Sunday, December 31, 2017

Resolutions of Gratitude

Sermon from Sunday, Dec. 31, 2017
John 1:1-18; Galatians 3:23-25,4:4-7

Well, it’s a week after Christmas Eve, a week since the miracle of Love coming down to us.  That miracle is just the start, of course; in the Gospel stories about Jesus, we hear about lots of miracles.  In fact, we hear about miracles so often that they almost seem commonplace.  “Blah, blah, blah; the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the dead are raised; blah, blah, blah….” 
But what we don’t hear is what the formerly blind man or the healed woman is doing a week later.  My guess is that, after those miracles, the people involved were still trying to process it all, trying to make sense of some incredible thing that had happened.  They probably looked back to the stories of their tradition to help them understand why and how God had healed them.  And they probably asked the question, “OK, God – now what am I supposed to do?”
That’s what we’re doing here this morning, too.  Last Sunday and Monday, we heard about astounding things.  A virgin gave birth to a king, “and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:33).  Angels appeared to a bunch of frightened shepherds, singing God’s praises and telling them God’s anointed king was lying in a feed box in a dirty stable.  Just as amazing, the shepherds went to Bethlehem and found the baby just as the angels said.  The Son of God has come into our world to save us.
So, last Sunday was the time for praise and awe; today is the day for theological reflection.  And to help us with that, we’re given the prologue to the Gospel of John.  Though it may not have sounded like it, the Gospel reading this morning is John’s version of the Christmas story.  John never mentions the baby or the shepherds or the kings or a virgin giving birth.  Instead, John begins his story long before that: “In the beginning” – back to the Book of Genesis, the book of beginnings. 
“In the beginning was the Word,” John says.  Not the written word, not the books of Scripture that we read, but the Word, the Logos, the power through which God created the universe and holds it in order.  All things came into being through this Word of God; and without it, life simply would not be.  When God said, “Let there be light,” (Genesis 1:3), it was the Word of God that brought the light of life to the universe.  Without the Word, darkness would overcome the light every time.
And this divine Word through which God creates and recreates everything “became flesh and lived among us,” John says (1:14).  It’s like imagining all the power and light and heat of our sun being bottled up in a single light bulb.  In that one baby in the manger, in that one man teaching and healing in the villages of Galilee, John says we have seen the glory of God’s creative Word, “the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth” (1:14).  “No one has ever seen God,” John admits.  But this human being, who seems so normal at first glance, this human being “is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart [and] who has made [God] known” to us (1:18).
So, in the clear light of the week after Christmas, we can see a little better just who this miracle baby really is.  But that’s not all.  John takes it one step further and answers the question that has to come eventually for anyone who considers actually believing the Christmas story.  And that question is this: So what?  OK, maybe the Word of God has come to take flesh and dwell in the world.  Maybe this baby is exactly who John says he is.  But what difference does that make?  What’s in it for me?
In a nutshell, here’s the difference it makes: It means salvation.  And that means complete healing.  It means a second chance to be who we were created to be in the first place, when God made us in God’s own image.  We turn away from that and reject the identity God has in mind for us.  We turn to ourselves and our own desires, even to the extent that when this true light of God came into the world in Jesus, “the world did not know him.  He came to what was his own,” John says, “and his own people did not accept him.” (1:10-11) 
And so it is with us.  We see the light of God breaking into the darkness around us, and we hear the Word of God calling out to us; but too often we choose emptiness of our own making.  We seek the happiness of the moment.  We measure our value by how we look or how perfect our lives seem.  We grow up damaged by our childhoods, having watched the people we love hurt themselves and each other, and we swear we’ll never be like them.  But then we live out the pathologies we’ve learned anyway, and we add to them a new one – the pathology of shame as we see the ways we fall short, too.
But because of that baby in the manger, because the Word of God became flesh and dwelled among us, saying “no” to God doesn’t have to be our final answer.  Every year at this season, we get another chance to open ourselves up and let the Word of God take flesh in us.  To all who receive him, John says, to all who believe in his name, Jesus gives power to become children of God, to be reborn not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of people, but reborn of God (1:12-13).  The Word became flesh and dwelt among us so that we could see what we were missing – and choose that instead.
Years ago, I saw a church sign at Christmastime that read, “Remember: It’s Jesus’ birthday, not yours.”  In a sense, of course, that sign was dead on.  We need to hear the call to get over ourselves and remember that Christmas isn’t about how many presents we get.  But in another sense, that sign missed something important, because Christmas actually is about us.  This celebration of Jesus’ birth is also a celebration of our rebirth as the creatures God intended us to be: God’s children and heirs of eternal life.  Here’s how Paul puts it in the reading from Galatians this morning: “When the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, … so that we might receive adoption as [God’s] children [and receive] the Spirit of his Son into our hearts…” (Galatians 4:4-6).  When we bring Jesus into our hearts and into our lives, when let the Lord actually govern us, then God breathes new life into us, filling us with the Spirit we were made to enflesh. 
And as we stand here at the threshold of a new year, we have the perfect opportunity to put that new life into action.  It’s resolution time.  Now, I know resolutions are notoriously hard to keep, and I am just as guilty as anyone else of resolving to work out or lose weight and then losing my resolve after a couple of weeks (or less) – and then feeling worse about myself than I did before.  But this year, I’m taking a different approach.  I’m committing to ride an exercise bike.  That doesn’t sound much different than most resolutions, but here’s where I think the difference lies.  I’m not just doing this because I think I “should.”  I’m doing it as a thank-you gift to God for the new life of love I’ve been given, for being God’s child redeemed by Love itself. 
So, here’s my New Year’s wish for you: that your resolutions might not hang over you with the weight of unfulfilled promises, but that they might serve as offerings to God in thanksgiving for who you are – a beloved child giving a gift of gratitude to the parent who loves you more than you can imagine.  In this new year, may you live boldly as God’s new creation, and may the true light that enlightens the world flash like fire from your eyes.

Sunday, December 24, 2017

Crazy Love

Sermon for Christmas Eve 2017
Luke 2:1-14

This is a night of crazy love.  In the midst of everything else you have on your heart and mind tonight, I’d ask you to stop for a moment and consider whether this makes any sense at all:  In a particular historical moment, specifically while some guy named Quirinius was governor of Syria, the Creator and Sovereign of the Universe decided it was a good idea to experience being human in order to save humans from the powers of sin and death that beat us down.  And not just that:  The Creator and Sovereign of the Universe decided the best way to do that was to be born to an unwed teenaged peasant oppressed by a foreign empire, in a day when medical infrastructure looked like pieces of cloth wrapped around a baby screaming in a barn.  This is how the Creator and Sovereign of the Universe decided to experience human life in order to save us: from the bottom up, from the inside out.  The theologians call it the doctrine of the Incarnation, but I call it crazy love – love that bends our minds even as we come here tonight to bend our knees.
I’ve had some glimpses of crazy love in my life.  Mostly, they’ve come from my parents.  My parents are older now and slowing down, but what I remember is love they drew from a well whose depth I can only hope to fathom.  My mother raised four kids, working as a teacher through several of those years; yet what I remember is her presence – reading to me every night, playing games, taking me to the library or the zoo, encouraging me to ask questions and explore.  My father was a university dean, doing the thankless work of administration with such taxing honor that his colleagues gave him the nickname, “Spike the Just.”  Yet, I remember him being there with me when he came home from work, playing catch in the backyard.  On a wall in my house is a fading photo from about 1970 of my father and me sitting at a campfire we’d built on a cold Colorado morning, warming our hands in mirror image and grinning the same grin that says, life doesn’t get any better than this.  In every way imaginable, my parents have given themselves to the four of us kids, then and now.  Being their child has been like living the last scene of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life.  And when I’ve told them how I feel incapable of ever paying them back, they say, of course, that’s not the point.  The point is to pay it forward with my kids … and with the world around me.  It’s crazy love, accounting that only makes sense in God’s economy.
Here’s what I’ve learned from my parents:  Their unconditional love is a glimpse, a sacrament, of God’s unconditional love.  And what that means, as hard as it is to say it out loud, is that I hold immeasurable value in God’s eyes.  There is nothing and no one that matters more to God; nothing and no one that stirs God’s heart more deeply.  And the same is true for you.  I don’t care who you are, or what you’ve done, or what you haven’t done – it is the truth, the fundamental truth of this holy night, that God loves you immeasurably.  Like any parent, God’s disappointed in you sometimes.  God’s heart may even ache tonight, wishing to see you coming down the road back home.  But God never gives up on you.  And you never cease being worth all that crazy love.
And you know, the same is true about the person sitting next to you.  And the person sitting down the pew.  And the person sitting on the couch back home.  And the person sitting at an empty bar, with no one to go home to.  And the person sleeping on the street, freezing tonight.  And the person lying in an Alzheimer’s unit.  And the person running away from the cops.  And the person crying because she can’t afford to buy her daughter a Christmas present.  God loves each of them a million times more than my parents love me. 
That is the gift of Christmas: love you can never earn, and love you can never repay.  All you can do is love someone else in return. 
Deep down, we all know that.  But what does that love look like? 
Our cherished images of Christmas tell us the story, like Christmas cards hanging on the doorways of our lives.  Think about A Christmas Carol, with Ebenezer Scrooge seeing the emptiness of his life, receiving the gift of a second chance, and finally sending the prize turkey to Tiny Tim and his family.  Think about It’s a Wonderful Life, with the self-sacrificing George Bailey wanting to kill himself for a life insurance payout but finding his friends rallying around, and showering him with love, and showing him he’s the richest man in town.  You know the story, told a hundred ways:  Life shortchanges you, or you shortchange others.  You feel your heart held captive, and you start to lose hope.  You can’t even see what redemption looks like, and you can’t imagine it coming to you.  And then God acts.
In the great, cosmic story of redemption we hear tonight, God announces divine action through angels visiting shepherds, with the whole host of the heavenly army turned into a glee club, stepping aside from the battle against sin and death to let a tiny child do the work instead.  And in that child, God comes as the true emperor, the one to show that Caesar is a cheap fraud, the one to free us from the power of evil and sin and death, vanquishing those powers at Easter.  But God does it in the last way anyone would’ve guessed.  In the words of the ancient carol we’ll hear in a few minutes, “This little babe so few days old is come to rifle Satan’s fold; / All hell doth at his presence quake, though he himself for cold [doth] shake.”  In the deep mystery of love, God sends a little child to do a conqueror’s work.
Though it’s crazy, it’s a pattern of love we can trust and from which God calls us to act.  Love is what changes the world.  Love is what frees us from the disfigured shadows of ourselves that life can turn us into.  Love is what changes the heart of Ebenezer Scrooge, and warms the heart of George Bailey, to live into the fullness of whom God’s created them to be.  Love comes from people we don’t expect to see, in places we don’t expect to find them, to fill holes in our hearts we never knew were there. 
That happened to me at the Free Store this Wednesday – and I imagine most of us who went there to give out clothes and talk to clients could tell our own story of unexpected love that came down that day.  One of our volunteers introduced me to a client.  The man looked at me and asked, “Can I trust you?”  And I said, “Well, if you can’t, I might as well just go on home now because trust is pretty much all I’ve got to work with.”  So the client replied, “I have a little feedback about this project, for you to consider for next year.”  And I thought, “OK, what did we do wrong…?”  But the man said, “Everything here is great, and I really appreciate it.  But next year, put out an offering box so we can help out, so we can give back.”  Then he handed me six dollars and said, “Here.  Use this as your first donation toward next year.”
That is God’s crazy love, a divine mystery we come to know best through flesh and bones.  Through people no better than ourselves.  Through the divine mystery of Incarnation: that the very essence of God’s being, love itself, comes to dwell among us and within us, stirring our stiff hearts to remember, form deep within our divine DNA, that we were created by Love for love.  In fact, the instrument of choice for accomplishing God’s grandest and most eternal purpose is … you.  Just as God comes into the world as a baby shivering in the cold, so God comes to you tonight, aching to be born anew.  And in your mundane flesh and bones, in your sometimes cold, cold heart, the Word takes flesh and dwells among us once again.
My parents were right.  I can never pay them back.  I can never return the love they’ve given me.  But I can take that love and show up for someone else, thousands of times over.  None of us can fix the world, but we can love it, one child of God at a time.  We can show up when someone is sick.  We can stay in relationship when our selfish hearts tell us to run.  We can show our children what it looks like to love, no matter what.  We can talk to a stranger who lives on the street.  We can get to know someone God brings into this church.  We can follow God’s lead, on this holy night, and love the world precisely as we find it, one broken person at a time.  As crazy as it sounds, that’s how Love saves the world today.  God wants nothing more than to share your life, and shape your heart, and take your flesh, and be born tonight, in you.

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Road Trips to the Wilderness

Sermon for Dec. 10, 2017
Isaiah 40:1-11; Mark 1:1-8

On Monday, I drove to Springfield to see my parents.  The day began in some anxiety.  I felt like I needed to go see my parents, that this was an important time for me to show up, not just talk on the phone.  At the same time, nine hours of driving and chatting and driving some more was a lot of time to be spending at a pretty busy season of the year … to say nothing about all the e-mails I haven’t been returning in any kind of timely way.  But I needed to take a road trip, so off I went.
Actually, I like driving.  I like having the space to listen to NPR and take in the wide-open countryside.  There are days when my perspective becomes pretty small, I’m afraid – only looking a couple of feet in front of me at a computer screen or a few more feet across the table at the other folks in that hour’s meeting.  It was good to look out farther, into the open space of late-autumn-into-winter, across the west Missouri countryside.
It was a dark day, as so many days are this time of year.  Clouds hung low in striations of slightly different shades of gray.  Bare trees poked into the gray; naked branches reaching up like black capillaries, the trees’ darkness broken only by a few ghostly gray trunks of sycamores among the oaks and hickory.  The ground added a little contrast – fields of short, light-brown grass, with slightly darker brown prairie grasses waving in the wind above it.  It all looked like an Andrew Wyeth painting, and just as cheery.
Though you’re never more than a few miles from a gas station and convenience store on this route, it was easy to imagine the landscape around me as wilderness.  Wilderness looks different in different geographies – sometimes dense forest, sometimes rugged hills, sometimes barren desert.  For me, the wilderness was west Missouri in early December, rolling by outside my car.
There’s something about the wilderness.  Sometimes it calls to us; sometimes it scares us to death.  But always it’s potent – a place of revelation, if we’re willing to let God be revealed.
A couple of our readings for this second Sunday of Advent take us to the wilderness.  There, in the windswept desert landscape of Judea, with rocks and dust all around and just a meager stream running through it, we come upon John the Baptist.  He’s there to “prepare the way of the Lord [and] make his paths straight” (Mark 1:3).  He calls God’s people to “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,” and “people from the whole Judean countryside and … Jerusalem were going out to him … confessing their sins” and marking their repentance with a rebirth in the River Jordan (Mark 1:4-5).  Hearing this story may seem like an odd way to prepare for Christmas.  Here we are – shopping, trimming the tree, going to parties, minding our holiday business – and we run smack into a prophet dressed in camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist like the prophet Elijah from Israel’s history, eating locusts and wild honey rather than smoked salmon and Christmas cookies.  John the Baptist and his wilderness can certainly get in our way this time of year, like a drive through the west Missouri countryside we don’t have time for. 
But God puts John the Baptist into Advent for a reason, of course.  He is indeed preparing the way for the coming of the Messiah in the Gospel story, with John acting in Elijah’s role to signal the beginning of the end of the age.  But John the Baptist is out there in the wilderness for each one of us, too – waiting for us.  There’s something to the fact that John the Baptist sets up shop out in the desert, away from busy Jerusalem, away from the demands of every day.  John the Baptist doesn’t come knocking on our doors, delivering introspection and repentance like an Amazon box, left for our convenience.  Instead, John the Baptist makes people come out to the wilderness to find him.  And the amazing thing is, they go – “all the people of Jerusalem,” the Gospel writer says.  Sure, it’s hyperbole, but it makes the point:  Even the busy people of Jerusalem knew they needed a road trip to the wilderness.
And what happens there?  Is there something mystical and magical about the wilderness that lets us find God in a way we typically can’t?  You hear people talking and writing that way sometimes, and we might hear it in today’s Gospel story, too – all those people, heading to the wilderness in search of God.  But I don’t think that’s how it works.  At least that’s not how it works for me.  In the Andrew Wyeth landscape of a December west Missouri, God didn’t make some dramatic personal appearance.
So, what is it about the wilderness then?  Why do our Scriptures and our hearts take us there?  I think the first reading this morning gives us the clue.  Because in Isaiah’s poetry, we don’t hear about the people entering the wilderness to find God.  We hear about God entering the wilderness to find God’s people.  In this reading’s historical moment, the people of Israel are in exile, held captive in Babylon after erring and straying from God’s ways like lost sheep over the centuries.  But now the time has come, says a voice from heaven.  “Comfort, O comfort my people,” the heavenly messenger tells the prophet.  “In the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” (Isaiah 40:1,3)  The mountains shall be plowed down, and the rocky valleys shall be filled, and God will come across the desert toward Babylon to lead the captive people back home.  “The Lord God comes with might” to “gather the lambs in his arms” and set them free, the prophet says (Isaiah 40:10-11).  The people aren’t heading to the wilderness to find a God they’ve lost.  God heads into the wilderness to find the people God loves and longs for. 
But the irony is that the people had to lose something they held tightly before they could receive the healing return that God wanted to offer them.  It took the loss of their freedom and control during 50 years in exile before the people were ready to hear that they had served their term and their penalty was paid.  They had to lose the illusion of self-sufficiency, the conceit that they knew best, in order to make space for God to act.  And once they let it go, God came to bring them home.
I don’t know what you may need to lose this Advent, what you might be clinging to, but I’ll bet there’s something God’s asking you to let the River Jordan wash away.  For me, I think it might have to do with wanting to see things fit together neatly, wanting to see my work all sewn up.  I remember, three years ago, talking with a priest in Manchester, England, on my sabbatical, the Rev. Nick Bundock.  Nick and I were having lunch at a lovely spot in his church’s neighborhood, which reminded me so much of Brookside it was a little eerie.  We were talking about the challenges of parish ministry, and how to engage with people in the neighborhoods around our churches, and how to deal with impossible expectations … in other words, how to do this work faithfully.  Nick said, “You know, I spent a long time thinking my call was to sort things out for God.  God would show me some problem or challenge, and I would think, ‘I’ll take that on; let me manage that one for you.’  I think I’m finally realizing,” Nick said, “that God isn’t asking me to sort everything out.  God’s asking me to be there and help while he takes care of it.”  I felt like I was looking into a mirror across that lunch table.  But three years later, I’m still guilty of thinking I’m supposed to sort out the mess for God rather than working with God to love people through it.
That’s probably what I need to take to the River Jordan this Advent.  That’s probably the wilderness I need to open up for God to enter.  Because, like I said, it’s not so much about us going to the wilderness to find God; it’s about us inviting God into the wilderness we ourselves carry.  It’s about us preparing the way of the Lord in our own hearts and souls, making the rough places a plain so that the glory of the Lord may be revealed within them.
So, where’s your wilderness?  Finding it is not necessarily an easy journey, and my hunch is that you don’t have time to take it.  But this Advent, go ahead and take a road trip to find your wilderness.  Give yourself the early Christmas gift of looking honestly at your life and asking yourself, “Where do I need healing?  Where do I need grace?  Where am I trying too hard?  Where am I too scared to try hard enough?  What am I hanging onto so tightly that I can’t open my arms to the Lord who’s waiting there to embrace me?”
My guess is that, once you find your wilderness, the King shall come precisely within it.  As I left Springfield on Monday afternoon, the darkness of the day was just as deep as it had been that morning.  The browns and grays were all still there, the trees standing lifeless and the fields painted dirty beige.  Or, at least they were until the clouds gave way for a few moments.  And as they did, the Son repainted the scene.  The edges of the gray clouds were lit with pink and purple; and the dirty beige fields blazed gold; and the darker beige prairie grass blazed orange; and the sickly gray sycamore trunks shone silvery white.  And in the wilderness, the glory of the Lord was revealed.