Two kings

It was a kind of reversal of gazing at the stars. On Christmas Eve 1968, the astronauts of Apollo 8—Frank Bormann, Bill Anders, and James Lovell, Jr.—were busy scouting landing spots on the surface of the moon for a future mission when they suddenly witnessed a spectacular moment: over the ash-colored lunar mountains, against the black backdrop of space, they saw the Earth rising like a shining, blue marble. As one writer put it,

Major Anders had the job of photographing the lunar landscape. When Earth rose, a robot would have kept on clicking off pictures of the craters. Indeed the astronauts briefly joked about whether they should break off and aim their cameras up. “Hey don’t take that, it’s not scheduled,” Commander Borman said. Then, like good humans, they grabbed cameras and clicked away.

“Earthrise” became an iconic image, something of an epiphany: Sent to examine the Moon, Major Anders later said, humans instead discovered Earth. Apollo 8’s greatest legacy turned out to be a single photograph of home, glorious and beautiful, “fragile and miraculous as a soap bubble.”[1] Over fifty years later, we know a lot more about just how fragile our planet is, and we’re still far from knowing how to be at home here, together.

Matthew tells us that in the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem. We don’t know much about them, these sky-gazing travelers from far away lands who came to Jerusalem guided by a star to pay homage to the newborn king of the Jews. And because we know almost nothing about them, we have long let our imaginations soar.

Matthew gave us an almost blank canvas, and we have gladly filled it with rich, colorful detail. First we looked at the map, and we started listing all the lands East of Jerusalem—Arabia, Babylon, Persia, India, China—from how far East did they come, these wise ones? Then we looked at the gifts they brought—gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Very expensive gifts, not the kind of stuff you can pick up at the corner market on your way to the birthday party—but hadn’t Isaiah mentioned gold and frankincense, and hadn’t he written about kings? That was when, in our imagination, they began to look like kings, royal visitors bearing royal gifts, and because three gifts are mentioned, we determined that there must have been three of them. And so we began singing songs like We Three Kings From Orient Are, but our hunger for detail wasn’t satisfied yet. How did they get from the East to Jerusalem? Certainly they did not walk all the way — but wait, hadn’t Isaiah mentioned a multitude of camels? Sometime in the Middle Ages, we named the three Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, and we saw them riding high on their camels, with more camels carrying their treasure chests.

With passing centuries, the stories of the wise men from the East became ever more colorful and elaborate — and all because of the child whose star they had observed and followed. This child arouses in us a holy extravagance of story, image, song, and gift, because in this baby and the man he became, we see the face of God. The nations are coming to the light that has dawned, and in Mathew’s story, these travelers from the East represent all of the nations, they are the first in a long procession—we come from Asia, Africa, Europe, Australia, and the Americas, we all come: the whole world is gathering to pay homage to the newborn king. Matthew gives us but a hint or two, and we let our imagination run, because this child is the good king, born to bring us all together in the city of God, born to show us how to be at home, together.

What about the other king? Imagine King Herod’s face when his staff informed him that visitors of considerable wealth and status were entering the city. He was very fond of hearing his underlings refer to him as Herod the Great, but imagine the satisfaction in his eyes, imagine the regal pace with which he made his way to the palace window to see his own majesty and greatness reflected in the very important visitors from far away. They had come from distant lands to meet him and, no doubt, pay him homage, to admire the magnificent building projects under way in the city, especially the temple—he was Herod the Great, King of the Jews, the most important person in the realm, was he not? Then the foreign visitors entered and asked him where they might find the newborn king of the Jews—imagine his face now.

We hang a star in the baptistry window during Advent and Christmas. It’s beautiful, especially when it gets to shine in the darkness. You can’t miss it when you come into the sanctuary at night. It’s supposed to stand out. We hang it in the window to focus our attention on the one who was born under its light. It’s like the ancient version of a pin dropped on the map of the sky to mark our destination.

In Matthew’s story, only the stargazers from the East notice the one star among the countless others visible on a clear night. Herod doesn’t see what they see; nor do the scribes and scholars whom he consults. They talk about Bethlehem, but they can’t see the star, they can’t see the house, they can’t see God’s presence in this child, Emmanuel, God with us. Epiphany means manifestation, appearance, showing forth — but Matthew wants us to see how God slips into the world by way of a poor family in a one-light town.

“Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.” Matthew knows the words from Isaiah by heart, and he wants us to see that the glory of God has risen, but not upon Herod’s palace or his spectacular temple, but a little ways to the south, upon a dusty hill town called Bethlehem. “Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn,” the prophet declared, and Matthew shows us the nations coming to the light. “They shall bring gold and frankincense, and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord” — and they do, but all Herod can see is a threat to his own reign. And as they get to represent the nations of the world, drawn to the light of Christ, Herod gets to represent the kings who aren’t exactly drawn to this light, but rather alarmed by it—we hear echoes of Pharaoh in the story, echoes of powerful men who have no use for a glory they cannot grab to polish their own. As Rome’s puppet king and client of the emperor, Herod’s task was to foster loyalty to Rome. He presided over a political system that benefited a small elite while depriving many of their daily bread. Describing Herod’s cruelty, the Roman writer Macrobius penned the memorable line that it was “better to be Herod’s pig than his wife or son.”[2] He was used to getting rid of people who didn’t serve his ambition. He had ten wives and ordered multiple assassinations, including the murder of some of his own sons to make sure the one of his choosing would take his throne when he died. No epiphany for Herod, no star-light, only fear and cunning and ruthless determination.

So Matthew’s story really is not about three kings, but about two, Herod and Jesus. The contrast between their kingdoms runs through the whole gospel, and through the long history of the kingdom of God disrupting our dreams of empire, and all the way to this moment and to us: do we see the glory of the Lord that has risen upon us? Do we see the the glory of God in the face of Mary’s boy, and do we let him dismantle our stubborn dreams of empire, or do we put the vision away together with the star and the rest of the Christmas decorations?

The background against which Isaiah calls the city to arise and shine, is ancient and disturbingly familiar: “Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands at a distance; for truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter.”[3] Truth stumbles in the public square – I can’t think of a better line to describe the web of lies that’s strangling our public discourse in the name of power.

[Woe to] you who call evil good
and good evil,
who put darkness for light
and light for darkness,
who put bitter for sweet
and sweet for bitter!
[Woe to] you who are wise in your own eyes,
and shrewd in your own sight!
[Woe to] you who are heroes in drinking wine
and valiant at mixing drink,
who acquit the guilty for a bribe,
and deprive the innocent of their rights![4]

Isaiah knows our corruptions. Isaiah knows we have become experts at Herod’s game, whether we have power, privilege and prestige or seek them. Isaiah’s own vision is not immune to the temptations of empire. Walter Brueggemann writes,

In the past, Jerusalem has been subordinate to the nations. [But now] we are about to witness a great inversion… When Jerusalem looks around, what it sees is a great caravan of the nations, all coming to the recovering city. The nations have heavy cargo for Jerusalem… We are not told if they bring [tribute] gladly or under coercion. What matters is that … for as long as anyone can remember, Israel had paid imperial tribute to other nations — the Assyrians, the Babyonians, the Persians — all money going out. Now the process is reversed.[5]

Now the process is reversed, but the great reversal doesn’t change the underlying logic of domination and exploitation. “In its worst moments,” writes Michael Chan, “this [passage from Isaiah] is a revenge fantasy that longs for one’s oppressors to be the oppressed, for the masters to be the servants, and for the system of economic oppression to be tilted in favor of the victims.”[6] Reversal is not enough when justice is at stake. It’s like we need to remember Isaiah against Isaiah’s own imperial dreams; Isaiah who gave voice to God’s promise that they will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. [7]

That is why we go to Bethlehem to greet the new-born king. That is why we worship him and not our own twisted fantasies of domination. For our own sake and for the sake of the earth, fragile and miraculous as a soap bubble, and soon, we pray, full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/science/earthrise-moon-apollo-nasa.html

[2] Warren Carter, “Between text and sermon: Matthew 2:1-12,” Interpretation 67, no. 1 (January 2013), 64-65.

[3] Isaiah 59:14

[4] Isaiah 5:20-23

[5] Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah 40-66 (Louisville: Presbyterian Publishing Corporation, 1998), 204-05.

[6] Michael Chan https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/epiphany-of-our-lord/commentary-on-isaiah-601-6-3

[7] Isaiah 11:9

Little like us

We have heard the story—and what a wondrous story it is of God and the baby. We have sung the carols, muffled by masks, yes, but we sang them nevertheless, with a touch of defiance of omicron’s demand to be the story; we sang them reminding ourselves and each other of the bigger story, the wondrous story of God and the baby, the story of Jesus’ birth and the life that is nothing but life, the story we continue to tell with our lives.

Her name was Sharon, John Shea tells us.

She was five, sure of the facts, and recited them with slow solemnity, convinced every word was revelation. She said, “They were so poor they had only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat and they went a long way from home without getting lost. The lady rode a donkey, the man walked, and the baby was inside the lady. They had to stay in a stable with an ox and an ass … but the Three Rich Men found them because a star lighted the roof. Shepherds came and you could pet the sheep but not feed them. Then the baby was borned. And do you know who he was?” Her quarter eyes inflated to silver dollars. “The baby was God.” And she jumped in the air, whirled around, dove into the sofa and buried her head under the cushion, which is the only proper response to the Good News of the Incarnation.[1]

Incarnation is a big word Sharon didn’t need in order to speak eloquently of the baby embodying God in the flesh, but the magnitude of what she had just said demanded some jumping and whirling around, and then some sofa-diving and cushion-digging. At five years old she knew what an awesome thing it is to say, “The baby was God.” Saying, “The baby was God” means that heaven and earth have not merely touched for an instant, but have come together in a human being. Saying, “The baby was God” radically changes how we conceive of and speak about God, and how we speak about and treat each other. The Word became flesh and lived among us and we have seen his glory, and he has changed everything.

The Christmas hymn, “Once in Royal David’s City,” contains the stanza,

Jesus is our childhood’s pattern,
Day by day like us he grew.
He was little, weak and helpless,
Tears and smiles like us he knew.
Thus he feels for all our sadness,
And he shares in all our gladness.[2]

We can assume that the infant Jesus was weak and helpless, and that “like us” he grew from infancy and childhood to adolescence and adulthood, with the full range of experiences, thoughts, feelings, and reactions that are part of growing up. But the biblical gospels are almost silent on those years. And that silence was a motivating factor in the emergence of Christian writings dedicated to Jesus’ childhood years. In one of them, Jesus was Sharon’s age, five years old, when he was playing by a brook. From soft clay, he shaped twelve sparrows. It was the Sabbath when he did this, and somebody went and told his dad about it. Joseph scolded him, “Why are you doing this on the Sabbath, which is not lawful to do?” But little Jesus clapped his muddy hands and said to the sparrows, “Go!” and they flew away chirping.[3]

The writer clearly wanted to show that conflicts over Sabbath laws in Jesus’ ministry were foreshadowed when he was but a little child—a child, however, resembling a young superhero from a comic strip rather than one who, “day by day like us he grew.”

Luke’s story of the 12-year-old Jesus in the temple is the only incident in the biblical gospels about the life of Jesus between infancy and the beginning of his ministry as an adult. Luke resists the temptation to paint young Jesus as “superboy”,[4] but the scene is similar to childhood stories found in ancient biographies of famous figures. “Jesus is twelve years old, a signal to the original audience,” writes Wesley Allen, “that he is on the cusp of adulthood as defined in the ancient world … His actions on this occasion, then, foreshadow his ministry and especially his relationship with God.”[5] Just as the adult Jesus will make one trip to Jerusalem on Passover, where he will encounter the teachers in the temple and finally give his life in obedience to the Father’s will, so the boy Jesus, near the end of his childhood, makes one trip to the temple, on Passover, where he encounters the teachers. To his family, he appears to be lost, but he knows he is exactly where he needs to be.

"Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" he says to his parents, sounding a little like a sassy pre-teen, while at the same time stating very clearly to them, to himself, and to us that his life would be about the household of God and the relationships defining it.

"Why were you searching for me? Did you not know …?” These are the first words Jesus utters in Luke’s narration of the gospel. They don’t sound like Christmas, do they? But they spell out why we celebrate Christmas.

Before I get to that, let me tell you that I do not own a Christmas sweater or a Santa Claus tie. Several years ago, though, I picked up a pair of Christmas socks at Target. Black, with little green Christmas trees and a jolly, fat Santa. Every year, I wear them once, and then they go in the laundry basket and eventually back in the drawer until next year.

Why am I talking about Christmas socks? Because the wonderful passage from Colossians for today talks about getting dressed. The baby was God. The Word became flesh. We have seen the glory of God in the face of Jesus. Now what?

As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

The baby was God, and with Sharon’s Three Rich Men we come to adore him and to offer our gifts—only to realize, be it suddenly or gradually, that Christmas is a reverse baby shower: new clothes for us. We’re invited to let ourselves be wrapped snuggly in layer after layer of all that Jesus embodies—compassion, kindness, humility, patience, forgiveness, peace.

We will soon put away the Christmas socks and sweaters until next year, together with the left-over wrapping paper and all the decorations. But the birth of Jesus isn’t about decoration, it’s about incarnation: the complete embodiment of the divine in a human being.

We know he didn’t come so we could have a day or two of merriment and nostalgia—beautiful and life-giving as such days are. He came to reclaim and fulfill all our days. He came to free us and to bind us together for good in the love of God.

[1] John Shea, The Hour of the Unexpected (Allan, TX: Argus Communications, 1977), 68.

[2] Cecil F. Alexander, “Once in David’s Royal City,” Chalice Hymnal No. 165.

[3] ​​Infancy Gospel of Thomas 2:1-4; text available at http://gnosis.org/library/inftoma.htm and elsewhere online.

[4] Eugene Boring and Fred Craddock, The People’s New Testament Commentary (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), 184.

[5] O. Wesley Allen Jr. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-of-christmas-3/commentary-on-luke-241-52-5

God's magnifying gaze

Mary sings, and we just got to join in.

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior,
for you have looked with favor on the lowliness of your servant.

Mary sings, I’m convinced of it, though Luke doesn’t give it to me in writing. Even when merely spoken, her words easily fall into rhythm and make the whole body search for a tune to go with her confident posture.

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior,
for you have looked with favor on the lowliness of your servant.

Mary sings of the magnifying gaze of God. She sings of the Holy One of Israel who looks with favor on what is small in our eyes, on what we dismiss as insignificant, on what is often overlooked or ignored—lowliness. Mary sings of God’s magnifying gaze that has changed her life and the course of the world.

We’re told an angel came to her; she would get pregnant and give birth to a boy, the angel said, and that she would name him Jesus. And that was only the beginning of the angelic announcement; the divine surprise was still unfolding. God would give to her boy the throne of David, and of his kingdom there would be no end. And this child of hers would be called the Son of the Most High.

After dropping the news, the angel lingered a little, didn’t just return to heaven, having delivered the life-changing message. The angel waited. Clearly this pregnancy was not just a matter of divine fiat. The angel waited to hear what Mary would have to say. The angel waited because the good news for all people does not press us into service or coerce us. God speaks and awaits our response, awaits our consent to let our lives serve God’s saving purpose. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord,” Mary said. “Let it be with me according to your word.” Fully seen in our dignity as creatures made in the image of God, none of us are treated as mere means for God’s ends; we are partners whose consent God awaits and honors. Advent is a time of expectant waiting, and not just for us, but for God and whole host of heaven

“Let it be with me according to your word,” Mary said. Then the angel departed, and Mary departed as well, with haste, to go and see Elizabeth down south, in the hill country. It’s with Elizabeth, that Mary finds words beyond her courageous, “Let it be.”

My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior.

“The confession ‘Savior’ expresses the desperate need of the lowly, the poor, the oppressed, and the hungry,” writes Alan Culpepper.

Those who have power and means, privilege and position have no need sufficient to lead them to voice such a term that is itself a plea for help. ‘Savior’ gives evidence of one’s sense of need greater than one’s strength. The proud are thereby excluded from the beginning from the confession that leads to joy and salvation.[1]

The confession “Savior” expresses the desperate need of the lowly, but also their confident hope in the God who sees them and looks on them with favor. Mary glorifies God her Savior, because the Mighty One of Israel doesn’t act like the mighty ones of the world. Mary sings, because God’s magnifying gaze renders the overlooked visible, making seemingly insignificant people greater in status and importance, moving them from the margins to the center. Mary sings, because her life matters, her consent matters, her voice matters. She sings, because God chose her to participate in the great work of salvation. “Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed,” she declares, moving quickly from the very personal to the vast horizon of God’s promise to Abraham: all generations will call her blessed, and in the end all the families of the earth will be blessed because God is faithful.[2]

God’s magnifying gaze is by no means a new thing, it simply is the way God looks at the world. “You, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah,” the prophet Micah declared, “you who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel… He shall stand and feed his flock in the strength of the Lord, … he shall be great to the ends of the earth; and he shall be the one of peace.”[3] Of all the towns and clans of Judah, God chose Bethlehem. Of all the sons of Jesse, God chose David. Of all the nations, God chose Israel. Of all the women, God chose Mary, a teenager from some town called Nazareth that nobody had ever heard of. Under the magnifying gaze of God, the people and needs we all too easily overlook or ignore, or are prone to dismiss as marginal or insignificant, are fully seen and recognized, and therefore honored.

Wendy Farley writes,

When we expect the power of redemption to mimic the power we see around us every day in fathers, judges, rulers, warriors, or captains of industry, it is because we have not been able to digest the shocking images of power we celebrate every Christmas and Easter. … Christ has always been a terribly offensive icon of the Holy, not least because he is perhaps the poorest display of power one sees in any of the world’s religions. In him, we see immortal, invisible God birthed into this world through an impoverished and nearly outcast young woman. We watch Jesus wander around a little rag-tag occupied country for a while and then leave it by one of Rome’s most hideous methods of execution. Although we love these stories and tell them over and over again, they capture something about divine power that [many of us] often find indigestible. Our love of power finds little satisfaction in Jesus. [4]

And perhaps because our love of power finds little satisfaction in Jesus, we are tempted, forever tempted, it seems, to fashion God for us in the image of an autocratic ruler. Yet for centuries, Christians have recited Mary’s confident and exuberant words in their evening prayers, with the desire to join her praise of God’s world-flipping redemption, and hopefully with the desire to have our own views of people and needs adjusted by God’s magnifying gaze.  

For you, God, have scattered the proud in their conceit,
casting down the mighty from their thrones,
and lifting up the lowly.
You have filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.
You have come to the aid of your servant Israel,
to remember the promise of mercy,
the promise you made to our ancestors,
to Abraham and his children for ever.

Mary’s words reach far into the past, into the time of promise, and they reach deep into the time of fulfillment, even as the promise fulfilled reaches into the present with the birth of her child. We join Mary in her praise because the Spirit who came upon her has been poured out on us. We sing with her, because the God she birthed into this world is faithfully moving the whole creation toward its consummation in Christ. We sing Mary’s words of confidence and courage, because as we sing, our own hearts become a little more courageous and willing to follow Jesus on the way. We sing justice. We sing redemption. We sing the end of hunger and war. We sing the resurrection. We sing the power of love overcoming the love of power, and we say with her, “Let it be with me according to your word.”

During the years of military rule and civil war in Guatemala and El Salvador, those in power banned the public reading of Mary’s canticle of praise—they recognized it as subversive. When Martin Luther first translated the Bible into German, a number of German princes gladly supported him in his struggles with the Holy Roman Empire. But when they considered their own peasants singing along with mother Mary about the God who casts down the mighty from their thrones, they got nervous. And Luther, convinced that he needed the princes’ support, revised his German translation of the New Testament: he left Mary’s song in Latin.

Only that kind of maneuvering by those in power did not then nor will it ever prevent God’s merciful gaze from lifting up the lowly. In the late 80’s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Christians in Leipzig gathered on Monday evenings in and around St. Nikolai church to pray for peace and to sing. They lit candles, week after week, singing songs of hope, and their numbers grew from a few dozen to more than a thousand and eventually to more than three hundred thousand men, women, and children. After the fall of the Wall, a reporter asked an officer of the Stasi, the dreaded secret police, why they did not crush this protest like they had so many others. And the officer replied, “We had no contingency plan for song.”[5]

In the deep shadows of injustice and despair, we light the candles of Advent. In the thick darkness of the world’s sinful, loveless ways, we raise up our heads and hum along with Mary’s song—already a little more confident than we thought possible; a little more courageous than we imagined. We sing the birth of Jesus. We go to Bethlehem to see what God has done for us. We will enter the house where the promise of God is fulfilled and new life comes into the world. We will kneel next to the manger, and all that is proud and powerful in us will be brought down and scattered. And all that is lowly and poor, humble and hungry in us will be lifted up and strengthened and filled. And the hungry will eat. And those who flee for their lives will find refuge and home. And those who thirst for righteousness will drink. And we will all know and live the good news of great joy.

[1] Culpepper, Luke (NIB), 56.

[2] See Genesis 12:3

[3] Micah 5:2-5

[4] Wendy Farley, The Wounding and Healing of Desire. Weaving Heaven and Earth (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 29, 96; my italics.

[5] David Lose http://www.davidlose.net/2015/12/advent-4-c-singing-as-an-act-of-resistance/

The coat in your closet

A few weeks ago, I drove the van to pick up a group of guests from the Room in the Inn campus down on Drexel Street. When I got there, the line was short, so I pulled right up and got out of the van. I saw a man who looked very familiar, despite the mask covering much of his face.

“Charlie, is it you? I haven’t seen you in what feels like ages! I’m Thomas from Vine Street. It’s so good to see you! How are you?” Even in the dark, I could see Charlie Strobel’s eyes light up with a smile. He told me how he was, mentioned his health problems, but that wasn’t what he wanted to chat about. He couldn’t stand staying at home, he told me, he needed to be where he was, at the campus, with the people who didn’t have housing, people he knew as siblings and friends. “The real problem,” he said, and I’m paraphrasing, “the real problem is private property. There’s nothing wrong with owning things, but the way I understand Jesus, he tells us, ‘This is yours, enjoy it. It’s yours until someone else needs it.’”

I laughed and said, “That’ll preach, Charlie!” In the van, on the way back to the church, I kept thinking, who but this man would skip the chit-chat about the weather or the Titans and go right to the heart of the matter? A lifetime of prayer and loving service condensed into a simple, incredibly challenging statement, offered with humility and the warmest smile: The way I understand Jesus, he tells us, “This is yours, enjoy it. It’s yours until someone else needs it.”

“Love your neighbor” is not a religious way to spell charity; it’s the most challenging way to spell justice. It is the challenge to take the needs of our neighbor as seriously as we take our own. In the fourth century, Bishop Basil of Caesarea, said in a homily, “When someone steals another’s clothes, we call them a thief. Should we not give the same name to one who could clothe the naked and does not?” And the bishop continued,

The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it; the shoes rotting in your closet belong to the one who has no shoes; the money which you hoard up belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help.

In the Gospel of Luke, John the Baptist is presented as a preacher of repentance. “You brood of vipers” he addresses the crowds—not a way to capture your audience’s friendly attention, not in any compendium of rhetoric, not in any culture. “Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” He sounds like one of the prophets of old: fiery, single-minded, borderline obsessive. The people are there to receive his baptism, but he won’t let them get away with thinking that the water ritual would make them presentable on judgment day, or that some other symbolic action like donning sackcloth and ashes would do, or that they could always fall back on having Abraham as their ancestor, Abraham with whom God had made the covenant that included all his descendants. John slams all those exit doors shut until it is just the people and the urgent demand to repent. “Bear fruits worthy of repentance.”

And the crowds don’t get mad and they don’t leave to find a more accommodating prophet—they get it. “What then are we to do?” they ask.

Repentance is about more than feeling sorry with an added layer of religious overtones. The Hebrew term literally means return, as in returning to the ways of God. And the Greek term means change of mind, indicating a revolution in one’s thinking that effects a change of direction in one’s life. I don’t know if there’s a term in Greek for a revolution in one’s acting that effects a change of direction in one’s thinking. But you and I know there’s a need for such a term, because some of us think our way into new ways of acting, while others act our way into new ways of thinking. What all this is to say is that repentance is more than a mindset or an intention; it is a fundamental reorientation of one’s life, a reorientation that becomes visible, observable, tangible.

“What then are we to do?” they ask.

“Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none,” says John; “and whoever has food must do likewise.” It doesn’t get any more everyday than the clothes on your back and the food on your plate. Bearing good fruit, it turns out, is neither spectacular nor heroic, but rather ordinary and mundane. John counsels that if I have more than I need to sustain my life, the neighbor who does not have such abundance has a claim on it. Or as Charlie paraphrased Jesus’ teaching, “This is yours, enjoy it. It’s yours until someone else needs it.” Or as Basil put it, “The bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry; the coat hanging unused in your closet belongs to the one who needs it.” Or the book of James, If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.[1] And the First Letter of John, How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?[2] Love of neighbor is a golden thread woven into text after text. It doesn’t get any more everyday than the clothes on your back and the food on your plate. And it doesn’t get any more challenging than what you do with the clothes in your closet and the food in your pantry.

We collect a special offering of socks today, and like so much we do in worship it is a way of practicing new life habits. Little we do in this gathering is designed with global, systemic change in mind, but we trust that practicing new habits like confession and forgiveness, gratitude and giving, serving and praising changes us, and that through these habits we are indeed becoming, by the grace of God, the change we wish to see in the world. In giving a pair of socks, we get a little closer to becoming a people who care as much about our neighbors’ needs as we do about our own.

The tax-collectors in the crowd ask John, “What are we to do?” and he doesn’t tell them to sever relations with the occupying power, because the system of taxation is corrupt and unjust. He does tell them, though, not to take more than they are authorized to take. And John doesn’t tell the soldiers in the crowd to abandon their jobs, because they are collaborating with an unjust and corrupt system. He does tell them, though, not to extort money from anyone through threats or false accusations. Again, nothing heroic, nothing spectacular, just a commitment to act with justice within the social structure, to let love of neighbor become visible and tangible in everyday situations.

John tells the people of the coming one who is more powerful than he, who will baptize them with the Holy Spirit and with fire. “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” John has just talked about trees that don’t bear good fruit getting cut down and thrown into the fire, so it’s quite understandable when some folks wonder if wheat and chaff represent groups of people—perhaps those who bear the fruit God expects to find and those who don’t?

No. The point is rather that until harvest time, every grain of wheat is wrapped in a husk. Only after threshing are there wheat berries and a dusty mess of husk parts called chaff. And to this day, farmers around the world make use of the wind to separate the chaff from the grain—a small portion of the messy mix is tossed up into the air, the chaff is blown away some distance, and the wheat berries fall back onto the ground. And the point, of course, is to save every grain, not merely some. The image suggests a view of judgment that is liberating rather than punishing: We experience life as a mix of good and evil impulses and actions; they aren’t always neatly separable, often frustratingly intermingled; combinations of good intentions and bad outcomes; poor judgments we can’t forget and compromises that haunt us; too many choices where the best option seems to be the lesser of two evils—and the judgment John announces as the work of the coming one is a judgment, but not one of division, but of cleansing and gathering. What is carried away by the wind and burned in the fire are all the bits that keep us from being who we were made to be, the bits that embody apathy and selfishness, rather than love and communion.

I want to end with a story I’ve told before, but good stories get retold again and again for a reason. This story tells us about being generous with what is ours, and about the Spirit who brings such generosity to life.

It was Christmas Eve and the pews at New York City’s Riverside Church were packed. The Christmas pageant was underway and had come to the point at which the innkeeper was to turn away Mary and Joseph with the resounding line, “There’s no room at the inn!”

The innkeeper was played by Tim, an earnest youth of the congregation with Down syndrome. Only one line to remember: “There’s no room at the inn!” He had practiced it again and again with his parents and the pageant director and seemed to have mastered it.

So Tim stood at the altar, bathrobe costume firmly belted over his stomach, as Mary and Joseph made their way down the center aisle. They approached him, said their lines as rehearsed, and waited for his reply. Tim’s parents, the pageant director, and the whole congregation almost leaned forward in the pews as if willing him to remember his line.

“There’s no room at the inn!” Tim boomed out, just as rehearsed. But then, as Mary and Joseph turned on cue to travel further, Tim suddenly yelled “Wait!”

They turned back, startled, and looked at him in surprise.

“You can stay at my house!”

And Bill Coffin, the preacher, stood up in the pulpit and said, “Amen”—and that was the sermon.

[1] James 2:15-17

[2] 1 John 3:17

Dig a little

When you were little, how did you count the years? From birthday to birthday or from Christmas to Christmas? And when you were a little older, how did you count them then? From one first day of school to the next or from summer to summer? We all count the years in different ways — children, teachers, couples, sports fans — we have so many ways to count the earth’s journeys around the sun.

The church counts time from Advent to Advent. One could argue that the church year should begin on Christmas, with the birth of Christ, or on Easter, with his resurrection from the dead, or on Pentecost, when God began to pour out the Holy Spirit on that small band of disciples in Jerusalem. But there is great wisdom in starting the year with Advent.

We begin with our eyes on the horizon. We begin with expectant hope. We look to the future God has promised and prepared for us. We practice living into this future not bound by the past. We remember that the present is always open, always, to genuine newness brought forth by our God who is making all things new. And so we live in Advent remembering the birth of Jesus and confident that the one who began a good work among us will bring it to completion, as Paul wrote with joy from his prison cell.[1]

I wonder about that confidence of Paul’s — was it simply a given for him, a gift of the Spirit, or did he have to strain at times to hold on to it, did he have to find ways to cling to it by his nails, against the pull of his own heart, against the weight of soul-crushing circumstances?

The shooting on Tuesday afternoon at Oxford High School in suburban Detroit was the nation’s deadliest school shooting in three years. The youngest victim, Hana St. Juliana, was 14 when she died. Tate Myre was 16. Justin Shilling was 17. Madisyn Baldwin was 17. Seven other people were wounded. The boy who shot them is 15. The gun was an early Christmas gift from his parents: a semiautomatic 9-mm Sig Sauer handgun. “My new beauty,” he called it. The day after Thanksgiving, he and his father had gone together to a Michigan gun shop to buy it. He and his mother spent a day testing out the gun, which was stored unlocked in the parents’ bedroom. On Monday, when a teacher reported seeing their son searching online for ammunition, his mother did not seem alarmed. “LOL I’m not mad at you,” she texted her son. “You have to learn not to get caught.” A day later, the authorities say he fatally shot four fellow students in the halls of their school, using the handgun his parents had bought for him for Christmas.[2]

There hasn’t been a year without a school shooting since I came to this country, and most years had multiple ones.

1994 Ryly High School, Union, KY

1995 Richland High School, Lynville, TN

1996 Frontier Middle School, Moses Lake, WA

1997 Pearl High School, Pearl, MS

1998 Westside Middle School, Jonesboro, AR

1999 Columbine High School, Littleton, CO

2000 Bidwell Porter Elementary, Bidwell, OH

2001 Santana High School, Santee, CA[3]

And the list goes on, but I don’t want to count the years by school shootings. It was during Advent, on December 14, 2012 when a 20-year-old man killed 20 children between six and seven years old, and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary, Newtown, CT. Certainly, I remember thinking, certainly this will change how people think and vote about semi-automatic firearms and large-capacity magazines. It did not.

On February 14, 2018, a 19-year-old man killed 17 students and staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, wounding another 17, just weeks after mass shootings in Paradise, NV and in Sutherland Springs, TX, in October and November 2017. Certainly, I remember thinking, certainly this will change how people think and vote. Some people may have changed their minds, but pride is not so easily shaken. The idols of weapons worship stand firm on their pedestals, wrapped in the sacred cloth of liberty.

Shaken by disbelief, gripped by anger, and drained by sadness I keep returning to the prophet Isaiah, whose words continue to be a gift from one mourner to another.

The way of peace they do not know,
and there is no justice in their paths.
Their roads they have made crooked;
no one who walks in them knows peace.
Therefore justice is far from us,
and righteousness does not reach us;
we wait for light, and lo! there is darkness;
and for brightness, but we walk in gloom.
We grope like the blind along a wall,
groping like those who have no eyes.[4]

Groping like the blind along a wall, we wait for light. And in the darkness, old man Zechariah sings. And lighting a candle against the thick darkness, last Sunday we sang with him,

Blessed the God of Israel, who comes to set us free,
who visits and redeems us and grants us liberty.
The prophets spoke of mercy, of freedom and release;
God shall fulfill the promise to bring our people peace.

In Luke, Zechariah’s canticle ends with the words,

By the tender mercy of our God,
the dawn from on high will break upon us,
to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the way of peace.[5]

I could quote the statistics for gun violence. I could read the list of reasonable gun control proposals law enforcement officials across the nation have endorsed. I could mention that it’s easier to purchase a semi-automatic weapon than to get a driver’s license. And I could again lament the corrosive influence of NRA money on our politics. But that’s not really the point. There’s just so much fear in all of it, so much fear and false pride, and so little courage, so little hope.

We live in Advent time, gratefully singing of the light that has come and eagerly waiting for the dawn to become the day without end. We sing of Advent so we become brave enough to stop groping like the blind along the same old walls, and to stand up and raise our heads, because our redemption is drawing near. Living in Advent is about leaning into the dawn from on high and living in ways that reflect that light into the everyday dark places. Living in Advent is about lighting candles and becoming candles whose flickering lights proclaim the good news of God’s tender mercy.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s novel, Animal Dreams, set in the early 1980s, a young woman named Hallie has gone off to Nicaragua after the Sandinista revolution, when the war with the Contras is in full swing; despite the danger,  she’s there to support the revolution by helping to improve crop yields. Hallie is a horticulturist who knows her way around plants and soil and bugs. In a letter to her sister Codi back home in the States, Hallie writes:

You’re thinking of revolution as a great all-or-nothing. I think of it as one more morning in a muggy cotton field, checking the undersides of leaves to see what’s been there, figuring out what to do that won’t clear a path for worse problems next week. Right now that’s what I do. You ask why I’m not afraid of loving and losing, and that’s my answer. Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work—that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children’s bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don’t get lost. Codi, here’s what I’ve decided: the very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I’m living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides. I cannot tell you how good it feels. I wish you knew. … I wish you knew how to squander yourself.[6]

The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed is no small thing. It’s Hallie’s hope. It’s every prophet’s song. It’s the promise of God. It’s why we count the years from Advent to Advent. We begin, again and again, with a hope that’s big enough to live in and close enough to the ground so we remember that the daily work adds up and good things don’t get lost.

Such hope is not something we simply have or produce at will. It is a gift from God who is committed to the flourishing of creation and its consummation in peace. It is a gift nourished in the community drawn together by the gentle power of God’s Holy Spirit who inspires courage. It is the gift of the One born among us who squandered himself for the sake of God’s reign and our belonging in it.

On Christmas we don’t celebrate that the Lord came to visit us in our exile to make it a bit more bearable. We celebrate that the Lord is come to set us free. We celebrate that we are called to follow Jesus on the way to true freedom, to the harvest of righteousness, to peace. We celebrate that Jesus has come to us to be for us the way into God’s future, and to be with us on the way.

So when John, the son of old Zechariah and Elizabeth, when John instructs us to prepare the way of the Lord, he’s not talking about a seasonal exercise. He calls us to live in the light of dawn. He urges us to remember every morning whose coming we await and where we’re going. And he wants us to see in that light the valleys that need lifting up and the mountains that need lowering — whether that’s in our own attitudes and habits, or in the disparities among us and around us, or in whatever seems insurmountable.

Dig, for every shovel of dirt lowers a mountain and exalts a valley. Dig a little, for daily work adds up and good things don’t get lost. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make a way in the wilderness. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed is no small thing. You gotta prepare the way of the Lord—for hope’s sake, for love’s sake, for life’s sake.

[1] Philippians 1:6

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/us/crumbley-parents-charged-michigan-shooting.html

[3] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/map_of_the_week/2012/12/sandy_hook_a_chart_of_all_196_fatal_school_shootings_since_1980_map.html

[4] Isaiah 59:8-10

[5] Luke 1:68-79

[6] Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (New York: HarperCollins, 1990) 299; my italics.

Dreams of domination

A trial is a formal meeting in a law court, at which a judge and jury listen to evidence and decide whether a person is guilty of a crime. Those who are called to testify are asked to “affirm that all the testimony they are about to give in the case now before the court will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Typically the truth at stake is solely about the facts of the case, but sometimes a trial reveals a larger truth.

On Friday the news broke that Kyle Rittenhouse had been acquitted on all charges in the shooting deaths of two men and wounding of a third at a Wisconsin protest against racial injustice last year. The truth all of us are facing after this trial is that in this country a young white man can carry an assault weapon into a situation rife with tension, shoot three persons, killing two, and the people won’t hold him accountable because he hasn’t broken any laws. We have to live with that hard truth, and with the fact that some of us are actually celebrating while others are in mourning and worried sick. And I will continue to live with the troubling conviction that if Rittenhouse were Black, “acquitted on all counts” would not have been Friday’s headline.

In 1967, a group of Black Panthers demonstrated at the California Statehouse in Sacramento carrying loaded rifles and shotguns. Ronald Reagan was governor and he said of the Panthers’ action at the time, “I don’t think that loaded guns is the way to solve a problem that should be solved between people of good will. And anyone who would approve of this kind of demonstration must be out of their mind.” The California legislature passed and Reagan signed the Mulford Act, which banned the open carry of firearms in the state. The NRA supported the measure. The bill’s author, Don Mulford, said at the time, “We’ve got to protect society from nuts with guns.”[1] It appears we have changed our minds about nuts with guns; the NRA certainly has.

Today is the last Sunday of the church year. The readings for this Sunday in the ecumenical lectionary invite us to reflect on the consummation of Christ’s reign—something that may feel like an escape, welcome or not, to some of you, but it actually takes us to the heart of the matter.

The psalm sings of the Lord’s majesty and everlasting throne, and in the Gospel reading, John takes us to phase two of a trial. Jesus has been arrested by a detachment of soldiers and temple police. After an interrogation by the chief priest, they have taken him to the headquarters of Pilate, with the goal to get him sentenced to death.

Pontius Pilate had been appointed governor over Judea just a few years before; Judea was a remote but strategically important corner of the Roman empire. Fully aware that he represented the greatest power in the mediterranean world, Pilate ruled the province with an iron fist.  A contemporary of his described him as “rigid and stubbornly harsh, wrathful and of spiteful disposition,” and that his rule was marked by corruption and “ceaseless and most grievous brutality.”[2] Whoever raised their head too high or their voice too confidently, risked being disposed of as a threat to Roman dominance. Pilate had heard about Jesus, he had received preliminary intelligence reports about a Galilean whom the crowd had greeted at the city gate as king of Israel.[3] “Are you the king of the Jews?” he asked Jesus. Pilate was neither a prosecutor nor a judge, but that mattered little; those were just formalities: he represented the power of the Roman empire. He looked at the man before him the way he looked at everything and everyone: through the eyes of those above him, those who would decide whether to advance his career or terminate it. As governor, he played the empire’s game, and he knew that if he didn’t handle matters in Jerusalem to the emperor’s liking, his next appointment would definitely not be a move up.

“Are you the king of the Jews?” Pilate asks Jesus rather routinely, to see if this Galilean peasant might have insurgency on his mind. But John uses this trial scene to help us see a larger truth. Pilate may think that Jesus is the one being interrogated here. The temple authorities may think Jesus is the one on trial here. But Jesus turns the tables on them and becomes the interrogator. “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” he asks Pilate. Whose questions are you asking? Do you want to know who I am?

The issue of Jesus’ kingship had been raised before. He had fed thousands by the lake up in Galilee, and when he realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he went away.[4] The empire, of course, excels at controlling the masses with bread and circuses, but Jesus has no dreams of empire. He won’t command an army to put himself in power. He doesn’t want to live in a palace behind high walls and guarded gates. He has no ambition to sit on Caesar’s throne, as unimaginable as that may be to a man like Pilate. This king knelt to wash the feet of his friends. This king told his companion who still carried a sword to put it back into its sheath. This king insists that should any blood be shed, it would be his own.

“What have you done?” Pilate asks. And Jesus continues to testify, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Jesus’ kingship is not from this world, not based on this world’s ambitions and assumptions, not established with this world’s methods. Jesus’ kingship doesn’t fit into the world’s power patterns, but it is for the world and exercised in the world, for the life of the world.

“So you are a king?” Pilate asks, and Jesus still won’t give him a simple yes or no answer. Jesus is testifying, and he tells Pilate and all who are overhearing this interrogation that his entire life has been a testimony to the truth. “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

John uses this trial scene to show us a larger truth: it may look like the temple authorities and Pilate, driven by political expedience, have put Jesus on trial, seeking to convict, sentence and execute him; it may look like the world has put Jesus on trial, but in condemning him, the world is  condemning itself. Jesus’ entire life is a testimony to the truth, but the world can neither hear nor see him. He doesn’t fit the patterns of perception of the powerful. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice,” says Jesus. “Truth? What is that?” says Pilate.

To belong to the truth is to see in Jesus the fullness of God revealed and to hear the words of God in Jesus’ voice. To know the truth is not a matter of having been told all the relevant facts, but a matter of encounter and relationship, a matter of belonging. Pilate assumes that truth is a “what”—a concept, an idea, a set of facts—but in the Gospel according to John, where truth is mentioned at least three times more than in all the other gospels combinded, Jesus is never said to teach the truth, and the disciples are never said to have to truth; and Jesus doesn’t give us great truths to live by—he gives himself. He himself is the truth of God. In the Fourth Gospel, truth is not a “what” but a “who,” a person, a king who isn’t a king and yet the only one worthy to reign over God’s creation.

One who rules over people justly,
ruling in the fear of God,
is like the light of the morning,
like the sun rising on a cloudless morning,
gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.[5]

The longing for one who rules over people justly goes back as far as ancient songs and poetry can take us. The hope for one who rules in the fear of God is as old as the persistent reality of rulers and princes and judges who don’t. The testimony of Jesus reveals love as the power at the heart of the universe, love that calls and invites, love that serves and never overwhelms. The truth about God is God’s love for the world, and the truth about the world is God’s love for it. The truth is Jesus.

In Gian-Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors”, one of the three kings says,

The child we seek doesn’t need our gold.
On love, on love alone he will build his kingdom.
His pierced hand will hold no scepter.
His haloed head will wear no crown.
His might will not be built on your toil.
Swifter than lightning
he will soon walk among us.
He will bring us new life
and receive our death,
and the keys to his city belong to the poor. [6]

“Jesus’ kingship … can be difficult to see, for it is manifest in crucifixion rather than in political dominance,” writes Susan Hylen.[7] Jesus’ kingship rests not on bribe and coercion but on self-giving love—something that cannot be legislated or decreed or enforced, only received. And those who know themselves to be recipients of this love no longer dream of domination. The good-shepherd king who lays down his life for those he loves—he has no subjects, only friends who see him and know his voice and follow him on the way to the fullness of God’s reign. May we be among them.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/opinion/gun-control-and-white-terror.html

[2] Philo of Alexandria, Legatio ad Gaium, 33.

[3] John 12:13

[4] John 6:1-15

[5] 2 Samuel 23:3-4

[6] https://www.opera-arias.com/menotti/amahl-and-the-nightvisitors/libretto/

[7] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/christ-the-king-2/commentary-on-john-1833-37-3

Steadfast anchor of the soul

There is a story about New College, Oxford, that I’ve come across here and there; I really like it, and I’ve retold it a few times. According to this story, it was discovered in the 1860s that the long oak beams holding up the roof of the ancient dining hall were in bad shape and needed replacing. Nobody knew where they might find such huge timbers, though, and back then they didn’t call it supply chain issues. Then the college woodsman reminded the building committee that when the hall was built in the fourteenth century, the college’s founder William of Wykeham had a grove of oaks planted that were expressly reserved for one day replacing the beams. And so, thanks to Bishop Wykeham’s wise stewardship, 500 years later the college had the timbers it needed for the job, and the fellows and students have been happily dining under the replacement beams ever since.

“It’s a wonderful story,” writes Roman Krznaric in his latest book. “The only problem is that it isn’t true.” He talked with Jennifer Thorp, who oversees the New College archives, and he learned that the oaks for the beams came from a woodland that wasn’t purchased by the college until decades after the original hall had been built, and they had never been kept in reserve for roof restoration. Bishop William of Wykeham had not been so far-sighted after all.

My heart broke a little when I read that. But then the author goes on to point out that “the popularity of this story shows just how much we want to believe in the human capacity for long-term planning. A tale about planting trees for the benefit of people half a millennium in the future feels like the perfect antidote to our age of pathological short-termism.”[1]

We want to believe in our capacity to care about our neighbors not only in distant lands, but also in distant centuries. We want to believe in our capacity to extend the reach of the command to love our neighbor like ourselves to generations far into the future.

Jonas Salk wrote in 1992, “We have so altered the conditions of life on the planet, human and non-human, as to become the co-authors of our destiny. … Will we have the wisdom to perceive the long as well as short-term advantages in the choices we make?” The title of his article is a question, “Are we being good ancestors?”[2] It’s a terrific question. Hard to answer, yes, hard to live with, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep asking it. Robert Macfarlane said, “To be a good ancestor is to bear responsibility for a future you will never know, for people you will never know, even for species you will never know. To extend care forwards in deep time to what Rebecca Solnit has memorably called the ‘ghostly billions.’”[3]

This week the UN climate conference in Glasgow, COP 26, went into overtime to finish work on a final draft document, and there was plenty of last-minute watering-down. It was a step, not the leap forward many hoped for. The governments of the world’s nations are trying to hammer out a difficult agreement with tremendous impact on this generation and generations to come, human and non-human. We want to believe in our capacity to cooperate, to compromise, and to co-author a better path forward. But we’re not certain. We’re not so sure of ourselves, not so sure about each other’s motives and dependability.

In today’s passage from Hebrews, we encounter a very different voice. It’s a voice brimming with confidence, confidence in what God has done in Jesus Christ. Christ has effected forgiveness of sin, once and for all. The affirmation is strong, because the audience is uncertain. One commentator suggests that “the entire sermon addresses a particular congregation’s exhaustion” and “weariness.”[4] There has been a noticeable decline in attendance at its assemblies. The reasons aren’t stated, but the context suggests fear of public ridicule and persecution, leadership tensions, and discouragement over the delay of Christ’s return. In the verses following our passage, the preacher tells the congregation,

Recall those earlier days when, after you had been enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to abuse and persecution, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion for those who were in prison, and you cheerfully accepted the plundering of your possessions, knowing that you yourselves possessed something better and more lasting. Do not, therefore, abandon that confidence of yours; it brings a great reward.[5]

“Confidence” is the keynote here. In Greek, the word connotes frankness, openness to public scrutiny, courage, boldness, fearlessness, and joy. It is a characteristic of free citizens who may hold their heads up without shame or fear, looking others directly in the eye. In Roman society, it belonged to the free members of the household, but not to slaves. In Hebrews, it characterizes all members of the household of God, in their relationship with God as well as in all their relationships with each other and the community at large.[6]

Confident in God’s forgiveness, we follow Christ into the heart of holiness, the very presence of God. “We have this hope,” says the preacher, “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered.”[7] Because of him, we may “approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”[8] Grace to be honest with ourselves about the burdens of guilt and shame we bear—and to let God take them. Grace to be kind to each other, knowing that we all carry such burdens. And grace to be bold in our witness, particularly in the face of hostility.

Through forgiveness we are drawn into a transformative relationship with God, a relationship that frees us to love, to live fully in the love of God. We become conduits through which God’s unceasing love flows to revive the parched places in the lives of others. We become who we were made to be.

Many generations ago, the preacher of Hebrews addressed the weariness and exhaustion of a particular congregation, but his or her words and the Spirit who inspired them continue to move us closer to God, closer to each other, closer to our own true selves. Let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us embrace this moment of freedom and new beginning, and since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.[9]

When we ask ourselves, “Are we being good ancestors?” we remember those who have been good ancestors to us, who chose the path of love when the highway of convenience was wide open, who chose faithfulness over fear, and hope for the sake of the hopeless. So let us hold fast to the confession of our hope, let us hold fast to the sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, not because our track record of not wavering is so impressive, but because the one who has promised is faithful.

The preacher of Hebrews walks us all the way into the holy of holies where in the company of Jesus our whole being becomes praise, and then we follow the stream of words back to Monday morning when lofty phrases have little chance of being ruminated, but another work week begins, another school week, another week of daily routines. And that, of course, is when the holding fast and the running with perseverance become complicated and challenging and urgent. Now the preacher of Hebrews speaks with rare simplicity: Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds. And let us not neglect to meet together, as is the habit of some. We can’t provoke one another to love and good deeds with a bunch of unread emails piling up in our inboxes. We can’t encourage one another to move from apathy and fear to love with inspirational memes endlessly shared on social media. And we can’t ask ourselves if we are being good ancestors without getting on each other’s nerves with our half-baked ideas and our tired clichés and our wildest dreams—and loving each other anyway. We can’t be who we are without each other, from the 93-year-olds and up to the 3-year-olds and down, to the saints who have gone before. Let us not neglect to meet together, because the challenges we face demand the best we have to offer.

What would it take for us to love life, not as a commodity to be consumed, but as a gift we share with all generations of creation? Let us meet together. Let us bring our imagination, wisdom, and creativity, and let us consider how to provoke one another to love, to the glory of God.

[1] Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription For Long-term Thinking (New York: The Experiment, 2020), 92.

[2] Jonas Salk, “Are We Being Good Ancestors?” World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues 1, no. 2 (1992): 16–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45064193.

[3] https://lafayettestudentnews.com/114337/arts/robert-macfarlane/

[4] Elizabeth Felicetti, Connections, 482.

[5] Hebrews 10:32-35

[6] See Susan Eastman https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-33-2/commentary-on-hebrews-1011-14-15-18-19-25-2

[7] Hebrews 6:19-20

[8] Hebrews 4:16

[9] Hebrews 12:1-2

To what end?

North Haven is a small town in Minnesota, just east, I heard, of Lake Wobegon. Michael Lindvall has written a couple of books about life in North Haven, tales about a minister and his flock.[1] Reading these stories you quickly get a sense that you know these people; they are your neighbors and co-workers, people you run into at the grocery store.

James Crory is one of them. He’s an overactive seven-year-old who talks a mile a minute and sleeps only sporadically. Calling him energetic would be an understatement. James loves to hang out with Angus and Minnie, both in their 80’s, and they, for the most part anyway, enjoy his company as well. They smile at his enthusiasm, and his stories and the seemingly endless stream of his questions and declarations about the world are way more entertaining than anything on tv.

It was in the afternoon of Halloween, the sun was already low, when James burst into Angus and Minnie’s living room complaining that his mom had gotten him the wrong costume.

“Spiderman? No one cares about Spiderman anymore. How can she not know that? I can’t possibly wear that costume! It will be the end! Everyone will make fun of me. Why did she do that to me? What am I going to do?”

Minnie waited a couple of seconds to make sure that he was finished.

“Perhaps you could be a ghost?”

Her boys had been ghosts every year growing up, even used the same costumes year after year—it never seemed to be a problem. Come to think of it, those ghost costumes were probably still up in the attic. And so Angus and James climbed up the creaky attic stairs to look for the costumes—and there they were! The classic design: a sheet with a couple of holes for the eyes, and a belt to keep the whole thing from blowing away.

Angus and Minnie insisted that James use a high-visibility reflector belt because it had already snowed, and you can’t see a ghost in the snow. The little boy could hardly stand still long enough to get the belt on. “Trick or treat! Trick or treat!” he shouted, jumping up and down.

Angus said he’d trail along behind to make sure the boy was OK, but before he could get his coat on, James dashed out the door and ran smack-dab into their maple tree.

Angus was rushing out to be sure he was okay, when little James picked himself up and rushed full speed ahead again. This time he ran into the neighbor’s pear tree. And this time, he stayed down a little longer.

“James! James, are you all right?” Angus quickly went over to the little boy. He looked down, and he realized that the holes in the sheet were not lined up with his eyes—not even close. James couldn’t see a thing. So Angus adjusted the sheet, and the boy’s eyes opened wide with surprise: “I didn’t know I was supposed to be able to see!”

I’m grateful for people like Minnie and Angus, old couples who become friends with young neighbors, and generously share with them their time, their food, and their love.

I thought about baptism, of all things, when I read this story from North Haven. In baptism we put on the white robe of new life. It’s not a costume that changes every year, nor is it a manufactured plastic dream that allows us to be the Hulk, Wonder Woman, or Chewbacca for a day. The white robe of new life is much more like a treasure from the attic, something generations before us have worn with joy and great reward. So you put on that robe, and you rush out the door to live your new life, only to run smack-dab into a tree.

“Something just hit me,” you say to yourself, but you rub your head, get up and start over, and—bang!—you run into the next tree. “Determination is everything,” you say to yourself, and you’re about to jump up and start over, when thankfully somebody helps you see a bit more clearly where you are and where you’re headed.

We are not alone in the adventure of faith, and this Sunday gives us an opportunity to gratefully acknowledge that reality. We are surrounded by saints, by a great cloud of witnesses who in generations past have walked the road we are on: they have faced challenges, they have kept the faith in the most difficult circumstances, and they are watching us, they are cheering us on, and they adjust our vision so we can see where we are going.

Frederick Buechner reminded us that “saints are not plaster statues, men and women of such paralyzing virtue that they never thought a nasty thought or did an evil thing their whole life long. Saints are essentially life givers. To be with them is to become more alive.”[2] Every Christian has them: precious people who have helped shape us, role models in the art of living well, people who continue to inspire and encourage us. Some of them may still be around, others have joined the church in heaven. Some of them you may have known in person, others you may have heard or read about. They are your saints, the people through whom God has made you who you are and continues to form you. Most of them are not  faith celebrities or super heroes of piety, but people like Angus and Minnie, ordinary people whose lives reflect God’s grace like walking mirrors.

Saint John the Divine was a Christian leader, banned by order of Rome to the island of Patmos. Jerusalem was gone; the Romans, tired of the protests and revolts in the volatile province of Judaea, had destroyed the city and demolished the Temple—a pile of rubble was all that was left. With an iron fist they had brought peace to the troubled region, the Roman variety of peace, that is, PAX ROMANA.

Christians were suspect because of their refusal to honor the gods of the empire. Violent persecution of the church wasn’t the norm, but many Christian leaders were executed or imprisoned, or, as in John’s case, banned. He found himself far from home, a prisoner on the small island of Patmos, off the coast of Turkey. The world around him was falling to pieces, and he knew that across the sea, in the cities of Asia Minor, where arrests and executions continued, his friends were suffering. They were losing hope. They weren’t running into trees out of joyful exuberance, but because Roman imperial culture surrounded them with demands that turned their acts of faithfulness to the risen Lord into acts of rebellion. How could they possibly acclaim the emperor as Lord and Son of God when they had come to know Jesus as Lord? How could they praise the emperor as Savior of the World when that title belonged to Jesus Christ alone? How could they continue to live faithfully when all they could see was Rome’s overwhelming might?

John saw all that, but it wasn’t all that he saw. He looked beyond the horizon defined by Rome’s imperial reach. And he saw a holy city coming down out of heaven from God. He saw a city for all peoples, a beautiful city of true peace.

To what end do we put on the white robe of baptism? To what end do we follow Jesus on the way, and not other lords that vie for our allegiance? To what end do we love and serve God and our neighbor, and not our own ambitions? We are walking toward that city. In faith we have embraced the gospel as the story of our life, and those who are walking with us, along with those who went before us, adjust our vision and help us align our lives with the promises of God.

The end, Saint John reminds us, is not a handful of souls escaping to heaven; the end is the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven to earth. The end is not one tribe’s triumph over the others, or one nation’s imperial aspirations fulfilled—the end is a city for all peoples, and God is at home among them, dwelling with them, wiping every tear from their eyes. The end is a city where death is no more, where mourning, crying, and pain are no more—because the old order has passed away for good.

The end is a feast for all peoples, a feast of rich food and well-aged wines where the nations join Israel in singing, “This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation,” and the one seated on the throne says, “See, I am making all things new.”

We hunger and thirst for righteousness, and we can already see what is coming. We long for redemption and a world where people come together to celebrate and share the gift of life, and in the company of God’s saints we can already see what is coming. We follow Jesus on the way, and in the company of Isaiah and John, surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses, our eyes are lined up with the promises and purposes of God, and we can see what is coming: the blessed communion of humanity with God, the joy of heaven to earth come down, unhindered and unending and complete.

To what end do we put on the white robe of baptism? To what end to we follow Jesus on the way, and not other lords that vie for our allegiance? To what end do we love and serve God and our neighbor, and not our own ambitions?

To be part of the great transformation that heals life’s wounds and fulfills the promise of creation. To receive and give the fullness of God’s love and grace.

[1] Michael L. Lindvall, Leaving North Haven: The Further Adventures of a Small Town Pastor (New York: Crossroad, 2002)

[2] Wishful Thinking, 102.

An oasis of friendship

There’s an old story about a gentile who wanted to convert to Judaism. He went to Rabbi Shammai and said to him, “Take me as a proselyte, but on condition that you teach me the entire Torah, all of it, while I stand on one foot.” Shammai, insulted by this request, threw him out of the house. Then the man went to Rabbi Hillel, and Hillel accepted the challenge, saying, “What you don’t like, don’t do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary—now go and study!”[1]

The debate didn’t begin with Shammai and Hillel, and it didn’t end with them. According to Jewish tradition, 613 commandments were given to Moses. 365 negative commandments, answering to the number of days of the year, and 248 positive commandments, answering to the number of members of the human body.[2] Thus the commandments of God address the whole human person, every day of the year, and they cover all of life: what to eat and what to wear, when to work and when to rest, how to teach your children and how to treat strangers, how to lend and borrow, how to love your spouse and how to cook a meal, how to pray and how to farm—everything. Is there a way, students of the Torah wondered, to capture that totality in a single teaching? Is there one commandment that is something like the principle that is being unfolded in all the others, a central commandment, as it were, that anchors all the others?

The prophet Micah named three: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” The prophet Isaiah named two: “Maintain justice and do what is right.” The prophet Amos named one: “Seek me and live.” And the prophet Habakkuk named another: “The righteous shall live by their faith.”[3] Rabbi Hillel answered, “What you don’t like, don’t do to your neighbor.”

Last week when I stood in the candy aisle, wondering what to get for the neighborhood kids for Halloween, I said to myself, “What you don’t like, don’t do to your young neighbors.” So I didn’t get any candy corn, and saying that candy corn fits the category of what I don’t like, is putting it mildly. I also didn’t get what I do like, simply because I’m more than a few years past my prime as a connoisseur of kids’ candy. So I got some KitKats, some Hershey bars with almonds, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. But now my curiosity had been piqued: What is the most popular candy bar in the United States?

Lists, of course, abound on the internet, and I learned that M&Ms are the top selling candy in the United States. Yeah, I could have bought some M&Ms, I said to myself, but noticed with great relief that Peanut Butter Cups and Hershey bars came in second and third, and Kit Kat a very respectable fifth. I also learned that Candy Corn ranked sixth in Halloween candy sales last year, ahead of Snickers and Sour Patch Kids, which is just devastating.

But sales numbers don’t tell the whole story when it comes to popularity. Because what we buy and hand out may not be what the kids going door to door actually like. Somebody, of course, did a survey, with a cutoff at age 17, of U.S. kids’ favorite Halloween candies. The results? Let’s just say I won the candy aisle trifecta: Hershey Bar #1, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups #2, and Kit Kat #3. They also surveyed kids up to age 17 to find the most hated Halloween candy in the nation. Do I have to say it? It ranked #6 in sales and #1 in most hated: Candy Corn.[4]

When the scribe asked Jesus, “Which commandment is the first of all?” he didn’t have rankings in mind. He didn’t want to know which commandment Jesus thought was most important, followed by 612 less important ones. As a scholar of Torah he was interested in determining whether there was one commandment that was foundational for all the others, one stone, as it were, upon wich the entire edifice of devotion and obedience rested.

Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” 

The greatness of the double love commandment, writes Amy Allen, “lies not in its surpassing value over and against all of the other commandments of Jewish law, but, rather, in its ability to hold up all the rest. It’s less about beating out all of the other candidates and more about helping them to do their jobs.” The rock upon which the whole structure rests is love.

And Jesus didn’t name just one commandment, but two, implying that the will and desire of God for God’s people cannot be reduced to a single principle; all the commandments are rooted in a set of relationships. Love of God and love of neighbor go together, inseparably, so that we cannot be in right relationship with God without being in right relationship with each other, and we cannot love each other well without giving over our whole and broken selves to God—heart, soul, mind, strength. These two love commandments come first in the law because it is on them that all of the rest of the commandments of the Torah rest—all that God asks of God’s people, God asks as a response to and expression of love.[5] Together they reveal the meaning and orientation of the Torah as a whole.[6]

Most of us think we know what love is and that we are all talking about the same thing when we say the word—but we’re not. Love is about affection, desire, commitment and belonging, and the constellation of these elements shifts from relationship to relationship and from season to season. In our twenty-first century world love has widely been reduced to having good feelings about someone or something, and it has lost much of its core as a call to faithful action. Douglas Hare reminds us that,

In an age when the word ‘love’ is greatly abused, it is important to remember that the primary component of … love [in the Bible] is not affection but commitment. Warm feelings of gratitude may fill our consciousness as we consider all that God has done for us, but it is not warm feelings that [the commandment] demands of us but rather stubborn, unwavering commitment. Similarly, to love our neighbor, including our enemies, does not mean that we must feel affection for them. To love the neighbor is to imitate God by taking their needs seriously.[7]

Love is a deep loyalty to another, the kind of loyalty Ruth shows her mother-in-law. And when Jesus highlights the intimate link between loving God and loving our neighbor, he’s not telling us to have warm feelings for friends and strangers alike, but to commit ourselves to their wellbeing. Your neighbor, according to Jesus, can literally be your next-door neighbor who might be tired of eating alone or who might need somebody to rake the leaves for her. Your neighbor may be your father and mother who, after so many years, need you in unfamiliar ways that almost reverse the relationship of parent and child. Your neighbor is every person you encounter, and to love them is to take their desire to flourish no less seriously than you take your own. Think about that. To love them is to take their desire to flourish no less seriously than you take your own.

We know that there are all kinds of love. There is a covetous love that simply takes what it wants, but that is far from neighbor love. There is the love between equals, a love that thrives in mutuality and reciprocity. And there is a kind of love that is self-giving without a thought of reciprocity, a love whose sole concern is the other person’s well-being. Neither love reflects a merely emotional state, but rather, points to the relation in which one person lives toward another. One can perhaps be described as true friendship, the other as a holy selflessness that borders on recklessness. There are different words for these loves in New Testament Greek, but the two cannot be neatly separated. We often experience them together, be it as friends, lovers, parents, or neighbors, and at times we live out one more fully than the other.

Jesus calls us to follow him and to move continually from a self-centered way of being in the world to one centered in complete devotion to God and in those whom God gives us as neighbors. Jesus leads us from apathy to love.

The scribe said to Jesus, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

Significant as the temple liturgy, offerings, and sacrifices are, giving ourselves completely to God and giving of ourselves to each other is much more important. The scribe agrees with Jesus. This remarkable scene is the only one in all of Mark’s gospel where a religious authority agrees with Jesus. Throughout his ministry, Jesus has encountered strong opposition from temple leadership—the chief priests, scribes and elders—and now that Jesus is in Jerusalem, the conflict between him and them continues to escalate. They are already conspiring to have him arrested and put on trial, and any questions they are asking him are designed to trip him up or trap him.

Except for this scribe who breaks the hostile pattern by asking a sincere question. He transcends the party strife and the us vs. them mentality. And Jesus answers him in an equally non-combative way. The scene itself illustrates what love of neighbor, in particular love of the challenging neighbor, might look like. In the middle of the brewing storm the two make room for each other and for each other’s honest questions and honest answers, for the pursuit of a deeper understanding of God’s will for God’s people—and the moment sparkles like an oasis of friendship in a wasteland of hostility and fear.

“You are not far from the kingdom of God,” Jesus says to the scribe, and that, in Mark’s telling of the gospel, is as close as it gets for any of us who await the kingdom’s consummation. Not far from the kingdom, closer to the truth and peace of God, closer to life in fullness.

[1] See Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 31a

[2] See Babylonian Talmud Makkot 23b-24a

[3] Micah 6:8; Isaiah 56:1; Amos 5:4; Habakkuk 2:4

[4] https://blog.galvanize.com/candy-crush-figuring-out-favorite-sweets-with-data/

[5] Amy Lindeman Allen https://politicaltheology.com/the-politics-of-the-greatest-commandment-mark-12-28-34/

[6] Eugene Boring, Mark, 345.

[7] Douglas Hare, “Matthew,” Interpretation Commentaries, 260.

Subversive love

They were on the way to Jerusalem. Jesus was walking ahead of them, with resolve in his stride, often a solitary figure against the horizon. The physical distance between him and the disciples illustrates how hard it is for us to follow him, to keep up with him, to walk the path he has blazed with his life.

The disciples in Mark’s story didn’t fully grasp yet who they were following and where he was going. On the way, Jesus had begun to teach them that he must undergo great suffering and be killed and after three days rise again, and they couldn’t bear to hear it. The first time Peter rebuked him for saying such things.[1] The second time, Jesus told them again that the Son of Man would be betrayed into human hands and be killed, and after three days rise again. And they didn’t understand what he was saying, and they were afraid to ask. Instead, they argued with each other about who was the greatest.[2] “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” he taught us then, but we’re slow learners. All we can do is try and keep up with him. A third time Jesus stopped to tell the twelve what awaited him in Jerusalem, and this time he added even more detail. He would be handed over. He would be rejected and condemned by the temple authorities. He would be mocked, abused, tortured, and killed. And after three days he would rise again. That’s when James and John came forward, the sons of Zebedee. They had been with him since the early days of his mission in Galilee.

“Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Perhaps you wonder if they had heard at all what he had just said. What led them to make this about themselves, this moment when Jesus had just spoken about what would happen to him in Jerusalem? How could they be so obtuse and insensitive? There remains, though, the possibility that they had actually listened to every word and heard every detail about how he would run into the walls of rejection and political convenience, and how these walls would become his grave. And perhaps their confidence in Jesus’ final triumph was so complete that they cast their vision past the darkness that lay ahead, and into the glory beyond. In their minds, perhaps they were already standing in the royal palace, with their toes touching the threshold to the banquet hall, and seated on the throne of glory they saw the Risen One.

“What is it you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked them. “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory,” they replied. Were they dreaming about cabinet seats? Certainly the Messiah would need a Chief of Staff or a Chief Justice – and why not them, trusted friends who had been with him almost from day one? They knew how power works: the grand pyramid with its wide base among those in the dust, rising all the way up to the few whose feet never touch the ground because they rest on soft couches and ride in limousines or fly in personal jets. It’s a tall structure, with multiple layers, and the higher you climb, the greater the power and the more exclusive the company. James and John envisioned greatness quite conventionally, as most of us do, with the greatest occupying the pinnacle of the pyramid and God hovering over the top. They wanted to sit at the right hand and the left of the one in charge, imagining God’s reign like any kind of earthly rule, only shinier and purer, without corruption and cover-ups.

James and John knew how power and status work, we all do. Social Psychologists tell us that status anxiety accounts for much of what we do on a daily basis. We need to know where we are on the pyramid and where the people around us fit in: Are they above? Below? Somewhere on the same level? And when we’re not busy climbing, we’re busy keeping ourselves from falling. It’s hard, stressful work.

James and John were disarmingly honest about wanting to be near the top of the pyramid. “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory,” they said. And Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking.” They had been two of the three disciples who witnessed Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain, who saw him robed in clothes of dazzling white and conversing with Moses and Elijah. Perhaps the brothers were imagining a similar scene with them in it. John Calvin called the whole episode “a bright mirror of human vanity,” and the writer of Matthew was so embarrassed by the disciples’ lack of understanding that he had the mother of James and John make the request on their behalf.[3] Mark wants us to look into the mirror and see ourselves; and Mark is very careful to remind us that the only ones at Jesus’ left and right when he was hailed “King of the Jews” were the two bandits who were crucified with him.[4]

The way of the Christ is the way of the cross, not a new and improved way to lord it over others. Jesus puts his own life and death, along with the lives and sufferings of his followers, in complete opposition to conventional expressions of power. “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.  But it is not so among you.” His death would exemplify the violent resistance his teaching and practice elicit from those who hold power over society, and it would exemplify a radical renunciation of that kind of power.[5] And more than a radical renunciation. In his death and resurrection, Jesus has delivered us from the constellations of power we concoct to control each other and set us free to serve one another.

“Not what I want, but what you want,” was Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane as he prepared to drink the cup of suffering, and those who follow him learn to pray with him.[6] Not what I want—not my aspirations, my ambitions, my pursuits—but what you want—your will, your purposes, your kingdom. The reign of God conquers the world not by overpowering it, but by subverting our notions of power.

Everybody wants to be somebody, and there’s nothing wrong with that, nothing at all. But since the dawn of human history, we have been tempted to choose power over love. Jesus didn’t manipulate people to get what he wanted. He didn’t use others in the pursuit of his own personal ambitions. Jesus was in the world as one who served God and every human being he encountered. And in his company, we learn to look at others not as means to our ends or as threats to our status, but as beloved of God. On the way with him, we let ourselves be opened to the coming reign of God where love alone is sovereign.

Martin Copenhaver tells a story about a church where he had been the pastor years ago. Some of the older members could remember a time when the wealthy families would send their servants to help cook church suppers alongside those who did not have servants to send. The world changed, and by the time Pastor Martin came to the church these stories were repeated with some amusement, but similar confusions continued.

According to the bylaws of the church the deacons were charged with the spiritual leadership of the congregation, and at a deacons meeting, someone complained that instead of being true to this high and momentous charge, deacons spent too much of their time delivering food to the homeless shelter and washing dishes after communion. How could they tend to important spiritual matters when they were occupied with such mundane tasks? “I schlepp bread and wine from the kitchen to the table, and when all have eaten I take the dishes back to the kitchen and wash them,” one of the deacons complained. “I feel like a glorified butler.”

They did a little Bible study and discovered that the apostles in the Jerusalem church commissioned deacons to take food to the widows. They learned that the word deacon was the anglicized version of the Greek diakonos, and that a diakonos was a servant or a waiter. They were indeed butlers, charged with the mundane task of delivering food, and they were indeed glorified because that simple act of service was an expression of the love of Christ the servant.[7]

Here at Vine Street, just a few days after our big anniversary weekend, the new season of Room in the Inn will begin. Every first, third, and fifth Thursday, from November to March, we will come together to prepare and serve meals, to make beds and set tables, and to open the doors of this house and welcome our unhoused guests.

Call us glorified butlers, if you want. Call us waiters or servants, we’d be honored, for we’re serving in the company of Jesus; we’re learning from the master.

We’re aware that our desire to be affirmed as persons of importance is deeply rooted in us; we all want to be somebody. But in the company of Jesus we practice affirming one another in our shared dignity as members of God’s household. We’re participating in the revolution that undermines the love of power with the power of love. Because we all are somebody.

[1] Mark 8:31-33

[2] Mark 9:30-37

[3] Mt 20:20-22

[4] Mk 9:2-8; 15:27

[5] With thanks to Matt Skinner http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=435

[6] Mk 14:36

[7] Martin Copenhaver, Christian Century, October 5, 1994, 893.