All posts by Miranda Hassett

Announcements, Creation Care, Restorative Action

Mound Care Project, January 2023

This is an invitation that we’ve received, that may interest some of us as we move into the spring and beyond. In 2022 we drafted a parish land acknowledgment. We have given Amends funds to an organization representing the Wisconsin tribes.

We’ve also been on the lookout for some restorative actions we could take, too – not just words, and not just dollars, both of which can be abstract, but ways some of us can commit our time and energy and skill to doing the things that the Native peoples of Wisconsin and beyond would like their allies to do. 

We’ve looked at lists of restorative actions from other organizations and have been preparing to develop our own – and in the meantime, we were approached and asked to consider something. 

Governor Nelson State Park is kind of our neighborhood state park. It’s up on County M; its southern end is about an 8-minute drive from right here. At that southern end of the park there are a few effigy mounds – an animal shape, called the Panther Mound, and four conical mounds. These are mounds created by the Native peoples of Wisconsin, centuries ago; they are sacred places that need and deserve care. State agencies and the Wisconsin tribes have worked together to develop some very clear best practices for the care of mounds like these. 

We are being invited to help care for these mounds. 

At the most basic level, and perhaps to begin with, that would look like working with park leadership, with some guidance from tribal representatives, to help care for the Governor Nelson mounds in a culturally appropriate way. That might be a small-to-medium group of volunteers going out for two or three workdays a year to weed whip, remove woody brush, look for animal holes, and so on. 

At the slightly more committed level: Maybe there is a cohort of us who would like to really get trained on the specifics of mound maintenance – which is different in small but important ways from how we care for our grounds here, or how you might work in your garden at home. Then we would be able to help out at park workdays by lightly supervising other community volunteers, making sure they’re abiding by those best practices. That would ease the burden on park employees and tribal representatives to keep explaining the guidelines, and could make it easier to use community volunteers without compromising the standard of care. 

At the most ambitious level: Maybe our team could become part of a sort of Friends of the Mounds network – perhaps including interested folks from the other Madison Episcopal churches and other churches and community organizations with similar commitments. That group could go out as needed to help maintain mounds located on private property – for example, on farms out in the nearby counties. We have learned that that’s where the real need is – because the parks have willing volunteers they can call on, to some extent, and have been providing some level of care for their mounds already. Some of the mounds on private property need a lot of care, and it would be great to have a team that could go out on a Saturday, with the landowner’s agreement, and just do what they can. 

We do want to stress that this can start small, and we can see what our capacity is. We believe this is an opportunity where a relatively small group of committed folks can be part of something important and worth doing. 

The next likely steps are gathering a few folks, as soon as the ground is relatively clear, to go “meet” the mounds in Governor Nelson, and probably separately, an early-spring training on mound maintenance best practices. 

If this interests you, contact Rev. Miranda or the office and we will loop you in!

scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Jan. 15

When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day.

In our calendar of Sunday scripture readings, we’re in the year of Matthew’s Gospel. But this is one of the Sundays when we get a little chunk of John’s Gospel for some reason. 

Next week we’ll hear Matthew’s version of the calling of Jesus’ first disciples. That might be more familiar: Jesus walks along the shore of the sea of Galilee and calls these young men away from their nets and their boats. 

John’s version of the calling of the first disciples isn’t really a calling at all. It’s more of a sending. 

Andrew is a disciple of John the Baptist. He’s already left home and work and family to follow a rabbi, a teacher. 

But then his rabbi, John the Baptist, tells him that Jesus is the real deal. The Lamb of God. 

So Andrew and another guy go follow Jesus. 

And Jesus, naturally enough, sees them following him and asks, What’s up?

Actually, he asks: What are you looking for? 

This question makes a lot of sense when we realize Jesus surely knew that these men – who may have been quite young, teenagers even – have literally just walked away from John the Baptist to start following him. 

This rabbi-hopping suggests that they were seekers, looking for someone to offer them meaning, purpose, hope, a way to spend their days. 

So he asks: What are you looking for? 

And they don’t know how to answer. 

I love that; it’s so real. I wouldn’t have an answer ready either.

I’ve had those moments, when somebody asks an unexpectedly profound or intense question, and I just stare at them and say, “Um. Huh.”  

And then maybe I say something like, “So where are you staying while you’re in town?”

Which is what Andrew and the other guy do. 

And Jesus says, Come and see. 

So they go with him to where he is staying. Some cheap first-century AirBnB or hotel room in a nearby village, probably. 

It’s clear that the where isn’t really that important.

The who is what’s important. 

The text notes that it was about four o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe that means it was coming up on dinnertime by the time they arrived, so they decided to stick around. 

Some commentators think we’re meant to assume it was a Friday, so sunset and the Sabbath were approaching, and that these disciples ended up spending the Sabbath with Jesus – Friday evening and all day Saturday. 

I wonder what happened, during those hours. Was Jesus preaching or teaching? Were they just sitting together over some simple food and a little wine and talking, talking, talking about the world? 

Were they doing ordinary everyday things? Was Jesus, whom Mark describes as a carpenter, doing little woodwork to earn his keep? Maybe building a bench, or a storage box, or a cradle? 

Who knows? Just being around him, being near him, listening to him, awakened something in Andrew. 

Curiosity. Hope. Love. Loyalty. 

We meet someone like that, now and then, in life… Someone who earns our esteem or our devotion very quickly, for reasons it’s hard to put a finger on.  

And sometimes it turns out that our first instincts were wrong. Sometimes charisma misleads us; sometimes people who are compelling, who draw others to them, turn out not to have much substance, or worse, to be selfish, exploitative, abusive. 

But other times, when you keep abiding with that person, you find that they are what they seem to be, and more. Not perfect, but true. Not perhaps always nice, but good. 

A person who looks at you and you can see in their eyes that they really do love you just the way you are, but also, they’re not going to leave you that way. And you want to step up to being the person they know you could be. 

A person who you just want to hang around because they are going to make something happen, something that matters, and you want to be there to see it. 

Andrew finds something like that, in his hours abiding with Jesus.

Something that makes him give Jesus a particular name, when he describes him to his brother Simon: We have found the Messiah. 

John offers us a translation of Messiah, a Hebrew word. It means, the Anointed. (In Greek, that’s Christos – the source of the word Christ, which is a title we give Jesus, not part of his name.) 

What would that word have meant to Simon – to Andrew? To say that Jesus was the Messiah? 

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg wrote a piece just this week about the history of the idea of the Messiah. The practice of anointing someone with oil as a sign of their taking on a new special, sacred role begins in the time of Moses, during the wilderness journey, with the ordination of Aaron and his sons as priests to serve God in the tabernacle, the sacred tent.  

Anointing as a mark of a new status came to extend to kings as well as priests, in the following centuries. 

After the time of King David, the peak of Israel’s political and economic power, expectations that God would send an Anointed One focused on a King, a political leader who would bring back the good old days. Ruttenberg writes, “The hope for a Messiah was a hope to get back to how things should be soon in the current timeline.”

But as first the Northern Kingdom, then Judea, are conquered by the great empires of the time, hopes for an earthly king start to feel more and more distant. 

The Messiah becomes e a more otherworldly figure. Someone who will bring in the World-to-come, the coming Age. 

Our Isaiah text this morning hints at that turn: extending the vision for God’s Holy One beyond restoring Judah to its pre-conquest state, to bringing Light and Salvation to all nations of the earth. 

That’s the vision of Messiah that would have been circulating in Jesus’ time – someone sent by God to transform the world. 

That’s the name Andrew puts to what he is hearing and seeing and experiencing as he spends time with Jesus. 

That’s what motivates him to bring Simon along – Simon Peter, who will become one of Jesus’ closest friends and, later, the central leader of early Christianity. 

I want to turn back to Jesus’ words in this Gospel passage. 

What are you looking for? 

Come and see. 

I think John kind of means for Jesus to break the fourth wall, in theater terms, when he asks: What are you looking for? When he says: Come and see. 

I think John’s Jesus is looking directly into the camera when he says these lines. 

The Gospel writer we know as John is well aware that the readers of his Gospel will not have a chance to abide with the earthly Jesus. That’s why he’s writing a Gospel: to try to pass on something he finds so important, so compelling, so transformational, that he urgently wants to share it, to pass it on. 

He wants his readers to be drawn into this scene. To hear Jesus speaking to them. To us. 

And both of the things Jesus says – the question, the invitation – point towards an important word that’s hiding in today’s Gospel. 

The word is Abide. 

Well: In New Testament Greek, it’s meno. 

In reading about this passage, I saw somebody say that it’s a very Johannine word – a word typical of John’s Gospel.

Well, I didn’t take their word for it – I looked it up. There are tools for this kind of thing! 

That word is used three times in Matthew’s Gospel.

Twice in Mark’s. Six times in Luke’s. 

And somewhere in the ballpark of forty, in John. 

So. Okay. Fair to say this word matters to John.

In John’s often poetic and mystical writing style, there are lots of words that mean more than they mean. 

(That’s one of the reasons I wish we had a John year in the lectionary is that we could really explore that and follow through!)   

So Meno means remain. Also translated as dwell, stay, and abide. 

It’s an important term for John, somehow. 

I wonder if John chapter 15 is the key text for understanding what “abide” means. This is part of Jesus’ long speech at his last supper with his friends. 

Jesus tells them, Abide in me as I abide in you. 

I am the vine, you are the branches; the branches can only be sustained by the vine if they abide in the vine. 

As the Father has loved me, so I love you; abide in my love. 

I like that the NRSV, the Bible translation we usually use, chooses the word Abide here. 

It’s not an everyday word and it makes us pause and perhaps think about how abiding is different from just staying or remaining. 

“Remain in my love” just doesn’t have the same feel. 

But I wish that our translation used abide other places too, to make it clearer that this is a core word for John. In fact, by the time we get to the disciples staying with Jesus in chapter 1, verse 39, John has used meno three times already.

John the Baptist twice says that he saw the Holy Sprit abide on Jesus at his baptism. And the disciples’ question uses meno too – Where are you abiding? 

I find Abide to be a beautiful and evocative word. 

“Abide” is related to “abode”, a place where you live; “dwell” also captures this sense of really settling in somewhere with intention, not just hanging around between other things. 

For me “abide” – as opposed to “stay” or “remain” – has overtones of slowing down, being present, belonging, putting down roots. 

And even though John’s Jesus won’t talk about the deeper meanings of abiding until much later, his words in this Gospel text invite abiding. 

What are you looking for? 

The question takes our outward-bound energy and turns it inward: what’s this really about? What feels unfulfilled or insufficient in you, that’s driving your busy-ness, your seeking and striving? 

What do you really need? What do you want, deep down inside?

I don’t think it bothers Jesus at all that they can’t answer. 

That I can’t answer. 

It’s a question to sit with – to abide with. 

But in the meantime, while we’re asking ourselves, What am I looking for?… in the meantime, John’s Jesus says, Come and see. 

Next week we’ll hear the call of Simon and Andrew again. 

In Matthew’s version, Jesus’ first words to them are: Follow me.  

Follow me. A command, an invitation? A little of both?

Here, instead, John’s Jesus says: Come and see. 

It is a command, grammatically speaking. 

But it’s an interesting contrast with Follow me.

Follow me calls for movement: get up and go.

Come and see invites arrival followed by attentive presence. 

Follow me means decide, commit, NOW. Immediately. 

Come and see calls the disciples closer – calls us closer – but leaves the next step in our hands. 

In Greek as in English, the meaning of “see” spreads out beyond literal sight to mean understand, comprehend, experience, know. 

If we come and see – if we abide a while with Jesus – will we find something there that deepens our love, our loyalty, our curiosity? Our hope?  

There’s a lot to wonder and a lot to say about what it means to abide with Jesus when we can’t sit down for a meal or watch the sunset with the living breathing man, as Andrew could. 

But I’m grateful to know John’s Jesus.

I do strive to follow Jesus, with all the energy and direction that implies. 

But it is a balm to my soul to be reminded that movement and activity isn’t the only thing – or in John, even the primary thing – that Jesus asks of us. 

I’m grateful for Jesus’ invitation, here, to abide with my own deep self, to wonder what I am really looking for. 

And I’m grateful to be reminded that in my life with Christ, when I’m not sure where to go, it is sometimes okay to just be.

 

 

Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on the Messiah idea: 

https://lifeisasacredtext.substack.com/p/anointed

Baptism, Church Seasons & Holy Days, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, January 8

  1. About the Gospels.
    1. Start with basics; bear with me
      1. Bible – a collection of many kinds of texts spanning over a thousand years that, together, tell the story of God’s relationship with God’s people. 
      2. Old Testament – before Jesus, scripture we share with the Jews; New Testament – foundational texts of Christianity. 
      3. New Testament includes letters, sermons, prophetic texts, a chronicle of the early church, and four different accounts of the life, teaching, works, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. = Gospels. 
      4. Sunday lectionary (calendar of readings) – three of these get their own “year”. 
    2. Some folks find those many voices confounding. If all this Jesus stuff was real, why don’t we have one clear account of it? Why, instead, four, that differ on many details & some big stuff too? 
      1. I find the four voices of the Gospels very human, very real, and very reassuring. I’d go so far as to say that it’s one of the anchors of my faith. 
      2. An analogy for us: Imagine a funeral, or a gathering before or after. 
        1. People share memories, stories, what that person was like and what they meant to them. 
        2. Some things – big events, oft-repeated stories – will be told much the same by everyone, though perhaps some differences – how you understood that person, your relationship with them, your own personality and perspective. 
        3. Other memories or impressions aren’t shared as widely – part of someone’s particular relationship with the deceased, or an experience that only a couple of people shared. 
        4. When you put it all together, you get a sense of who that person was. But no one person has the whole picture. And often people’s impressions don’t all line up neatly. 
        5. If you asked four people to write down that person’s life, those four versions would be pretty different. 
      2. Now, in our funeral analogy, those four people probably all knew the deceased. It’s unclear whether any of our Gospel writers knew Jesus directly. 
        1. The Gospels seem to have been written down between thirty and sixty years after Jesus’ death. 
        2. But let me clear up a minor pet peeve. You might have heard that the life expectancy in Jesus’ time was around forty. That does not mean that people dropped dead at forty! 
          1. Numbers like that are an average that includes infant mortality, which was really really high right up to the mid-20th century. 
          2. Most people who survived early childhood might easily live to 55 or older; and many lived to seventy, eighty, or ninety. 
          3. Many of Jesus’ followers were younger than him. The Gospel writers seem to have used earlier written sources, now lost; but they could also easily have known people who did know Jesus and were present at the events they describe. 
          4. And talking with people with different memories and interpretations could be part of why the Gospels are different. 
  1. Let’s talk about the voices of the Gospels.
    1. Seminary exercise: read the first verse of all four Gospels – gives you a good sense of their voices and agendas. 
    2. Baptism of Jesus kind of does too. 
      1. It’s in all four, which doesn’t go without saying. 
      2. Look at your sheet. Vaguely chronological order, though Matthew and Luke may have been written around the same time, or Luke may be a little later than Matthew. 
        1. How John the Baptist is introduced, and whatever is said about Jesus’ actual baptism, in all four. (There’s more about John in all four, and there are interesting differences – but beyond our scope!) 
  2. First, and briefly: what is happening here? 
      1. John was a prophet and religious ascetic – meaning he chose simplicity and poverty – who hung out in the wilderness outside Jerusalem. He preached a message of metanoia, to use the Greek word. I dislike the translation of metanoia as “repentance”; it feels limiting to me. 
        1. Fave translator, David Bentley Hart: “a baptism of the heart’s transformation”; John: “Change your hearts, for the kingdom of the heavens has come near!” 
      2. Baptism – an adaptation of Jewish practices of ritual washing or bathing. Greek word baptizo just means to immerse or dunk. 
      3. There’s a whole thing about how John’s baptism was just a water baptism, but Christian baptism is with water and the Holy Spirit. That is important but we will not go down that rabbit hole today. 
      4. In all four Gospels, Jesus’ baptism by John is the beginning of his public ministry. Apart from the birth stories and one childhood story, he has been invisible for thirty years, presumably living an ordinary life and waiting for the right time. 
  1. MARK
    1. First written Gospel, perhaps as early as 66 – soon after the death of the apostle Paul, whose letters are our earliest window into the beliefs and life of the early church. 
    2. (When we say 66, by the way, the Zero that we’re counting from is in theory the year Jesus was born. And he would have died around the year 33, give or take.) 
    3. Mark dives right into the story – Jesus is baptized by John in the ninth verse – the sixth sentence – of his Gospel. 
    4. Jesus is coming from Nazareth of Galilee – his hometown and region. About 30 miles to the Jordan River, depending on where exactly John was baptizing. Not just a casual day trip, or stopping by on his way somewhere else. 
    5. As he is baptized, Jesus has a vision, hears a voice: “YOU ARE my Son, the Beloved.” Affirmation and comfort. And then – immediately – the divine Spirit drives him into the wilderness. We get that story at the beginning of Lent, late in February!
    6. What’s Markan about it? Brisk, clear, no nonsense. Purposeful. It happens and the story moves on. 
  1. MATTHEW
    1. Matthew and Luke both knew Mark’s Gospel and used it as a source. 
    2. Matthew follows Mark pretty closely here, but adds this dialogue between John and Jesus: “John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfil all righteousness.’ Then John consented.”
      1. Maybe this happened; maybe Matthew is capturing the testimony of an eyewitness that Mark didn’t have.
      2. But maybe Matthew adds this to address a discomfort that all the Gospels besides Mark seem to share. 
        1. Why would Jesus, God’s Son, the Beloved, need this weird wilderness preacher to shove him down in the water of this muddy river, as a sign of repentance? 
        1. Furthermore: There are hints in the Gospels that John had followers, disciples, and that his movement continued at least for a while beyond his death – which probably happened just a few months after Jesus’ baptism. 
          1. Some of John’s followers came to follow Jesus instead, but others may have felt like John was the real deal. The fact that Jesus came to John for baptism could seem to seal their guy’s position. 
        2. Jesus’ answer in Matthew is vague: Let it be so, to fulfill all righteousness. Okay, boss. John does as he is told. And again, Jesus has a vision – heavens open, dove-like Spirit, voice. 
          1. But this time the voice says, THIS IS my Son, the Beloved. Not YOU ARE. Implies a broader audience – not just Jesus hearing, but others receiving this revelation of Jesus’ true identity. 
      2. What’s Matthean about this? Not the most distinctive; John calling people a brood of vipers, a few verses earlier, is more on brand. 
        1. Emphasis on fulfillment – though usually Matthew has a specific passage from the Hebrew Bible that he describes Jesus as fulfilling. 
  1. LUKE
    1. Luke does not actually describe John baptizing Jesus. He says, “When all the people had been baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized…” I think that’s how Luke manifests his discomfort about this baptism – by kind of rushing past it. 
      1. Again, the heavens open, there’s a dove, there’s a voice. But this isn’t just Jesus’ vision anymore – the words “he saw” drop out. And the Holy Spirit descends IN BODILY FORM like a dove. Maybe Luke is trying to make sense of Mark’s metaphorical language and decides there must have been an ACTUAL REAL HOLY DOVE. 
      2. What’s Lukan about this? 
        1. “John son of Zechariah” – Luke is the Gospel that gives John a backstory. 
        2. Also: Luke doing this very Lukan thing of naming a bunch of government officials. He likes historical details, though he sometimes gets them wrong, and he likes contrasting the big global-empire scale stuff with the very local events he’s describing, which secretly have cosmic significance. 
  2. JOHN
    1. Confusing that this is another John. And the John of Revelation is yet another John. What can you do? 
    2. John’s language is cosmic and poetic right from the start. The first verse of his Gospel is, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” That sets the tone! 
    3. What’s Johannine – John-ish – about this? Lots. 
      1. One of John’s themes: bearing witness. The role of the Church and her members – to bear witness or testify to what we have seen and experienced, and how God has acted in our lives. 
      2. John describes the Baptist’s mission: to testify to the Light, which is Jesus.
        1. Luke’s birth story for John the Baptist has a similar upshot – he is destined from before his birth to prepare the way for God’s Messiah. This is just John’s very Johannine way of saying the same thing. 
      3. John goes a step further than Luke and doesn’t “show” Jesus’ baptism at all; it happens offscreen, so to speak. 
        1. This is another John thing. I think John – the latest-written Gospel – assumes people have read one of the others and know the basic plot. So sometimes he doesn’t tell about the big events, but comments on them instead.
        2. The biggest example: the Last Supper. John’s Jesus has a long farewell speech that evening, but he does not describe the meal itself. He assumes you know. 
        3. Here – John’s John the Baptist tells about baptizing Jesus, bears witness to what he has seen and heard:  God’s Spirit descending on Jesus, marking him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.
    4. So there we have it. The baptism of Jesus, the beginning of his public ministry, refracted through the lenses of four different Gospel voices. 
  1. VIII. The baptism of Christ – the Gospel event that the church always celebrates on the first Sunday of the season of Epiphany – raises a kind of riddle for the church. Jesus was baptized; Jesus told his followers to baptize people; but Jesus did not baptize people. Why not?
    1. One possibility: Jesus’ insight into how best to build his movement. In the early phases, you just need people to follow and listen and spread the word. 
      1. It’s later in the process of movement-building and eventually institution-building that you need a boundary rite, something to mark who’s fully committed, and who’s an outsider or inquirer.
    2. Second – there’s a cranky bit in one of Paul’s letters where it sounds like people are arguing about who’s most important, based on who baptized them. (Paul is disgusted and wants none of it.) 
      1. I can imagine that Jesus knew that kind of thing would happen, and that it would be counter to his hopes for equity and mutual service within the church. 
      2. He never baptized anyone so that there could not be people who would try to set themselves apart as having been baptized by Christ himself. 
    3. I think those are both good reasons. But it’s completely possible that there are other reasons we cannot know. It’s definitely on my list of questions to ask someday!
  2. What our baptism, the church’s practice of baptism, means for US is another sermon, or several. But let’s wonder briefly what Jesus’ baptism means to us. Why DID Jesus need – or choose – to be baptized by John? As John says in Matthew: Why are you coming to me? 
    1. There’s much of mystery here too – no clear or complete answers on this side of things. But when I put these four accounts side by side, I noticed something I hadn’t thought about before.
      1. In three of the Gospels, Jesus’ baptism follows some kind of birth story. 
        1. Luke has the one we all know best, with Caesar Augustus and the stable and the shepherds. 
        2. Matthew has the angel telling Joseph in a dream that he should take Mary as his wife despite her mysterious pregnancy; and he has the wise men, the astrologers, who come to visit the child, and King Herod trying to kill him, forcing the family to flee. 
        3. John’s birth story is very different, but it’s there. He names Jesus as the Word, and the Light; he tells us that from the beginning of everything, Jesus was with God, and was God. And then in the fulness of time, the true Light came into the world; the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. 
        4. And then there’s Mark. The only thing Mark says about where Jesus comes from is Nazareth. There is no birth story in Mark.
      2. Or is there? 
        1. When I’m talking with families about baptism, I like to say that baptism is, among other things, a symbolic birth. There’s water and mess and crying and joy and naming and welcome. 
        1. What if Jesus’ baptism is Mark’s birth story? 
          1. There is water, and there is rending open.  
          2. There is naming, and beginning. 
          3. There is a Voice crying out with joy: My Son! I am delighted with you! 
        2. I like thinking of Jesus’ baptism as another birth story. It helps ease the sudden jump in the church’s calendar from the babe in the manger to the full-grown man standing in the river. 
      2. Just as the other Gospels tell us that God chose to be born among us as a baby, Mark tells us that God chose to join that crowd gathered by the Jordan – the desperate, the confused, the curious, the skeptical, dusty and poor and weary and wary.  God chose to join that crowd, and then to step out from among them, and into the waters, to be born among us and for us. Amen. 
Uncategorized

Sermon, Dec. 25

Prepared by the Rev. Thomas McAlpine.

Readings here. 

Good morning, and Merry Christmas!

The puzzle in today’s Gospel reading: why does light need a witness (and how does that work)? I’m going to wonder about that in this sermon slot, but since at best I’ll only scratch the surface, I’d encourage you to take the bulletin home to wonder about it yourselves.

Why does light need a witness? That light [pointing] is on. If that’s my shtick, I’d better have a day job. Light doesn’t need a witness—unless we’re visually impaired. And that theme, it turns out, shows up elsewhere in John’s Gospel. In the arguments after Jesus heals the man born blind: “Some of the Pharisees near him heard this and said to him, ‘Surely we are not blind, are we?’ Jesus said to them, ‘If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, “We see,” your sin remains’” (9:40-41).

So even if we’re talking about “the light of all people,” or—as our epistle puts it—”the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being,” we need witnesses—like John the Baptist.

If we wonder how to unpack this metaphor there’s this aphorism: “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.”

Chew on that, and it’s not hard to despair. We like to assume our vision is 20/20. But we see things as we are, so why do I assume that I’m seeing things clearly, that I’m reading situations correctly, that I have a reliable idea of who I am or what I need? We can spend a lifetime observing the visual problems others have without it registering that we’re vulnerable.

It’s not that we’re totally blind. John’s Gospel explores the ambiguities. Sometimes the obscurity is elective. From early in the Gospel: “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil” (3:19). Sometimes it’s a strange combination of prophetic clarity and blindness. From later in the Gospel: “But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, ‘You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the whole nation destroyed.’” (11:49-50). From one angle Caiaphas sees more than any of the disciples, but is blind to Jesus having anything useful to show him.

The good news of the Gospel: God can deal even with our lousy vision, as evidenced repeatedly in the Gospels, whether with James and John (“sons of thunder”), who are all for calling down fire on a village that doesn’t receive them (Lk 9:54), or Thomas, the resident Eeyore, who greets the upcoming trip to Bethany with “Let us also go, that we may die with him” (Jn. 11:16).

How does God deal with it? By sending folk like John the Baptist that nudge us towards Jesus, and then putting us together with others who are fumbling towards Jesus.

It’s not that John the Baptist gets everything right; he has his doubts about Jesus (Matt 11:3), but he points folk to Jesus, and that’s enough. The folk God sends to play John the Baptist’s role in our lives don’t get everything right, but that doesn’t mean they can’t nudge us towards Jesus.

And God puts us together with others who are fumbling towards Jesus. I like how Paul puts it: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12). And that’s on our good days.

As you may recall, this comes toward the end of Paul’s description of “a still more excellent way” (love). The description is often read at weddings, but what Paul wrote it for was to help the Corinthians get through their thick heads the sort of practices needed to not self-destruct as a church: “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful” (1 Cor. 13:4-5 NRS). We might hear those verses as a sort of warning label: churches—marriages, for that matter—can be difficult, and flourish only with liberal amounts of patience and humility. As the African proverb has it, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

My favorite example of what God achieves in putting us together comes toward the end of John’s Gospel. One week after the resurrection the disciples don’t even agree on whether Jesus is dead or alive. But there’s enough patience and humility—enough love —that they stay together, and together meet the risen Lord.

It’s John’s Gospel that has that memorable “God so loved the world.” The word ‘love’ doesn’t appear in today’s reading, but it’s the motor for the action. God loves, and the Word reaches out to us. God loves humbly, and the Word takes on human flesh. God loves humbly, and sends John the Baptist to nudge us towards Jesus. And as the text lays it out, we need some corresponding humility to engage the story: humility to recognize our need for various versions of John the Baptist, however off-putting we may find them, humility to hang with others fumbling towards Jesus. We’re not alone. The Holy Spirit who came upon Mary has come upon us. As Spufford puts it “Far more can be mended than you know.” One day we will see face to face.

Merry Christmas.

 

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Current Events, Sermons

Sermon, Christmas Eve, 4:30 & 9PM

A few months ago I stumbled on a book called “A Church Year-Book of Social Justice,” for the year 1919 to 1920. It was compiled by the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross, a spiritual community of lay and ordained women in the Episcopal Church. 

The book has a short reading for each day of the church year, exploring Christian thinking over the centuries and how it relates to “the great principles of social justice which preoccupy our own time.” 

As an Advent practice this year, I started posting the readings for each day on Facebook. That drew me into pondering what our siblings in faith were thinking and talking about, just over a century ago. 

1919 was a tough year. 

World War I had just ended – a shocking, brutal disruption. 

A deadly influenza pandemic closely followed the war, killing many children, healthy young adults and elders.

And then there were the ongoing struggles of poverty and unregulated industrial development. 

Upton Sinclair published his expose of the meat industry, The Jungle, in 1906.  

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which killed 146 garment workers, was in 1911. 

The West Virginia Mine Wars, a series of violent clashes as mine workers struggled to organize for safer working conditions, began in 1912. 

There were big reasons that social justice was on the hearts and minds of people of faith and conscience in 1919. 

As I’ve posted readings from the Yearbook day by day for the past month, I’ve noticed that some don’t resonate – don’t “hold up.” But other passages have given me a vivid sense of standing with these siblings in faith a century ago. 

W. E. Orchard wrote: “In the anguish of the hour, when kingdoms are rocking to their base, the social structure of modern civilization is strained to the breaking point, and all hearts are full of fear…”

Who’s felt like that at some moment in the past few years?… 

In this era of climate change and the overwhelm of capitalism’s excesses, I feel like this text may be MORE relevant to us than it was when John Ruskin first wrote it in 1917: 

“Think you that judgment waits till the doors of the grave are opened? … The insects that we crush are our judges, the moments we fret away are our judges, the elements that feed us judge as they minister, and the pleasures that deceive us judge as they indulge.”

And then there’s this, from the great preacher Phillips Brooks: 

“The real question everywhere is whether the world, distracted and confused as everybody sees that it is, is going to be patched up and restored to what it used to be – or whether it is going forward into a quite new and different kind of life, whose exact nature nobody can pretend to foretell, but which is to be distinctly new, unlike the life of any age which the world has seen already… It is impossible that the old conditions, so shaken and broken, can ever be repaired and stand just as they stood before. The time has come when something more than mere repair and restoration of the old is necessary. The old must die and a new must come forth out of its tomb.”

I resonate with every word of that passage. 

One day, when I posted some particularly salient snippet to Facebook, I asked: Is it comforting or disconcerting to know that people living a century ago also felt like civilization was strained to the breaking point? 

And some wise soul replied: Both. 

It’s comforting not to be alone with these feelings, to have the bold and hopeful and urgent words of these siblings in faith to encourage us. 

It’s comforting to know that humanity survived another century despite it all, and that some of the great challenges they faced are actually better now, thanks in part to the efforts of bold reformers who worked and fought for change. 

But it’s also disconcerting, the resonance of these texts with our present moment. 

The 20th century is hardly a consoling tale.

We know some of the costs and struggles to come. 

The Depression. Another world war, atomic weapons, the Holocaust. 

The bitter social strife, as well as the important legislative strides, of the 1960s. 

The recognition of environmental degradation in the 1970s. 

The rapid increase in economic inequality and incarceration in the 1980s and 1990s.

Knowing that companions in faith a century ago also felt like their whole way of life was coming apart at the seams is no reassurance that our way of life is not coming apart at the seams. 

Dwelling with the 1919 Yearbook has made me think about time. 

We tend to think of time as a line that we’re moving along, in one direction. 

For example, we would draw the events I just named as tick marks along an arrow from 1900 towards 2000 and beyond. 

The Church brings another way of thinking about time alongside linear, historical time. 

Church time is all circles and cycles. Turning and returning. 

In the church’s time, it isn’t Christmas again; it’s just Christmas.

This Feast of the Incarnation is every Feast of the Incarnation.

[The Eucharist we will celebrate tonight is every Eucharist.]

We’re not recreating or re-enacting something.

We’re returning to something that has always been waiting for us. 

These are moments when we step into holy time, and meet the Divine present in our world in immediate and tangible ways. 

Thinking about the Yearbook from that perspective: It’s not just that people 100 years ago felt and thought similar things to what we might be feeling and thinking.

It’s that we’re all living Advent together. 

Brooks and Ruskin and the others are not just forebears but companions in this season of holy anticipation. 

Let me take this one step further. 

There’s everyday historical linear time and there’s the church’s cyclical time that returns and returns again. 

And then there’s God’s time.

Jesus, the baby we welcome tonight, when he grows up, will talk a lot about time. 

He will talk about two Ages, or Aeons, or Epochs, or Dispensations, or whatever fancy word you want to use for something we aren’t really equipped to comprehend. 

There’s the present Age, this messy ordinary world with all its problems; and then there’s the Age to Come, the Age of the Kingdom of God. 

The Age to Come is mysterious, distant, not yet fulfilled; and yet it’s not so far away that it’s irrelevant. 

It is, somehow, already dawning, already unfolding, within reach in small shimmering moments, in hopeful possibilities, in the thin places where grace breaks through. 

This kind of time isn’t linear time and it isn’t cyclical time. 

It’s more like, I don’t know, the before and after of a really good dream home makeover show: The way things are and the way things could be, transformed towards beauty and joy and wholeness.

In terms of the Present Age and the Age to Come, we are in the exact same Before situation not only as our early 20th century siblings from the Yearbook, but as Jesus’ first followers. 

We’re all watching and waiting and working for the coming of the Kingdom of God.

We’re all yearning for God’s great intervention in the confusion, struggle and suffering of our times.

Advent – the four-week church season that ended when the Feast of the Incarnation began at sunset this evening – Advent is a season of double anticipation. 

We anticipate Christmas; but we also anticipate the fulfillment of God’s purposes for the world. 

That holy After when Christ will return to earth and that new Age we have been taught to hope for will come to fruition. 

The theologian Fleming Rutledge writes, “In Advent, we don’t [just] pretend, as I once thought, that we are in the darkness before the birth of Christ. Rather, we take a good hard look at the darkness we are in now, facing and defining it honestly, so that we will understand with utmost clarity that our great and only hope is in Jesus’s final victorious coming.”

In Advent we pray, again and again, for the dawning of that new Age. It’s woven through our liturgies and hymns: our longing for God’s rescue, restoration, renewal. 

When we cry Come, Lord Jesus! in Advent we’re not just talking about the baby in the manger, although he is very nice indeed. 

We are praying for the end of the world, friends. 

At least, the end of the world as it is, and the beginning, in Brooks’ words, of a “quite new and different kind of life.” 

For something more than mere repair and restoration; 

For the old to die, and the new to rise up from the tomb. 

And yet when we arrive at Christmas – when we enter holy time to gather in wonder around the manger, gazing at that surprising, ordinary, luminescent child – when Christmas comes, we tend to let that second layer of our anticipation drop away. 

We act like what we were waiting for, has arrived.

And then – even if we have a really good, lovely Christmas – there will be a moment, tomorrow or Tuesday or next week, when we think, “Well, Christmas came, but we still have all the same problems. I guess all that praying and hoping and expecting didn’t really amount to anything.” 

Instead of faithful, joyful and triumphant, we may feel uncertain, weary and discouraged.

What I need from Christmas this year, and therefore what I’m offering you – because preachers are always preaching first to themselves, beloveds – is the reminder that God coming among us in love and mercy and fury is not a once-long-ago thing, friends.

It is always and it is already and it is not yet.

It is still and it is someday and it is surrounding us right now. 

We live in the world’s time, the relentless onward march of history, dates and events, wars and elections and pandemics, birthdays and graduations and deaths. 

We live in the church’s time, holy rhythms that circle and cycle and always bring us back to sacred moments and pivot points.

And we live in God’s time, as people of expectation, who know that things are not as they are meant to be. 

As people whose hopes and imaginations reach beyond the satisfactions and struggles of our present moment. 

People who believe that another world is not just possible, she is on her way. (Arundhati Roy)

And that our purposeful acts of mercy, courage, justice and generosity can help pave the path for her arrival. 

And sometimes our biggest fight is with the powers and principalities of the world as it is, and sometimes our biggest fight is within ourselves: with our own inner resignation to the broken reality around us, our honest skepticism that better is possible. 

What I want from Christmas this year as its gift to all of us is a profound sense of sacred incompleteness. 

The knowledge that what we’ve been waiting and yearning for is not here yet, and that it’s safe to say that out loud, to name that a lot of stuff still seems real bad, even on Christmas Eve.

And the knowledge, planted deep in our hearts, that the gulf between this Age and the Age to Come, between our long Before and God’s After, is itself a holy space, a space of promise. 

A space of darkness and unknowing and possibility. 

A space of birth. 

May it be so.

Amen.

Church Seasons & Holy Days, Kid-friendly, Sermons

Sermon, Christmas Eve, 3PM

This is a story about big and small. 

God is big. 

Not big like a whale or a tall building or the ocean. 

Big like you can’t even find the edges, where God begins and ends. 

Big like you can’t find the beginning when God wasn’t yet. 

Big like everywhere, like always. 

God is so big that nobody is more or less important to God.

God can know and love each star and every dog. 

God knows how many hairs are on your head, and still has time to be present with a parent grieving in Ukraine and an elephant giving birth in Botswana. 

God is big. 

But a baby is small. 

Who’s seen a newborn baby?

Who has held one? … 

They’re pretty small, right? 

Small and floppy and helpless. 

The heart of this story, the story we tell today, the reason it’s important, is this:

God who is big, SO big, became as small as a newborn baby. And why? To come close to us. 

It’s a big mystery, a strange thing to think about! 

It’s the kind of thing that is easier to talk about with poems and music and art, than to explain it like a lesson at school.

Let’s talk a little more about big and little. Let’s do a quiz.

Is an elephant big or little?

Is a chipmunk big or little? 

Is an ocean big or little?

Is a puddle big or little? 

Is ice cream big or little? 

Is a star big or little?

Is dawn big or little?

Is a sprouting seed big or little?… 

Has anybody ever grown a seed & watched it sprout? 

I learned something interesting a couple of weeks ago. 

The Bible wasn’t written in English. English didn’t exist yet! 

Parts of it were written in a language called Hebrew, and parts of it were written in a language called Greek.

And in Greek, there’s a word that can mean two things: 

It can mean dawn, sunrise. When the sun comes over the horizon and starts to light up the whole sky and everything under the sky.

Did we decide dawn is little or big? 

That Greek word can also mean a seed sprouting, breaking through the ground to stick up a tiny green sprout.

Did we decide that a sprouting seed is little or big? …

It says in the Bible that Jesus’ birth is like a kind of dawn.

Like the sun rising on people who have been sitting and waiting in the dark for so, so long.

And maybe Jesus’ birth is also like a sprouting seed. Like life springing up where you couldn’t see anything alive, before…

Dawn is big and a sprouting seed is tiny, but they can both be held in the same word. Pretty cool! 

The thing about dawn and a sprouting seed is that they both make you think things are going to keep happening, right?

Dawn is just the very very beginning of morning, of a new day.

And a sprouting seed is the very, very beginning of a plant. Maybe of a field, or a garden, or a forest. Who knows? 

There are so many things a sprouting seed could become.

You have to keep watching and pay attention and find out. 

In the Christmas story, when God is born as a human baby, God comes to us as something very small. 

But that’s not the only way God shows up in the little things. 

When we read the Bible and listen to the Spirit and learn from the saints and wise ones of the faith, we learn about God’s purposes, God’s intentions, how God means things to be.

Things like kindness and peace, justice and making things right, healing what hurts, building better ways and worlds, helping people have enough, helping people be their real true selves. 

When we watch and pay attention, we might notice the small ways God is nudging those things along.

And we might notice the little ways we have a chance to join in and help move the world towards kindness and justice. 

Like putting out food for the birds when it’s snowy. 

Or listening to someone who’s struggling. 

Or sharing with people who don’t have enough.

Or writing a letter to a leader to ask them to do the right thing. 

We need some big changes, too; we all now that.

But it’s important to tend to the little things.

Little things can be beginnings. 

Little things can add up.

Little things can matter in big ways. 

I like to give people a gift on Christmas Eve. My gift this year is to help you remember to tend to little things. 

It’s a little box, and inside is an even littler baby Jesus. … 

Uncategorized

Sermon, Dec. 18

It’s one week till Christmas Day!

That means it’s almost time for our pageant.

Every year on Christmas Eve we do a special little play of the Christmas story. Some of you are here, some of you are traveling to see family. (So we usually do another pageant in January.) 

This year we’re trying something new – instead of acting it out, we’re going to have our performers make pictures of the different scenes – not by drawing but with their bodies – costumes, etc. 

Getting ready for this – interesting to think about what people in the story would have been feeling. 

Chance for our actors to really think about that –  not just to stand in a particular place or pose, but how to show with their faces and their bodies how they would have been feeling. 

I thought today maybe we could practice that a little bit. 

Let me give an example. 

First scene in the story the way we usually tell it: An angel comes to Mary to ask her if she is willing to become pregnant with God’s son who is also God, Jesus. 

What do angels look like?…

In pictures they usually look like very pretty people, with wings, right?

Angels are messengers for God – that’s what the word angel means. They are God’s helpers. 

In the Bible sometimes they look like people, like in the Tobit story. Sometimes they are invisible, like in the Balaam story. Sometimes they look blindingly bright and strange and terrifying! 

One thing people have noticed is that a lot of the time, when an angel appears to a person, the first thing the angel has to say is:

Fear not! Don’t be afraid!

Which makes it seem like something about angels must be kind of scary, at least at first!

Here is one of my favorite pictures of this scene when the angel comes to talk to Mary. 

The artist is named Henry Ossawa Tanner. 

What choice did he make about how to show the angel?…

I like that part of the picture. 

But what I really like about the picture is how he painted Mary.

Look at her face and her body. What feelings do you think she is feeling? …

I like how this painting invites us to think about all the big mixed-up feelings Mary might have been having, when the angel asked her to do this big thing for God. 

Let’s try on a couple of those feelings with our faces and bodies. 

Mary might have been afraid of what the angel was asking her to do, and what it would mean for her. 

Not, like, I just saw a ghost afraid, but, this changes everything about my life, afraid. 

How can we show afraid with our faces?…

With our bodies?….

At the same time, Mary feels hopeful! 

That’s why she says Yes!

We hear that later when she sings her bold song of hope to her cousin Elizabeth, about how she will be remembered and blessed by future generations because of what she is doing, and how God is working to raise up the lowly and feed the hungry. 

Can we show hopeful with our faces? Our bodies? … 

Mary says Yes, to the angel, right? She agrees to do it. To become God’s mother. What a huge thing to do!

But then Joseph comes into the story. 

Mary is engaged to get married to Joseph, but now she is pregnant and Joseph doesn’t know anything about it. He’s upset!

Maybe he doesn’t believe her story about what happened. 

So God sends an angel – maybe the same angel? – to talk to Joseph too. To tell him, It’s OK. Go ahead and get married. This baby who is also God will need a human daddy. 

I wonder what Joseph would have been feeling?

I think he was probably kind of sad. 

Getting married is a big deal, and this wasn’t how he thought things were going to go.

Can we show Sad with our faces? 

Our bodies?….

He was probably also confused, right? 

He didn’t know what to think! 

Mary’s story didn’t make sense.

The angel’s story didn’t make sense but it’s hard to argue with an angel.

How could God have a baby, or be a baby? 

Why would his fiancé be chosen to be involved? 

Why would HE be chosen to be involved?

It’s a lot to take in and figure out!!

Let’s show confused with our faces… and our bodies.

Okay, let’s do one more scene! Later, in the story, after the baby is born, the angel shows up AGAIN to tell some shepherds all about it, and that they should go visit the baby and worship him.

God wants ordinary, poor people to be the first to know the good news about God coming into the world to dwell among us and share our lives.

The shepherds were just sitting around, waiting for the next sheep to be ready to have her lambs so they could help her, and making sure wolves or lions don’t come steal the lambs that have already been born.

And suddenly there’s an ANGEL!

And then there are a LOT MORE ANGELS!

How would they have felt?….

We already did Scared; let’s show SURPRISED with our faces and bodies! …. 

And then when the angel tells them that God is doing a wonderful thing, and that they should go visit the baby Jesus, they feel so EXCITED! They can’t wait to go! 

Let’s show EXCITED with our faces and our bodies!….

There are so many feelings in this story!  Lots more than we’ve talked about today. I think that’s one reason why even though we tell this story every year, I’m always glad to see it again.

Thanks for exploring those feelings with me! Maybe this will help some of our pageant actors when we start our work later today. 

Now, I have something I want to say to the bigger kids, before we go on. So while I’m doing that, I have a little project for you.

I thought you might like to make some angel ornaments.

We talked about how in pictures and paintings, people usually make angels look like pretty people with wings.

But some people have found that there are some pretty weird descriptions of angels in the Bible. Like, angels that have six wings instead of two, and are entirely covered with eyes!

So if you’d like, you can take these ornament bases, and use some sticky dots to stick on feathers for wings, and some eyes… and make a biblically accurate angel ornament for your family. 

* * * * * * 

Okay, now I want to say a few words to the bigger kids.

I gave a longer version of this sermon a few years ago but I think maybe it’s important to talk about now and then. 

There’s a word we’re going to hear a lot over the next couple of weeks. 

That word is Virgin.

We heard it once today already, in our Gospel.

Matthew thinks he’s quoting Isaiah, though actually the word in Isaiah is just “young woman.” 

And we’ll hear that word a lot in hymns and carols, as Christmas approaches. “Round yon virgin tender and mild,” and so on. 

We know several things about Mary. 

God chose her to bear Godself as a human infant.

God respected her enough to ask her permission.

She was bold enough to say Yes.

In the song of faith we call the Magnificat,

She celebrates being chosen by God – 

“All generations will call me blessed! How cool is that!!”

And she talks about the things she hopes to see God do:  

Tear down the powerful from their thrones! 

Raise up the powerless! 

Fill the hungry with good food and send the rich away empty! 

Nothing mild about all that. 

Much later in the Gospels, we see her struggling with her son’s mission. Fearing for him. 

Later, she follows him to the cross and watches him die.

She goes on to be one of those who tells his story. 

And, yes, at the very beginning, here, she is a virgin. 

Somebody who has not yet had that special kind of physical closeness with another person that they teach you about in … is that sixth grade Health? 

She says so herself in Luke’s Gospel: 

“How exactly am I going to get pregnant with this special baby? Because….” 

Out of all the things that we could say about Mary, the fact that she is a virgin is what churches have chosen to say over and over again, down through the centuries. 

It’s kind of strange that the historical Church managed to make Mary this icon of purity, when in Matthew’s Gospel, Joseph nearly abandons Mary because he doesn’t know how she got pregnant! 

That shame and struggle is part of what Mary agreed to face, 

when she said Yes to the angel.  

It’s important to Matthew, our Gospel writer, that God works through situations that humans find awkward and shameful. 

We learned that through the stories we heard last week, of the women Matthew names in his genealogy of Jesus. 

But somehow, through the ages, that’s not the message that churches have taken. 

And churches have not only obsessively focused on Mary’s virginity; they have made it an ideal for all young people – especially for those categorized as girls and young women. 

Many of our sibling churches still put a heavy emphasis on virginity and purity. You may meet people who are wrestling with those “purity culture” messages as they try to build healthy intimate relationships. 

Physical intimacy and our choices about it matter, of course. 

But I think a lot of the reasons for this focus among some churches and church leaders, over the centuries, are more people-reasons than God-reasons. 

Reasons like controlling young women’s behavior, and making sure men know whose children they’re raising. 

When the word virgin starts cropping up all over the place in our churches as Christmas approaches, it’s weird because it can evoke or trigger all that stuff. 

And it’s weird because out there in the culture virgin is also often used as an insult, especially for young men and amab folks. 

When I was in my teens, the message was pretty clearly that girls are bad if they’re not virgins and boys are bad if they are – which was a heck of a double-bind, especially for the straight kids.

My sense is that today the cultural messaging around all that is more complicated, but not necessarily better.

And that there’s still a lot of potential for confusion and shame. 

Here’s what I want for the youth and young people of this church. I want physical intimacy to be something you are able to choose freely, if and when you want it, with joy and curiosity and safety, and with somebody who thinks you’re amazing. 

I want you to know that your value, your worth, in church and in the world and before God, does not depend on what you have or have not done with your body. 

And I want you to be able look to Mary, the mother of God, and not see some icon of purity and perfection we can never live up to, but a young woman – youth group aged! – whom we honor for her courage, her faith in God’s purposes, and her vision for a better world.

Church Seasons & Holy Days, scripture, Sermons

Sermon, Dec. 4

The readings for today, the second Sunday in Advent, call us to attend to the relationship between Christians, Jews and Judaism. 

While perhaps not as loaded as Holy Week, Advent and Christmas raise these questions too: do we think Jesus fulfilled Judaism, completely and finally?  If so, do we see Jews as irrelevant, spiritually extinct? And if we don’t think that: Are we using language in church that suggests that we do? 

These questions matter. The consequences range from the kind of causal Christian cultural supremacy that results in public school classrooms being decorated for Christmas – to the kind of violence that means synagogues routinely hire armed guards to watch their doors during worship. And that my rabbi colleagues are still tending to the pastoral needs of families shattered across generations by the experience of the Holocaust. 

Today each of our Scripture readings raise questions of how Christians think about Judaism – in three different ways. We’ll start with our Gospel reading, from Matthew. 

In our 3 year cycle of Sunday Scripture readings, which we share with many churches, we have readings from one primary gospel each year – with chunks of John, the fourth gospel, scattered all around. We just started a new church year on the first Sunday in Advent, last week; and our gospel for this year is Matthew. 

Let me confess right now: Matthew is my least favorite Gospel – in part because of his often violent and frightening language. 

Why is Matthew like this? About thirty years after Jesus’ death, in the year 66, some of the Jews of Judea began to rebel against Roman colonial rule. The rebels never really had a chance against Rome’s military might, and the revolt quickly turned bloody. Rome crushed the rebels and burned Jerusalem. The Great Temple was destroyed. Many people died; many lost everything. 

This earth-shaking event profoundly shaped both Christianity and Judaism, from that moment onward. All the Gospels are marked by it – but perhaps Matthew most of all. His Gospel text boils over at times with his grief and rage. He seems to blame the Jewish leadership for what happened – feeling that it’s their rejection of Jesus that brought down this destruction, rather than the predictable eruption of the tensions inherent in colonial rule always and everywhere.

Turning to today’s passage: Matthew introduces John the Baptist. The Gospels are pretty consistent in their picture of John: A preacher who separated himself from society to live in the wilderness, wearing simple clothes he made himself and eating what he could find, and proclaiming that people need to change their hearts and their lives and turn back towards God and God’s ways – and to be baptized, a ritual washing, in the Jordan River. 

To all that, Matthew adds this angry speech against the Pharisees and the Sadducees. We know this is Matthew, because later, in chapter 12 and again in chapter 23, Matthew’s Jesus says almost the exact same thing, calling groups of Pharisees and Sadducees “brood of vipers” and yelling at them: “How can you speak good things, when you are evil?” And “how can you escape being sentenced to hell?” Those passages are NOT echoed in the other Gospels. 

Who were the Pharisees and the Sadducees? The Pharisees were a reform movement within Judaism at the time of Jesus, focused primarily on the common people. The Sadducees were an elite and privileged group who more or less ran the Great Temple in Jerusalem. The Pharisees and Sadducees would not have been natural friends; I suspect it’s Matthew throwing them together as enemies of Christianity in his eyes. 

Far too much of Matthew’s hatred of these groups seeped into Christianity as a general suspicion and hatred towards Jews – which in turn has spawned unimaginable violence. I read this passage with pain and repentance. 

It’s ours, but it’s not comfortable, and it shouldn’t be. 

Then there’s our Epistle – a portion of the apostle Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, written in the late 50s. Paul is writing here to the Christians of Rome, who included both Jewish and non-Jewish Christians, and he’s trying to help them respect one another and get along.

Before he became a Christian, Paul was not just any Jew. He had studied Jewish texts and scholarship deeply. He had become a Pharisee, a member of that reform movement that sought to spread more active and heartfelt Jewish practice among the folk of Judea. He was an up and coming young Jewish leader, when Jesus called his name and changed his life on the road to Damascus. 

Scholars have wondered, over the centuries, what to make of the fact that Paul was a Roman citizen, as we learn in the book of Acts. Maybe one of his parents was a Roman. Maybe his family was gifted citizenship, a major privilege, as thanks for service to the Empire. 

Either way, perhaps young Paul threw himself into his Jewish faith as a way to resolve the tensions of divided allegiances, of having ties to both subjects and empire. And perhaps it’s by growing up both Roman and Jew that Paul learned some of the skills of both/and living. Of holding ambiguities within yourself; of finding the value in different worlds and ways – even when they seem at odds. 

That’s the wisdom that Paul brings to this letter to the church in Rome, as he urges Jewish and non-Jewish Christians to welcome one another just as Christ has welcomed them. In today’s passage, he is trying to help the Jewish members of the Roman church see that it’s right and joyful! for God’s saving work to extend to non-Jews – without their having to first convert to Judaism. He quotes a series of texts from the Old Testament, the Jewish Scriptures, that mention God’s intentions to also bring Gentiles – the nations, the goyim – into God’s saving purposes. 

A few chapters earlier he was urging Gentiles, in turn, to feel humbled and grateful for being grafted onto the living tree of God’s covenant people, the Jews. 

He concludes this passage with this beautiful prayer for the Roman Christian community in its diversity: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Paul is dealing here specifically with Jews who have become Christian, like himself. But Paul’s attitude towards Judaism is nuanced and interesting. He knows that he was called to something different – something more; but he honors the beauty and integrity of what he came from. He’d like other Jews to become Christians too, but I think he’d also like to see Christianity stay pretty Jewish. 

It’s complicated! But I do think a truly Pauline Christianity would have a much more open and humble heart towards Judaism than historical Christianity has had. 

For Matthew, Christianity fulfills Jewish faith – and leaves Jews behind. For Paul, it’s less clear: he loves his Jewish heritage and kin, but feels called to a new way of faith beyond Judaism.

Who’s right about God and salvation: Jews or Christians? What if it’s not up to us to decide – or even to know? 

One of the texts Paul quotes is today’s Isaiah passage: “The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope.”

Back in Lent of this past year, Father Tom McAlpine led us in a study of how Christians read the book of Isaiah. We were looking specifically at a set of texts from much later in Isaiah, known as the Suffering Servant songs. Today’s passage is somewhat different – focusing on a wise and righteous leader who will bring peace to God’s people – but it raises similar questions. 

Historically, the prophet Isaiah and his eighth-century-before-Christ audience probably thought this prophecy was about King Hezekiah of Judah. Hezekiah was a young king who called his people back to exclusive and faithful worship of God.  But it’s the nature of prophetic language not to be fulfilled or exhausted by any given historical figure or event. Hezekiah did big things – but his reign did not usher in a cosmic realm of peace. It’s possible to see elements of a prophecy fulfilled, while other parts still hang in the air, waiting and shining. 

This text is here, in our Advent lectionary, because Christians have assumed for millennia that it’s about Jesus. That he is the “shoot of Jesse” – meaning, a descendant of Israel’s great king David, whose father was named Jesse. 

Now, Matthew and Luke both make a point of the fact that Jesus is born into a family with links to King David. But listen: David lived in Judea a thousand years before Jesus. And he had a lot of kids. By sheer dint of math and time, a heck of a lot of Judeans could have claimed Davidic ancestry by the time Jesus was born. 

It’s so, so hard for us not to read these Old Testament texts backwards from Christianity, as as inevitably and exclusively pointing to Jesus. In Father Tom’s class we kept tripping over that, how deeply-seated our impulse was to read these texts and think: “Well, this is obviously about Jesus; how could it not be? What else could it possibly mean?”

Texts from the Old Testament, and especially from Isaiah, shaped the language and hopes of the Jewish people for centuries. The way they thought and spoke about a coming Messiah, a holy leader sent by God to save and restore God’s people. And these texts likewise shaped the ideas and language of the first Christians, especially those steeped in the Hebrew Bible – like Matthew, like Paul. They used Isaiah and other Hebrew Scriptures to help them make sense of what they had experienced in Jesus’ life and ministry, and in his death and resurrection. 

We think we recognize Jesus in these Old Testament texts because how Christians think and talk about Jesus has been shaped by these Old Testament texts, literally from day one. 

I would rather say that everybody’s right than that everybody’s wrong. And I think that’s more faithful to the mystery of how holy texts can speak and speak again in new times and places. 

This passage is about Hezekiah and it’s about Jesus and it’s about the promised Messiah whom our Jewish siblings still await and it’s about the second coming of Christ that we still await. 

What passages like this tell us about God’s purposes for Israel and for the world can help us understand the person and work of Jesus. We can rightly treasure these texts as Christians. But we need to hold them carefully, with an awareness that they don’t only belong to us. 

At the Beth Israel Center across town, when my friend Betsy’s congregation opens the ark where the scrolls of Scripture are kept, and take out the scroll of the Nevi’im, the Prophets, and remove its silver end caps and its embroidered velvet cover and unroll it on the altar and chant it aloud in Hebrew – Isaiah’s words resonate differently in that space than they do here. 

Not entirely differently, to be sure. But importantly differently. And some of the difference is history and humanity – and some of it is holiness and mystery. 

It’s important for Christians to grapple with the anti-Judaism embedded in our history, our texts, our practices. Good citizenship and good ally-ship are part of our call to love our neighbors and serve the common good. 

But for me there’s something more here too – something a little hard to put my finger on, but I’ll try.

I find a sense of joy and freedom and possibility in the idea that God’s saving purposes are bigger and broader and honestly messier than any human mapping. We can’t pin down the meanings of ancient prophecy, or the mechanics of salvation, to fit within our categories of belonging and belief, doctrine and truth. 

This is one of the fundamental themes of Advent: The God who came among us as Jesus of Nazareth is coming again. 

We are people of expectation.

People called to expect mystery.

To expect disruption. 

To expect redemption. 

To expect, someday, whether in this world or the next, to come face to face with the Living One who both fulfills and transcends all our scriptures and theologies.  

May it be so. Come, Lord Jesus. 

 

Uncategorized

Advent Song Cycle, week 4 – Welcome!

The fourth week of Advent, December 18 – 24

This Week’s Song: “Enter, enter, holy pilgrims!”           Traditional

Enter, enter, holy pilgrims! Welcome to my humble home! 

Though ’tis little I can offer, all I have please call your own!

Entren, santo peregrinos, peregrinos! Reciban este rincón. 

Aunque es pobre la morada, la morada, os la doy de corazón. 

 Learn the tune here:

(Note that the English translation of the Spanish words is a little bit different than ours, in this video.) 

About the song

Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. 

– Luke chapter 2, verses 4 – 7

The word posada means inn or lodging, and traditionally posadas are a celebration of the Christmas story. They take place on nine nights from December 16 to 24 and commemorate the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph’s search for a place to stay where Jesus could be born. At the beginning of a posada, people are divided in two groups, the ones “outside” representing Mary and Joseph, and the ones “inside” representing innkeepers.  Sometimes two people dress up to represent Mary and Joseph. Then everyone sings the posada litany/song together, re-enacting Mary and Joseph’s search, going back and forth until they are finally “admitted” to an inn. After this tradition, the party proper starts. Posadas parties in Mexico feature hot food and drinks, sweets, music, and piñatas. Throughout Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, churches and communities celebrate these festivities with their traditional, religious elements. Today almost any party held around Christmas is called a posada. Schools often host posadas as end-of-the-year parties for students and teachers.

Source: https://www.journeymexico.com/blog/posadas-in-mexico-christmas-tradition

The Posadas song has verses that go back and forth between the pilgrims and the innkeepers. The first innkeepers are suspicious and don’t want to let in Mary and Joseph. But finally Joseph sings, “My wife, Mary, is the Queen of Heaven, and she is going to be the mother of the Divine Word.” The innkeepers sing back, “Are you Joseph? Your wife is Mary? Come in, pilgrims! I didn’t know who you were!” Then everyone sings a welcome song – the song above: “Enter, enter, holy pilgrims! Welcome to my humble home! Though ’tis little I can offer, all I have please call your own!” 

Watch a video of a wonderful storybook about Posadas here: 

(Or go to YouTube and search for “The Night of Las Posadas”.) 

WORD FOR THE WEEK: WELCOME

How to say “Welcome” in American Sign Language… 

The sign “WELCOME” is done by holding one hand out from your body, flat with your palm up, off to the right a bit, and then bringing the hand in toward your torso/belly. 

(Note that this is different from “You’re welcome,” which is a sign some people might know. To say “You’re welcome,” hold your flat hand to your mouth and then drop it down.) 

 

PRAYER PRACTICE for this week…

Christmas and the days before Christmas can be very busy. We may be wrapping things up at work or school, preparing for travel, finishing buying or making gifts, preparing for guests or special events, and much more. Some of those things may be joyful, some may be stressful, some may be both! 

Christmas is a lot of things. It’s a secular holiday as well as a religious holiday. It’s a time when many people have a break from work or school. It’s a time when many folks travel to spend time with family, which may be joyful and/or hard; and when many people are missing loved ones who are not present. There are so many feelings and so many things to do. 

The good news of the Feast of the Nativity, the Feast of the Incarnation (God becoming embodied), is that God is with us in the messiness of our human lives. We are not alone. We are known, loved, held, and accompanied. 

As a prayer practice, take a little time this week to ask yourself or each other what would help you feel ready to receive and celebrate the good news that God is always with us. Maybe it’s a quiet walk around the block (even if there are things to do). Maybe it’s a conversation or reflective time around the Advent wreath one evening. Maybe it’s listening to some favorite music, or reading Scripture or Christmas poetry, to help you hold in your heart what this time means for us as Christians. 

 

HANDS-ON PROJECT: 

When we welcome someone we let them know they are cared for and that they matter. Brainstorm one simple way you can show care to somebody, in the days leading up to Christmas – or in the days after it: remember that Christmas is 12 days long! Here are some ideas. 

  • Send a card, note or friendly email to someone you haven’t been in touch with for a while, just to let them know you’re thinking of them.
  • Look at the wish list for a local agency that serves those in need and buy some small items to help them with their mission. 
  • Make or buy a small gift or card for a coworker, classmate, teacher or school staff person, to express gratitude for their place in your life. 

 

SOMETHING TO LEARN…

Why is Advent four weeks long? 

Advent always has four Sundays in it. This year (2022) Advent as long as it can possibly be, since Christmas Day is on a Sunday! 

The Church developed special holy seasons during the first few centuries after the time of Jesus. When Advent (which is based on the Latin word for “Coming”, because Jesus is coming!) was first established, maybe about 1600 years ago, it was the same length as Lent, the season of preparation before Easter. Lent is forty days long, not counting Sundays, based on Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness in the Bible. 

Advent and Lent were both observed as penitential seasons, meaning people would focus on simplifying their lives, repenting and making amends for their sins, and giving to those in need.

Eventually Advent was shortened from about seven weeks to four weeks, and began to become more different from Lent – just as Christmas is very different from Easter. But we still make sure to give to those in need, in this season, and we reflect on the ways the world continues to need God’s presence among us. 

 

RESONATING TEXTS

These texts offers another perspective on welcome. 

Poem: O Sapienta    by Malcolm Guite

https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/tag/o-sapientia/

 

Poem: A Tale Begun      by Wislawa Szymborska, 1923 – 2012

This poem uses lots of strange allusions; you don’t have to understand them all to understand and enjoy the poem!

http://inwardboundpoetry.blogspot.com/2007/05/410-tale-begun-wislawa-szymborska.html

 

Poem: Advent Calendar (Rowan Williams, b. 1950)

Rowan Williams: Advent Calendar

Church Seasons & Holy Days

Advent Song Cycle, week 3 – Dark

The third week of Advent, December 11 – 17

This Week’s Song: “Honor the Dark”

Lea Morris

Learn this song and the ASL signs that go with it on YouTube:

About the song

Lea Morris (who also performs as LEA) is as Unitarian Universalist songwriter and musician.  This song was composed recently, during the Covid pandemic. This is a great song for this time of year when the nights are getting longer and it may be dark by the time we leave work or school. While we may prefer the light, the dark can also be holy and have gifts for us. 

WORD FOR THE WEEK: DARK

How to say “Dark” in American Sign Language…  If you watch the song video you will see it! 

Hold your arms out to each side with your upper arms a little below your shoulders and your lower arms pointing towards the ceiling, palms flat and towards your face. 

Then swing your lower arms inward so that your flat palms cross each other in front of your face. Your hands end lined up in front of your chest, elbows out. 

The sign expresses not being able to see, as your hands briefly cover your face. 

SOMETHING TO LEARN… What is the solstice? 

We live on the Earth, which goes around the Sun. The Earth also spins as it goes around the sun – each spin is one day and night. The Earth tilts on its axis as it spins, which is why in many parts of the world the days are sometimes longer and sometimes shorter. (There is a belt around the middle of the Earth – the Equator – where days and nights are always about the same length!) 

Every year has two solstices, a day/night when the Earth is tilted as far as it can tilt. In the summer, in the northern hemisphere (the half of the Earth that’s closest to the North Pole; we live in the northern hemisphere) is tilted TOWARDS the sun. That means we have the LONGEST day of the year – the summer solstice – on June 21st. (That’s also the SHORTEST day of the year in Australia!)  In the northern hemisphere, we have the winter solstice – the longest NIGHT of the year – on December 21. It’s coming up, next week! 

Even though it is early in the winter, after the solstice, the nights will start getting a tiny bit shorter – bit by bit – and the days will start getting a tiny bit longer – bit by bit. We can honor the dark, and also be glad to see the light beginning to return.

 

PRAYER PRACTICE for this week…

Take a walk in the dark. 

Walk in a familiar area, like the street or block where you live. Be safe; use a flashlight, or go for a walk when it’s not fully dark yet so that you can see. Wear something light-colored if you are walking where there might be traffic. 

If walking isn’t a good idea for you, you could sit in the dark on your porch or in your home and see what you can notice there. 

If you can find a red flashlight (or tape something transparent and red over a normal flashlight), that can be a good tool for a night walk, because the red light will help your eyes adjust to the dark so you can see better. 

Before you set out, ask God to help you notice the gifts of the dark, and to walk with you. 

What can you see, in the dark? What can you hear? What can you smell? What do you notice that is different from what you notice in the daytime? 

Does it feel different inside of you to walk in the dark? 

At the end of your walk give thanks to God for what you noticed or felt on your walk. You could sing this week’s song, “Honor the dark”!

(The Emily Dickinson poem on the Resonating Texts page goes well with this activity.) 

 

HANDS-ON PROJECT: 

  1. Make a Light & Dark Play area! 

Gather some things that are shiny in interesting ways, or colorful and translucent. Suggestions: colored clear or translucent glass or plastic cups, vases, and so on – even things that look solid may be translucent, meaning light can shine through them; shiny/reflective things – mirrors or an old CD or two. If you have a prism or a crystal paperweight, that might be interesting too!

Arrange everything a table. Find a couple of light sources – a flashlight or phone light, a headlamp or small portable lamp that you can point in a particular direction. Glow sticks could be fun too.

Turn off the lights and use your flashlights or lamps to explore how all those things look when you shine a light on or near them in the dark. Can you cast their shadows on the wall?

2. Learn some winter constellations!

A constellation is a group of stars that people have thought for a long time look like a particular shape or creature.  There are apps and websites that can help you figure out where to look – or Rev. Miranda can send you files for some constellation pages for winter constellations here in the northern hemisphere.

BONUS ACTIVITY: 

Celebrate the Feast of St. Lucy, on December 13! 

St. Lucy was one of the earliest Christian martyrs, meaning someone who died for her Christian faith. Lucy was a young woman who became a Christian. She made a vow that she would never marry, so she could commit her whole life to following Jesus. She was killed for her faith during persecution under the Roman emperor Diocletian in the year 304. 

St. Lucia’s Day is celebrated as a festival of lights in many parts of Scandinavia. Traditionally, a young girl will dress in white and wear a wreath with lit candles on her head. (We do not recommend this!) The wreath with candles comes from a story about St. Lucy. During her life it is said that she brought food and blankets to prisoners in a dark underground prison. Because she wanted to use her arms to carry as many supplies as possible, she made a wreath for the top of her head and inserted candles so she wouldn’t have to carry her candle. (Source: https://www.catholicicing.com/st-lucy/) 

The traditional foods for the day are coffee, saffron bread, and ginger cookies. It’s also a traditional time to make gingerbread cookies or houses.

A gory detail: Legend has it that Saint Lucy either plucked out her own eyes to avoid marriage to a pagan, or had her eyes put out by the Emperor Diocletian as part of her martyrdom. Sometimes images of St. Lucy have her holding her own eyeballs on a platter. She is the patron saint of the blind. 

RESONATING TEXTS

These texts offers another perspective on the dark. 

We grow accustomed to the Dark Emily Dickinson

We grow accustomed to the Dark –

When Light is put away –

As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp

To witness her Goodbye –

 

A Moment – We uncertain step

For newness of the night –

Then – fit our Vision to the Dark –

And meet the Road – erect –

 

And so of larger – Darknesses – 

Those Evenings of the Brain – 

When not a Moon disclose a sign – 

Or Star – come out– within –

 

The Bravest – grope a little – 

And sometimes hit a Tree

Directly in the Forehead –

But as they learn to see –

 

Either the Darkness alters – 

Or something in the sight

Adjusts itself to Midnight –

And Life steps almost straight.

 

Ode to Winter – Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales – link here: 

http://beingtransformed-bonnie.blogspot.com/2013/02/winter-poem.html

Cwtsh: Welsh word for a cubbyhole. It also means a hug! 

Hiraeth; a sense of longing for something you cannot find.