Chapter 16 marks the end of the beginning of Matthew's gospel. Here Peter calls Jesus “the Messiah”; and Jesus calls Peter “Satan.” Those with ears to hear know the struggle isn't local. It’s cosmic. It is personal, however. The disciples learn that the future includes a cross, prepared and waiting. One for each of them, to do with as they decide. And for us – readers, followers – ever since. Whatever we decide, nothing is what it seems. Or, maybe said better: everything is more than we can begin to imagine.
Let's pray: Good and holy God of space and time and everything therein, that we should propose to speak to you is silliness beyond reckoning. And yet, we come, giving voice to we know not what. Our wishes? Our fears? Whatever counts as good, O God, help us to wish for that. Whatever keeps us from you, may that be our fear. Amen. The next time he goes off alone to pray, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John. Either the other nine weren't invited or they didn't want to go. They did not have a good time in his absence – that we know for sure. How would the church be different had Jesus chosen poets and painters as his disciples? Poets and painters might have left us able to sit with this, knowing better how to carry it in our hearts and minds, in our life together. Because the words do not suffice. All the words in the world make this – whatever this thing is – no less unfamiliar in our mouths for two thousand years of saying it. This thing. This event. This mystery. This illusion. This vision. This experience. This miracle? called “Transfiguration.” And if it is a miracle, what makes it so? That three humans claimed to see it? Maybe this is how Jesus always prayed – with ancient prophet friends?...but “ancient” only to us. Peter, James and John didn't see something new, only something new to them. And something of Jesus they have never seen before, something they did not expect, something for which they had no words. Peter, naturally, was not deterred. He declares he will build shelters for the prophets right here on this mountain. It is one of those sentences that sound better inside your head than coming out of your mouth. Jesus doesn't get to answer before God in heaven interrupts: “This is my own dear Son, and I am pleased with him. Listen to what he says!” Now, they fall down like dead people. The moment is over. Jesus touches them and says, "Get up. Don’t be afraid!” On Sunday afternoons I drive home from here exhausted, but mostly embarrassed. Embarrassed about preaching. I am embarrassed right now to tell you I'm embarrassed. Embarrassed that it takes hours and hours to write bad sermons. Embarrassed at how every single one misses the mark of telling the gospel of Christ. Misses by so far I'm embarrassed at the memory of it. I do okay at what I do, but I'm not doing what I am supposed to do. Like a surgeon who is a very skilled knitter. So, in a twisted sort of way, it's truly comforting for me to watch Peter – who is watching Jesus in all his divinity and transcendence – open up his mouth and sound like a braying jackass. And then – this is the important part – and then, Jesus doesn't smite him! Jesus doesn't even call him “Satan” again. God yelled a little bit, true. Then Jesus just puts out his hand and says, “Get up. Don't be afraid.” Jesus knows that Peter has hardly done his worst. His worst is still weeks and weeks away, in Jerusalem, in the courtyard of a man named Caiaphas. I pray to God I've done my worst. You? Maybe, maybe not. Either way, not until we've been and done our worst to him and to one another – which are the same thing, of course – will we even begin to glimpse or grasp the best of this faith we already claim. We see Jesus as Jesus wants to be seen. We don't know what forgiveness is, before we realize what we've been forgiven. Our feeble hearts and minds can't hold it, so our tongues certainly can't tell it. And I wonder if, in some way, this knowing what we do not know, that living with this knowing and not knowing, wishing we could speak the grace of God, but having no speech to say it, is the cross we bear. In my case, this wanting to and failing to preach. Jesus says that all who choose to go with him have our own cross to carry. I know, or at least thought I knew, that he means death. We learn to carry ourselves toward death, fearlessly. We learn to carry the knowledge of our own death in us, knowing he has taken the sting of it away. But here, Jesus does not speak of death, he speaks of life: forget your life; save your life; destroy your life; give up your life; find your life; get back your very soul. Here, Jesus doesn't appear to want my death. Jesus wants my life. I really thought I was going to outgrow Dorky. Here I still am: dorky, tongue-tied and simple-minded, faint- hearted as my life is and, as best I can tell, Jesus wants it. Completely. A life to be borne cheerfully, resisting the urge every Sunday afternoon not to have to think about what I am doing right now. Am I making any sense at all? Is this connecting? Some days, the notion that Jesus was both human and divine is no greater mystery to me than that I am preacher now. Both strike me as amazing. One strikes me as absurd. And yet we carry on, like Peter down the mountain, Jesus wisely suggesting to him that he not talk about the things that he'd just seen. Not until after my resurrection. Which surely prompted another twenty questions. But there was not time to explain. The other nine disciples had a problem on their hands that Jesus had to fix. The story arc has shifted now. Jerusalem looms large over every scene and conversation. The cross is distant, but constantly in view – and the invitation for whoever would go with him. Our lives are what he wants, whatever we would make of them. Amazingly, the Lord, God, Creator and Sustainer of heaven and earth, has use of them. Far be it from a dork like me to explain it. Better that we all keep silent and answer with our lives, this day and every day to come. Would you pray with me?
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In a certain Baptist church in the South, it was traditional for the deacons to take the new pastor on an all-day Saturday fishing trip. When they hired their first woman pastor, they wondered whether it was still appropriate – and decided it might offend her if they stopped. She hated fishing, but she too did not want to offend. They picked her up before daylight, arrived at the lake, got the boat into the water, and motored out half a mile from shore.
She was freezing from the get-go and wanted her sweater, but she was too embarrassed to ask them to take her back. Finally, she said to herself, this is ridiculous, so she stepped out of the boat, walked across the water to the car, got her sweater, walked back across the water, and got back into the boat. And everyone just kept fishing in total silence. The next day at church, a deacon who hadn't been there asked, Well, how did it go? To which another replied, Brother, not only can that preacher not fish, she cain't swim either. That one never gets old! The way Matthew 14 never gets old. The way these two stories overflow with the message of abundance – the abundance of poverty and fear and violence in this world, some of it driven by human greed and injustice, some of it driven by nature itself – but more than that, the abundance of grace; the abundance of faith; the abundance of courage and goodness and joy, available to people willing to have their hearts and minds transformed, willing to keep their eyes on Jesus even when the wind picks up. Because we are getting wet either way, friends. Let's pray. We cannot predict the future, o God, except to say that it will be mostly ordinary with some terrible and some lovely along the way. Disappointments and losses. But rain too – for the just and the unjust. We do our worst and try our best – and either way end up more wet than we thought we'd be, soaked to the skin some days, for better and for worse. So help us live by faith, o God, to face each day with the hope and the courage that breed justice, kindness and decency. We pray in Jesus' name. We call it speaking truth to power. But really, it's saying out loud what most everybody knows already – in this case that Herod, Rome's puppet ruler in Israel, was sleeping with his brother's wife, a clear violation of the Torah. Jewish leadership in Jerusalem may have been too spineless to stand up to Herod, but John wasn't. For his preaching he got thrown in jail and then executed, his head literally served up on a platter. Herod was equally afraid of Jesus, so when Jesus heard about his cousin's fate, Matthew says he left that place to go somewhere and pray. No doubt! But word got out. And the crowds who had been following him kept doing so, as many as fifteen or even twenty thousand people – which explains Herod's anxiety. Can you imagine if 20,000 Americans were following one preacher from town to town on foot, listening as she pointed out the moral failing of the government? The church today should be so faithful. Jesus' plan for a personal prayer retreat was interrupted, and the interruption became his plan. He didn't get to pray. He got to work: teaching, healing, casting out demons. All day. Exhaustion now layered on top of grief – grief for John, his cousin and his friend, his one and only colleague. Now he has only these twelve clowns to depend on, doing the best they can, no doubt. But still. Doing their best at the end of this very long day, they attempt to interrupt the interruption. They suggest Jesus exercise some self-care. Self-care is big in ministry circles, don't you know? Because burnout is bigger still. It's late, they say. These people need to eat. Let's send them back to town to buy their supper. Who is actually hungry, do you suppose? It's not the crowds complaining, is it? You know that feeling, right? I get it every time I pick up my Panera salad, then stop at the light right by the man with the sign that says, “Anything Helps.” Jesus agrees – that it's time to eat, at least. But his reason, Matthew says, is compassion. That they were hungry hurt his own heart, stirred his own heart to act. So, you do it, he says to his clowns. Interesting that Jesus stirred to action means his disciples are the actors. We are his muscle when he exercises his compassion. We can't, they reply; we have nothing. They said nothing because they weren't using Jesus math, but rather privileged people math. You know privileged people math, right? In privileged people math, 5 loaves + 2 fish = 12 fish sandwiches for us. In privileged people math, what you have plus what you want always equals exactly enough for me and mine. In privileged people math, 5 loaves + 2 fish also equals ZERO. Zero fish sandwiches for people whose neediness I'm tired of. The disciples are just beginning to learn Jesus math where 5 loaves + 2 fish = 20,000+ fish sandwiches. Jesus math takes a long, long time to learn. It’s heart and mind work. Cravings, addictions, reputation are all involved. Fear, trust – in a word, faith. Matthew will tell this story again in a couple of chapters, setting it that time in a Gentile place, drilling his disciples on the fact that Jesus math works the same for all people everywhere. That's big – very big. Jesus was serious about this math of his. One way we know? This “5 loaves + 2 fish = 20,000 fish sandwiches” is the only story told in all four gospels. The only one. Is 20,000 even right? We get the number by giving all 5,000 men one wife and two kids. But it could be more with grandmas and grandpas. It's church food after all – of course people expected seconds! Were any teenagers there? Good Lord – it might have been 40,000 fish sandwiches! Bring me your twelve sandwiches, Jesus says. He organized the crowd (probably made the teenage boys go to the back of line), looked to heaven, blessed the food, broke the food, and then gave it to the disciples and told them to serve everyone. There, the foreshadowing: Eucharist and cross. People ate their fish sandwiches, and the disciples picked up twelve baskets of leftovers. My, my, my, there is an entire sermon in just that one line of text. Those twelve baskets of leftovers, echoing manna from heaven. One basket per disciple. In a land overflowing with that kind of abundance, still nothing shall be wasted. We are not given to know how the disciples reacted to this miracle. Because, now suddenly, Jesus IS ready to be gone from this place. He hustles the disciples into their boat and shoves them into the lake and says, see you in the morning on the other side. Then he dismisses the crowd and he leaves, up a mountain, by himself, all alone. Matthew cares for us to know Jesus wanted to be away from all the humans. All night. Meanwhile, the disciples never make it to the other side of the lake. Tossed in the waves of a storm – your translation might say “battered.” Tossed or battered – the same word is elsewhere translated “tortured.” They were being tortured by nature itself. Maybe they were handling it; some were fishermen, after all. Matthew doesn't note them being afraid until they see Jesus walking on the water toward them. Then they are terrified – screaming, even. They think he's a ghost. He come to them in a way they don’t recognize. Maybe they thought salvation was going to be more fun than this. He speaks to them, Take heart. I am. Here's Jesus not speaking in parables, straight up identifying himself as God. And yet. Peter says, Lord, if it is really you...? Does that sound familiar, like an echo of something already in Matthew? If you really are the Son of God. If you really are the Son of God, turn these stones to bread. If you really are the Son of God, throw yourself down from the Temple. Only this time, Peter is the tempter; only this time, Jesus complies. Like with bread and fish the day before, Jesus provides. And Peter walks on water too, until the wind picks up and he remembers that he can't walk on water, and he starts to drown and Jesus has to catch him. Your faith is little, Jesus says to Peter. You thought I would call you out just to let you drown? That is little faith. Clearly Jesus will work with little faith, right? Otherwise he would have let Peter drown. Every storm ends eventually. See all thirteen of them huddled in that boat, soaked to the skin, shivering? Then and there they came to faith, Matthew says. Truly, you are the Son of God. Know what I wonder, friends? I wonder if what makes being a Christian so hard is the simple fact that being a human being is hard. Living decently with integrity and dignity and in community with others is such a complicated project. I rather understand why some folks give up and live unto themselves, and that's why the world gets so mired in evil and injustice. People would do better if they could do better; but being better is such a battle, and human beings are so weak. And we come to the invitation of Christ already weak and overwhelmed – soaked and shivering, if you will – yet still with the desire to be good, to do right, to live decently and well. And we might think it's nothing because it's so shaky that it barely feeds us sometimes. But Jesus says that if we will bring it to him and offer it up with ourselves too – not just the sandwiches, but the labor that goes with serving them – there really will be so much more than we can ever, ever imagine. Of all that I might fish out of this story today and give you to consider, here are three “fish.” Fish #1 – Compassion is the everyday Christian response to everyday human suffering. Following Christ well means keeping our hearts open to the everyday suffering of people around us. As tempting as it is to close ourselves off against the chaos of their neediness, if we can keep our hearts open the compassion of Jesus will keep us full and able. Of course we have to take care of ourselves in all-important ways and use good judgment. But it's easy sometimes to walk around with hard hearts and thin skins, when it's tender hearts and thick skins that are needed to serve needy people for a lifetime. Fish #2 – Christian compassion is profoundly pragmatic and, sometimes, surprisingly small. We are richer than we want to admit, as persons and as a congregation. We have vast resources at our disposal, friends – vast! – in the bank and in our repertoire. How available those – and we – are to the work that Jesus would assign us is up to us. Fish #3 – Christ-followers like us require as much compassion as anyone else. Jesus went out onto the lake for the same reason he fed the people on the shore: people he loved needed him. We need him. We get as hungry, angry, lonely, tired and afraid as any Gentiles anywhere ever did. (Well, maybe not as hungry – but you get my point.) We don't have to worry there isn't enough for us, for you. Remember those leftovers – the abundance in that little word? Friends, once we have seen and heard and tasted the compassion of Jesus in us, the love that leaves us unafraid in the midst of the worst this world can do, I am confident there is nothing we cannot do or will not give for the whole world to see and hear and taste it too. Would you pray with me? Jesus speaks of good seed and bad, sown together in a field by cosmic enemies. Jesus will preach this same lesson in half a dozen more parables – the point every time being that his followers don’t know heads from tails between judgment and redemption, so we’d best lay off pretending we do. Faithfulness itself – if not our eternal destiny! – depends on it, or so the parables go. But why? ask the children of the Son – in every generation since. Why do you watch and do nothing? Why didn’t you stop it – the evil – before it took such root, got such a hold on what would have grown up good? or, Let us go do it! That’s Jesus for you, though. Never answering the questions we DO ask, but rather the ones we don’t. We want to know why God is the way God is, and he tells us how to live. We’d settle just to KNOW something, and God pitches the chance to have a happy life. Here. Now. In this field of wheat and weeds, where the beautiful and disgraceful are all tangled up together. In our hearts and histories. Our own households even. Let’s pray: Great is the temptation, o God, to spend our spiritual energy picking ourselves apart in judgment. Picking others apart with those same tweezers. Create in us, we pray, the hunger to be happy, the courage to trust you. Amen. Matthew says Jesus said nothing without saying so in parables, to fulfill the prophecies of Isaiah – a very Bible-y sounding reason. But I wonder, are people worried about that? About what Isaiah prophesied? I wonder if Jesus’ reason wasn’t a bit more practical than that? If he spoke in parables because, well, because the God of the universe doesn’t really have any other way of talking to human beings. Seems to me that God trying to explain the kingdom of God to a human being would be like Albert Einstein explaining quantum theory to a Golden Retriever. God is absolutely going to have to use a tennis ball, or she’ll never get the hang of it. The parables are the tennis ball – simple human things we already know that God uses to help us try to grasp the enormous spiritual ones we don’t. How can we possibly imagine being set free, not merely from death itself someday, but from the fear of death every day? In chapter 13, Jesus selects three ordinary household spaces containing three ordinary objects: seeds, plants, and bread. Real things people already know, to tell them something about the kingdom of God. All three require similar treatment for them to do what they do:
In a word, we must do NOTHING. I don’t know the science of a seed, but I know that if I put certain seeds in the dirt in May and keep the chickens out of the garden in June, I’ll have flowers in July and tomatoes in August. I don’t know the science of gluten, but I feel like a magician every single time I mix sugar, yeast, and warm water in a bowl and smell it activate. When my kids were little and I fed them bread I’d made myself, I felt like a really, really good mother. So when Jesus says the kingdom of God in this world works like seeds in the ground and yeast in the bread I can begin to imagine what that means – that God is working in ways my eyes cannot see to bring enormous change, using tiny little things like art, like ministry, like the church, like strangers, like you, like me. I can imagine the kingdom of God as a kitchen table surrounded by healthy kids laid with bread and butter and jam and cheese by parents who feel rich and safe and never afraid for their children. We are the kind of people who take a certain confidence in being smart, in believing it’s possible to be competent – experts, even. And it’s possible that we do that with faith too: that is, imagine being competent at faith to understand God. As if understanding God will change us in ways that make life better. What if we come here reaching for some religious understanding of reality while God is here wanting to convince us that we are loved, that we are safe? Are we really too smart, too competent, to admit that we want to be loved? What if the whole truth of what God has done for us is, in fact, just too big and too mysterious for minds as small, for hearts as frail and fearful as ours? What I know for sure is that the religious spaces I have ever been in which were deeply invested in judgment and redemption – specifically, who is in and who is out – are not the same spaces that made a convincing case for the unconditional, overwhelming love of God. That said, this text has a hitch: Jesus’ hellfire rant beginning in verse 41. I could do without it, honestly. Maybe his explanation of the parable is also a parable, seeds refer to children, children refer to something else? Blessings and curses, maybe. The causes of sin (as in verse 41). Push parables to logic and they all fall apart. I can’t make heads or tails of these two verses, except where Jesus says again, it’ll be angels who sort it out. Not the slaves. Not the workers. Not you. Not us, since God knows we can’t. Not among ourselves, nor inside our own hearts. Leave it alone, remember? Stay out of the way. Be patient. Jesus says, The kingdom of God is among you. And the most we may ever grasp of that is that he loves us and wants us to be happy – here, now, wheat and weeds all tangled up together. Believing as best we can that God is busy in this world in ways we cannot see – except for when we can, like when seeds become tomatoes. And we find ourselves both braver and more humble, joyful and more generous, rich in everything that matters. Would you pray with me? Every thought is like a timber, Every habit like a beam, Every imagination like a window In this house which we are building Called a life. These lines pushed up like poetry from the pages of a heavy book of commentary – though, that I know of, George Buttrick was not a poet. Still, it works, poetically and exegetically from the Sermon on the Mount: thoughts, habits, and dreams as the girders and trusses of a life built either on stone or shifting sand; what we think and do and dream as the essential framework from which our plans and projects sally forth; what just one chapter back Jesus called our heart and that which he wants to be – our treasure, inasmuch as we are his.
Half of following Jesus through the Sermon on the Mount is shifting with his metaphors for faith, wishing he'd speak plainly, then getting sassy when he does. Chapter 7 is loaded – with metaphors, that is. I want to pick through them. But first, let's pray. The word is aimed at us again, O God, loaded with invitation. An invitation to be made new, made free, made lighter than air. OR, to stay the same: heavy-burdened with judgment – ours of others, others’ of us. Trampled and mauled, but stubbornly sure of our position. Still the invitation stands from you, the poet, the author, and the authority of it all. May we have hearts to hear – and to respond. Amen. The log in my own eye and the splinter in my neighbor's was always a favorite in Bible charades, back in my youth group days. The hypocrisy rampant in church has not been nearly so much fun since. The #churchtoo movement is gaining traction – #metoo, #churchtoo: so many progressive preachers, so publicly supportive of gender equality in the ministry, yet so privately predatory in their relationships with women colleagues. At least the fundamentalist preachers never pretended to respect us professionally at all. The tension of course being that, in talking to me about sin, Jesus is talking to me about the beam inside my own eye – not the splinter in my neighbor's, however hateful my neighbor's splinter surely is. His discipleship (my neighbor's), much as I may wish it so, is not between Jesus and me. Not what Jesus wants to talk about with me. Grrr! Do not judge, the verse does technically say. But “judge” is bothersome here. Judge in New Testament common Greek meant condemn, as in “condemn to hell.” Do not condemn to hell. In 21st-century English, “judge” means lots of things, The Great British Bake Off being one – where everything is judged, but not even the flattest scones of all are condemned to hell! Don't condemn to hell. By such measure you shall condemn yourself. See Jesus sketching out the framework of my house? Not divine retribution so much as explaining me to myself. To condemn to hell is to build a reality wherein I control the forces of grace, of mercy. Really? I take upon myself powers that rest only with God? Grace as mine to distribute or withhold? Meaning I myself never have need of any, since it all belongs to me? Really? Never? Meaning I myself am therefore ever content, ever at ease, ever full of all hope and faith? Needing nothing from outside myself? I don't find Jesus so much harsh in this scenario, as curious. Like Dr. Phil: how's that working for ya? Being your own god? For Valentine’s Day a zoo in El Paso, Texas will let you name a cockroach after your ex and then feed it to a meerkat. If Jesus were teaching this now, verse six might say “don't give what is holy to cockroaches” instead of dogs, which were considered mangy, garbage-eating beasts; unclean, like pigs and gentiles; incapable of appreciating the holy, the valuable. Jesus admonishes those who would be his disciples to use good judgment in offering what is holy and valuable. I spent no small amount of time this week thinking on what Jesus is referring to here: the holy? the pearls? What is the “it” of verse 7? The thoughts, habits and dreams? The mysterious treasure from chapter 6? The good gifts of verse 11? What is God giving us, the way good fathers give bread to their children? The answer, I decided, is yes. Any of that. All of that. And more. Anything and everything in our lives that is useful, beautiful and good. Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise. . . . [Philippians 4:8] All that is within range of our judgment and contained in our care, Jesus gives us permission – more than permission, he admonishes us – to treat as valuable, as worthy of honor. It seems to me, therefore, there must be no end to the list of the holy, the pearls involved, nor to our need of this word, for I can find no end to the inclination among church people to treat ourselves, and others, as worth less than Jesus did. To treat with contempt what God has gone well out of God's way to redeem. When I think about it, I realize I have been both the holy and the dog. To myself and to others. Jesus offers the remedy – here, in fact. Jesus says, “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you.” Others had said the same before him – rabbis and philosophers. Except they’d nearly always put it in the negative: don't do unto others what you don't want them to do to you. Cumbersome, first of all. A life made of NOT doing. Jesus commends construction of the good. Still, the point in both cases: we choose. The point of the entire Sermon on the Mount. Jesus invites, we choose. Salvation is bestowed. Discipleship is a choice, a chosen way of life. Following Jesus is a choice. Choosing not to follow Jesus is a choice. We live inside the choices that we make. Our thoughts, habits, and dreams are made of the choices we choose or choose not to make. Alongside is the terrible reality of how incredibly difficult choosing is – because everything around us begs us to stay the same. Homeostasis: the absence of tension or resistance, of the slightest conflict, mental, emotional, physical. Every effort toward change is met with greater energy against it, without moral consideration. We stay addicted. We stay all kinds of ways that are bad for us. Every good intention is met with resistance two, three, four, five, ten times as strong as the good intention. Or, said poetically, wide is the gate and easy the road to destruction. Narrow the gate and hard all the way is the road that leads to life. We can kick our feet till the cows come home, and after that the choice will still be ours to make, the invitation of Jesus still there to answer: upon what shall we build these lives of ours? stone or shifting sands? on wisdom or on folly? The folks who first heard Jesus say this were astonished. May our own hearts be so finely tuned. Would you pray with me? So, again, the Sermon on the Mount, from Matthew's gospel – Jesus poised like Moses on a hillside, teaching a crowd of Jews who have been following him around Judea for some time, listening to his teaching, watching him heal people. Chapter 5 says that here, Jesus is specifically teaching his disciples. Many more are listening, but the teaching is for the ones committed to the way of life he is offering.
Beware, Jesus says. Sounds serious – dangerous even. There is danger associated with following Jesus? There is the danger of death by state execution, of course; the danger of speaking truth to power, of turning the other cheek. Except Jesus isn't talking about any of that danger. He's talking about the danger of practicing one's piety before others in order to be seen by them. Do so, he says, and you'll have no reward from your Father in heaven. And he says it as though he thinks his disciples want it, like we want it most of all – that reward from our Father in heaven. Which, I've decided, is what makes this text so hard to preach. Let's pray. To want what you want to give us, O God, may we always pray. To stop craving this world's praise. For the faith to know you love us now, completely. And empty as we may feel sometimes, being empty of everything false makes us most ready to receive you. Amen. A relative of mine announces on Facebook every next book she reads. This might be news if she were in first grade. She has a master's degree. Because, no news is too small to post on social media. There was no social media in Jesus' time. But they did have trumpets. Can you imagine? Every time you wanted to announce your accomplishment? He might have been exaggerating, but I don't think he was wrong. Humans do like to have their names on things. My husband used to work at the IU School of Business. Now he works at the Kelley School, Steak and Shake School of Business. Mike works at the Maurer School of Law. Luke Gillespie teaches at the Jacobs School of Music and plays the organ at the Andy Mohr baseball diamond. Men who are no longer mere humans – they are schools! Generous men who have done good in their community and received their earthly reward. We can't all buy a school though. Thus the beauty of our Facebook, whatever our Facebook forum is – the place we project our public self. I post, therefore I am. I am published, therefore I am. I preach, therefore I am. Someone clicks on “like.” Therefore “I Am” even more than I was before. The more likes I get, the more “AM” I AM. It's become a psychotherapy gold-mine, did you know that? One person becomes two – the real-life version a person who never measures up to the one she is online. Her real-life children are less delightful than their Facebook selves. A whole market, an entire clientele of people whose emotional and mental well-being ride on social media validation. Which got me to thinking that maybe Jesus is suggesting something like the same thing here in chapter six of Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount; that when the near entirety of our discipleship, our life in God, is lived on the outside in public view for public consumption, we are not in the relationship with God that God offers – a relation with the actual groceries to sustain us through the real-life experience of being human. We'll get what we asked for: public praise. But we will miss the reward, the treasure destined from God, to our hearts. Our heart: not the blood-pumping organ, but the seat of the self and the will, where our personality is born and rooted; where our most fundamental decisions are made, such as who or what shall rule us, what shall be regarded as truth. The heart is our most closely guarded self. No one enters without permission. And anyone allowed in has great power over us. That is the “me” God is most interested in. Not the one I work so hard to make you think I am. The one God knows I am. God wants to sit there, rule there, live there. But God will neither come nor stay uninvited, and we cannot invite God to a place we will not go ourselves. My new favorite Netflix binge is “Blue Planet.” Do you know more life lives under the deep sea than above? There are fish miles under the sea only just discovered in the last ten years when technology enabled cameras to go so deep. However generous, prayerful, or sacrificial they appear on the outside, Jesus' disciples are those hearers willing to go to deep – deep below the surface, below the known tides of our public lives – into our hearts, our minds, our memories, and show God around in there. Talk to God about what is there. How it got there. Whether it ought to stay or be put out. To cry over it. Tell the truth about it. Deal with it. Allow those hearts to be re-formed, re-made. Such reformation cannot be confined, naturally. It will spill over into every part of life. We can pretend – and we all do – that our locked-up, broken hearts don't affect us. But of course, they absolutely do. They stay in the way of grace. They keep us stalled in places God is fine to let us stay – and so glad to move us to healed and happy hearts too. Healed hearts make us brave. Healed hearts make us joyful. Healed hearts make us truly generous and free – generous and free in ways that pretending and trying to be generous and free never, ever, ever will. In chapter 6, Jesus speaks of three religious habits he assumes his disciples already practice: almsgiving (money), praying, and fasting. Jesus does not say “if”; he says “when.” When you give. When you pray. When you fast. We may have to catch up to Jesus' starting place, if we aren't already giving, praying, fasting. But for those who are, Jesus says, It’s not enough just to go through the motions. He doesn’t say, STOP! No way. Keep it all up! Raise your tithe, even. But the real discipleship work is the inside job. What do you think and feel? What are you trying hard NOT to think and feel? Whom are you most trying to impress? And why? What losses will you suffer if others never see? And what is this reward we are after, by giving, praying, consuming, living, from healed and happy hearts? It surely must be something only God can give: True Peace. True peace because it looks and smells and tastes like peace we have never known. Peace that is the complete and total absence of anxiety and fear, or any hint of loneliness. Or maybe freedom is the better word. Being completely, entirely unbound by anything including, if you can imagine, doubt. I even wonder, if this reward for which I cannot find words is what Jesus means by treasure in verse 21. Where your treasure is, so is your heart. Treasure heart. As if, by our faithfulness to Christ the two wind up as one, in the mystery of it all. Would you pray with me? Suffering exists. Suffering has causes. Happiness is possible. There is a path to happiness. These are the Four Noble Truths of one Eastern religion — and the distillation of Jesus' Beatitudes.
He is sitting on the side of the hill, a crowd of Israelites below him. Matthew has composed a remake of Moses on Mt. Sinai, the ancient Law remade for modern Jews in the modern era of Pax Romana, the era of world peace maintained by military might. Suffering exists. Suffering has causes. Happiness is possible. There is a path to happiness. “There Is a Path” is Jesus' first sermon we are given to hear. Let's pray: How to hear you, O God, through the babble of voices in our minds, in our memory, in our world, on our screens? We pray to want to hear you. We pray to learn to listen. Amen. Sermons on sermons are tricky, the trick being to stay out of the way so that the primary preacher is primarily heard. Jesus is preaching — which in Matthew's gospel is nearly always called teaching. Here, in chapters 5, 6, and 7, he is teaching his disciples in such a way that bigger crowds overhear him. The distinction matters. Anyone may listen, but the teaching is NOT for everyone. It is for people interested in following Jesus beyond the free-food phase of his mission. This teaching is for people who, given the choice between feeding their own bellies and feeding their own spirits, choose spirit. Remember, Jesus is just out of seminary – 40 days of fasting and temptation in the wilderness. And the language Jesus uses for this feeding of the spirit is happiness. Yet, his followers, on the western side of the world at least, felt the need to adjust his language. Make it more religious sounding, as though poverty is God-given rather than disciple-chosen. Blessed, we say, instead of happy -- or better yet, happier. Happier are the poor in spirit. Happier than whom? Happier than the rich is spirit? Happier are those who mourn. Happier are the meek. Happier are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. Happier are the merciful. Happier are the pure in heart. Happier are the peacemakers. Say it just right and Jesus sounds positively frivolous. Still, I wonder how I'd be different now, if I'd grown up as convinced that Jesus wanted me to be happy as I grew up convinced that Jesus wanted me to be good? If you had asked me when I was ten years old what I understood the central message of the gospel to be, and if I'd had the nerve to tell the truth, I'd have said, “Jesus loves us so much. Therefore, we should be very, very afraid.” The Christianity that I ate and drank and breathed told me that Jesus wanted to save me. And to be saved, I had to be good. I have always been very good at being good. Not perfect. Nevertheless, obnoxiously good. Nellie Oleson good. Mary Poppins good. Hermione Granger good. Was I happy? I'd have said yes. But I think that was because I assumed being good and being happy were the same thing. What is more true, however, is that I was always just a little bit afraid. Afraid of disappointing God; my parents; the church. And the thing about fear is, it paralyzes. And if fear drives every decision, I am left to wonder “What does it mean to live fearlessly?” Is that the path Jesus is offering here? Happy are those who aren't afraid to be poor: the entire kingdom of God is your home. Happy are those who aren't afraid to be sad: you can lose every friend you have and never be lonely because God is still with you. Happy are the meek, the ones who expect nothing: Then every day will be a gift. Happy are those whose greatest desire is to be good: they will discover more good than they ever imagined. And so on. It's not rocket science why all those people followed Jesus around Judea in Matthew chapter 4. They were aching for decent healthcare and he healed them. They were hungry and he fed them. They weren't being selfish. They were being human. But for those ready to imagine there might be even more to life than food and clothes and a salary plus benefits, Jesus offered an entirely new way of life that he called happiness! Matthew 5:1-12 is the core teaching, comparable to Moses' Ten Words at Mount Sinai. The remainder of chapter 5, and chapters 6 and 7 are the exposition of the core. The Law remade, useful for modern believers of any era. Heaven is crammed into earth, Jesus will go on to say. Eternity into time. The kingdom of God crammed into the here and now. My love for you crammed into this package of skin and bone called human-ness. And it is possible for you to live and feed and drink and breathe from that reality, if you are willing to lift yourself from the fear that drives life in this modern era called the world. Imagine the possibility that Jesus means for you to be happy. Not to neglect the suffering and misery of this world, but to put all truth together. Suffering exists. Suffering has causes. Suffering around us is caused by human sin — greed and prejudice mainly. Greed is the engine; religion’s foot is on the gas pedal. Jesus invites us to step out of that vicious, violent, hateful cycle. This side of heaven, happiness consists of living truthfully in the world, aware of the suffering around us, causing none that we can help, relieving as much as we can. An Eastern religious monk I love to read says it really very simply. “Every time you choose to say or do or buy something, take a moment to ask yourself, ‘Will this word, act, purchase cause anything to suffer: a human, animal, plant or mineral?’ If the answer is yes, simply don't say it; don't do it; don't buy it.” To our ears, the animal, plant and mineral part may sound a little extreme. But his thinking is right, it seems to me. We humans depend on animals, plants and minerals for our very lives. So if they suffer, eventually we will too. These are very hard teachings. And if it is too stressful hearing them from a Buddhist perspective, consider the 18th-century Quaker John Woolman, who wrote much the same thing from his study of Jesus and chose a life in which he would buy or use nothing the production of which profited slavery, or war, or the abuse of workers. Of course, finally, we don't need a Buddhist monk or a Christian Quaker to tell us these things. We have Jesus' masterpiece: the Sermon on the Mount, his Path to Happiness — for those brave enough to imagine that God wants something as sweet as happiness for our lives and our life together. Would you pray with me? As genocides go, this wasn't much of one. In and around Bethlehem when Jesus was a toddler – twenty people probably; thirty at most. All of them little brown-skinned boys.
About sixty kids a year die of child abuse, just in Indiana. Well over a hundred in California. Around 3000 total, more or less. Nineteen kids are gunshot every day in the US; three of them die. That's 1100 more. Ironically, almost the same number of kids who died of war injuries in Syria in 2017. Globally, 3.1 million kids under age 5 starve to death, a number way down from 25 years ago. 85,000 kids dead in Yemen since the American-backed bombing began in 2015. 9.6 million more children are in near- constant danger there. So maybe we can admit to ourselves and one another that our shock and grief at this god-awful story here in Matthew, chapter 2, is slightly put-on – amen? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are but three of thousands – millions, really. Millions and millions of parents and children, terrorized and running for their very lives in the world right now. Let's pray: How to live, O God? How to live these privileged lives of ours, and faithfully call ourselves faithful? You are our heart’s desire, and we are so easily overwhelmed by the suffering of this world. We pray to read the word with honest minds and brave hearts, to listen for THE word it might give us for our lives here and now – our time, our talent, our treasure, O God. Ease our grip on them; ease our want of them for ourselves, that others may be less afraid, that other children have a safe and happy life. Amen. Let's quickly go over the characters:
Herod has heard that foreigners have come to worship a newborn king within his borders. Using his own advisors to locate the birthplace, he orders a raid. By the time his butchers arrive, the foreigners are gone by another road, and Joseph has been warned in a dream to get out. He picks up his family and gets them to Egypt. And while it may have been for only twenty little boys, Matthew says the wailing from Bethlehem sounded like Rachel wailing in Ramah for all her children who would never ever be. Because, of course, there is no such thing as a little genocide. The death of any child is the death of an entire history of people who will never, ever be. I've another text for you this morning, written last week by my friend Christie Popp. She is an immigration lawyer and faithful member of Beth Shalom next door. She spoke here last year about the current immigration crisis. She wrote this last week while in Tijuana, volunteering with refugees stalled there. What is happening in Tijuana:
She goes on to share ways to give money and volunteer. Friends, it's no more fun to read this than it is to hear it. But it matters. It matters hugely to read the scripture in the context of the world we live in. Guatemala, Columbia and Honduras are ALL more than 2000 miles from Tijuana. Russia is 5000. The Congo is 9000. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary had it easy compared to them. It's only 430 miles from Bethlehem to Egypt, the same as from here to Memphis. Google maps says it would take five days and ten hours to walk from Bloomington to Memphis and require one ferry ride. But what difference does it make to compare? Ours is to figure what the text has to do with faith for us here and now, with any of us who claim faith in Jesus in this time and place. The text makes plain that in choosing incarnation as the vehicle of salvation, Jesus chose incarnation NOT among the privileged and protected, but among the lowly and the terrorized. To ignore the suffering and injustice of the people Jesus most embodied – well, that's heresy, isn't it? At best it's idolatry. Flexing a self-indulgent faith to worship a made up god who asks nothing we do not want to give. Again, again, again, Friends, grace is free for everyone. Once. And. For. All. But stepping up to discipleship, we are no longer the ALL. We count ourselves as his. His followers. His servants. His disciples. His church. He is Friend-Teacher-Father-Lord of us. And our Friend-Teacher-Father-Lord has not kept secret what he wants from us. He wants everything. Remember the rich young ruler? He wants everything. And we've re-written that story so that the young man keeps his fortune and follows Jesus after all. The church loves the Magi – Epiphany we call it – when the gospel is given to the Gentiles. But when we linger there too long it becomes easy-peasy to miss Baby Jesus doing what grown-up Jesus always does: situate the gospel in and among the least, the last, and the littlest; the frail, the forgotten, and the fearful; the terrorized, the tyrannized, the traumatized; the confounded, the coerced, the conquered; the bullied, the beaten, the broke, the babies; the harassed and the hounded and the hated; the ones who are so, so, so easy for people like us to never lose a wink of sleep about. The fortune tellers left their gifts and escaped Herod by another road, Matthew says. In doing so, they did what? They financed Joseph's flight to Egypt, the undocumented years there. Friends, if we are the gentiles gathered around Baby Jesus' playpen, then I believe that, by default and by design, we are also his ally with every refugee father bribing his way across some border now; with every endangered, starving child. Not because we agree with the politics involved, but because that's where Jesus chose to be, and he called us to follow him. We cannot do for them what Jesus did. But neither can anyone else do what Jesus has called you and me to do. No one but you governs the time, talent, and treasure in your care. Nor me and mine. God help us if we sit too easily with it, unchanged by the truth we know. God break us into people more generous and glad to serve this world than we've ever been before. Would you pray with me? Your bulletin cover [a blank family tree] is a worksheet. You can write in a name. But see if you can remember a story to go with it – maybe a story you’re not sure you want a stranger to know about your kinfolks.
In the 1920’s, one of my great-great uncles was so depressed, the whole family organized a schedule to make sure he was never alone. Then one fall, they were all at one farm to work an apple harvest and realized nobody had eyes on him. They went searching and two of the boys found him in an orchard with a paring knife. In front of them he cut his own throat and bled to death. My grandma was a child at the farm that day, told me the story – the same grandma who hid her whiskey in the linen closet, even after she’d moved into assisted living. Two cousins from my own generation, boys I grew up with, have also committed suicide. One just this year. That’s only my mother’s people. Carl’s Uncle Jack went to federal prison in the 1970’s, convicted for acting as bagman for a Mississippi sheriff. Another set of Briggs were small time bootleggers who fled Arkansas for Oklahoma, where one of the sisters was murdered. These are my children’s people: the suicidally depressed; secret alcoholics; bootleggers and bagmen. Along with a few soldiers. No more than a handful of devout church people. Many, many rent farmers. Housekeepers and shopkeepers, beauty operators (a term I love!), coal miners. But no teachers, preachers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, professionals, politicians, not a single college graduate on either side before 1986. Just the plainest and poorest and hardworking-est of people, including the bootleggers, bagmen, suicides, and secret alcoholics. Anybody else have a testimony? All of it is why I am so deeply comforted that Matthew’s account of the salvation of us all does not begin with the story of an eight-pound, six-ounce, newborn, sweet little baby Jesus. He did not come to us from thin air, Friends, but through a long line of the liars and crooks who were his kinfolk – just like our kinfolk – on this earth. Let’s pray: For the great courage it takes to know and tell the truth of from whom we’ve come, we pray, O God. For the even greater courage necessary to keep loving ourselves and those other people – the corruption and the grace – we pray as well. Amen. I read you a poem on Christmas Eve by Carol Penner. Here is part of another by her: We love you in the manger, Jesus. Your little hands and feet, your soft breathing, your eyes closed in sleep. You may be a revolutionary, but we like ours in diapers. Forgive us, Lord, for preferring a Saviour who can’t talk; Who has no words of judgment; Whose chubby arms can’t flip tables Whose baby feet aren’t marching to Jerusalem. No gospel writer goes on so long as Matthew about the baby Jesus – except his story doesn’t start there. Abraham and David – that’s Matthew’s beginning, the Founding Fathers of Judaism. Abraham – dirty old man. (Remember Hagar? Remember him passing his wife off as his sister?) David – the rapist-murdering king. In between them, Jacob the swindler; Rahab the prostitute; Solomon the colonizing slave-maker. And Manasseh – son of Hezekiah, grandson of Ahaz, king of Judah, whom the Bible describes as more evil in the sight of God than all the nations God destroyed in the sight of Israel. They are all here, these men. Along with Rahab, Matthew mentions Tamar, Ruth, and Bathsheba – interesting because women don’t belong in Jewish genealogy. But they show up in Jesus’. None of these ancestors are blood kin to baby Jesus, remember. They are Joseph’s family, and Joseph was Jesus’ adopted father, at least as Matthew would have us believe. Adoption counts the same as blood for Jewish families, then and now. It must – otherwise Jews would be extinct. So the pre-incarnate Christ looked across humanity to choose a family. As one Princeton preaching professor describes it, he selected a household of melodious healing, youthful courage, abusive power, rape, murder, incest and fratricide – a despicable history, making Jesus kin to those who need his forgiveness most. “Most”? Do some need it more than the rest? Years ago my ten-year-old neighbor visited me after his trip to the country of his father’s birth. How did you like it? I asked. He replied, This world is a dirty, disgusting place. I expect that seems true to someone who’s only ever lived in a tidy subdivision half a mile east of here. But don’t you wonder, Friends, if from God’s perspective the difference between here and there, between the best and worst of us, is infinitesimal? That when deciding where to land as a newborn human being, God could pretty much just spin the bottle. Pretending there’s no whiskey in my grandma’s closet doesn’t mean there isn’t. Or that it has nothing to do with me. It just means that I still don’t know all I might about why this world hurts me so, about why I’m sometimes mean or sometimes angry, or sometimes so very much afraid. Without knowing how broken and disgraced we are, Friends, we cannot know how very much God loved us. And not knowing how much God loves us, we have not yet taken in that God chose to save us instead of letting our messed-up nature take its course. It hurts to know. It’s embarrassing to know. It’s necessary to know. It’s true repentance to know. It’s grace discovered and freedom found, to know how much God loves us in our brokenness and disgrace. To know ever more precisely into what circumstance God chose to come, to become like us. To know is hard, hard work – the work of prayer and trust. And we don’t ever have to do this work. But I do want to point out that this work of knowing from where and whom we come is where the gospel of Jesus Christ begins. Crooks and liars. Saints and sinners. Secret alcoholics. Suicides. Bootleggers. Bagmen. Saints. And sinners. Before Jesus says a word, we know so much about him, don’t we? We know he comes from folks pretty much like ours, into a world as messed up as this one – and wasn’t one bit surprised. After all, this is the world and we are the folks he chose in the first place. Would you pray with me? On this night we recall another – the night God took a deep breath for all that must be saved, even the stars outshone themselves and hillsides gloried with angelic music, the good, good, good news bouncing down like boulders, shaking the foundations royally, announcing the advent of a ruler born for all who must be saved. It was the bloody same way we all arrive on the scene through the mother of all labor and sweat, the pain stretching out like tidal waves for all that must be made flesh. Love is now newborn, if not exactly recognizable . . . except to those who know all must be saved from ourselves Whatever evil armies occupy our affections . . . by the bouncing baby news that will throw even kings from their thrones. Mary and Joseph and all of us are left holding the baby, Is this sensible, God? Jesus doesn’t answer. He just suckles and sleeps and wakes to a new day. I didn’t write that poem. But I would have if I could have, because poetry gets so much closer to what cannot be spoken. God giving God’s own child for love of us, God’s other children. I’ll not make heads nor tails of it in words. But here we are just the same. Can we even fathom such love – love meant not to crush us with guilt, but flood us with the realization of our own beloved-ness; to tempt us to imagine such self-worth that we treat our own lives like a treasure, and each other’s too. The Creator God talking to God’s own self, reckoning what to do with the likes of us: “I will become one of them,” God said to God’s self. “A baby brown one,” God’s self answered back, “then they’ll really have to pay close attention.” It’s only sweet because it’s a baby, because we’ve staged it with shepherds and lambs instead of the starving and the dying, the broken and the lost. They are the very evidence against us, the proof that we have failed to follow the simplest instructions: Do good and not evil; depend on me and not yourselves. Every story needs a beginning. Christ’s coming – at what we’ve named Christmas – was a new beginning. Our celebration is our own new beginning, our do-over of the same project: to do good and not evil; to depend on God and not ourselves. The church can use the season as we please: to refocus our lives and our life together on the mystery of our belovedness, on this invitation to be lovely to ourselves and one another. Friends, the world doesn’t care where Christmas came from. The world cares if there is any cause for hope. We’re accountable to them for it – Hope. We who claim it now. Gathering. Reading. Singing. The Word became bouncing, brown, baby flesh – And then he lived among us to Set. Us. Free. That is the story we’ve come to hear, and the one we’ve been sent to tell – here, now, to this waiting, wanting world. Would you pray with me? The context for Isaiah 7 is II Kings, chapters 16, 17, and 18. Ephraim was another name for the northern kingdom, Israel. Aram was a foreign power, trying to stave off the even larger powers of Assyria and Egypt. The king of Aram, King Rezin, recruited Ephraim (Israel) to help them try and take Judah, the southern kingdom, in order to expand their border between Egypt and Assyria. It almost worked.
But the king of Judah, King Ahaz, made an eleventh-hour deal with the king of Assyria, his enemy’s enemy – a guy named Tiglath-pileser, who sent enough troops to drive the Arameans back and save Jerusalem. Which left Ahaz beholden to Assyria. Not ideal, but not wiped-out either. Summoned to Damascus to pay homage, he took some of his designers and engineers along and told them to study Assyrian religious temples, so they could build perfect replicas in Jerusalem. God's spokesman in Jerusalem, Isaiah the prophet, saw all of this for what it was – covenant infidelity – and called the king out on it. “Ask God for what you need. Ask God for anything.” But the help Ahaz wants isn't the help God wants to give. God wants to give faith and fidelity. Ahaz wants troops. Ahaz is some kind of arrogant though, talks to the prophet as if he's doing God a favor. “No really, I'm fine. Go ahead and take the day off, God; no need to worry your head about me, God.” I love the prophet's response: “Is it not enough that you wear out mortals, you have to wear out God too?!” Then comes the hit of the prophetic text. Judah shall be saved, but not by Ahaz. Another will reign. One not yet born. One called Immanuel, which means God with us. But that salvation shall not come before the judgment you fear has rained down on Judah. The very king you have trusted, the king of Assyria, is coming to crush you and yours, Ahaz and Judah, for your persistent, unwavering, infidelity. Since Matthew, the Isaiah text has been assigned to Baby Jesus in the manger, as though Isaiah himself had seven hundred years of foresight. Most likely, Isaiah was talking about Ahaz's second son, Hezekiah. Are we taking scripture wildly out of context to read Jesus into Isaiah, chapter 7? Did Matthew? Matthew wrote for Jews and so wove Jesus into their history's context. Can we faithfully inscribe the text over our own nativity scenes? I think so, so long as we are honest with ourselves. This week I've been reading articles with titles like:
One had a link to a graphic of a crackling fireplace to run on the sanctuary screens. Single use is only $7. Another suggested a foyer photo booth with reindeer and Santa props. And the craziest: fake snow that falls from the ceiling during the closing candlelight hymn – Silent Night, of course. What exactly is out of context about how the church does Christmas, Friends? Celebrating the birth of Christ without the blare of corrupt and fearful kings making alliances with dictators – that is wildly out of context! Celebrating Christmas without the goose-step of 20,000 stamping boots getting louder every minute is Christmas wildly out of context. Celebrating Christmas without foreign armies to whom we'll be beholden. Or with preachers taking Santa pictures instead of doing their job, which is to preach keeping covenant with the God who made us free and to warn us of the consequences when we choose not to listen. It’s all Christmas wildly out of context. So yes. Only wildly out of this world's context can we know, faithfully know, and worship the baby Jesus. He is the one who comes where everything is broken and we keep trying to pretend it isn't. He is the one who comes to us to interrupt the judgment we brought upon ourselves before it destroys us all completely. The breaking-in of Christ breaks every definition of a life of faith in God: our sense of time and boundary; our under- standing of relationship; even our vocabulary becomes a language foreign to this world. Words like safe and rich and free mean something different to this world than to followers of Jesus. We are safe because Christ has saved us. And rich because we want for nothing God has not given. We are free because the principalities of this world can never manufacture the power to keep us apart from God. Words like productive, successful and work – who defines those words for us? this world or the love of God in Jesus Christ? How about the word enough? Or happy? Or content? Friends, it's awfully easy to think sweetly of the season with lives as safe and rich as ours. To us occupation is a job – not a geo-economic-socio-political circumstance that bears down on us like a gathering storm. A poor peasant girl giving birth in a shack with animals is a story only rich white people could think is sweet. We don't have little toy sets for the genocide one chapter over, little Roman soldiers tossing boy baby carcasses into wagons. That genocide one chapter over casts no shadow on our Christmas bliss, so long as we keep nativity next to the Christmas tree. Context is everything, remember? It absolutely is. Jesus belongs smack center of Isaiah, chapter 7. Into this world's disgrace and brokenness, God-came-to-us because left to ourselves humanity ruins everything every time. We cannot, for the life of us, do right – by ourselves, by one another, by the earth itself. Our fear, failure, and greed infuriate the God who made us – and then break God's heart. God was moved to do once and for all what we could not, would not, did not. God moved in the Christ event, from covenant to grace – a story we tell to the sounds of stamping boots and a crying baby or of Christmas trees and fake snow. It is our choice again, this year and every day, what story to believe and tell. Would you pray with me? |
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