Watching just beyond the candle light

Friends,

I haven't posted here in many weeks, instead focusing on my book project in my early morning writing time. I am close to finishing a first draft, so it is getting time once again to come back to this space.

A few kinds folks asked me this morning to post my sermon, so that seems a good way to start. The day is icy, and sleet is covering the sidewalks. More than 100 hearty souls braved the weather to make it to church. We improvised a few things, and it was a more intimate worship than we typically experience.

I  was not slated to preach today, but put something together with a major inspirational assist from Steven Charleston. The readings for today are Isaiah 11:1-10, Romans 15:4-13 and Matthew 3:1-12.

Here it is:

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         Good morning. Thank you for being for braving the elements and being here this morning. Not everyone could get here, including our scheduled preacher, and so our prayers today are with everyone who isn’t here. And we are here to pray for them.

         I had not planned to preach today, so forgive me, I haven’t had much time to prepare. That of course, goes a bit against the admonitions of Advent, a time when we are told to be awake because we don’t know what is coming next.

         But I am an old newspaper reporter, and I can still do a few things on deadline.

         This morning I could give you a little biblical background about John the Baptist, but I’d rather save that for another day.

         Today might be a day to be a little more low key, a little quieter than John the Baptist calling us a brood of vipers. Today I would rather John’s unquenchable fire stay in the fire place.

         So, I’d like to read you something that a friend of mine wrote the other day on his Facebook page. This is from Steven Charleston, who is the retired bishop of Alaska.

         Here is what he wrote:

         “When the hour is late and the world is quiet, when prayers are being said and dreams are being sought, then the space between this life and the life to come draws thin, and if you look with eyes of the Spirit you will see your ancestors watching over you, watching just beyond the candle light, keeping their gentle vigil through the night, offering their wisdom in words too still to speak.

“You are being blessed by those who loved you most. You are safe in their care. The air around you is filled with a ceaseless benediction, your life held secure in hearts as pure as holy.”

Advent is a time of being awake the holy that is so near us. It is a time of waiting for the holy, but also noticing the holy already here. It is a time for noticing our dreams, looking with the eyes of the Spirit into the candlelight. It is a time for remembering our ancestors, and feeling their presence.

I am always struck by those individuals who feel this more clearly than I do, more clearly than the rest of us. John the Baptist was certainly one – it is why people flocked to the river to hear him and be washed in the river by him. He told them to repent – the word means “turn around.”

The word “repent” has gotten so laden with guilt and judgment that it has lost its meaning with us. But in its classic meaning, repent means simply, turn around to see God once again.

All he was really doing is telling people to turn around, go home, what you seek is already with you – God is walking with you. If you can see that, feel that, your life will be changed.

We’ve had people like that in our own time – and some have been prophets and sages. We know them because we can see how the Holy Spirit changed them, and then how they profoundly change the lives of others, and even change entire nations.

We know them by how they march in the light of God, and how they base their life not on hatred, violence and revenge, but on love, hope and reconciliation.

St. Paul himself was a man of violence and hatred until the Holy Spirit filled him the joy and peace of believing.

We lost one of those giant figures this week – Nelson Mandela. He transformed himself from a prophet of violence to a prophet of love and forgiveness. He changed a nation and changed the world.

At communion today we will sing the hymn, Marching in the Light of God, that became the unofficial anthem of those in South Africa who brought down apartheid.

We are blessed by so many other people still living. And we are still blessed by those who are gone from us but whose lives we can feel in flicker of the candle light, the breath of the wind.

Most of them aren’t famous, but they somehow touched our lives deeply. Who are they for you?

Some are our ancestors, and they watch over us, whisper to us.

May this Advent be a time for you to remember those individuals in your prayers, give thanks for how they changed you, and then be awake to how they still walk with you.

And soon, we will remember again how long ago, God came to be among us as a human being, as Jesus, and how by his life we are changed, healed and made new forever.

There really is more to this life than what you see now.

No matter what bruises and bumps we encounter along the way, healing does come, sometimes here, sometimes in the next life – but healing comes.

Life eternal begins in this place and dwells with each and every one of us. The One who comes is already here. The dawn soon arrives, and the blessing is ours forever. So be awake, look for the salvation that is already yours forever.

And may we always march in the Light of God.

Amen.

Down by the riverside the people come from far and wide

Today at the 10 am worship service we have our wonderful children's Advent-Christmas Pageant (and no sermon!).

Albrecht von Gaudecker and a great group of kids have worked long and hard to bring this season's pageant, so I hope you will come if you are in the area.

I am preaching at the 8 am worship. The lessons for today are Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11, Psalm 126 , 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 and John 1:6-8, 19-28. Here in my sermon:

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Today we make the acquaintance once again of John the Baptist, that pleasant fellow who is definitely not jolly old Saint Nick. John the Baptist, as you know, wears clothing made of camel’s hair and he has a leather belt and he eats insects. 

Although his name is “John the Baptist,” he is not a Southern Baptist or an American Baptist or any other kind of modern Baptist. 

He might better be called “John the Baptizer” because that is what he does. He stands in the river baptizing people. 

But before we completely dismiss John the Baptizer as someone who has trouble translating into the 21st century, I’d like to point out something remarkable about John Baptizer:
John the Baptizer draws people to him – many, many people from far and wide. 

In Mark’s gospel mentioned last week, that all the people of Jerusalem and all the people of the Judean countryside come to John the Baptizer. 

This week we get the version in John’s gospel. Not only do the common people come to him, the Temple authorities are so thoroughly perplexed they sent emissaries to question him, and they wonder if he is the messiah, or maybe the prophet Elijah. 

John the Baptizer has captivated all Israel, from the bottom up. 

That is an amazing fact. The gospels are saying, not so subtly, that the people of Israel are having trouble seeing the holy in the holy city.

People are having trouble finding the holy in their homes and work, and they wonder if the holy can be found outside their regular modes of organized religion. 

Maybe that has a ring of familiarity for us? 

And then these ancient people are willing to walk a very long distance to find this holy man standing waist-deep in a muddy river in the desert. 

Something very, very powerful is happening with John the Baptizer, and all the people of Judea have come from far and wide to experience it. 

These people long ago may dress and speak differently than we do. But I would also guess they have much in common with us. 

They have experienced the ups and downs of life, and they are searching for the same things we are, and they probably walked for days to reach the river Jordan and find this John the Baptizer. 

When they get there, John tells them something extraordinary: What you seek is with you already. Look up, open your eyes, God is everywhere and was with you all along.
The word repent means to “turn around,” and that is the great and wonderful irony of this story. 

People walk miles into the desert to find what they had all along. Turn around, see what has always been with you. 

John the baptizer tells the people, who have come so very far, that all they really needed to do is turn around to see God. 

The Holy was with them all along and never had left them, even when life looked bleakest. John declares the same good news that comes from the prophet Isaiah:

“The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted.” 

Then John the Baptizer washes the people – baptizes them – in the river as a symbol that their life has begun new again, that it is never too late to see and experience God. 

And John tells them something more remarkable, that God will soon walk among them as a human being, as the One who will wash them in Holy Spirit.

“I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal.” 

How will we know this? 

By being awake in this time of Advent before the dawn. 

John the Baptizer is still standing in the river, telling us to sharpen our eyes and ears. Look and listen for God all around you. What you seek is already with you. The One who comes is already here, and is washing you in holy spirit,

Be awake. You really don’t have to travel far to find what you seek. Look for the dawn of Christ’s light in life, and in everyone you meet, today, and in the days to come.
Amen.

Photograph above of the Jordan River Valley, courtesy of GLOWA, an international research project working on maintaining sustainable water resources in Jordan River region.

It's all about showing up, or who is this messiah anyway?

This morning we have the children's Christmas pageant at the 10 am worship service. I am preaching at the 8 am service and the 5:30 pm service. The Rev. Nicholas Forti, our newly ordained priest, will celebrate his first Eucharist at the 10 am service.

At the later service, I will be talking about a feast day that the captures the imagination of much of the world -- the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe. That sermon will be posted later this afternoon.

My 8 am sermon is posted below, and is based on James 5:7-10, Matthew 11:2-11. Here is the sermon:

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It’s all about showing up.

Today the lessons have an outwardly simple theme: Showing up.

But let’s back up.

To set our stage: We meet again John the Baptist, only this time when we meet him, he is in prison. The placement of this passage in our weekly lectionary is a bit odd, because last week he was standing in the River Jordan calling people vipers, and this week he is already in prison.

We have skipped past Jesus coming to him to be baptized – we will circle back to that part of the story on another Sunday. The passage comes this week because it helps set the stage for Christmas, the birth of the messiah. But we aren’t quite there yet.

Today, John the Baptist is in jail and he sends a message to Jesus:

“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

He wants to know, who are you? Who has shown up?

John’s question is jarring. Doesn’t John already know the answer?

According to Luke, John has always known Jesus. They are blood relatives. Even before he was born, John knew it was Jesus in his mother’s womb when Mary came to see John’s mother Elizabeth.

John had leapt in his mother’s womb when Mary, pregnant with Jesus, entered the room. And they were cousins, and probably grew up together.

So it’s a very odd question from someone who supposedly knows the answer.

One way to read this is to hear John expressing doubt – and I take comfort in that. He’s experienced Jesus first hand, and still he is not sure.

Maybe even John the Baptist, this strident prophet of God’s kingdom, had his moments of doubt. From our moments of doubt can come moments of clarity.
Paradoxically, doubt can be a tool pushing us to a deeper place of faith by compelling us to ask hard questions and not settle for pat answers.

Yet John may be asking a more nuanced question, and the nuance can be found in Jesus’ answer.

John is really asking: What kind of messiah are you? Are you the one we have heard about: A messiah who will raise an army and vanquish the Romans with a sword in your hand? A messiah like King David who will bring us back to the glory years? Are you that kind of messiah?

That is the kind of messiah people yearn for in the time of Jesus.

By one estimate I’ve read, two-thirds of the Jewish population of the Middle-east was annihilated by the Romans in the century of Jesus. It was the first Holocaust, and we do well to read the New Testament with that backdrop in mind.
John the Baptist’s question is not unreasonable.

There was another “messiah” – Shimon Bar-Kokhba – who led an uprising against the Romans that briefly gained momentum before he and his followers were crushed by the legions.

John the Baptist wants to know: Are you this kind of messiah? Or are you something else?

Jesus replies, I am something else.

“Go and tell John what you hear and see: The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

Jesus is a very different kind of messiah.

Then he lobs a wonderful inside joke. Like all inside-jokes, you have to have been there to get the humor, and this joke is 2,000 years old, so you can be excused if it flew past you.

“What did you go out into the wilderness to look at?” Jesus asks, “A reed shaken by the wind?”

The reed was the symbol of Herod Antipas, the Judean king who is a puppet of the Romans. Herod’s reed was stamped on coins to show his strength.

Jesus takes a dig at Herod by calling him a “reed shaken by the wind.” Jesus is calling Herod a wimp.

That is an outlandish statement on the part of Jesus. After all, Herod is part of the Roman machine that will put Jesus to death. So what to make of this?

Jesus is saying that he is a messiah that stands outside of the human social and political order. We get a messiah who is pointedly not a politician with his symbol on a coin, not someone “in soft robes” – another dig at Herod.

Jesus is not using his messiahship as a place of power, but quite the opposite. He is saying I am the messiah who brings healing and health and life now.

The values of the world – power, possessions, violence – have nothing to do with what this kind of messiah is. Power, possessions and violence are but empty idols.
Jesus makes his claim of messiahship by standing outside those values, and by standing inside of God’s unlimited Grace that has no boundaries in this world or in the next.

The values of Jesus, the One for whom we are waiting, are the values of healing, wholeness, forgiveness and reconciliation.

Salvation comes not as a reward for standing in lock step with a political leader, or strictly adhering to a set of doctrines.

Salvation comes not from a human economy based on reward-and-punishment.
Rather salvation is gift from God’s unlimited grace-filled abundance. By saying so, Jesus is deliberately setting himself up outside the social order of this world.

Jesus’ position is profoundly threatening to the powers of this world because he is declaring that our salvation is not dependent on those powers.

His position brought tension in his time and brings tension in ours. We still live in a world dominated by politics and economics. We need social order. We still need police officers to patrol our streets and show up at this church when we have a break-in.

We need schools to educate our children, and yes, we still need the Congress to pass laws to deal with complex issues like health care, energy, national security, economics and global warming.

But we should not mistake our social order as being our messiah. Or to put this another way, our limited social constructions, even at their best, are not the best God has for us. They can become empty idols if we are not careful.

And that brings us back to Jesus, the One whom John wonders: What kind of Messiah are you?

Jesus replies with his life-giving actions, demonstrating that God’s gift of eternal life begins now, not in the future, but now. Healing and wholeness are ours, now.
That, too, is an outlandish statement.

We all know that people get sick and tragedy happens. So how can Jesus make this claim? I believe Jesus is showing us that there is a continuum from this world into the world just beyond the horizon of our experience.

There really is more to this Creation than what you see now. Healing does come, sometimes here, sometimes there – but healing comes.

God’s creation is all connected in this world and in the next. So be awake, look for the salvation that is already yours.

Life eternal begins in this place and dwells with each and every one of us. The One who comes is already here. The dawn soon arrives, and the blessing is ours forever. Amen.

Icon above of John the Baptist.

"You brood of vipers!"

On the Third Sunday of Advent, we have our children's pageant at the 10 am worship service. This is my sermon from the 8 am service. It is taken from Luke 3:7-18.

“You brood of vipers!”

There, I have always wanted to say that. It feels pretty good.

Today we make the acquaintance again of John the Baptist, that pleasant fellow who is definitely not jolly old Saint Nick. John wears clothing made of camel’s hair and he has a leather belt and he eats insects.

Although his name is “John the Baptist,” he is not a Southern Baptist or an American Baptist or any other kind of modern Baptist. He might better be called “John the Baptizer” because that is what he does; he stands in the river baptizing people.

But before we completely dismiss John the Baptizer as someone who comes off as, well, a bit unhinged and has trouble translating into the 21st century, I’d like to point out something remarkable about John Baptizer.

There is something about this John the Baptizer that draws people to him. The gospel of Luke today tells us that crowds of people came looking for him. The crowds come looking for something better; I would venture the crowds long for an encounter with the holy. And they are willing to walk a very long distance to find this holy man standing in a river in the desert.

Something very, very powerful is happening with John the Baptizer, and the crowds have come from far and wide to be part of it.

Those people may dress and speak differently than we do. But I would also guess they have much in common with us. They have experienced the ups and downs of life, and they are searching for the same things we are, and they probably walked for days to reach the river Jordan and John the baptizer.

When they get there, they want to know something: Are you the messiah?

But John surprises them; he tells the crowds: You are asking the wrong question.
The messiah is coming, he says. But you haven’t asked the right question.

The right question is: What will you do in the certain knowledge the messiah is coming?

He tells the people to get right with God. And to get right with God, you must get right with each other. Feed the poor, make sure no one goes hungry. Give away your extra coat, make sure no one goes cold. Those of you with much, don’t complain you don’t have enough. Give some of it away.

Get right with each other, and when you do you will be ready to see the Messiah coming among you.

John uses a word very unfashionable in our world: he tells people to repent.

The word “repent” means to “turn around,” and that is the great and wonderful irony of this story.

John the baptizer tells the people, who have come so far, that they really did not have to travel so far to find what they sought. All they need do is turn around and go home to see God.

But before they go, John the Baptizer washes them – baptizes them – in the river as a symbol that their life has begun new again, that it is never too late for anyone to see and experience God, that it is never too late to answer God’s call to serve each other.

John steps into the river of people and tells them – and us to repent – how to turn back to God:
By being awake, looking for God around you and listening to the Holy Spirit at work in your life, and then doing something with that experience by acting right with each other.

And then he tells them the Messiah is coming. And for us, the Messiah -- Christ Jesus -- has already come, and is here. But perhaps we still do not see.

I would like to think all of this has something to do with this color blue of Advent, the color of the sky before the dawn.

Have you ever noticed something else about the pre-dawn sky? It is the time when it is hardest to see anything. Think of the world where we live as the pre-dawn sky – it is sometimes so very hard to see God in our surroundings.

In the days ahead, look and listen for God all around you. What you seek is already with you.
John the baptizer gives each of us the message of Advent: Be awake. You really don’t have to travel far to find what you seek. Look for the dawn of Christ’s light here, today, and in the days ahead. Amen.