will always be something I did wrong. Hearing about repentance beats me over the head with my mistakes and constantly reminds me of how unworthy I am.”
What do you think of when you hear the word “repentance”?
How would you feel if someone demand you to repent?
Kathleen Norris writes about helping young children in a parochial school encounter the Psalms by having them write some of their own. One honest little boy wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” In his poem he talked about how his father would often yell at him, and his response to this, in the poem, was to “throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town. The poem concludes: ‘Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, I shouldn’t have done that.’”
“’My messy house’ explains it all,” Norris reflects. “If that boy had been[a young monk] in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?” (A Vocabulary of Faith, 70).
The line of God’s relationship to humanity as seen in scripture from the Garden of Eden on is a dynamic relationship, of God knowing we are more than our messy houses: God making creation good, God being disappointed, God encouraging, God being disappointed, God praising humanity…God being disappointed.
And then as if God knew nothing else to do, God- because of love- came to us.
and bedded down in our messy house.
God probably came in anticipation. God probably had some questions: Will they see me? Will they be prepared for me? Will they repent of those things that keep them from really seeing me? Will they start to see within themselves what I have always known, always heard, always seen?
And—like that honey dripping off the lips of the prophet-- the sticky invitation (slash) demand comes, telling us how to prepare. How to make ourselves ready for the divine and the human to dwell together, without consuming each other, without overpowering, or exploiting.
Prepare for God to lay down with your troubled soul with the gift of repentance.
Repent, not so you are ashamed of what keeps you bound
but to free you so you can begin to see what God sees in you.
Repent, not so you are constantly reminded of how unworthy or wicked you are but
repent
so you can encounter God’s insurmountable love for the world.
[pause]
It would be arrogant to believe that we will see entirely with God’s eyes.
But it would be denying the miracle of the incarnation to believe that we can’t, in some small way, with some small hint of clarity, look for what God sees and hopes for in this world.
And you—can you begin to see what God sees in you?
If not, receive God’s gift.
Prepare.
Repent.
And see.
Isaiah, 10:33-11:9, Matthew 3:1-12
Second Sunday in Advent
I think that each generation has a crisis that defines them Actually most generations have a multitude of crises. For people my age, 9-11 was decisive, but we were adults in our early 20s. We analyzed, criticized, pointed fingers with the rest of the adult world we were growing into.
I’d venture to say that for people my age, a critical moment of our childhood was in January 1986 when millions of school children gathered around televisions sets to watch the first public school teacher fly into outer space.
As you know, Christa McAuliff and the rest of the crew of the Challenger never made it. The Challenger exploded in the first few minutes of take off, leaving this eight-year old, and other eight-year olds at the time, forming a critique of technology’s limits because of what we witnessed, because of the fear it caused us.
For my mother, it was the death of John Kennedy. She remembers crying in her cafeteria when she heard the news. And yet for others, in the year before that event, what was going on south of Florida, in Cuba, that shaped the tenor of their fear. In 1962 the Cuban missile crisis brought the threat of nuclear war, literally, to our back door. A new crisis was born in the lives of Americans.
Some of you remember this time. Some of you were children. Some of you feared for your children. The future, undoubtedly, seemed a fragile hope.
It was this fear that prompted the songwriters Noel Regney and Gloria Shayne Baker to write a peace hymn, which became a beloved Christmas song. You probably know it “Said the night wind to the little lamb ‘Do you see what I see?”. This song has been recorded by over 100 different artists.
If you know it well, you likely have the cool crooning of Bing Crosby in your mind, singing one of the most familiar recordings of the song—a version that, ironically, was recorded on the day Kennedy was assassinated.
But as many times as it’s been reinterpreted and recorded, it has at its core an unwavering message: “I am amazed that people think they know the song” said the song’s author Noel Regney, “and not know it was a prayer for peace.”
But more than the images it evokes of shepherd boys and night winds and mighty kings, we are left with a question: do you? Do you see what I see? Do you hear what I hear? Do you know what I know?
Do you?
Do you see the possibility of predators protecting their prey? Of coal companies healing the mountains? Of people actually restraining their consumptive habits? Do you see the possibility of Christians transforming their good intentions into radical acts of faith?
Do you see what God sees?
Do you see the possibility of living without shame? Of bedding down your envy with your potential? Do you see the possibility of living in peace, with yourself?
It’s a sweet, perhaps too sweet, vision, isn’t it?
So it is with questions like this that we cross the threshold into the season of Advent. And like honey dripping off a prophet’s lip we encounter, not a polite invitation, but an urgent demand.
Prepare. Get ready to see what God sees because you’re going to see God. It’s all going to be clear.
Those things you’ve hidden from yourself, you’re gonna see them.
Those things you’ve denied about yourself or the world around you, you’re gonna have to deal with them.
The potential you’ve neglected, the purpose you’ve pushed aside, the blind eye you’ve given to the world’s misery—all of it is going to be crystal clear to you…and where will you be then?
What will you construct to protect yourself when you’re seeing what God’s seeing?
Do you really think you’ll be spared this new sight?
Who warned you to flee the wrath to come?
[pause]
Now I don’t know if this was the most effective way for John the Baptist to proclaim the coming of Jesus. Generally, fear tactics have initial success but don’t really give long term payoffs. But who am I to judge his PR skills? We have to assume that his audience was receptive, at least in part, because their spirits longed for such an invitation, albeit a scary one.
Though, honestly, I can appreciate the invitation to prepare. It assumes some measure of time involved, a process, an orderly sequence of events.
But while we often say that John’s message is about preparation, if we look closely at the text, he does not say “prepare”. The author of Matthew describes this wild-eyed prophet by quoting Isaiah saying this is the one Isaiah spoke about, a “voice of one crying out I the wilderness; ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”
No, John himself does not say "prepare." John says "repent."
That’s a whole another thing, in our minds.
Preparation probably means you know what to expect.
Repentance means anything could happen.
Preparing is logical.
Repenting is messy.
Repentance is not something we think of when we enter into Advent. And it is here that I think we have let the consumer calendar overshadow the church’s calendar. The commercials will tell you that Christmas celebration begins around Thanksgiving, or earlier.
But the church reminds us that to get to that celebration (which begins on Christmas) we move through Advent. A time of waiting. Of preparing our hearts. It is not a time of making orderly lists of gifts, but entering the messy tangle of repentance.
Which is probably what John would say is the best way to prepare ourselves. Like the saying “honesty is the best policy”, John the Baptist tells us “repentance is the best preparation.”
But there is a problem, I think. Most of us don’t like the word repentance. As I forced myself to encounter my hangups about repentance this is what I came up with in some of my writing earlier this week: “Repentance seems like an unobtainable demand , and I am set up for failure. There will always be something I did wrong. Hearing about repentance beats me over the head with my mistakes and constantly reminds me of how unworthy I am.”
What do you think of when you hear the word “repentance”?
How would you feel if someone demand you to repent?
Kathleen Norris writes about helping young children in a parochial school encounter the Psalms by having them write some of their own. One honest little boy wrote a poem called “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” In his poem he talked about how his father would often yell at him, and his response to this, in the poem, was to “throw his sister down the stairs, and then to wreck his room, and finally to wreck the whole town. The poem concludes: ‘Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, I shouldn’t have done that.’”
“’My messy house’ explains it all,” Norris reflects. “If that boy had been[a young monk] in the fourth-century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?” (A Vocabulary of Faith, 70).
The line of God’s relationship to humanity as seen in scripture from the Garden of Eden on is a dynamic relationship, of God knowing we are more than our messy houses: God making creation good, God being disappointed, God encouraging, God being disappointed, God praising humanity…God being disappointed.
And then as if God knew nothing else to do, God- because of love- came to us.
and bedded down in our messy house.
God probably came in anticipation. God probably had some questions: Will they see me? Will they be prepared for me? Will they repent of those things that keep them from really seeing me? Will they start to see within themselves what I have always known, always heard, always seen?
And—like that honey dripping off the lips of the prophet-- the sticky invitation (slash) demand comes, telling us how to prepare. How to make ourselves ready for the divine and the human to dwell together, without consuming each other, without overpowering, or exploiting.
Prepare for God to lay down with your troubled soul with the gift of repentance.
Repent, not so you are ashamed of what keeps you bound
but to free you so you can begin to see what God sees in you.
Repent, not so you are constantly reminded of how unworthy or wicked you are but
repent
so you can encounter God’s insurmountable love for the world.
[pause]
It would be arrogant to believe that we will see entirely with God’s eyes.
But it would be denying the miracle of the incarnation to believe that we can’t, in some small way, with some small hint of clarity, look for what God sees and hopes for in this world.
And you—can you begin to see what God sees in you?
If not, receive God’s gift.
Prepare.
Repent.
And see.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Wait-ing for God-with-us
sermon by Torin Eikler
Isaiah 2:1-4 Matthew 24:36-44
I want to introduce you to a quirky little group of people I first met back in the last 90s. The five of them: a dentist, two travel agents, a Dairy Queen employee, and a small time theater producer live in a small Missouri town called Blaine that claims the first alien visitation and was once famous for the stools produced there. By the time I met them, the town they lived in had become a small, depressed community clinging to its heritage just like so many communities in the Midwest, but they had a dream of putting it back on the national stage by putting on a Tony-award-worthy musical celebrating the town’s history
Over the course of several weeks, they overcome a lack of funding as well as several other obstacles (including their own lack of any real talent) and put the show together for the sesquicentennial celebrations. The real coup, though, is that using his New York connections, Corky arranged for a representative of the prestigious Oppenheimer Organization named Mort Guffman to come and watch the production. If Mr. Guffman liked the show, Corky said, they would have a good chance of taking it to Broadway.
You should know (if you haven’t figured it out yet) that this is not the real world … not exactly. This is the world of a satirical movie called “Waiting for Guffman” that has become something of a cult classic on a small scale. As the title suggests, the climax of the movie comes on opening night when the cast and crew are waiting anxiously for Mr. Guffman to show up so that they can start the show, having pinned all their hopes for a golden future on what is sure to be his good review. But Guffman is late, and so they wait and wait … and wait. And the audience waits and waits … and waits.
(pause)
That’s one kind of waiting – nervous waiting, waiting with anticipation, waiting for something that will change your life … maybe save it? Or, if you’re in the audience, it’s waiting with frustration for a distraction that you’ve been looking forward to.
(pause)
Let me tell you how the story ends. I’d hate to keep you waiting, after all.
Of course, the show has to start eventually. So, they begin, all the time keeping an eye out to see if the empty chair in the front row has been filled. Finally, just before the intermission an elderly gentleman is directed to the chair, and the cast throws everything they have into the second act. When it’s all over and they have taken their final bows, they wait eagerly in the dressing room only to discover that the man in question is not the right guy. Mr. Guffman, as it turns out, was not able to attend the show. And life goes on in Blaine – plain ordinary life, life with a little less luster for the hope unfulfilled.
Now let me introduce you to another group of wait-ers. This one is much, much bigger, and it has been growing for a long, long time. In the beginning, it was a movement of just a few thousand people spread across a lot of space, and they were waiting for a prophecy to be fulfilled. That prophesy said that Christ would return before the first generation of his followers passed away, and they interpreted it literally. So, they, too, were waiting and waiting … and waiting. Waiting together. Waiting through suffering and persecution. Waiting in poverty. Waiting with anticipation. Waiting with hope. Waiting for the promised Kingdom of peace and love foretold by the prophets and by Christ himself.
(pause)
Well, it didn’t happen. The first generation came and went, and no parousia – no second coming. And life went on in the Roman Empire, BUT … But the hope and the promise did not die. It was passed on from generation to generation, and down through the ages, believers have been waiting. At times, when prophetic reminders swayed them enough, people have sold all they own in preparation or gathered on hill tops to await the coming of the Lamb. Once, they even overthrew the government of Muster, Germany, convinced that it would become the New Jerusalem – the capital of the Kingdom that was coming.
Most of the time that hasn’t happened. Most of the time Christians have lived “normal” lives. Most of the time they have lived, in large part, like we do. They … and we find a way to muddle through: marrying and having families (if that comes our way), earning money to make ends meet, eating, drinking, sleeping, etc., etc., etc.
Each year at the beginning of Advent, we hear the story of Jesus’ birth again. Each year, we are reminded of the way God broke into the world at an unexpected time in and unexpected way. Each year we hear the promise echoing down the centuries, and we pick up the anticipation that we have left behind as the months wore on. And we get excited. And we sing hosannas. And we wonder at the strange compassion of a God who would become human and dwell with us.
And then life goes on. The trappings of Christmas are put away along with the Holiday spirit of warm generosity, and we take up the task of making it through another year – paying bills (sometimes too big), losing the weight we may have gained, shoveling the snow, and all the rest. And, the anticipation wanes. The hope stays with us, but the sense of expectation fades away.
(pause)
It’s hard to hold onto a sense of expectation. As days and weeks pass we get a sort of “anticipation fatigue.” Our emotional, spiritual, and physical selves get tired of being held at the ready. We come to expect that nothing will change, and we fall back into old patterns - senses dulled, sense of wonder submerged, both overwhelmed by our sense that God’s timing is inexplicable. It is hard to stay alert, especially when you don’t know what is coming or when it will arrive.
That makes it particularly hard to follow the implied command that Jesus gives to his disciples in the guise of a metaphor. “If the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore, you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
How does one do that? How do you prepare for an unknown thief who will come at an unknown time? Do you put in an alarm system, giving it your confidence and giving the thief time to figure out how to circumvent it? Do you hire security guards to watch around the clock, knowing that they will eventually succumb to the same fatigue I mentioned earlier? Would any of that really work against someone determined to get in?
When I was in elementary school, I participated in the Olympics of the Mind (it’s Odyssey of the Mind now … the International Olympic Committee objected to the name). It’s a program that challenges students to solve problems in creative ways, and one of the things they focus on is teaching you to think outside the box. It’s a useful skill, and it’s kind of fun. For example, one task we were given was to name as many keys as we could. The straightforward answers, of course, are things like car keys and house keys, but there are also monkeys and the Florida Keys. I think you can see how kids might enjoy this kind of challenge.
Apply this way of thinking to the question of being ready for a thief. What do you come up with?
(pause)
(I’ll give you a break. You haven’t had much time to think after all.) Here are a couple of ideas that I came up with.
You could leave your home completely unlocked and keep nothing there that someone would want to take. Or you could put up a sign inviting everyone who comes to your home to come in and join you for tea (I’m so sure that one would always work). Or you could work at changing the world around you so that nobody would need to take things from other people.
All three of those ideas require us to think and live in a different way, but isn’t that really what Jesus was challenging us with in his teaching and his living? Remember all those “you have heard it said …, but I say to you …” statements in the Sermon on the Mount. Loving enemies, turning the other cheek, and welcoming the stranger are all still huge reversals in our thinking today. The idea that in the Kingdom of Heaven the poorest, most despised members of society might have the highest status, if you really think about it, still defies our expectations – at least if the way we live is any indication. Yet these things define how we understand our dreams of the ultimate future and our lives as disciples in the present. These are the visions that we get so excited about when Advent comes along. They are the reality at the heart of the promise we hope for and wait for with or without an urgent sense of anticipation.
Often when modern pastors or theologians talk about Christian living we try to verb nouns. We characterize faith as not just a thing we have but a way that we live. We disciple people on their faith journeys. We belong people into the congregation even before they share our beliefs. But in this case, we might do well to noun a verb. Let us take the verb “wait” out of our everyday lives where it becomes a placid, tedious pause empty of action and make it something more exciting. We won’t even have to make up a new meaning. We just need to return to an old one.
“Wait,” as a noun, once meant a night watchman and developed over time into a name for a band of musicians who go around the streets during the Christmas season playing carols. What if we became a wait of sorts, wandering the streets around us while singing out the good news that God came to live with us and will come to be with us once more?
What if we went a bit farther … made our wait a little more hands on? We could share our wealth with those in need. We could care for those who are sick and alone. We could reach out with compassion to those that society despises. We could shine the light of hope and promise into the darkness of despair that sometimes seems to be overwhelming the world.
In that way, we would be living into being in a small way the promise of what is to come. We would be anticipating the Kingdom of God by living as if it were already here – as if peace, love, justice and mercy already ruled the world. And when God’s time is fulfilled, we will be ready and wait-ing to welcome the Son of Man among us.
Isaiah 2:1-4 Matthew 24:36-44
I want to introduce you to a quirky little group of people I first met back in the last 90s. The five of them: a dentist, two travel agents, a Dairy Queen employee, and a small time theater producer live in a small Missouri town called Blaine that claims the first alien visitation and was once famous for the stools produced there. By the time I met them, the town they lived in had become a small, depressed community clinging to its heritage just like so many communities in the Midwest, but they had a dream of putting it back on the national stage by putting on a Tony-award-worthy musical celebrating the town’s history
Over the course of several weeks, they overcome a lack of funding as well as several other obstacles (including their own lack of any real talent) and put the show together for the sesquicentennial celebrations. The real coup, though, is that using his New York connections, Corky arranged for a representative of the prestigious Oppenheimer Organization named Mort Guffman to come and watch the production. If Mr. Guffman liked the show, Corky said, they would have a good chance of taking it to Broadway.
You should know (if you haven’t figured it out yet) that this is not the real world … not exactly. This is the world of a satirical movie called “Waiting for Guffman” that has become something of a cult classic on a small scale. As the title suggests, the climax of the movie comes on opening night when the cast and crew are waiting anxiously for Mr. Guffman to show up so that they can start the show, having pinned all their hopes for a golden future on what is sure to be his good review. But Guffman is late, and so they wait and wait … and wait. And the audience waits and waits … and waits.
(pause)
That’s one kind of waiting – nervous waiting, waiting with anticipation, waiting for something that will change your life … maybe save it? Or, if you’re in the audience, it’s waiting with frustration for a distraction that you’ve been looking forward to.
(pause)
Let me tell you how the story ends. I’d hate to keep you waiting, after all.
Of course, the show has to start eventually. So, they begin, all the time keeping an eye out to see if the empty chair in the front row has been filled. Finally, just before the intermission an elderly gentleman is directed to the chair, and the cast throws everything they have into the second act. When it’s all over and they have taken their final bows, they wait eagerly in the dressing room only to discover that the man in question is not the right guy. Mr. Guffman, as it turns out, was not able to attend the show. And life goes on in Blaine – plain ordinary life, life with a little less luster for the hope unfulfilled.
Now let me introduce you to another group of wait-ers. This one is much, much bigger, and it has been growing for a long, long time. In the beginning, it was a movement of just a few thousand people spread across a lot of space, and they were waiting for a prophecy to be fulfilled. That prophesy said that Christ would return before the first generation of his followers passed away, and they interpreted it literally. So, they, too, were waiting and waiting … and waiting. Waiting together. Waiting through suffering and persecution. Waiting in poverty. Waiting with anticipation. Waiting with hope. Waiting for the promised Kingdom of peace and love foretold by the prophets and by Christ himself.
(pause)
Well, it didn’t happen. The first generation came and went, and no parousia – no second coming. And life went on in the Roman Empire, BUT … But the hope and the promise did not die. It was passed on from generation to generation, and down through the ages, believers have been waiting. At times, when prophetic reminders swayed them enough, people have sold all they own in preparation or gathered on hill tops to await the coming of the Lamb. Once, they even overthrew the government of Muster, Germany, convinced that it would become the New Jerusalem – the capital of the Kingdom that was coming.
Most of the time that hasn’t happened. Most of the time Christians have lived “normal” lives. Most of the time they have lived, in large part, like we do. They … and we find a way to muddle through: marrying and having families (if that comes our way), earning money to make ends meet, eating, drinking, sleeping, etc., etc., etc.
Each year at the beginning of Advent, we hear the story of Jesus’ birth again. Each year, we are reminded of the way God broke into the world at an unexpected time in and unexpected way. Each year we hear the promise echoing down the centuries, and we pick up the anticipation that we have left behind as the months wore on. And we get excited. And we sing hosannas. And we wonder at the strange compassion of a God who would become human and dwell with us.
And then life goes on. The trappings of Christmas are put away along with the Holiday spirit of warm generosity, and we take up the task of making it through another year – paying bills (sometimes too big), losing the weight we may have gained, shoveling the snow, and all the rest. And, the anticipation wanes. The hope stays with us, but the sense of expectation fades away.
(pause)
It’s hard to hold onto a sense of expectation. As days and weeks pass we get a sort of “anticipation fatigue.” Our emotional, spiritual, and physical selves get tired of being held at the ready. We come to expect that nothing will change, and we fall back into old patterns - senses dulled, sense of wonder submerged, both overwhelmed by our sense that God’s timing is inexplicable. It is hard to stay alert, especially when you don’t know what is coming or when it will arrive.
That makes it particularly hard to follow the implied command that Jesus gives to his disciples in the guise of a metaphor. “If the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. Therefore, you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
How does one do that? How do you prepare for an unknown thief who will come at an unknown time? Do you put in an alarm system, giving it your confidence and giving the thief time to figure out how to circumvent it? Do you hire security guards to watch around the clock, knowing that they will eventually succumb to the same fatigue I mentioned earlier? Would any of that really work against someone determined to get in?
When I was in elementary school, I participated in the Olympics of the Mind (it’s Odyssey of the Mind now … the International Olympic Committee objected to the name). It’s a program that challenges students to solve problems in creative ways, and one of the things they focus on is teaching you to think outside the box. It’s a useful skill, and it’s kind of fun. For example, one task we were given was to name as many keys as we could. The straightforward answers, of course, are things like car keys and house keys, but there are also monkeys and the Florida Keys. I think you can see how kids might enjoy this kind of challenge.
Apply this way of thinking to the question of being ready for a thief. What do you come up with?
(pause)
(I’ll give you a break. You haven’t had much time to think after all.) Here are a couple of ideas that I came up with.
You could leave your home completely unlocked and keep nothing there that someone would want to take. Or you could put up a sign inviting everyone who comes to your home to come in and join you for tea (I’m so sure that one would always work). Or you could work at changing the world around you so that nobody would need to take things from other people.
All three of those ideas require us to think and live in a different way, but isn’t that really what Jesus was challenging us with in his teaching and his living? Remember all those “you have heard it said …, but I say to you …” statements in the Sermon on the Mount. Loving enemies, turning the other cheek, and welcoming the stranger are all still huge reversals in our thinking today. The idea that in the Kingdom of Heaven the poorest, most despised members of society might have the highest status, if you really think about it, still defies our expectations – at least if the way we live is any indication. Yet these things define how we understand our dreams of the ultimate future and our lives as disciples in the present. These are the visions that we get so excited about when Advent comes along. They are the reality at the heart of the promise we hope for and wait for with or without an urgent sense of anticipation.
Often when modern pastors or theologians talk about Christian living we try to verb nouns. We characterize faith as not just a thing we have but a way that we live. We disciple people on their faith journeys. We belong people into the congregation even before they share our beliefs. But in this case, we might do well to noun a verb. Let us take the verb “wait” out of our everyday lives where it becomes a placid, tedious pause empty of action and make it something more exciting. We won’t even have to make up a new meaning. We just need to return to an old one.
“Wait,” as a noun, once meant a night watchman and developed over time into a name for a band of musicians who go around the streets during the Christmas season playing carols. What if we became a wait of sorts, wandering the streets around us while singing out the good news that God came to live with us and will come to be with us once more?
What if we went a bit farther … made our wait a little more hands on? We could share our wealth with those in need. We could care for those who are sick and alone. We could reach out with compassion to those that society despises. We could shine the light of hope and promise into the darkness of despair that sometimes seems to be overwhelming the world.
In that way, we would be living into being in a small way the promise of what is to come. We would be anticipating the Kingdom of God by living as if it were already here – as if peace, love, justice and mercy already ruled the world. And when God’s time is fulfilled, we will be ready and wait-ing to welcome the Son of Man among us.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Willing and Stirred. Building and Becoming.
Celebration Sunday sermon
by Carrie Eikler
Exodus 35:20-29
Who here likes to sing?
Who loves to sing?
I like to sing, there's no doubt about it.
But if you had the choice between hearing me belt out a solo, or say, Marge or Cindy, or Jacob Lewellen sing a solo, you wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you choice one of the Lewellen’s.
And I'm not saying I'm a bad singer, I'm not. I have a decent, steady alto voice (emphasis on decent).
But I was humbled, as I stood next to Elesha Coffman last Sunday at choir practice.whoa. I mean, I can sing…but she can sing.
It was enough to make me want to lower my enthusiastic warbling and let her be the entire alto section
Singing is not my gift. It's more like a stocking stuffer--a nice bonus, but not what gets kids out of bed at 5 oclock on Christmas morning.
I sing because I like to. I'm in the choir because I'm willing. It's not my most favorite thing to do.
If you gave me the choice between choir practice and having the same people around a dinner table for a meal I cooked, I'd probably choose the meal. Sorry, Cindy, but there you have it.
I'm willing to sing in choir. I’m happy to do it.
Bring people around the table? That’s my passion. That’s what stirs my soul.
Willing and stirred.
Before the temple was built in Jerusalem, we have the wandering Hebrews, following Moses, taking their place of worship with them. The tabernacle…a mobile synagogue of sorts.
And the people are bringing their very best offerings…what their hearts were willing to give, but also, what their spirits were stirred to give.
Out of all the scriptural allusions about individuals bringing their gifts to the building up of the reign of God, this is my favorite. Because in a way, it’s not just about building, it’s about becoming the people of God.
It’s about making it beautiful, …a celebration…a stirring of souls
In your hands, you have chosen a beautiful object. For some reason you were drawn to it. Think of this as your gift, a symbol of what stirs you, what it is in this world makes your spirit find its home as you wander and navigate through life. Take a moment, and feel this gift that God has given you.
What stirs you?
[pause]
Call me a cynic, but I believe much of what is done in our congregation, and in many congregations, are done with willing hearts.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to have willing workers, or nothing would get done. But done with a spirit that is stirred?…I have a feeling that is done elsewhere.
I’d venture to guess that for many of you, your stirring is seen most clearly and passionately…somewhere else.
Not in the confines of this church building, or on leadership teams, or in meetings.
Maybe it is, but I would guess that if you looked at where you lived most passionately, excitedly…where you were stirred by God’s gifts, it is probably out in your everyday life, where you spend your free time (free time?), your hobbies, your activities…
Your spirits are probably stirred elsewhere
[pause]
And AMEN FOR THAT! Thank you, for offering your gifts to God in the world.
THANK YOU for stirring the spirit among your neighbors, or co-workers, or children, or friends.
THANK YOU for uncovering God out there where God has always been and meeting Christ in the messy and marvelous world, in the broken and blessed world. THANK YOU!
And we as a congregation, made up of diverse people have them as well. It can be a joy and a challenge to see what beautiful addition we might bring as an offering. And while we know we have gifts, it’s all too easy to measure our gift against the gift of other congregations, isn’t it. In the same way compare our individual gifts to others.
We’re not the biggest.
But we welcome the stranger.
You don’t see our church name on hip coffeeshops or billboards or leaflets handed out at parades.
But you do see our members involved in their communities doing the work of justice and peace and beauty.
We shy away from the word evangelism,
but we relish in the word outreach.
We get nervous about the word conversion,
but ponder the significance of transformation.
I don’t hear many of you talk about “personal relationship with Jesus ”
but I’ve seen you sit with each other in love while you struggle to understand how to be a disciple of Christ .
But above all, even if you are simply a willing participant in this church, I believe that this congregation feeds and encourages the stirrings of each of your souls, so you can be the church in the world. We give you strength for the journey.
And I hope that is why you give yourself to this congregation. Not because you are simply willing, but because you are reminded to attend to Christ in the world…in your own soul…to remind you that you are blessed.
Would you agree?
These are our gifts. This is what we bring to the building up of God’s kingdom, this is us becoming the people of God.
In his book, A Hidden Wholeness Parker Palmer speaks about farmers on the Great Plains who would tie a rope from their house to their barn at the first sight of a blizzard.
Occasionally people would freeze to death by simply going to their barns in the middle of a blizzard.
Believing they could find their way back to their homes in the whiteout of snow they would become stranded in their own backyards.
But if they had a rope, it would guide them safely in the midst of the swirling storm.
When I try to flesh out our gifts, have a visual of what we are becoming, it is this image that comes to me, most clearly.
God has made us, as a congregation, into a very good rope.
This rope which leads its members out into the storm and guides them back to the heart of God. That is the offering we bring.
All of us, with our different stirrings, and willing hearts, travel this rope to show God’s peace, love, and grace to a world a wash in a blizzard.
arker Palmer reflects on the importance of such a rope. It helps us catch sight of the soul, the heart of God.
He says, “When we catch sight of the soul, we can survive the blizzard without losing our hope or our way. When we catch sight of the soul, we can become healers in a wounded world—in the family, in the neighborhood, in the workplace—as we are called back to our “hidden wholeness” amid the storms.
As you offer your gifts to the world, we are the rope that helps you catch sight of your soul.
During our time of communion later in the service, you’ll have a chance to attach your gift to an actual rope: Making it beautiful, giving it color and texture, weaving it with your gifts.
Until that time, hold your gift throughout the service and pour into it your prayers, and your hope for our congregation as we hear stories and sing songs celebrating who we are as a congregation.
May God continue to bless us…and celebrate us…in the journey.
As we give thanks to the one who created us and blessed us. Alleluia and Amen.
by Carrie Eikler
Exodus 35:20-29
Who here likes to sing?
Who loves to sing?
I like to sing, there's no doubt about it.
But if you had the choice between hearing me belt out a solo, or say, Marge or Cindy, or Jacob Lewellen sing a solo, you wouldn’t hurt my feelings if you choice one of the Lewellen’s.
And I'm not saying I'm a bad singer, I'm not. I have a decent, steady alto voice (emphasis on decent).
But I was humbled, as I stood next to Elesha Coffman last Sunday at choir practice.whoa. I mean, I can sing…but she can sing.
It was enough to make me want to lower my enthusiastic warbling and let her be the entire alto section
Singing is not my gift. It's more like a stocking stuffer--a nice bonus, but not what gets kids out of bed at 5 oclock on Christmas morning.
I sing because I like to. I'm in the choir because I'm willing. It's not my most favorite thing to do.
If you gave me the choice between choir practice and having the same people around a dinner table for a meal I cooked, I'd probably choose the meal. Sorry, Cindy, but there you have it.
I'm willing to sing in choir. I’m happy to do it.
Bring people around the table? That’s my passion. That’s what stirs my soul.
Willing and stirred.
Before the temple was built in Jerusalem, we have the wandering Hebrews, following Moses, taking their place of worship with them. The tabernacle…a mobile synagogue of sorts.
And the people are bringing their very best offerings…what their hearts were willing to give, but also, what their spirits were stirred to give.
Out of all the scriptural allusions about individuals bringing their gifts to the building up of the reign of God, this is my favorite. Because in a way, it’s not just about building, it’s about becoming the people of God.
It’s about making it beautiful, …a celebration…a stirring of souls
In your hands, you have chosen a beautiful object. For some reason you were drawn to it. Think of this as your gift, a symbol of what stirs you, what it is in this world makes your spirit find its home as you wander and navigate through life. Take a moment, and feel this gift that God has given you.
What stirs you?
[pause]
Call me a cynic, but I believe much of what is done in our congregation, and in many congregations, are done with willing hearts.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to have willing workers, or nothing would get done. But done with a spirit that is stirred?…I have a feeling that is done elsewhere.
I’d venture to guess that for many of you, your stirring is seen most clearly and passionately…somewhere else.
Not in the confines of this church building, or on leadership teams, or in meetings.
Maybe it is, but I would guess that if you looked at where you lived most passionately, excitedly…where you were stirred by God’s gifts, it is probably out in your everyday life, where you spend your free time (free time?), your hobbies, your activities…
Your spirits are probably stirred elsewhere
[pause]
And AMEN FOR THAT! Thank you, for offering your gifts to God in the world.
THANK YOU for stirring the spirit among your neighbors, or co-workers, or children, or friends.
THANK YOU for uncovering God out there where God has always been and meeting Christ in the messy and marvelous world, in the broken and blessed world. THANK YOU!
And we as a congregation, made up of diverse people have them as well. It can be a joy and a challenge to see what beautiful addition we might bring as an offering. And while we know we have gifts, it’s all too easy to measure our gift against the gift of other congregations, isn’t it. In the same way compare our individual gifts to others.
We’re not the biggest.
But we welcome the stranger.
You don’t see our church name on hip coffeeshops or billboards or leaflets handed out at parades.
But you do see our members involved in their communities doing the work of justice and peace and beauty.
We shy away from the word evangelism,
but we relish in the word outreach.
We get nervous about the word conversion,
but ponder the significance of transformation.
I don’t hear many of you talk about “personal relationship with Jesus ”
but I’ve seen you sit with each other in love while you struggle to understand how to be a disciple of Christ .
But above all, even if you are simply a willing participant in this church, I believe that this congregation feeds and encourages the stirrings of each of your souls, so you can be the church in the world. We give you strength for the journey.
And I hope that is why you give yourself to this congregation. Not because you are simply willing, but because you are reminded to attend to Christ in the world…in your own soul…to remind you that you are blessed.
Would you agree?
These are our gifts. This is what we bring to the building up of God’s kingdom, this is us becoming the people of God.
In his book, A Hidden Wholeness Parker Palmer speaks about farmers on the Great Plains who would tie a rope from their house to their barn at the first sight of a blizzard.
Occasionally people would freeze to death by simply going to their barns in the middle of a blizzard.
Believing they could find their way back to their homes in the whiteout of snow they would become stranded in their own backyards.
But if they had a rope, it would guide them safely in the midst of the swirling storm.
When I try to flesh out our gifts, have a visual of what we are becoming, it is this image that comes to me, most clearly.
God has made us, as a congregation, into a very good rope.
This rope which leads its members out into the storm and guides them back to the heart of God. That is the offering we bring.
All of us, with our different stirrings, and willing hearts, travel this rope to show God’s peace, love, and grace to a world a wash in a blizzard.
arker Palmer reflects on the importance of such a rope. It helps us catch sight of the soul, the heart of God.
He says, “When we catch sight of the soul, we can survive the blizzard without losing our hope or our way. When we catch sight of the soul, we can become healers in a wounded world—in the family, in the neighborhood, in the workplace—as we are called back to our “hidden wholeness” amid the storms.
As you offer your gifts to the world, we are the rope that helps you catch sight of your soul.
During our time of communion later in the service, you’ll have a chance to attach your gift to an actual rope: Making it beautiful, giving it color and texture, weaving it with your gifts.
Until that time, hold your gift throughout the service and pour into it your prayers, and your hope for our congregation as we hear stories and sing songs celebrating who we are as a congregation.
May God continue to bless us…and celebrate us…in the journey.
As we give thanks to the one who created us and blessed us. Alleluia and Amen.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
It Takes All Sorts
sermon by Torin Eikler
I Corinthians 3:5-11 John 21:4-17
Do you love me? … Feed my lambs.
I don’t know how many of you are very familiar with sheep. I am not … though I have petted the odd ewe here and there, and I have the same “aaww” reaction as most people when I see young lambs stumbling around trying to find their land legs. Usually, I think of them (when I think of them) as pretty dumb animals that just follow the herd from food to water to shelter and back again on their way to becoming sweaters for our backs and chops for our tables. But a few years ago, I heard a sermon all about sheep at one of the Laurelville gatherings we attended, and I learned more about sheep in those 30 minutes than I ever really wanted to know.
As it turns out, sheep are actually quite intelligent. They can be trained almost as well as dogs if one has a mind to do it, and they will recognize their names and come when called (quite valuable, I’m sure, though I don’t really see the advantage to having a 300 pound, hoofed animal in your house). They have excellent memories and can return to pastures or water sources on their own even years after they were there before. They know how to stay safe, for the most part, and shelter themselves from the cold or wind by standing in a crowd and taking turns on the inside where it’s warm and dry. They also recognize faces and have been known to reject a shepherd if that person was unwise enough to shave his beard or dramatically change her hair style.
I also learned a lot about shepherds that day. They may be rough around the edges, but they have always been some of the most skilled and trusted artisans in the world of husbandry. The idyllic image of the shepherd boy sleeping away the day under a tree is not at all related to reality. Shepherding is more than just guiding a flock from pasture to pasture. It also meant living of the land as often as not – finding food, water, and clothing in the wilderness areas where the sheep grazed. And then there were the other things that go into taking care of sheep: helping ewes lamb, stitching wounds and treating disease, carrying sheep that went lame, collecting the wool, and helping animals beyond help ease into death. On top of all that, shepherds are often required to put themselves in harm’s way in order to rescue strays or protect the herd from predators or poachers. The job of a shepherd requires a huge range of skills and a lot of love and dedication.
There was a lot more that I don’t remember, but even this much is enough to make me much happier with Jesus’ tendency to call all of us sheep and himself the shepherd. It is nice to know that he doesn’t mean for us to be mindless, placid beasts herded around until it’s time for us to go to the butcher. He loves us and he wants much more than that for and from us, and it’s comforting to realize that the last thing he expressed to his disciples – and Peter in particular – was his desire to have someone take his place, feeding and caring for us in his place.
Do you love me? …. Tend my sheep.
The thing is ... tending the sheep of Christ is a lot bigger job than feeding lambs. It may have started off okay, but as the followers of the way grew in number and began to spread out from Jerusalem, it became harder and harder for Peter to care for them, even with the help of the other eleven disciples (Matthias having replaced Judas to make up the number). It quickly became clear that more people were needed.
It started with the appointment of seven people called to serve the needs of the poor and the widows in the community. Then there were apostles sent out to proclaim the gospel among those who had not yet heard it. Paul came along and was eventually given authority to work with the gentile believers. And as the numbers of the faithful increased, the central council in Jerusalem grew to more than fifty members in order to keep up. Eventually leaders were named in local communities and others were given the task of traveling around various regions, providing oversight, inspiration, and further teaching to the churches under their care.
Seeing to all the various needs of a spread out group made up of people from all classes and all walks of life is more than just a few people who were more suited to lives devoted to prayer and preaching the word of God. Tending an ever increasing flock takes a whole community of people with different gifts and talents spread out among the sheep. Faithfully building up the church on the foundation laid by Christ takes many hands and hearts and voices.
This is nothing new to us. Many of you have heard the saying, “it takes a village to raise a child,” and similarly, it takes a community to build a church – and by that I don’t mean a building. Anabaptists have always been particularly attentive to this truth, but Christians the world over have understood the reality that William T. Ham expressed when he said, “there are many things which a person can do alone, but being a Christian is not one of them.”
Consider this fable brought back by Mennonite mission workers in Mongolia….
Batzorig lived with his mother and four brothers in a tent on the steppes of Mongolia. They were together all the time, and even more so in the winter when the frosty weather kept them inside most of the day. Batzorig was the youngest of the brothers and the others teased him all of the time. One day it was too much for him, and he stomped out of the tent where he lived in embarrassment and anger.
Outside the protection of the hide walls, the wind was fierce, and in no time at all, Batzorig was shivering, his nose made red from its icy touch whipping past him. Then he heard his mother’s voice calling from behind him, “Batzorig! Come inside; it’s too cold out there! Batzorig!”
Even though he didn’t want to, Batzorig turned slowly and walked toward his mother. She gathered him in through the door flap, and they went inside the warm tent together. Batzorig immediately began to glare at his brothers as they sat around the warm fireplace talking and laughing happily, but before he could say anything, his mother handed him an arrow, which he took respectfully with both hands. Each of his brothers did the same when she came around to them.
“I want you to break this arrow,” the mother told her sons. The crisp sound of arrows breaking filled the tent … snap … snap … snap … snap … snap … as each of the brothers broke his arrow in turn. Then she gathered up the broken arrows. She handed the whole bunch to one of her sons and told him to break the cluster of arrows. Try as he might he could not, and when he gave up, she handed the bundle to the next son, asking the same thing of him. Each of the brothers tried in turn, and none of them could break the arrows.
At this, the mother said, “You all have the same mother. Listen to me. Just as you were able to easily break the one arrow, if you go ahead divided and separate, you, too, will find your strength fails you. But, like the cluster of arrows, if you are together, you will not easily be broken.”
If we are to be the church, the body of Christ, then we must walk together in community, supporting each other, leaning on the arms of brothers and sisters in our times of struggle and offering our own arms to meet another’s need when her path leads down a dark and difficult road. No one of us can make our spiritual journey alone. We need each other. If we are to be faithful to the Christ we follow, the Christ who has loved us and loves us still, the Christ we love, then we must build each other up, tending to one another in love so that, together, we can serve each other and the world as Christ has taught us. It’s not just some Peter’s job. It belongs to all of us.
Do you love me? … Feed my sheep.
Now here’s a question … just who are the sheep? Are they you and me? Are they all of us Anabaptists? All of us Christians? Is it what one believes or how one lives that makes that person a sheep? Who do you think the Christ who lived and died for the sake of all humanity – even all creation – would see as part of his flock?
I think you know the answer. The shepherd spends time and energy, sometimes risking everything to restore even one weak, suffering sheep or to reach the member of the flock that has wondered off into danger and bring it back home. If the people Jesus spent his time and energy … his very life to restore – prostitutes, tax collectors, blind, lame, dirty, possessed, leprous outcasts – are any indication, I think it’s safe to say that everyone is a sheep. And if the task of tending the sheep belongs to all of us – to the gathered body of Christ, then we are called to be caring for all of God’s children.
So what does that mean? It could mean that we are to tend the spiritual needs of those around us. I haven’t spoken much about that this morning, but it’s the traditional interpretation of Jesus’ commission to Peter. We are to bind up the wounds of those who have suffered spiritual injuries. We are to ease the pain and distress of those in despair. We are to comfort and support the weak and the lost, shepherding them – sometimes carrying them - on to those green pastures beside still water. And, we are to help bring forth new life: welcoming brothers and sisters new to the body of Christ, searching out and naming gifts and talents, and encouraging … calling … sometimes even pulling one another forward along new paths in our spiritual journeys.
That’s part of it – a big part, I think … but Jesus used such down to earth imagery and spent so much of his time caring for people’s bodies that I don’t think we can completely spiritualize this tending/feeding/shepherding thing. When people don’t get basic needs like food or love or protection met, they tend to focus their energy on those needs. Sometimes, that includes turning more and more toward God. More often it doesn’t, and if we aspire to tend people’s spiritual needs, we need to meet their physical and emotional needs first … or at least at the same time.
We need to feed people when they are hungry. We need to care for people who are sick or injured or lonely or depressed. We need to help people find safety and security (physical and emotional). That’s the other part of our task – the other part of our calling as followers of the Christ we love.
That’s big – that task of feeding the lambs. This calling to tend Christ’s sheep, when we look at the whole of it, it’s really big and really overwhelming … for any one or two or three of us. But just as there were others to help do the work in Peter’s time, there are more than just a few of us. There is more than just this congregation. The body of Christ spans the globe and reaches out to our communities with myriad hands, and we are all fellow workers in God’s field. We are all fellow workers building up the Realm of God one stone – one person at a time.
The true gift, the grace of God for our mission is that we don’t have to take it all on. We don’t have to start at the beginning. The foundation has already been laid … and by a builder far more skilled than any of us. We don’t have to work alone, for we are many and the Spirit moves and breathes into the work and the workers alike inspiring, refreshing, and steadying all of it and all of us along the way.
Each one of us builds in a different way. Each of us has our own sense of God’s work in this world and our own way to lend it a hand. And we work together as we build; doing what is ours to do as others do what is theirs to do. And we tend the sheep together, offering our own strength and compassion to meet the needs of the Children of God in our midst.
And in the end, whenever our struggles and frustrations threaten discouragement or our successes and accomplishments bring complacency, Christ appears on our shoreline, tends our needs, and asks … do you love me?
I Corinthians 3:5-11 John 21:4-17
Do you love me? … Feed my lambs.
I don’t know how many of you are very familiar with sheep. I am not … though I have petted the odd ewe here and there, and I have the same “aaww” reaction as most people when I see young lambs stumbling around trying to find their land legs. Usually, I think of them (when I think of them) as pretty dumb animals that just follow the herd from food to water to shelter and back again on their way to becoming sweaters for our backs and chops for our tables. But a few years ago, I heard a sermon all about sheep at one of the Laurelville gatherings we attended, and I learned more about sheep in those 30 minutes than I ever really wanted to know.
As it turns out, sheep are actually quite intelligent. They can be trained almost as well as dogs if one has a mind to do it, and they will recognize their names and come when called (quite valuable, I’m sure, though I don’t really see the advantage to having a 300 pound, hoofed animal in your house). They have excellent memories and can return to pastures or water sources on their own even years after they were there before. They know how to stay safe, for the most part, and shelter themselves from the cold or wind by standing in a crowd and taking turns on the inside where it’s warm and dry. They also recognize faces and have been known to reject a shepherd if that person was unwise enough to shave his beard or dramatically change her hair style.
I also learned a lot about shepherds that day. They may be rough around the edges, but they have always been some of the most skilled and trusted artisans in the world of husbandry. The idyllic image of the shepherd boy sleeping away the day under a tree is not at all related to reality. Shepherding is more than just guiding a flock from pasture to pasture. It also meant living of the land as often as not – finding food, water, and clothing in the wilderness areas where the sheep grazed. And then there were the other things that go into taking care of sheep: helping ewes lamb, stitching wounds and treating disease, carrying sheep that went lame, collecting the wool, and helping animals beyond help ease into death. On top of all that, shepherds are often required to put themselves in harm’s way in order to rescue strays or protect the herd from predators or poachers. The job of a shepherd requires a huge range of skills and a lot of love and dedication.
There was a lot more that I don’t remember, but even this much is enough to make me much happier with Jesus’ tendency to call all of us sheep and himself the shepherd. It is nice to know that he doesn’t mean for us to be mindless, placid beasts herded around until it’s time for us to go to the butcher. He loves us and he wants much more than that for and from us, and it’s comforting to realize that the last thing he expressed to his disciples – and Peter in particular – was his desire to have someone take his place, feeding and caring for us in his place.
Do you love me? …. Tend my sheep.
The thing is ... tending the sheep of Christ is a lot bigger job than feeding lambs. It may have started off okay, but as the followers of the way grew in number and began to spread out from Jerusalem, it became harder and harder for Peter to care for them, even with the help of the other eleven disciples (Matthias having replaced Judas to make up the number). It quickly became clear that more people were needed.
It started with the appointment of seven people called to serve the needs of the poor and the widows in the community. Then there were apostles sent out to proclaim the gospel among those who had not yet heard it. Paul came along and was eventually given authority to work with the gentile believers. And as the numbers of the faithful increased, the central council in Jerusalem grew to more than fifty members in order to keep up. Eventually leaders were named in local communities and others were given the task of traveling around various regions, providing oversight, inspiration, and further teaching to the churches under their care.
Seeing to all the various needs of a spread out group made up of people from all classes and all walks of life is more than just a few people who were more suited to lives devoted to prayer and preaching the word of God. Tending an ever increasing flock takes a whole community of people with different gifts and talents spread out among the sheep. Faithfully building up the church on the foundation laid by Christ takes many hands and hearts and voices.
This is nothing new to us. Many of you have heard the saying, “it takes a village to raise a child,” and similarly, it takes a community to build a church – and by that I don’t mean a building. Anabaptists have always been particularly attentive to this truth, but Christians the world over have understood the reality that William T. Ham expressed when he said, “there are many things which a person can do alone, but being a Christian is not one of them.”
Consider this fable brought back by Mennonite mission workers in Mongolia….
Batzorig lived with his mother and four brothers in a tent on the steppes of Mongolia. They were together all the time, and even more so in the winter when the frosty weather kept them inside most of the day. Batzorig was the youngest of the brothers and the others teased him all of the time. One day it was too much for him, and he stomped out of the tent where he lived in embarrassment and anger.
Outside the protection of the hide walls, the wind was fierce, and in no time at all, Batzorig was shivering, his nose made red from its icy touch whipping past him. Then he heard his mother’s voice calling from behind him, “Batzorig! Come inside; it’s too cold out there! Batzorig!”
Even though he didn’t want to, Batzorig turned slowly and walked toward his mother. She gathered him in through the door flap, and they went inside the warm tent together. Batzorig immediately began to glare at his brothers as they sat around the warm fireplace talking and laughing happily, but before he could say anything, his mother handed him an arrow, which he took respectfully with both hands. Each of his brothers did the same when she came around to them.
“I want you to break this arrow,” the mother told her sons. The crisp sound of arrows breaking filled the tent … snap … snap … snap … snap … snap … as each of the brothers broke his arrow in turn. Then she gathered up the broken arrows. She handed the whole bunch to one of her sons and told him to break the cluster of arrows. Try as he might he could not, and when he gave up, she handed the bundle to the next son, asking the same thing of him. Each of the brothers tried in turn, and none of them could break the arrows.
At this, the mother said, “You all have the same mother. Listen to me. Just as you were able to easily break the one arrow, if you go ahead divided and separate, you, too, will find your strength fails you. But, like the cluster of arrows, if you are together, you will not easily be broken.”
If we are to be the church, the body of Christ, then we must walk together in community, supporting each other, leaning on the arms of brothers and sisters in our times of struggle and offering our own arms to meet another’s need when her path leads down a dark and difficult road. No one of us can make our spiritual journey alone. We need each other. If we are to be faithful to the Christ we follow, the Christ who has loved us and loves us still, the Christ we love, then we must build each other up, tending to one another in love so that, together, we can serve each other and the world as Christ has taught us. It’s not just some Peter’s job. It belongs to all of us.
Do you love me? … Feed my sheep.
Now here’s a question … just who are the sheep? Are they you and me? Are they all of us Anabaptists? All of us Christians? Is it what one believes or how one lives that makes that person a sheep? Who do you think the Christ who lived and died for the sake of all humanity – even all creation – would see as part of his flock?
I think you know the answer. The shepherd spends time and energy, sometimes risking everything to restore even one weak, suffering sheep or to reach the member of the flock that has wondered off into danger and bring it back home. If the people Jesus spent his time and energy … his very life to restore – prostitutes, tax collectors, blind, lame, dirty, possessed, leprous outcasts – are any indication, I think it’s safe to say that everyone is a sheep. And if the task of tending the sheep belongs to all of us – to the gathered body of Christ, then we are called to be caring for all of God’s children.
So what does that mean? It could mean that we are to tend the spiritual needs of those around us. I haven’t spoken much about that this morning, but it’s the traditional interpretation of Jesus’ commission to Peter. We are to bind up the wounds of those who have suffered spiritual injuries. We are to ease the pain and distress of those in despair. We are to comfort and support the weak and the lost, shepherding them – sometimes carrying them - on to those green pastures beside still water. And, we are to help bring forth new life: welcoming brothers and sisters new to the body of Christ, searching out and naming gifts and talents, and encouraging … calling … sometimes even pulling one another forward along new paths in our spiritual journeys.
That’s part of it – a big part, I think … but Jesus used such down to earth imagery and spent so much of his time caring for people’s bodies that I don’t think we can completely spiritualize this tending/feeding/shepherding thing. When people don’t get basic needs like food or love or protection met, they tend to focus their energy on those needs. Sometimes, that includes turning more and more toward God. More often it doesn’t, and if we aspire to tend people’s spiritual needs, we need to meet their physical and emotional needs first … or at least at the same time.
We need to feed people when they are hungry. We need to care for people who are sick or injured or lonely or depressed. We need to help people find safety and security (physical and emotional). That’s the other part of our task – the other part of our calling as followers of the Christ we love.
That’s big – that task of feeding the lambs. This calling to tend Christ’s sheep, when we look at the whole of it, it’s really big and really overwhelming … for any one or two or three of us. But just as there were others to help do the work in Peter’s time, there are more than just a few of us. There is more than just this congregation. The body of Christ spans the globe and reaches out to our communities with myriad hands, and we are all fellow workers in God’s field. We are all fellow workers building up the Realm of God one stone – one person at a time.
The true gift, the grace of God for our mission is that we don’t have to take it all on. We don’t have to start at the beginning. The foundation has already been laid … and by a builder far more skilled than any of us. We don’t have to work alone, for we are many and the Spirit moves and breathes into the work and the workers alike inspiring, refreshing, and steadying all of it and all of us along the way.
Each one of us builds in a different way. Each of us has our own sense of God’s work in this world and our own way to lend it a hand. And we work together as we build; doing what is ours to do as others do what is theirs to do. And we tend the sheep together, offering our own strength and compassion to meet the needs of the Children of God in our midst.
And in the end, whenever our struggles and frustrations threaten discouragement or our successes and accomplishments bring complacency, Christ appears on our shoreline, tends our needs, and asks … do you love me?
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