Taking You to Paradise

Sermon for Palm Sunday, April 14, 2019
Luke 19:28-40; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 23:1-49

Just in case you were wondering, you’re not the only one who thinks our worship this morning feels like spiritual whiplash.  I know we’ve just walked through it, literally; but I’d like to take a moment to think about the crazy path Scripture has given us in these past 20 minutes.

We started in the Jewell Room, hearing the story of Palm Sunday, Jesus’ “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem.  He asks the disciples to go find him a colt and bring it to the Mount of Olives.  Now, that may not sound provocative, but we have to realize, what Jesus is doing would have been like a leader today asking his supporters to get a bulletproof limo with a security detail, and bring it to him at the Capitol in Washington, and drive him down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House.  This was not an accidental parade.  Palm Sunday was a provocation, because everything Jesus did was to remind people of a bigger story his actions were telling – a story about power and authority that reaches beyond secular government. 

In ancient days, the kings of Israel came riding on a donkey or a colt (1 Kings 1:33-35), with people spreading their cloaks on the path along the king’s way (2 Kings 9:13).  And the people of Jesus’ time were desperately seeking a new king to save them from their Roman oppressors.  And here’s the coup de gras, maybe even the coup d’etat:  At the last day, the Day of the Lord, when God would come to be “king over all the earth” and set the world to rights, that final reckoning was expected to begin when the Lord came and stood on the Mount of Olives, just outside Jerusalem (Zechariah 14:4-9).

So, when Jesus begins his procession down the road from the Mount of Olives, the people begin shouting, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!  Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” (Luke 19:38).  That’s because the people knew what all this symbolism meant – that this was nothing less than the King.  His servant humility notwithstanding, Jesus was making it clear that he was the divine monarch, and that the rival of the day, Caesar Augustus, was just a pretender to the throne.  But Jesus wasn’t claiming any earthly throne, which is the only thing the authorities could understand.  He was asserting his authority as the cosmic King, a king whose reign even the rocks and stones themselves would shout about. 

In our New Testament reading this morning, St. Paul recognizes the same truth that Jesus was claiming there on the Mount of Olives.  Even though Jesus was God, in human form, he didn’t regard equality with God as something for him to exploit.  Instead, he set his cosmic kingship aside, at least for a time, exchanging his divinity and his royal prerogatives for death on a cross.  Now, we say that – “death on a cross” – like we can understand it, but we can’t even come close.  This isn’t an execution; it’s a lynching.  This is death that sucks life from its victim with the torture of slow drowning as your lungs fill with fluid – to say nothing of the pain from the nails in your feet and your wrists.  Yet still, Paul says, that dying man was the one they were waiting for after all – the one to whom every knee shall bend and whom everyone shall confess as the true Caesar, the true Lord. 

But why did Jesus do it?  Why did he need to do it?  This isn’t something a sane person would choose.  In fact, on Maundy Thursday night, Jesus sweat blood asking God to open some other way for him instead.  But in the end, the Lord of the universe chose this.  Why?

Here’s the short answer:  atonement.  That’s one of those theological words people throw around as if everyone knows what it means.  It’s a complicated idea, but the word itself is beautifully simple.  It means exactly what the pieces of the word say:  at-one-ment.  Atonement is at-one-ment.  Our story this morning goes the way it does, with the Lord choosing the worst death ever, in order that you and I might be made at one with God. 

OK.  But what how does that work?

Well, you can answer that question several ways.  You might go toward what the theologians call substitutionary atonement, the idea that God had to subject God’s own child, a part of God’s own self, to the suffering that all humanity deserved for the ungracious ways we turn against God.  According to this line of thinking, we humans could never make amends adequately for the offense of sin, of choosing against God’s direction, so God has to take the punishment for us, sending the Son to the cross.  It’s a medieval idea, actually, coming from the model of courtly justice in medieval Europe.  If a powerless servant were to insult the lord of the manor, the lord of the manor would have to demand satisfaction for the servant’s insult.  But even the servant’s life wouldn’t be enough to provide satisfaction because of the difference in their stations in life.  Maybe multiple servants would have to die for justice to be achieved.  And how could justice ever come if all the servants insulted the lord?  So, medieval theologians looked at this logic and saw God the Father atoning for the insult of human sin not by demanding the lives of countless humans but by giving one life, the life of the divine Son.  They saw it as the only loving way God could balance the scales so thrown off by human sin.  That model does a nice job of accounting for the scandal of grace, the fact that God loves us despite the fact that we can never make up for sin on our own.  But it also raises at least as many questions as it answers about a divine parent who sends a child to die. 

Here’s another way to think about how atonement works:  that Jesus was the ultimate example of a God-shaped life.  The way this thinking goes, Jesus the exemplar came to show us what a life lived for others truly looks like.  He bore punishment he didn’t deserve.  He emptied himself of power and glory in order to take our nature and go through everything we go through.  He showed us how to deal with the ugliness life can dish out – not with retribution or exclusion, but with a heart that bore unbearable pain so others wouldn’t have to.  According to this line of thinking, Jesus dies on the cross to lead us there ourselves – to take up our own crosses; to live for others; to value love at all costs, even at the ultimate cost.  There’s truth in that, definitely.  But if Jesus is just a righteous example, why does this sacrifice have to come from the Son of God?  We know many stories of selfless sacrifice, of people emptying themselves and dying so others might live.  There must be more to the story if the one doing the sacrificing is also God in the flesh.

So, here’s a third way to think about how atonement works.  It highlights Jesus’ powerful divinity just as much as his suffering humanity by telling a cosmic story with a surprise ending.  The way this thinking goes, Jesus, the Son of God, came to vanquish the power of sin and death and open the gate to eternal life for all who trust in him.  He emptied himself of divine power, submitting himself to death in order to trick the power of sin and evil into complacency.  Now, for this to make sense, you have to see sin and evil not as the temporary failure of good human hearts but as a power unto itself.  So, if you can accept that, then Jesus comes as the unlikely conqueror of that enemy, the one who brings God’s power directly into human life, fighting the cosmic struggle of God versus evil on the battlefield of human existence – and apparently losing.  But what evil doesn’t know was what C.S. Lewis calls the “deep magic,” the truth that the power of the Creator cannot be contained by the creation any more than the clay can tell the potter what to make.  And so, this thinking goes, God in Christ lets evil win – at least long enough to prove God’s ultimate power, crushing evil by reversing its victory, which is death itself, and giving the same power over death to all of us who trust in him.  To me, at least, that model of Christ as the victor holds a lot of truth.  I have seen enough of the power of sin and evil to know it’s real.  And I have seen enough of the power of Christ’s resurrection to know death doesn’t get the last word.

At the end of the day, especially at the end of this Palm Sunday, the point isn’t knowing the right model of the atonement.  The point is the truth of at-one-ment between God and us.  For as we heard in that Passion Gospel reading from Luke, death is not the end for those who trust in God’s power, even if the evidence says God’s power is absent.  Jesus’ promise to the thief on the cross is the promise to each and every one of us who fails along life’s journey.  Eternal life is not a function of scoring the most points or getting the answers right.  Eternal life comes from turning to Jesus as he hangs there on the cross with us, and trusting him when he makes that most unlikely of all promises:  that you – no matter who you are, and no matter how slim the odds may seem – if you turn to me, even “you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).

Calling Home

Sermon from March 17, 2019
Genesis 15:1-12;17-18

Here’s something I’m struggling to understand: My father died a week and a half ago.  I was there when he died, sitting with him through the hard, final hours.  My sisters and I took care of the arrangements for his cremation.  With my mother, we planned a celebration of his eternal life and reveled in the love that his life had brought us.  I’ve received prayers and good wishes from so many of you, loving offerings of your beautiful hearts.  All the evidence points to my father’s absence from the life we shared here, and I know his death to be a fact.  But here’s the thing:  I don’t feel like he’s gone.

Now, maybe that’s denial.  I do know grief doesn’t keep a schedule but comes in waves when you least expect it, and those waves will continue to crash on me.  But even when I confront my sadness about the distance between my father and me, it doesn’t feel like the relationship is gone.  So, rather than what I’m experiencing being denial, maybe instead what I’m experiencing is friendship, just now at a distance.

Friendship with a parent isn’t a given.  Early in my life, my father was the authority figure, the provider, the guy who went to work each day, and my partner in playing catch in the back yard.  Later, he was the guy who didn’t understand me and whose advice seemed tired and worn.  Still later, there didn’t seem to be very much for us to talk about, and getting together for family gatherings kind of felt like a routine.  My father and I did share an annual special event – a trip together to see baseball games – and those were good moments of remembering something deeper.  But then there were the other 51 weeks of the year.  There wasn’t anything wrong, exactly.  We were just on hold.

And then, my father did something out of character:  He told me what he needed.  One of his great strengths was his willingness to put the needs of others first; but the shadow side of that is how hard it is, then, to say what you need yourself.  Well, several years ago, my father found the words.  He simply said, “I’d really appreciate it if you’d call home more often.”  He wasn’t looking for some huge change in my life or wanting me to feel badly for the ways I’d been missing the mark.  He just wanted more connection.  So – through regular phone calls, and more-frequent visits, and those annual baseball trips, too – my father and I took stagnation and turned it into a relationship that connected us even when we weren’t together.  We took a good-enough parent-child dynamic and turned it into friendship instead.

So, here we are at the second Sunday of Lent, the season when the Church calls us to mend the ruptures in our relationship with God.  As you know, through this Lent, we’re encouraging you to think about creating a rule of life as way to hold up and nurture your spirituality.  Now, for those of us who find it hard even to give up chocolate or remember to say the Lord’s Prayer at night, creating a rule of life probably sounds way over the top, something more for nuns and monks than for folks like us.  But a rule can be just a few simple practices that encourage us to focus on and strengthen our spiritual lives.  So, through these weeks of Lent, the sermons will flesh that out and ask us to consider what we might do to build our relationship with God, with ourselves, with others, and with God’s creation.  You can also join the Café 9:15 class, or the parents’ class, on Sunday mornings to learn more about a rule of life – or you can just take home the green booklet in the entryway.

So, this week, the focus is building our relationship with God.  And as you might have guessed, the experience of my father’s death is making me think about my relationship with God differently. 

I sort of missed the boat with the start of Lent this year:  I skipped Ash Wednesday and the first Sunday of Lent; I haven’t really figured out something to give up or take on; and I’ve been feeling kind of badly about all that.  It’s not great form for the priest to ignore Lent.  But I’ve also heard God saying – especially through the kindnesses so many of you have shared – I’ve heard God saying it’s OK give myself a break and let go of the sense of failure, despite how well I hang onto that.  Because building our relationship with God isn’t about getting good grades in religious observance.  Building our relationship with God is about turning an acquaintance into a friendship.

We hear an example of that in today’s Old Testament reading.  As we come to this story, Abram and God are in the process of building an extraordinary relationship.  A few chapters earlier, for no apparent reason, the God of Israel tapped Abram on the shoulder as he was enjoying his life in Mesopotamia and told him to leave his country and his people to receive great blessing in a new land.  And Abram went, apparently persuaded by the power of God’s self-revealing.  But over time – as Abram encountered famine, and used his wife as a bargaining chip to save himself in Egypt, and rescued his nephew’s household from warring tribes – over time, things didn’t seem to be going so well for Abram, who’d risked everything he had on nothing but a promise. 

So, God comes to Abram again, which is where we pick up today’s reading.  Abram is thinking God’s promise of a new land hasn’t really panned out.  Plus, even if he does hang onto the land he’s occupying in Canaan, he’s got no one to leave it to; so, it’s basically an empty gift.  So, even though it may seem disrespectful to talk to the Lord God this way, Abram turns to God with some honest questions.  He says, “Look, you brought me here, but how am I supposed to know this land’s really mine?  And if it’s mine, who will it go to once I’m gone?”  So God says, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. …  So shall your descendants be.” (Genesis 15:5)  Look at the signs I give you, God says, and know that my word is good.  Well, Abram trusts their relationship enough to believe what God has told him.  And God honors Abram’s trust by renewing the promise of blessing beyond his dreams.

This kind of honest exchange between God and Abram keeps going for several more chapters in Genesis, through blessings and crises alike.  There’s God renaming Abram and Sarai as Abraham and Sarah, deepening the covenant they’ve made.  There’s the question of whether Abraham’s son with a slave will be his heir, or whether God can provide a child through Sarah in her very old age.  There’s Abraham’s negotiation with God to save even a handful of faithful people in the doomed city of Sodom.  And there’s Abraham’s time of deep testing, when God asks him to offer his only son as a sign of Abraham’s dependence on God alone.  This relationship between Abraham and God isn’t easy; it’s full of twists and turns.  Their relationship takes work, and faith, and honesty, and investment, and patience.  Above all, it takes connection – like any friendship.  And that’s how later books of Scripture describe Abraham, as nothing less than the “friend of God” (2 Chronicles 20:7, Isaiah 41:8, James 2:23).

OK, so, we’re not Abraham.  Few of us receive the word of the Lord in visions or witness holy fire and smoke to assure us of God’s promises.  But we, too, can be friends of God.  We, too, are inheritors of Abraham’s covenant, the mutual promise that as we invest our hearts and lives to follow God faithfully, so God will invest God’s heart and life to bless us in ways we can’t imagine.  And though we might not see visions, I do think we should listen for the voice of God calling us to a friendship we might never have expected was possible.  Because God asks for our friendship with the same surprisingly vulnerable request that I heard from my own father: “I’d really appreciate it if you’d call home more often.”

In churchy language, we call it prayer.  But as it says in the guide to a rule of life that we’re using this Lent,¹ prayer is not about saying the right words at specific times, no matter how much we may love our prayer book and its liturgy.  Prayer is about how we live – being responsive to God’s presence in all the facets of our lives.  It’s seeing God’s hand in the beauty of creation and hearing God’s voice in the insights of people we trust.  It’s looking for God’s direction in situations that might otherwise bind us in anxious fear.  It’s saying “thank you” for momentary gifts of beauty and blessing.  It’s saying “I’m sorry” when we find ourselves headed the wrong direction, and then turning a different way instead.  I think that’s what St. Paul means when he writes about “praying without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) – prayer that’s like breathing, prayer that offers nothing more and nothing less than our whole selves, prayer that brings us divine love in response.  In the same way that God takes mundane bread and wine and makes Jesus Christ present within it, God inhabits the mundane moments of our lives, sitting beside us as our true companion.  As Jesus said to his followers at the Last Supper, “I do not call you servants any longer, … but I have called you friends” (John 15:15).  

Growing a relationship with God isn’t nearly as imposing as it seems.  God’s not asking for heroic efforts.  God’s not demanding that we get all the answers right.  Our heavenly parent is simply asking us to pick up the phone and call home more often.

1.       Society of St. John the Evangelist.  Growing a Rule of Life workbook. Available at: www.ssje.org/growrule.  Accessed March 15, 2019.

Welcome to Spring Training

Sermon for Feb. 17, 2019
1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26

So, here we are in another weekend of snow.  I don’t know about you, but I need springtime, and I need it badly.  And thankfully, Major League Baseball is here to help us out. 

Spring training began this week, finally.  Pitchers and catchers reported on Wednesday, and full-squad workouts for the Royals start tomorrow.  Then, spring-training games begin this Saturday; and even though those games won’t count at all, I’ll be happy for every victory.  It’s great to see them win, even in Arizona. 

But the point of spring training, actually, isn’t to win.  The point is to get ready to win.  And to do that, sometimes you have to make it through some rough innings in the moment, as you get your team ready for 162 games that do count, leading (you hope) to baseball heaven, the postseason.

For each of us, in our own lives – what part of the season are we playing?  I think many of us live as though we were always in the late innings of the seventh game of the World Series, as if every move might make the difference between championship or failure.  I know I do that.  I get frustrated when I can’t get just that much more done in a given week, or when I miss something I should have gotten right, or when my effort just isn’t where I’d hope it would be.  It seems like I’m always in the late innings; and if I let up, the other team will win.

Now, because of the pastoral nature of baseball, I like to think that Jesus is a fan.  Much as I enjoy watching the Chiefs (especially this season), I do have to say there may be a little more divinity in “coming in safe at home” rather than blitzes and sacks and long bombs.  So, if Jesus is a baseball fan, he’d probably point out that, when I live this life as if the Series were on the line, I’m missing the elegant beauty of what comes first:  spring training.  Because I think Jesus might argue that spring training is exactly where we are in this life – all of us.

Like spring training, the point of our earthly life, oddly enough, isn’t winning today’s or tomorrow’s game.  The point is preparation.  The point is practicing the fundamentals.  You and I are just getting started as we play through a season longer than we can imagine.  Life in the here and now, Jesus might say, is just a warm-up for what’s coming.

Listen again to the point the apostle Paul is making in that First Letter to the Corinthians.  It’s not exactly Paul’s best prose; I think he needed some editing of the redundancies in that paragraph.  But still, his repetition ensures we don’t miss the point:  The resurrection of the dead is the good news on which Christian faith rests.  If Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, then we certainly won’t be, and all this “heaven” stuff is just a pipe dream after all.  But – Jesus was raised from the dead, “the first fruits” (1 Cor 15:20) of God’s offering of eternal life to all who follow Jesus’ way of love. 

So – if eternal life is real, that means, in the here and now, that we’re just getting started on a life of love that has no end.  We’re just beginning to learn how to play this elegantly beautiful game.  Just as the pitchers and catchers are loosening stiff joints and remembering their signs, just as the full squad tomorrow will start scooping up grounders and putting bats to balls, so each of us is at the very beginning of a very long haul. 

But still, like I said, we have trouble remembering where we stand in this long season of eternal life.  Many of us wake up and charge into each day imagining the championship is on the line.  Others of us maybe find the long season something of a bore, and we want to fast-forward to the joy and excitement of the postseason without putting in all the work it takes to get there.

And that brings us to today’s Gospel reading.  Now, this may seem like a stretch, but hang with me for a minute.  This is a pretty familiar reading, Luke’s version of the Beatitudes.  And honestly, it’s a little hard for me to hear.  Now, Matthew’s version is a little less intense.  In Matthew, Jesus says, blessed are the poor in spirit.  Blessed are the meek.  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.  Blessed are the pure in heart.  OK, maybe I can get Matthew’s version:  Pious people are blessed, and the rest of us have some work to do.  End of sermon.

But Luke is a little more “in your face” in the contrast Jesus draws about the life of worldly success versus the life of God’s reign and rule of love.  “Blessed are you who are poor….  Blessed are you who are hungry now….  Blessed are you who weep now….  Blessed are you when people hate you and exclude you….  Rejoice and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven.” (Luke 6:20-23) 

Just that’s hard enough to wrap our hearts and minds around, but then comes the gut punch:  “Woe to you who are rich,” Jesus says, “for you have received your consolation.  Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry.  Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.  Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.” (Luke 6:24-26) 

It’s tempting to twist ourselves up in some real Scriptural gymnastics to explain that one away.  I mean, let’s be real:  Aspiring to be rich, to be well-fed, to enjoy life, to be well-regarded by our peers … that kind of sounds like the American dream, right?  Who wants to be poor, and hungry, and weeping, and reviled?

Well, as we pursue the good life, I think Jesus is asking us to look hard at what the good life is.  It’s not about working like demons for our own affluence and satisfaction and status in this microscopic chapter of eternal life.  Instead, look at the reading again, and see what Jesus offers to those who’ve chosen to follow him, those whom he calls “blessed” or “happy” in their poverty and hunger and weeping and exclusion.  Look back at what happened in today’s reading just before Jesus speaks those hard words.  “A great crowd of his disciples” and “a great multitude of people” who’d learned about Jesus “came to hear him and be healed of their diseases….  And … power came out from him and healed all of them.” (Luke 6:17-19)  They may be poor, and hungry, and weeping, and excluded … but they’re also healed, on every level you can imagine.

It is interesting that the word “salvation” looks an awful lot like the word “salve,” as in an ointment we apply to heal a wound.  Christ’s healing is what saves us for the long season of eternal life.  And to find that healing, to find that salvation, I think Jesus is calling us to focus on the proper work of spring training:  the fundamentals.

As that great baseball movie Bull Durham puts it, this game is pretty simple.  You throw the ball.  You hit the ball.  You catch the ball.  All the excitement – the double plays, the home runs, the plays at the plate – all the beauty and all the championships come from getting the fundamentals right. 

I believe the same is true about eternal life.  It’s practicing the fundamentals that make us part of the kingdom of God.  The game is pretty simple, too.  You love God.  You love neighbor.  You love one another.  You choose the path of sacrifice when the world says to take what you can get.  You limit the time you spend on what you could have and help someone else get more.  You give money even though you can’t be guaranteed of the outcome.  You make time for a conversation when you don’t have time to spare.  You speak for justice and dignity when you see people suffering.  You ask the name of the person who’s cleaning the halls of the church for you, and you listen to her critique of the times when you’ve passed others by without even so much as an introduction, as she looks you in the eye and says, “It’s good to be seen and not observed.” 

Practicing these fundamentals will not leave us as rich, or as full, or as merry, or as renowned as we might have been.  But they condition us for the long season ahead.  Because our life here is just spring training.  This is less the time to be swinging for the fences, Jesus says, and more the time to focus on getting the fundamentals right. 

Looking for a Prophet in the Barbershop

Sermon from Feb. 3, 2019
Jeremiah 1:4-10; Luke 4:14-21

Welcome to Scout Sunday – which explains why the first several rows are filled with kids in uniforms, and why Scouts are serving as acolytes, lectors, and ushers this morning.  This is our annual opportunity to celebrate the ministry of Scouting.  Now, maybe that sounds odd, to describe Scouting as a ministry.  But after all, Troop 16 is a part of St. Andrew’s, not simply an outside organization using our building.  So, if that’s true, there must be some significant overlap between the church’s mission and Scouting’s mission.  So, how is Scouting a ministry?

We’ll there are definitely connections in what the Church and Scouting teach.  After all, the Scout Law says – say it with me if you know it – that a Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.  In the Church, we’d be on board with young people learning to practice all those values, but it’s that last one where we intersect the most – being reverent.  In fact, if you look at the Scout Oath, you find the intersection runs deeper than we might realize.  The Scout Oath begins this way:  “On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country, and to obey the Scout Law….”¹  So, a duty to God is part of what Scouting is all about.

But Scout troops are part of all kinds of religious and civic groups, so that “duty to God” plays out in lots of different ways.  Each tradition is free to carry out religious training as it sees fit.²  In the Episcopal Church, Scouts can earn four religious emblems as they grow up – God and Me, God and Family, God and Church, and God and Life.  Honestly, I don’t know the specifics of those programs as well as I should.  But I think our readings today might suggest that we should add a recognition that isn’t currently part of the program.  That would be a merit badge for serving as a prophet. 

Now, for that to make any sense, we have to know what a prophet is.  In the Bible, a prophet is not a fortune teller.  A prophet may get a glimpse of what’s coming as part of the message he or she receives from God, but the point isn’t to forecast the future.  The point is to be a spokesperson, delivering the word of the Lord and calling people to follow God’s ways.  That’s what it means to be a prophet.  Prophets speak for God – whether they want to or not, whether it serves their interests or not.

We get two examples this morning, from Jeremiah and from Jesus.  Our first reading was about the call of Jeremiah as a prophet of the Lord, an experience that probably scared the living daylights out of him.  He’s young – maybe actually a boy, maybe a very young man.  But no matter his age, he’s isn’t ready when God tells him he will be a “prophet to the nations” (1:5).  Jeremiah tells God, “You’ve got the wrong guy.”  But God quickly says – no, I’m not asking you to do this based on your own wisdom and power.  Instead, “you shall go to all whom I send you, and you shall speak whatever I command you.  Do not be afraid of [anyone],” God says, “for I am with you to deliver you.” (Jeremiah 1:7-8)

The second example of being a prophet comes from Jesus himself.  He’s in his hometown synagogue on the Sabbath; and he’s just read out loud from the prophet Isaiah, where God is proclaiming good news for the poor, and release for the captives, and healing for the blind, and freedom for the oppressed.  Jesus finishes his reading, sits down, and gives them the shortest sermon ever: “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21).  Jesus himself is one who will bring relief to the poor, the captives, the afflicted, and the oppressed by bringing God’s way of love into everyday life. 

Well, the people wonder what makes him say that, given that they’ve known Jesus forever.  This is his hometown crowd in Nazareth, where he was raised.  They know him as the carpenter’s son – a good kid, but hardly somebody who speaks the word of God.  Jesus gets it; he knows they’re not going to give him his due.  But still, he gives them God’s “truth” (4:25):  that just because they’re on the right team, just because they’re part of God’s chosen people, that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily doing what God asks.  After all, he says, several other times in Israel’s history, God has blessed outsiders instead of Jewish people who weren’t living very faithfully.  The hometown crowd doesn’t appreciate that kind of honesty, and they don’t like having their feet held to the fire by some carpenter’s son; so, they try to throw him off a cliff.  Being a prophet is risky business.

I think those two stories tell us something a little challenging.  First, God chooses unlikely people to be prophets.  In Jeremiah’s situation, God turns people’s expectations on their heads, asking a young nobody from a little village to be the one to speak God’s word to “nations and kingdoms” (1:10), telling the leaders how they and their people need to follow God’s path.  But God doesn’t stop there.  Like Jeremiah, we may not think we have the words to say on our own.  But I believe God chooses each of us to be a prophet, at least from time to time – when we find ourselves in situations where what we see and hear around us runs counter to God’s way of love. 

Let me tell you a story – something that happened 30 years ago but still sticks with me.  I had moved to take a job in Jefferson City, and I was only 23, with all the confidence of someone who hasn’t yet learned just how little he knows.  I needed a haircut, so I went to an old barbershop, a place that must have been there for decades.  I came in, and the barber invited me to step right up – a tall, muscular guy with a big smile, huge hands, and a buzz cut.  We made small talk as he put the cape around my neck and got started with the scissors.  It’s an odd situation, asking a stranger to cut your hair – he’s the one with the power, and you never quite know how that’s going to turn out. 

Well, as he cut, he started telling jokes, jokes I’m sure he had told a million times.  As he started out, he was pretty funny; but before long, it got ugly.  He was making fun of women and black people.  He must have thought it was OK because there were only white guys sitting there in the old barbershop.  But suddenly this huge, friendly-looking guy with the big smile was speaking sexism and racism.  And I had to decide what to do.

I would love to be able to tell you a David and Goliath story, that I confronted the barber about his ugly language even though he was the one with the scissors in his hand.  But I didn’t.  I just got quiet.  And as I was leaving, I had the perfect opportunity simply to tell him a holy truth:  that I wouldn’t be back because what I’d heard him saying didn’t align with how God tells us to talk about one another.  That was the truth; I knew I’d never go back to that barbershop, so saying something wouldn’t have put my future hairstyle at risk.  But I didn’t do it, and I’ve regretted that failure ever since.

So, why didn’t I, when what he said was so clearly wrong and I had nothing to lose?  Part of it is the culture of niceness – after all, my mother taught me, and maybe your mother taught you, that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all.  But you know, we don’t find that lesson about being nice anywhere in Scripture.  Instead, we find what we heard this morning: God saying, “You shall speak whatever I command you; do not be afraid … for I am with you to deliver you.” (Jeremiah 1:7-8)  

It’s not just the Scouts who have a duty to God.  When we renew our baptismal covenant, we promise to seek and serve Christ in all people, loving our neighbors as ourselves.  We promise to strive for justice and peace, respecting the dignity of every human being.  Now, that kind of a promise can feel too big to keep:  How am I supposed to promote justice and peace, especially when we can’t even agree about what the word “justice” means?  Well, respecting the dignity of every human being sometimes comes down to the simple, and countercultural, act of not letting “nice” get in the way of speaking for God.  Because you never know when the prophet God’s calling is you.

1.      Boy Scouts of America.  “What are the Scout Oath and Scout Law?”  Available at: https://www.scouting.org/discover/faq/question10/.  Accessed Feb. 10, 2019.

2.      Boy Scouts of America.  “Manual for Chaplains and Chaplain Aides.”  Available at: https://www.scouting.org/resources/info-center/manual-for-chaplains-and-chaplain-aides/.  Accessed Feb. 1, 2019.

State of the Parish Address: Love, One Child of God at a Time

1 Corinthians 12:12-31
Jan. 27, 2019

A few years ago, I was blessed with a sabbatical to do research toward a book.  The book was called Beating the Boundaries, and it told the story of several Episcopal congregations that were finding ways to be both “traditional” and “fresh” at the same time.  Some did it through worship, some through fellowship, some through service.  One even managed to use its facilities as connecting points with neighbors and community groups, creating new ways to welcome people in.  Hmmm.

Anyway, the big take-away for me was something so obvious we don’t usually name it out loud.  The thought comes from an innovator in Episcopal ministry who was serving in Santa Monica, California, at the time.  As he talked about how his congregation was connecting in new ways, he said, “You know, people are the new program.”  People are the new program.  He was talking about the power of playing the long game when it comes to being church: building one connection after another among very different people who, empowered by their differences, come together to comprise the body of Christ in a given place.  He was saying that it’s not institutions and programs that change the world.  People change the world – one individual connection at a time.

Now, despite the importance of each individual member, I would also say that the whole body is just as important.  I hear that in the reading this morning from First Corinthians – that each one of us needs the other members of the body in order to be more than we can be on our own.  Though people change the world, they typically don’t do that just following their own agendas.  The power comes when many individuals understand themselves as one, with a common agenda: the Body of Jesus Christ still alive and well and living in the world to reveal God’s way of love.

So, our work as a parish has to keep in mind both the micro and the macro – the journey of each individual, the strength of our parish family, and the well-being of the people around us whom God asks us to love and serve.

In 2018, we saw some real progress in loving and serving God, our neighbors, and one another.  You’ll find this information in the annual report you’ll receive downstairs, but I want to share some snapshots of blessing with you now.

·         At a time when many Episcopalians look around their pews and see 50 shades of gray, we are blessed with an increasing number of younger adults coming and getting involved.  Because of the work of a great new leadership team, about 20 younger adults are gathering for happy hours and a monthly brunch; and two young-adult dinner groups are up and running.

·         Participation in kids and youth ministry is increasing, and a group of parents are coming together for conversation and study on Sunday mornings.

·         Our average attendance in 2018 was up by 6 percent.  I don’t know how that sounds to you, but at a time when 52 percent of Episcopal congregations are losing attendance,¹ a 6 percent increase sounds pretty good to me.

·         Those red folders in the pews are working, though I understand they aren’t everyone’s favorite.  Because of them, we’ve more than doubled the number of guests leaving contact information.  Along with that, we’re doing a better job following up with guests, and we’ve strengthened the incorporation and Discovery process.  As a result, 55 new households joined St. Andrew’s last year. 

·         Then there’s HJ’s Youth and Community Center, which has been such a blessing to us and the community.  In just seven months of operation, HJ’s has brought in revenue of $38,000, and we project that to be $50,000 this year.  Just as important as the dollars coming in – more important, actually – are the people coming in.  HJ’s saw 189 unique events in 2018; and if you add up those that recur, the number of events in that space totaled 788 – from anniversary parties to medical lectures to worship and fellowship.  Estimating an average of seven people per event (which is probably low), that means the doors at HJ’s opened to about 5,500 people in those seven months.

·         At HJ’s, we’ve been working to create a new kind of worship and fellowship experience for ourselves and for our neighbors.  The events have gone by different names but mostly under the heading of our Sunset Concert Series.  People gather for music, food, some Scripture, and some prayer – which sounds like worship to me.  And if you came to Beer, Brats, & Bluegrass, or the Backpack Blessing, or Octoberfest, or the St. Nicholas Party, you know that scores of people left those events with smiles on their faces. 

·         Finally, we see continuing progress in stewardship and generosity.  Pledges are up, and those include 131 increases and 43 new pledges.  Nine more parishioners have joined the Legacy Society, bringing the total to 81.  And you marvelously generous people have given more than $850,000 over the past three Christmas seasons to help with special needs in the church.

All those numbers are good, and they help us see where we are, through a certain lens.  But just as compelling are the stories of individual people.  I want to tell you about three members of the Body of Christ in this place, just as examples of what can happen when we invest ourselves in each person who comes through our doors.

Many of you have come to know Susan Paynter over the past six months because she has jumped in here with both feet.  A long-time Episcopalian, Susan moved to Kansas City and started coming to St. Andrew’s in August.  She was part of the most recent Discovery class, and it seems to me that she’s tried out just about every gathering we’ve had this fall.  She’s found special connection through Café 9:15 and Morning Prayer at HJ’s, through volunteering at the Kansas City Community Kitchen and the Free Store; and she loves the spirit of hospitality she’s found here.  She says the life of this parish is like the yeast in Jesus’ parables, bringing about “growth that is palpable.”  In this new year, she’ll be bringing that kind of insight to the work of our Hospitality Commission and Adult Formation Commission.

Many of you also have come to know Norman Todd.  Norm grew up in a conservative Pentecostal tradition and then spent some years staying away from a conservative Pentecostal tradition.  He came to us in 2016 and took time to be sure we really were as welcoming as we presented ourselves to be.  He took part in the Discovery process and discerned he was called to be confirmed as an Episcopalian.  He’s found special connection with St. Andrew’s through Café 9:15, the Friday noon service, Morning Prayer at HJ’s, Cursillo, and making palm crosses for Palm Sunday.  Now he’s also a Eucharistic minister and – wait for it – has twice volunteered to serve as secretary of the Vestry.  That alone nearly merits sainthood.

And many of you know Victoria Fiori, though you may know her better by her maiden name, Victoria Launder.  Victoria grew up here, along with her brothers and sister – I still remember them as acolytes and vergers.  Like her older sister, Betsey, and husband, Ben Haynes, Victoria and her fiancé, Jon, were married here – and they bucked the trend by actually getting involved in St. Andrew’s.  In the past year, Victoria took a leadership role in helping to bring other younger adults together, resulting in the vibrant ministry I mentioned earlier.  And now, Victoria is among the candidates you’ll be asked to elect to Vestry later this morning.

These stories are what it looks like when we do good work in newcomer incorporation, adult formation, community building, and valuing the gifts of all whom God brings here.  And that doesn’t happen without the simply outstanding work being done by the members of our staff.  You’ve known know the incredible and selfless work of people like Dr. Tom Vozzella, Mary Sanders, Cheryl Cementina, Nina Edwards, Lauren Richardson, Robert Tillman, Mtr. Anne, and Deacon Bruce.  This year, we’ve brought on or promoted four people who’ve also been making an incredible difference:  Colleen Simon energizing engagement ministries; Zach Beall making HJ’s a success; Jean Long growing ministry with kids, youth, families, and younger adults; and Fr. Jeff Stevenson helping to build pastoral care.  It’s the best staff we’ve ever had in the years I’ve been here, and I give thanks for them every week.

So, now what?  How do we keep our foot on the gas for 2019?  You’ll see the priorities of the various commissions in the annual report, but I want to highlight a few ways we’ll keep building the Body of Christ here in the coming months.

We’ll keep looking for new ways to gather contact information for our guests, especially those coming through our doors at HJ’s.  We want to find what “red folders 2.0” might look like across the street.

We’ll offer a new app for your smart phone, along with ChurchLife, to help you find ways to connect with each other.  The new app is called Social Up, and we’ll demonstrate it at the annual meeting.  The idea came from the results of the parish survey last year, where people said they wanted to join with others to talk about movies, or discuss books, or play bridge, or work on crafts, or watch football, or whatever.  Basically, Social Up a way for people to self-organize for connections in the moment, rather than waiting for someone on staff to form an official churchy group to meet every need.

We’ll offer newcomers someone to walk alongside them as they make their way into the family.  Just last week, we gathered nine St. Andrew’s members who are interested in serving as Connection Partners, offering a one-to-one point of contact – someone paired with a newcomer to invite her to parish parties, or check in at coffee hour, or figure out what activities might be most interesting.

We’ll keep increasing the connections we make with existing members of the church, especially those on the edge of involvement and who risk falling through the cracks.  Fr. Jeff has been working hard to help us capture this information in our database and to strengthen ministries like Sweeney Care and Loaves & Fishes, which reach out to people needing a call or a meal.

Finally, we’ll also take intentional steps to build relationships with some of our neighbors whom we don’t know as well as we should.  In Kansas City, race has been a dividing factor for decades.  The roots of those divisions run deep, going back to the days when black people were enslaved in our community, and continuing through generations of residential and educational segregation.  I believe it’s time we engaged with our neighbors of color, not with a mindset of “helping” but with a desire to begin learning the story of race from their perspective and to see how relationships might grow among us.  We’ll do that beginning at our Vestry Retreat with the help of our diocesan Diversity and Reconciliation Commission (chaired by Cheryl Cementina, our adult formation coordinator).  We’ll also take steps to deepen St. Andrew’s relationship with our city’s historically black Episcopal congregation, St. Augustine’s.

Now, in all that we’re doing this year, I guarantee you we will make mistakes along the way, both with long-time members and with new friends.  As the Body of Christ, when we step off a curb and snap our ankle, we’ll bind it up and heal it.  And when things don’t work, we’ll see those situations as experiments that teach us, rather than failures that shame us.  But we’ll also take each other seriously enough, and be vulnerable enough, to tell the truth when things don’t work and let that honesty heal and guide us.

Through every individual connection we build, we’ll be strengthening the Body of Christ for the purpose the apostle Paul alludes to in the last line of our reading from First Corinthians this morning.  After naming all kinds of gifts among the diverse members of Christ’s body, the reading ends with Paul saying, “But strive for the greater gifts, and I will show you a still more excellent way” (12:31).  OK, Paul, what is that?  Well, it’s the next chapter of his letter, one we often hear at weddings, where he talks about the greatest gift of all – the gift of love.  “If I … do not have love,” he says, “I gain nothing” (13:3), no matter what gifts God has given me.

That’s what everything we do here is about.  Our mission is to love God, love our neighbors, and love one another.  Everything we do here must be about strengthening this body for that service.  Regardless of who we are – male or female, white or brown, gay or straight, long-time member or newcomer, young or old, Republican or Democrat, rich or poor – regardless of who we are, we are called to come together as one body, under this big tent, to help bring love to the world – one child of God at a time. 

1.       The Episcopal Church.  Episcopal Domestic Fast Facts: 2017. Available at: https://www.episcopalchurch.org/files/documents/2017_fast_facts.pdf.  Accessed Jan. 26, 2019.

Caesar in a Feedbox

Sermon for Christmas Eve, 2018
Isaiah 9:2-7; Luke 2:2-14

We began this glorious night by singing one of my favorites, “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”  It’s a great hymn with great theology about just how much love this baby in the manger is bringing to our broken world.  And, at the same time, that song makes a pretty big assumption about how our hearts are faring on this holy night.  The carol begins, “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant….” 

If you fall into that category, more power to you.  But I think it’s a pretty safe bet that many of us aren’t feeling so joyful and triumphant tonight, no matter how hard we try for Christmas.  Read or watch the news, and you’ll see children starving in Yemen, and families burned out of their homes in California, and leaders failing to govern in Washington.  In our own lives, maybe we’re struggling to keep relationships alive or watching them end.  Maybe you’ve lost someone in the past year, so this is the first Christmas with that piece of your heart gone missing.  Just the other day, I spoke with an incredibly strong woman who is watching both her husband and her daughter fight cancer in this “holiday” season.  Sometimes, even on Christmas Eve, peace is hard to come by.

And yet, the words from God we heard tonight, the love letters from the King who cares for us more than we can imagine – those words say that, “to us, a child is born,” one who is named “Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6).  The angels themselves declare that to us is born “in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”  And that news makes the army of angels proclaim, “Peace on earth among those whom God favors!” (Luke 2:11,14)

But what kind of peace does this Savior and Lord really bring us? 

Well, Luke’s Christmas story begins by telling us what kind of peace the tiny King won’t be bringing us.  The story sets his birth in the context of another king’s rule, the Roman Emperor Augustus.  Augustus is the kind of king who rules by force and decree.  In fact, in the strength of his 38-year reign, this emperor brought peace to the Roman world – peace, in sense of the absence of armed conflict.  Now, that’s a blessing.  That absence of conflict, and the prosperity that grew from it, caused the Roman world to hail Augustus with a couple of titles we’d recognize but wouldn’t apply to him:  He was known as “savior” and “lord.”  Those were common titles for this immensely powerful ruler who could snap his semi-divine fingers and command millions of people to carry out his every wish.

That’s the context of our story tonight.  The savior and lord Caesar Augustus has issued a decree that “all the [Roman] world should be registered” (Luke 2:1) so that the emperor could tax, and conscript, and otherwise dominate the provinces and peoples enjoying his peace.  And among the people following his order are Joseph and Mary, making the difficult journey in the last days of her pregnancy to go ... where Caesar told them to go.

It’s no accident that our Christmas story comes in contrast to this kind of saving lordship – lordship as the world defines it.  I think God was saying something very specific:  that the truly divine King would come in the least likely way possible – not as emperor but as a vulnerable newborn, born out of wedlock to parents whose relationship was on the rocks, born on the road with no place to stay, born into a people subject to powerlessness and poverty, lying in a feedbox not filled with golden, glowing straw like we see in the paintings but coated with animal spit.  Later Christian writers would see Caesar as the anti-Christ.  But from the start, God saw Christ as the anti-Caesar.

But why would God choose that path?  In a world where people follow leaders who enforce peace through mandates and decrees and the movement of armies, why would God choose to come to us, and save us, as a baby in a dirty feedbox?

I think it comes down to the same mystery that leaves us struggling sometimes with the reality of our own suffering.  Especially at Christmastime, we might be forgiven for wishing for a heavenly thunderbolt to deal with the issues that beset us.  We might find ourselves praying for a Christmas miracle, and I believe with all my heart that miracles do come.  But the thing is, they often don’t follow the timelines we’d specify or look the way we’d order up on our own.

To me, the miracle of Christmas is this:  That despite everything – despite centuries of people ignoring God’s call, despite fickle hearts that commit when the going is easy but quickly fall away, despite knowing that those being saved would turn against their Savior – despite every way we humans fail, God chose to take flesh, and inhabit our lives, and walk alongside normal, broken people.  And it wasn’t just divine tourism.  God came into our lives to offer us the hope of living in a redeemed world, in a new creation, forever, with the direct experience of human suffering now part of God’s own heart.  We receive the gift of eternal life from the King who reigns through service, the King who rules by giving himself away.  Jesus Christ reigns as Savior and Lord by investing his heart in yours. 

So, the miracle of Christmas is not that God will fix all our problems, because if God did, then we would be pets, not divine children and heirs of eternal life.  God could have made that choice, I suppose.  God could have chosen to play Caesar, invading a broken world with instant salvation.  God could have looked at the mess we make of things, and blown the whistle, and said, “You know, this free-will thing was an interesting experiment, but now it’s time for y’all to get in line.  Love me, or else.” 

That would have been peace, Roman style – the peace of authoritarianism, the peace of empire.  But instead, the miracle of Christmas is that the sovereign of all creation chose another way to save us – not the path of insistence but the path of investment.  God said, “This mess is worth my personal attention.  These broken people are my own children.  The only thing that will change their lives is love, and love can’t be coerced.  Love must be given, like an ever-flowing stream.  And love must be returned for the broken heart to heal.”

And, of course, the miracle doesn’t stop there, at the level of abstraction.  The real miracle of the incarnation, the real miracle of Christmas, is not just that God came as a particular human but that God still comes to a particular human – you.  To God, you are worth lying in a filthy feedbox.  You are worth healing.  You are worth dying for.  You are worth the investment of love that changes a life, because your changed life changes the world the Lord came to save.

I’ve seen it in a million ways, and so have you.  I’ve seen couples make the choice to resurrect a dying relationship.  I’ve seen parents make the choice to welcome lost children with God’s open arms.  I’ve seen brilliant people commit themselves to public service.  I’ve seen wealthy people commit themselves to ensuring that the lives of those without a voice are built up.  I’ve seen people in this church offer their gifts of hospitality or music or leadership or whatever, to serve the people they’ve grown to love.  I’ve seen people here give dearly of time and talent and treasure to educate children in a small town in Haiti.  I’ve seen more than 100 St. Andrew’s members serve and talk with people at the Free Store, just this Saturday, listening to others’ pain, and offering it to God, and providing a warm coat as a sacrament of grace. 

And, as I said, I know of a woman who is watching both her husband and her daughter fight cancer but whose heart looks outward still.  She could certainly be forgiven for not “feelin’ it” this holiday season – maybe even for polite and proper bitterness at the distance of God’s love.  Instead, she told me that, for years, she lived nearby another family that’s now going through their own grief about untimely endings, a Christmas without a mother and a wife.  And so, this woman with the outward heart said, “I made some cookies.  At least I could do that.  I made some cookies, and I brought them over.”  And Love came down at Christmas.

Because love doesn’t happen at a distance.  Love comes in filthy feedboxes.  Love blossoms in broken hearts.  Love heals us to heal God’s world.  That’s the miracle of Christmas.

Rough Good News

Sermon from Sunday, Dec. 16, 2018
Luke 3:7-18

At Fr. Jeff’s ordination on Wednesday, the preacher, the Rev. Dr. James Farwell, began with a great question:  “What did you all come out to see?”  He was asking about the ordination, but the reference was to Jesus asking the crowds about that crazy prophet John the Baptist.  And now, we’ve come out to hear John the Baptist, too, in our Gospel reading today.  It’s not exactly the Good News we might expect to hear just before Christmas.  We’re waiting for the baby in the manger, and John is getting us ready for “the wrath to come” with “unquenchable fire” (Luke 3:7,17).  Ho, ho, ho.

Last Sunday, we heard the first part of John the Baptist’s story, as Luke tells it.  Into a particular place and time, this prophet came to do what prophets do:  Speak for God.  That’s what it means to be a prophet.  It’s not about foretelling the future; it’s about telling people God’s word right now. 

So, out in that dry and dusty desert, John began his message with applause lines, red meat for peasants struggling under the thumb of the Roman Empire.  That’s what we heard last week, when John was channeling the prophet Isaiah.  Isaiah had brought comfort and hope to God’s people 500 years earlier, when they’d been defeated by the Babylonians and taken off into exile.  They had watched their army and their Temple crumble.  They’d been carted off to a foreign land to serve a foreign power.  But in that historical moment, God had intervened, telling Isaiah to speak words of restoration and hope:  “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight” (Luke 3:4).  The valleys will be filled in, Isaiah had said, and the mountains leveled, and the crooked paths straightened, and the rough ways smoothed out.  For the people in exile, that wasn’t just symbolic language about the coming of the Messiah, which is how we hear it.  For them, this was a promise that, literally, God would make a road across the punishing desert wilderness between Babylon and Jerusalem because God was about to free the people from exile and bring them home.

So, in last week’s Gospel story, 500 years later, John the Baptist was channeling Isaiah and promising the people that God was about to act again, as in the days of exile.  You didn’t have to be a historian to make the connection.  This time, the oppressors were the Romans, occupying God’s promised land.  And when John said, “All flesh shall see the salvation of God” (Luke 3:6), the crowd heard him talking about the Lord kicking some Roman heinie and putting God’s own king on the throne.  I think that’s what the crowds went out to see and hear:  a fiery preacher telling them that the bad guys were about to get what’s coming to them. 

But then, John the Baptist takes salvation in a whole different direction with the words we pick up in today’s Gospel reading.  After the applause lines about judgment against the bad guys, John turns on the crowd.  “You brood of vipers,” he says.  “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” (Luke 3:7).  Wait, what?  He’s going after us?  Yeah, and he’s just getting started about their self-righteousness:  “Do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.  Even now,” John goes on, “the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” (Luke 3:8-9)

OK, the folks in the crowd are thinking, that’s not what we came out to hear!  We’re the good guys, John, remember?  We’re the ones struggling under the Romans, with no decent income, and no opportunity, and taxes out the wazoo.  You’re supposed to be preaching the coming vindication, John, not naming what’s wrong with us.

So, after a moment of awkward silence, somebody pipes up with the question they’re all wondering:  Well, “what then should we do?” (Luke 3:10).  I think John’s answer is beautifully, and deceptively, simple:  “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” (Luke 3:10-11)  If you want to get right with God, get right with the person next to you, John says.  Salvation comes from turning toward God by turning toward neighbor.

That question from Fr. Jeff’s ordination, the question Jesus asked the crowds – it’s still relevant for us.  What have we come out today to see and hear?  Well, honestly, most of us have come out to see Christmas coming, right?  Even if we couch that in churchy terms, it’s still about looking forward to the baby in the manger.  To mark Advent here at St. Andrew’s, we use the color blue – in Western art, the color of Mary, the mother of Jesus.  We focus our Advent hearts on expectation, pregnantly waiting for what Jesus is about to do within us and among us.  Filled with hope, we long for the One who will save us and heal us and make us whole.  All that is right and good – and it’s how my heart usually spends Advent, too.

But then comes John the Baptist, God’s inconvenient spokesperson, crashing the Christmas party to remind us what Jesus is coming to save us from.  It’s actually not so much our enemies – whoever we see gaining advantage over us, whoever has wronged us most recently, whatever system gives its breaks to people who don’t deserve it.  Whether we’re white or brown, rich or poor, empowered or excluded, we can probably identify some people or some system that fits those categories, somebody who’s the bad guy.  These days, in our culture, we’re taking that to an art form, with everybody finding some part of the system to blame for their problems and, at the same time, implicitly justifying themselves as the injured party.

Well, out there in the wilderness, beholden to nobody, John the Baptist brings us the rough Good News of holy honesty.  We should look at ourselves, John says, not blame someone else; work on ourselves, John says, not assume we’re the good guys. 

Now, that could lead us to a theologically squishy conclusion:  that God isn’t concerned with the nature of our choices or the character of our society; that any outcome is OK, as long as we’re sufficiently humble about it.  But John the Baptist won’t let us stop there.  God does have a clear agenda.  Those who have more need to share with those who have less.  Those who have the opportunity to game the system need to play by the same rules as everybody else.  Those who have power in whatever form – political, economic, social – those who have power need to exercise it following God’s own model of sacrificial love.

So, like the guy who piped up in the crowd, we might well ask John the Baptist, “OK then, what specifically should we do?”

Here’s another deceptively simple answer:  Start by recognizing that we need saving, and that what we need saving from is sin.  After all, in this season of Advent, we could just as easily have chosen to deck the halls here with the penitential purple we put out at Lent, rather than pregnant blue. 

Even the name of the Messiah we’re waiting for tells this truth about our need to be saved.  “Jesus” is an Anglicized version, of a Greek version, of a very old Hebrew name, Yeshua, which is given as “Joshua” in other parts of Scripture.  Remember Joshua in the Old Testament?  He saved God’s people from their 40 years in the wilderness by leading them into the land and the life of promise.  So, when the angel visits Mary in one Gospel story and visits Joseph in another, and when the angel tells them of this baby about to be born, the angel says to both Mary and Joseph, “You shall name him Yeshua,” what we call “Jesus”; and that name means, “he saves.” 

But, what does he save us from?  In Matthew, the angel tells Joseph it’s about saving people from their sins.  In Luke, the angel tells Mary it’s about saving regular folks from oppression by bringing down the powerful from their thrones, and lifting up the lowly, and filling the hungry with good things, and sending the satisfied away.

So, as we wait for the One who will chop down the unproductive trees and burn the chaff with unquenchable fire, I think this is what John the Baptist would tell us to do:  Act in ways that save us, and in ways that save God’s world, from sin.  Look into our hearts and question the self-righteous assumptions we make.  Look around us, and see who needs a coat and some food, and then provide it.  Look at the systems we inhabit, and see what’s keeping people down, and then help make changes that offer hope.  Look at the divisions that infect our city and infect our hearts – where some people with light skin see people with dark skin as inherently threatening – and work to build relationships instead. 

That kind of saving action can take many forms, and no one response is right.  In fact, in a big-tent place like St. Andrew’s, we run the gamut.  I know people who volunteer in classrooms and gardens in Kansas City schools.  I know people who help educate children in rural Haiti.  I know people who work to elect candidates they trust to be agents of healing and reconciliation.  I know people who put signs in their yard to protest climate change and its effects on the people of our planet.  I know people who serve as personal shoppers at the Free Store for folks without warm coats.  I know people who show up at rallies to raise the minimum wage.  I know people who helped launch a social enterprise and now prepare people for living-wage jobs as dog groomers.  In each case, I believe, the intent is to help save us from sin – the separation of our hearts from one another, and our separation from God’s intentions for the children God loves.

We will disagree about the right paths, and I think God honors that, so long as we honor one another in the process.  Not every path fits each disciple’s feet.  But God is clear about where those paths must lead, and we proclaim it each time we gather to witness a baptism:  Seeking and serving Christ in all people, loving our neighbor as ourselves.  Striving for justice and peace, and respecting the dignity of every human being.  And – when we come up short in our work to resist evil and when we fall into sin – repenting and returning to the Lord. 

That’s our Christmas card from John the Baptist:  the rough good news of showing us our sin.  But without knowing that, what are we hoping our Savior will save us from?