In the Afterglow (Luke 2:41-52)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Dec 27, 2015)

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“But He Was a Baby Last Year…” 

In the nursery at the small, country Catholic church, Sister Teresa gathered the children round to tell them the story of Christmas. She set up the nativity and began. The little children were clearly captivated. They followed the gentle movement of her hands, as she brought the figurines to life. All was calm in the room. All was bright. Until Sister Teresa got to the end of the story and placed the baby Jesus figurine in the manger. At this, a look of utter confusion washed over the face of little Sammy, one of the older toddlers, and he leaned in for a closer look at the baby Jesus. Little Sammy had had a baby brother himself since the year before, and maybe that explains what he said next. “But he was a baby last year! Jesus must be bigger now.”[1]

While little Sammy had not yet quite grasped the nature of birthdays or anniversaries, he has a thing or two to teach us who would keep Jesus eternally in the manger, or eternally at the end of his life. Jesus, according to little Sammy and also to our story today in Luke, lived a life just like any one of us. Jesus grew up just like you and me, enduring growing pains just like any adolescent.

The Afterglow 

Which brings us to today’s scripture, a remarkable story that offers us the only glimpse we have of Jesus when he was a child.

And the setting of the story is a remarkably familiar one. We can imagine the scene in Jerusalem: decorations are being taken down; residents are tidying up; a satisfied silence envelops the city. Passover, the main holiday of the year, has just ended.

And I imagine that the first couple days after Passover are like the first couple days after Christmas: they pass anonymously, as though we don’t care so much to acquaint ourselves with them but would rather just rest in their quietness. And perhaps that’s why Mary and Joseph didn’t notice their son’s absence on the first day of their journey back. Perhaps they were relishing the tired plod of their donkeys, the relative quiet of their relatives, the calm afterglow of the festival.

I imagine that’s where a lot of us are right now: relishing the afterglow. We too are quietly coming down, gently preparing ourselves for the return to normalcy.

Where Is Jesus? 

And perhaps like Mary and Joseph, we too will eventually stop to ask: where is Jesus? Our nativities are coming down. Which means the baby Jesus is no longer a baby, no longer in the manger. So where is he now? Where is Jesus as we remove the ornaments and take the tree down?

According to Luke, Jesus has not yet left the scene of the festival. Passover was finished for Jesus and the rest of them. But Jesus was not finished with Passover. While the rest of his family were relishing the afterglow, reliving the festive scenes in their minds as they recalibrated their hearts to business as usual, Jesus remained alight, aglow, aflame with curiosity. By that time, the festive lights in Jerusalem would have been disappearing—as many of our Christmas lights will soon be disappearing—but as the fire died outside, it only flamed higher and higher inside the youthful soul of Jesus.

A holy spark had jumped the ashes of Passover and had caught hold of Jesus. He could not leave the Temple. And what follows is one of the strongest images we have of Jesus’ humanity.

It’s easy to sentimentalize this scene, to paint it in the broad, warm strokes of a Thomas Kinkade painting: the boy Jesus, astonishing the rabbis with his divine wisdom. But that would risk missing the point that this boy Jesus is just like any other boy his age. He’s full of questions. Eager. Curious. He’s not there with a point to prove. He’s there to learn—to “grow in wisdom,” as Luke says it (2:52). I imagine him pushing those rabbis to the limits of their knowledge, subjecting them to that most rigorous form of inquisition practiced by twelve-year olds all across the globe: “Why? Why? Why?” Or perhaps to that other infamous youthful inquiry, in which the impossible is imagined, along with the daring question: “Why not?”

If Jesus were with us today as a twelve year old, he might well take stock of our Christmas celebrations and then audaciously ask, “Why not? Why can’t we have this spirit of love and selflessness all year round?” I can’t help but think that he was asking similar questions there in the Temple just after Passover. In my mind, the grey and wispy-haired rabbis are remembering the exodus, how they were helpless strangers in Egypt but God took notice and saved them, and how they as Israelites were commanded to do the same, to take notice of the stranger in their midst and to care for them. And in the midst of this discussion, Jesus pipes up and asks, “And what about our enemies? How should we treat them? And what about forgiveness? If we only ever forgive people who are sorry, will that ever change the world?” How the biggest questions often come from the smallest among us. And yet even as Jesus grows up, he does not discard these big questions. His sermon on the plain, just four chapters later in Luke, will invite people to love their enemies and to forgive unconditionally (6:32-38).

Growing Pains 

The hard lesson that Mary and Joseph learn in today’s story is the same hard lesson that any parent must learn, I suppose. Their baby child is growing up.

And that, I believe, is the lesson for us today too. We learn it just as easily from little Sammy as we do from today’s story in Luke. Jesus was born a baby. But now he’s growing. And he’s showing us that even though the great festival has ended—Passover, in his case, Christmas in ours—even though the party is over, it continues in our hearts. As the fire dies down outside us, so it sparks something inside us. For Jesus, the fire within would grow and grow until he was publicly proclaiming the good and difficult news of enemy love and unconditional forgiveness. For us, perhaps the fire within is Jesus, and Jesus is growing. And like Mary and Joseph, we watch nervously, realizing that the baby Jesus is not ours to keep, but a curious and inquisitive and bold spirit who will exasperate us as much as he will endear himself to us.

“Let Christmas Last the Whole Year Through…” 

“Let Christmas last the whole year through. Let love and joy abound.” So begins the poem by one of our very own, Becky. It is an invitation that we see in the flesh in today’s story. The ancient story of Passover and God’s love for an oppressed people catches hold of Jesus, ignites a holy passion within. Passover the festival has ended. But Passover the story lives on in Jesus. Where it simmers beneath the surface, fermenting, evolving, growing into the gospel that Jesus will soon be proclaiming. So for us the festival of Christmas is ending. But the hope is that the story of Christmas will live on—and not just as a fixed memory. The hope is that the story will grow within us like the Christ child himself, will ask questions of us, will lead us to live out love and joy in a real and fresh way.

Naturally, I’m inclined to wrap this sermon up neat and tidy. But I think perhaps today’s story resists such a clean conclusion. Today’s story says rather that the afterglow of Christmas, like the afterglow of Passover, means that even as the fires without die, the fire within is flamed. And that fire within is unpredictable. It caught the parents of Jesus by surprise. Fifteen years or so later, it would catch all of Galilee and Jerusalem by surprise. Some might even say that, in the garden of Gethsemane, it caught Jesus himself by surprise.

You know how they say be careful what you pray for—you just might get it? If we should dare pray that Christmas last the whole year through, then we should also be ready for some growing pains—and a wonderful adventure we could never see coming.

Prayer 

We wonder at the Christ child, God, born in a manger, born in our hearts. Thank you for the gift of love. Our natural tendency is to hold on to the good gifts we receive. May we allow Christ to grow beyond the manger. Open our hearts to the play of a Christ who escapes our expectations, asks unending questions, and surprises us again and again. Encourage us through the growing pains as we seek to let the Christmas story live and grow in us. In the name of Christ our companion: Amen.

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[1] Adapted from a comment on Craig A. Satterlee, “Commentary on Luke 2:41-52,” https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1524, accessed Dec 24, 2015.

Welcome to the World (Luke 2:1-20)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Christmas Eve Worship, 2015)

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Who’s Welcoming Whom?

“So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger” (v. 16).

So we too have come in haste, amid the bustle of family gatherings and last-minute shopping, amid the excitement of wrapping gifts and cooking favorite dishes. So we too have found the child lying in the manger—finally filling that empty spot in our nativities.

And yet…it is a little bit ironic that we have come here of all places, that we have come to church on Christmas Eve. We come here, of course, with the best of intentions: we come to welcome the Christ child, and we do it here at church, because in our society, church is where respectable people go to pay their respects to God.

But on that first Christmas Eve, God did not receive a welcome at church. No one at the Temple sung God’s praise, no one in the local synagogue organized a welcome party. On that first Christmas Eve, God was not being welcomed so much as God was welcoming. God was out in the fields among the shepherds, those dirty, smelly wanderers who were among the least respectable in their society, who were considered by many to be the riffraff of the fields. On that first Christmas Eve, God went out into the brisk backcountry, welcoming the least among us.

And so it is ironic that we are here at church tonight welcoming God, when according to the Christmas story, God is out in the cold, dark world, welcoming us—especially those of us who, like the shepherds, are on the outside of life.

The truth is, for many in our world tonight, perhaps even for many of us, God is actually the last thing on our minds, because heaven seems so far away from the earth we walk—from the hospitals we visit, from the vacant seats at our tables and the emptiness in our hearts, from our fractured relationships. But if the good news of great joy that the angels proclaim is for anyone, it’s for these people, for those of us who feel this way. The good news of great joy is for anyone who feels unwelcome in this world, who feels like a stranger in this world, scavenging for hope, scrapping about for a bit of warmth. It is for anyone who feels a deep disconnect between the sentimental Christmas cards we share and the daily life we endure. The good news of great joy that the angels proclaim is not that all is well in heaven and one day we’ll get there, but that somehow all is well here even as all is not well, because God is in the dirt and shadows, among the shepherds and the lowest of the lowlife, because heaven is come to earth for anyone with eyes to see.

There are two welcomes going on tonight. There is the small welcome that happens here in church, where we presume to welcome God. And there is the infinitely larger, life-saving welcome that happens outside these doors—where God is welcoming us, where the angels are singing the good news of great joy that God is not tucked away in some holy book, or far away beyond the clouds, or beyond the tick-tock of our clocks. God is here with us, being born among us in countless indescribable ways. This world is God’s home, and we are all welcome. The good news of great joy that the angels proclaim is God saying to the shepherds—and all of us:

Welcome to the world—my world. I made all of this for you. I cannot promise an easy or safe life. See, I myself have made my home in this manger, in this little town of Bethlehem, watched over by a couple of nervous teenagers and you, a band of dirty, smelly shepherds. I myself will hang out with people who are broken and needy. I myself will be one of them.

I cannot promise an easy or safe life. But I can promise great joy and I can promise peace. I can promise you the stars and dinner feasts and companions along the way.

You have lived here all your life, but as strangers and scavengers. You have lived here all your life, but the world has been a hostile stopover rather than a home. So here, at this manger, in the mysterious murmur of this newborn child, I say to you again, “Welcome. This world is yours. I made it for you. It is my home—and yours too. Life is a gift. You need not look for it anywhere other than where I am—which is right where you are.”

God is with us tonight. Here in church, yes—but not just here, thank God. God goes out into the cold darkness of our world, to wherever we feel most unwelcome, to wherever we feel like strangers on this earth, and extends there an infinitely large, life-saving welcome, the kind that opens our eyes to the life right in front of us. And that, if ever there was, is “good news of great joy for all the people” (v. 10).

Merry Christmas

A merry Christmas to you all: a merry Christmas as you leave this church, as you return to family, as you return to the daily grind. A Merry Christmas to you as you return to the world, where God in Christ is welcoming you in ways as small and mysterious as a newborn child.

A Needy God (Luke 1:46-55)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Dec 20, 2015, Advent IV)

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Finally, the Birth Story…

Finally! For the first time this Advent, we get to the birth story itself. The last few weeks have led us on such a strange and roundabout journey through scripture, you’d be forgiven for wondering if the church leaders had had a bit too much eggnog before they sat down to pick out our Advent texts. On the first Sunday of Advent, we had a grown Jesus talking about the end of the world as we know it. On the next two Sundays, we went to the wilderness and listened to John’s wild words about forgiveness and repentance. And each story in its own way has been preparing us for the birth of Christ. Each has stripped the excessive sparkle and glitter of our festivities, reminding us that when God comes, God comes neither into a perfectly prepared palace nor by way of a poised, princely step. God comes unceremoniously into the dirt and darkness of our unprepared world. And God comes bringing change.

In today’s scripture, finally, we can sense God’s coming. Finally we get to something resembling the nativities that we set up weeks ago, the gentle scenes that have been waiting ever so patiently on our tables. Finally we can feel the baby kicking. Like Elizabeth, we can feel life leaping for joy deep within us (1:44). The birth is only a few days away.

A Hero’s Birth Story

And if the events leading up to this birth are to be believed, then this child is indeed worth singing about, as Mary does in today’s scripture. Angels, an unlikely mother, a miraculous conception. All the key ingredients of a hero’s birth story. Mary herself could have recited similar stories from ancient tradition: Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Samuel. These heroes of the Jewish faith all entered the world through a magnificent yet unlikely birth, where a barren mother conceived or the baby escaped certain death. A miraculous birth indicated that the child was destined for a miraculous life. It marked the child for greatness, imprinting upon him the stamp of divine approval.

And it is a striking coincidence—or perhaps more than coincidence—that such a miraculous birth story accompanies not only Jesus, but also the emperor who ruled at the time of his birth. Ancient Roman tradition tells us that Augustus was conceived miraculously one night by the god Apollo.[1] In time, Augustus would become emperor and would receive titles like “divine,” “son of god,” “lord,” “redeemer,” “savior of the world.”[2] Sound like anyone else you know?

Declaring God Great? Or Making God Great?

All of the sudden, then, Mary’s song loses the innocent tones that we may have been hearing of a gentle and grateful mother’s lullaby, and assumes instead a more dangerous, insurrectionary melody. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” she begins. But she is not magnifying lord Augustus. She is not proclaiming the emperor to be the “son of God” or the “savior” of the world (cf. 1:36; 2:11).[3]

Mary’s song is less of a lullaby, more of a march. If the ancient world had been in the habit of composing national anthems, Mary’s song would have been a perfect candidate for the people of Judea. In a world that proclaimed the greatness of the Roman emperor, Mary dared proclaim the greatness of God. It would have raised eyebrows among the Roman citizens of Mary’s day, in the same way that a refusal to pledge allegiance to the flag would raise eyebrows today. Mary’s song is the stuff of revolution; her ecstatic vision of the proud and powerful and prosperous being brought low and the poor and hungry being raised up would be enough to scare any government. It’s no coincidence that Mary’s song has been banned on numerous occasions—even in the last century, when British colonial rule outlawed the song from being sung in Indian churches, or when the military states of Guatemala and Argentina prohibited its public recitation.[4]

As a declaration of God’s greatness over against the powerful, Mary’s song is revolutionary enough as it is. But if we listen closely, there are revolutionary overtones in her song that go far beyond a challenge to empire. And it all begins in the first word of the song, megalynei, which can mean either “to declare great” or “to make great.”

God Needs Us 

(To Make God Great)

To “declare” God’s greatness would have been treason against the Roman Empire. But for many of the pious who pontificate from raised platforms, it would be an even higher heresy to even entertain the idea of “making” God great. “Make God great? God is already great. God doesn’t need you one bit to be great. A needy god would be an inferior god.”

Which is all true—according to the gods of our world, the gods of the Roman empire or any world power today, the gods for whom the most important attributes are power, command, and control. But the birth story that we celebrate this Advent, the strange and wonderful tale of Mary, does not celebrate a god of power, a god-above-us. It bows not at the altar of omnipotence but at a rustic crib in a lowly manger. It celebrates a God as powerless as a baby in Bethlehem; it magnifies a God who scatters the proud and brings down the powerful not by an iron first but by the powerless invitation of love extended by an infant with an infant’s needs, by a man with the same flesh and bones as you and me; it glorifies God-among-us, the God-within-us, the God who is seeking to become a part of our world.

The message of today’s birth story is so simple, it’s easy to take for granted: being born in human flesh is the way of God in our world. God needs people like Mary, people like Abraham and Sarah, people like the Hebrew midwives in Egypt, people who say, “Yes” to God’s plan for new life. God needs the flesh and blood of a baby Jesus, a teenager Jesus, a grown Jesus—all of whom embody the beauty of God’s love.

God is needy. Not in a possessive or clingy or neurotic sense. Rather, God needs us like the sun and the rain need flowers. Which is to say, God doesn’t need us at all. Just like sun and rain don’t need flowers in order to be sun and rain. But how would we ever experience the real beauty of the sun and the rain, if there were no flowers to soak up ray and water? And how would the world ever experience the real beauty of God, if there were no people who gave flesh and bones to God’s love?

God is great. But God’s greatness is not known or experienced unless we embody it. God needs us not merely to declare God great but to make God great in the world. God’s love needs hands that give, hearts that care, lips that kiss. God’s forgiveness needs heads that turn the other cheek. God’s hope needs dreamers and storytellers and artists that open us up to the impossible.

Mary’s revolution goes far beyond defying the Roman emperor and proclaiming the greatness of God. She makes the greatness of God, because she says, “Yes.” God is waiting, needing to be birthed into our world. Literally, in the case of Mary. But for us too. Just as love found its way into the world in the tiny town of Bethlehem, so love is looking for a way into the world today in our little corner of Richmond.

Prayer

God whose love can topple the powerful and lift up the lowly, in ways that no earthly authority or army ever can, we confess our need for You. Open our ears, that we might hear Your prayers to us, that we might hear angels dreaming the impossible and inviting our help. May our hearts be ready to receive You, to meet your needs, so that the beauty of your vulnerable, trusting love might grow and be known among us—so that it might save the world. Amen.

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[1] John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), 105.

[2] Crossan, God and Empire, 28.

[3] Crossan, God and Empire, 117: “Caesar’s coins said he was DIVI F…SON OF GOD.”

[4] Jason Porterfield, “The Subversive Magnificat: What Mary Expected the Messiah to Be Like,” accessed Dec 19, 2015.

The Gospel of Fire (Luke 3:7-18)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Dec 13, 2015, Advent III)

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The Gospel? More Like Put-downs and Threats

I almost have to laugh when I read the end of today’s passage: “So, with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people” (3:18). Good news? Luke, were you listening to what John said? If I didn’t know any better, I might think that Luke was trying his hand at a bit of stand-up comedy. “This guy, John, right? This religious fanatic? He’s in the wilderness, and a bunch of people come to him, expecting to hear the word of God. And he goes berserk, calling them a bunch of snakes, telling them that God is carrying an axe, threatening them with unquenchable fire. And the cherry on top? This is supposed to be ‘good news.’”

If that were Luke’s point—if this were just a sketch to ridicule John and those crazy Christians who dream up fire and call it “good news”—then I’d say he does a pretty good job. John’s talk about the “wrath to come,” an “axe…lying at the root of the trees,” all the rotten harvest being burned with an “unquenchable fire”: is that really good news? To me, it sounds more like a bunch of put-downs and threats, like a bit of holy blackmail. We see enough of it in our own world today. “Step in line with God, or else….”

Where’s the Fire Coming From?

So what happened to the word of God that came to John in last week’s text—the good news of a second chance? What happened to the refreshing waters of forgiveness? Why does John suddenly dress forgiveness up in such unforgiving terms? I won’t pretend to know exactly what John meant when he made his fiery speech. But if you’ll remember, John wasn’t proclaiming only forgiveness; he was proclaiming a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” So I have a hunch that his fire-tinged sermon has something to do with the other side of forgiveness: repentance.

There’s no one biblical formula for the way forgiveness and repentance work. In our world, most people treat forgiveness and repentance like an economic transaction: only after you repent do you receive forgiveness. This makes forgiveness like a mortgage: it’s always on the board, but it’s only ever yours after you make all the payments of repentance—and sometimes there are some pretty steep payments! But for Jesus, I suspect forgiveness is what comes first, unconditionally—whether you’re a friend or an enemy, whether you’re a disciple or a part of the crowd who put him on the cross. Repentance is what you do out of your own heart after you’re forgiven. It’s how you live your life after you’ve been set free. So it’s not “God forgives you if you repent,” but “God forgives you, so repent.”

So as I imagine the scene, John is speaking to a crowd of newly baptized folks, still dripping with water from the Jordan. They’ve heard the refreshing word of forgiveness. And now John’s proclaiming forgiveness’ counterpart. The uncomfortably warm word of repentance.

Divided Hearts

And if you’ll let my imagination run just a bit further: someone from the crowd finally pipes up and asks, “What exactly will be burned by this fire? Or”—and here they look a bit frightened—“who will be burned?” And John looks at the inquisitor, and his lips twist into an almost devilish smile. And he responds, “Ah. If only it were so simple! If only the rotten fruit and the useless chaff were people. If only there were evil people somewhere, and God could separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But surely you know it’s not that simple. The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”[1]

In other words, John’s fiery word of repentance isn’t directed against evil people, but the evil inside our hearts. At the end, repentance isn’t about dividing people up for heaven and hell. It’s about the divide in our hearts. And in fact, this is exactly what the Greek word for “repentance” means. Metanoia. A change of heart.[2] Repentance is simply a new heart. It’s a heart on fire—“fire” because it hurts to change, it’s uncomfortable to give up old ways and walk into the unknown of new life. A heart on fire is not easy; it’s the difficult and messy work of God.

More Kindergarten than Apocalypse

When we begin to think of repentance this way, as less of a repent-or-burn proclamation, and more of a repent-and-burn invitation, John looks less like a fire-and-brimstone preacher and more like a kindergarten teacher.[3] Listen closely to his words, and you’ll hear echoes of the most important lessons you learned in school. To the crowds, he urges, “Share. If you have two, give one away.” To the tax collectors, he says, “Play fair. Don’t take more than the agreed amount.” To the soldiers, he says, “Stop bullying. Don’t make threats, don’t take from others just because you can.”

“Share, play fair, stop bullying.” Jesus would say it even simpler: love your neighbor;[4] be a servant to everyone.[5]

And as colorful as John’s language is, it’s easy to miss the fact that he, like Jesus, proclaims the good news to everyone: to the regular folks with just a couple of coats in their closet, to the vilified tax-collectors, to the reviled soldiers serving the Roman empire. John’s wild-eyed speeches make him look like such a revolutionary, it’s easy to miss the fact that he’s not encouraging these folks to do something completely different with their lives. To the contrary. He’s encouraging them to keep doing what they’re doing, but to do it with a new heart, to do it in a way that welcomes the kingdom of God. John isn’t like a lot of Christians today; he’s not a two-world Christian who believes this world is helpless but heaven will make everything alright. He’s a one-world believer, an “on-earth-as-in-heaven” believer. And he says we can have heaven right here, the kingdom of God right here, as tax collectors and shepherds and soldiers, as accountants and teachers and computer programmers, students and mechanics and store clerks.

The Good News of Fire

And that is good news. It’s true: John’s bark is perhaps a bit bigger than his bite. His words are wild animals, baring sharp teeth and claws, and he makes no effort to keep them on a leash. But they are more than just a bunch of savage put-downs and threats. At the heart of his colorful speech is expectation and promise. He proclaims the gospel of fire, the difficult but good news of burning hearts, of holy flames that tear through our hurtful, harmful ways and make us new.

The gospel of John the baptizer, the dipper, the river-dunker, is the gospel of new hearts. It is an uncomfortable gospel, just like any gospel is—inasmuch as the gospel expects change and change is uncomfortable. But more than that, it is a gospel of joy for our world, a gospel fit for this third Sunday of Advent. It believes with all its heart that we can be changed. And not by some magical recalibration of the soul accomplished by an accountant God, duly keeping record of payments of repentance, nor by some powerful edict and heavenly army that enforces its way on earth. No, our hearts are changed by a child in a manger, a man sharing bread with folks like you and me, a criminal on a cross. Which are all ways of saying that our hearts are changed by love, by a simple and sacred soul whose love for us is contagious and spreads through all our hearts like wildfire.

Prayer

God of water and fire, who baptizes us in the refreshing river of forgiveness and in the difficult flames of change, we rejoice. We rejoice, even with divided hearts, even as parts of us remain stubborn and fearful of the fire of your love. We rejoice because your love is unquenchable, a light that shines ever into the darkness of our broken and confused hearts. May it shine so today, through Christ as we encounter him in our world. And may it burn always in our hearts. Amen.

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[1] Inspired by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (vol. 1; trans. Thomas P. Whitney; New York: Westview, 1974), 168: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”

[2] Metanoia literally means meta-, “after,” noia, “mind”—where the Greek conception of “mind” included the way a person thinks and feels, which is to say that it includes the predispositions and inclinations that are inextricably linked with our emotions, our “hearts.”

[3] David Lose, “Commentary on Luke 3:7-18,” accessed December 8, 2015. “This feels more like the stuff of Kindergarten than Apocalypse.”

[4] Cf. Matt 22:39; Mark 12:31; Luke 10:27.

[5] Cf. Matt 20:26; 23:11; Mark 9:35; Mark 10:43; Luke 9:48; 22:26.

A Wild Word (Luke 3:1-6)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Dec 6, 2015, Advent II)

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“As Long as You’re Not Finished…”

Norbert Young sat nervously in the Texas courthouse. The judge returned to his high seat and said a single word: “Guilty.” With that, Norbert Young went to jail. He had been caught, charged, and convicted of bank fraud.

Some time later, Norbert was sitting in his jail cell when someone came by and dropped off a postcard addressed to him. Personal mail was a rarity. A handwritten note was hands-down the highlight of his week.

Not even stopping to look at the front of the postcard, he turned it over and found a short note in his brother’s handwriting. It was a poem. No real surprise there. His brother, Harvey “Tex Thomas” Young, was a west Texas, country-music cowboy, the front man of the Danglin’ Wranglers, who had a poetic streak deep beneath his rough-and-tough persona.

The words on the postcard, which would later be put in song, began like this:

From deep dark wells comes pure clean water
And the ice will melt as the day gets hotter
And the night grows old as the sun climbs into the sky.

And then a few lines later, there was this simple promise:

As long as you’re not finished, you can start all over again.[1]

Simple words. But if you take them seriously, they’re a bit wild. They’re nothing like the reasonable word of the law, that says if you do something wrong, you pay the price. Nothing like the judicious word of the judge, that says if you’re guilty, you serve the time. The words on the back of the postcard said, You may be broken, but you are never broken beyond repair. You may have gone out of bounds, but you are not bound to what you have done. Within you is a wellspring of goodness. You are good.

What Norbert Young read on the back of his brother’s postcard in prison is goosebump-giving good news. It is a country-flavored rendition of the same gospel that we hear in today’s scripture. If Luke had been living in Texas in the 1980s, he may well have written today’s scripture just the same:

“Sometime in the presidency of Ronald Reagan, when Bill Clements and Mark White were governors of Texas, and during the papacy of Pope John Paul II, the word of God came to Harvey ‘Tex Thomas’ Young in the tumbleweeds of west Texas. He sent a postcard to his brother, proclaiming a baptism of ‘deep dark wells [and] pure clean water,’ a second chance for a broken soul. As it is written many times, Jesus said, ‘Your sins are forgiven.’”

The Wild Word of Second Chances

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the word of God, a word of forgiveness, bypasses the chain of command, flying over the heads of Tiberius and Pontius Pilate and Herod, over the heads of Ronald Reagan and Mark White, to the wilderness of the Jordan and west Texas, to the little-known wasteland wranglers John the Baptist and Harvey “Tex Thomas” Young. What could be a better illustration for the word of forgiveness, a word that disregards status and strength, a word that is meant for everyone? Whereas the words of our world establish order from on high, in a Christmas-tree shaped hierarchy, in which the word on top rules whatever is below, the rowdy and insurrectionary word of forgiveness confounds the established order.

According to Luke, the wild word of God belongs not to the rulers of the world but to the wilderness, where it makes home like a wild animal, unruly and untamed. It has not been domesticated in the ways of reward and retribution, it pays no attention to merit. It does not make a list and check it twice, nor does not it give people grades and put them in a pecking order. It does not reduce people to the deeds they have done but sees the goodness that people have it in them to become. It jailbreaks us from guilt and debt and obligation, deserved or not. It frees us from cycles of anger, fear, and resentment. The words of the world, laws and commands and shouts and raised voices and verdicts of power, maintain order by force and intimidation and violence. But the wild word of second chances that came to John and Tex Thomas is a midwife to the birth of peace.

Clearing the Stable of Our Heart

God’s word of forgiveness that brings new life is nothing new, according to Luke. It came to Israel through Isaiah. It came to the Jordan through John. And it came to Norbert Young through his brother Harvey. God has always desired for “all flesh” to know salvation.

Many of us have been setting out nativity scenes in our homes. But the story of Christmas is about more than Jesus’ physical birth in a manger. It is about Jesus’ birth in our hearts. And the wild word of forgiveness that comes to us is what clears the stable of our hearts, what readies the manger within. It is not like the words of emperors or governors or high priests, not a word of command or coercion or compulsion. It is not a raised voice that controls us, so that we are little more than dogs on a leash or puppets on a string. It is a gentle but firm word that clears away the debris, the sin, the broken pieces of our lives, whatever threatens to keep us within the prison of ourselves, and invites us to grow and to change, to allow the life of God in our hearts to blossom, to bloom, to be born.

“All Flesh Shall See…”

But the story does not end with our forgiveness and the birth of Christ in our hearts. Forgiveness is a straight and level highway to God, a highway for everyone, and so even as we hear the word of forgiveness, we proclaim it—to everyone. We make way for Christ this advent by proclaiming this wild word, as John did, and welcoming Christ not only into our hearts but also to our households and our schools and our workplaces and our community. So that, if Luke were living in Richmond right now, he might well write today’s scripture just the same:

“In the seventh year of President Obama, when Terry McAuliffe was governor of Virginia, and Dwight Jones was mayor of Richmond, during the papacy of Pope Francis, the word of God came to a group of Christ-followers who gathered at Gayton Road across from Ollie’s on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia. They went into their workplaces and their friends’ homes, into the supermarkets and supply shops and schools and hospitals, loving people just as they found them, warts and all. They proclaimed good news, and they proclaimed it using different words. Sometimes they used religious words, like God, sin, forgiveness, repentance, and resurrection. Sometimes they used regular words, like goodness, brokenness, second chances, change, and new life. Sometimes they used no words at all. They used whatever the people would understand, whatever would open their eyes.[2] As it is written in the gospel of Luke, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord…. All flesh shall see the salvation of God.’”

Prayer

We hear your wild word, God, calling in the wilderness, looking for a home. May we welcome your forgiveness even as we share it with others. In a world that lives constrained by fear and distrust, may we trust in the unruly, unpredictable power of your forgiveness. By your mercy, may it dawn upon our world, to give light to the many who sit in the darkness of anger, guilt, terror, resentment—and may it guide our feet, all our feet, today the way of peace. Amen.

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[1] See the song as it has been popularized by Joe Pug: “Deep Dark Wells,” on The Great Despiser (Lightning Rod Records, 2012). This homily’s retelling of Norbert Young’s story is dramatized from the account found in “As Long as You’re Not Finished: the Harvey ‘Text Thomas’ Young Story,” http://www.artslabormagazine.com/as-long-as-youre-not-finished-the-harvey-young-story/, accessed Dec 1, 2015.

[2] Dorothee Sölle, Theology for Skeptics: Reflections on God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), ebook loc. 36: “[I]f God is really God, then God is ‘that which is most communicable,’ as Meister Eckhart said.”

Hope/less (Luke 21:25-36)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Nov 29, 2015, Advent I)

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It’s the End of the World

(Season’s Greetings!)

Today is the first Sunday of Advent. And just as we have already decorated the sanctuary, many of us have begun decorating our homes for Christmas. Setting up trees, adorning the windows with lights, assembling gentle nativity scenes on coffee tables. And all against the background of festive music and the warmth of a roaring fire, perhaps, and the occasional cup of hot chocolate or cider.

All these preparations make for a charming scene. One that’s almost completely ruined by today’s scripture. Why did the church choose a text of trouble for a season of joy? In my mind, it plays out like this: there’s a choir, full of smiles, empty of anxiety, singing “Deck the Halls” with gusto, with delight, lifting our spirits as we set up the trees and put on the ornaments and take out old keepsakes that warm our hearts. And then, all of the sudden, Jesus barges in like a wrong note, like a misplayed chord, discordantly declaring one of the most disturbing speeches we have recorded in the gospels.

Stars falling. A blood red moon. Flooding along the coasts and rivers. Cities trembling from earthquakes. People huddled in places of refuge, fainting from fear. These are some of the images that today’s scripture evokes. Today’s text is about the end of the world. Literally. Jesus says, “Heaven and earth will pass away,” which is another way of saying that the world as you know it will end.

Doomsday Fascination

While Jesus’ proclamation today seems dreadfully misplaced in a season of joy, it is not an unfamiliar cry to our ears. In fact, it is quite common. In the last few decades, the popular genre of doomsday or end-of-the-world stories has flooded our culture. The list of books and movies is almost endless: Armageddon, The Day after Tomorrow, 2012, Interstellar, and one of my favorites, The Road. It is a rich genre of stories, and if nothing else, it shows us that there are many ways the world could end. But I think if we look beneath the surface of these different doomsdays, we find something even more fascinating. Underneath the different plots of these stories lies a common theme: hope holding out in a hopeless world. Which is precisely the reason we watch these stories, again and again, why they never get old, why they keep coming out. Hopeless worlds make us hope. Each time, as the twisting storyline draws us deeper into a bleak landscape, further into a world without hope, we finding ourselves hoping harder and harder, matching the hope of the heroic characters who hold out until their deliverance or their death, whichever comes first.[1]

Our Own End Times

But why do these stories captivate us? Why is hope such an attraction? Perhaps it’s because our own lives mirror these stories. We all endure experiences that seem, in the heat of the moment, like the end of the world. From the outside, a person may never guess. But on the inside, it feels just like the catastrophic terror we see on the big movie screen: stars falling, buildings collapsing, darkness and confusion and terror. The end of the world is not a far-fetched fear. It is something we all feel.

I’m reminded of a story my good friend from New York City told me once. It was New Year’s Eve. My friend and his housemate were hosting a little get-together, and supplies were running low. So he ran out to the corner shop. The lady in front of him in line to the cashier was visibly distraught. She said nothing, but her tear-stained face spoke volumes. After paying for a single bottle of wine, she shuffled out the door. When my friend had made his purchase and left, he couldn’t help but notice the same woman sitting at a nearby bench, head bowed. He felt an inexplicable pull to sit beside her for a moment. So he did. He asked how she was. And she poured out a hopeless story: a divorce, the threat of losing her home…and more than anything, the feeling that life was finished, that there was no way out of the darkness. For her, the sky was falling. The earth was shaking.

My friend ended up sitting with her for over an hour. Mostly just listening. Occasionally offering a sympathetic and encouraging word. I don’t know whether she got a start on the bottle she had bought or not. But either way, I cannot help but feel that the moment they shared was sacramental. That somehow the light of hope found its way through a tiny crack into her hopeless horizon, that “the Son of Man coming in a cloud” came to her (21:27). Because my friend tells me that at the end, she expressed her deep gratitude to him, hugged him for an uncomfortably long time—although he says that in this case, it wasn’t uncomfortable—and said that even though she didn’t know what would happen next, the future no longer frightened her quite as much as it had.

As I picture their parting, I imagine the lady walking away with her head held higher than before. In a very real sense, her world had passed away (cf. 21:33). But the presence of my friend and the few words he offered her—I would like to think that they echoed an ancient word of hope, a word that looks upon life and says, “It is good, very good.” I would like to think that, in that moment that she shared with my friend, redemption was drawing near, the kingdom of God was drawing near. I would like to believe that for a moment, the woman’s heart had been cut free from the worries weighing her down (cf. 21:34), like a balloon cut free from its string.

A Hope/less Christmas

Like all the doomsday stories that give expression to our moments of hopelessness, this personal story of despair hints at a paradoxical truth. It is precisely when things have become hopeless that hope is truly born. Before things have become hopeless, before darkness has covered the horizon, when we can still see possible solutions or answers, it is not hope that fills our hearts. It is our own plans or proposals, our own strategies or schemes. When there is still a chance of delivering ourselves, we live in the closed world of our own thought. We are not yet praying (cf. 21:36), not yet on our knees.

Hope is not a reasonable expectation. It is not the currency of stockbrokers, who measure probabilities and plan for possible outcomes. It “is not hope if you can see what you are hoping for on the horizon.”[2] Hope begins with hopelessness. Hope begins when we cannot see a way out, and yet we keep our eyes open anyway.

Hope is a woman who has lost her marriage and mostly likely her house, but who is nonetheless convinced in her heart of hearts not to give up on the possibility of new life. Hope is a homeless couple in Bethlehem, who cannot possibly foresee how their child will be born, but who nonetheless keep knocking…until they find a stable. Hope is a world that cannot possibly imagine peace but presses on for it anyway, trusting that its redemption is drawing near, believing that the kingdom of God is meant for earth as it is for heaven.

The words of Jesus that we hear today are not pleasant like the words that we expect to hear at this time of year. But to forget them, to sing “Deck the Halls” without any awareness of the many halls of life that are crumbling and passing away, including our own, is to—as the pope recently said—make a “charade” of Christmas.[3] If nothing else, today’s scripture strips our seasonal preparations of their excessive sparkle and glitter. It turns down the blinding lights. It returns us to a world of dirt and shadows, where hope actually means something.

Our joy at this time of the season is not mistaken. It’s only forgetful, sometimes, of where it comes from. Not from our own doing or wishing or expectation, not from our own plans or programs, but from the God of hope—which is to say, the God of hopelessness, the God who is truly born only when things are hopeless.

Prayer

God, the truth is, the world is sometimes a very scary, very unwelcoming place. And so we put up lights and sing songs and make merry. Bless our festivities. May they not be an escape or a charade, but rather an honest reflection of our hope. Not a hope that merely smiles and makes believe that everything is alright. But a hope that wakes, works, eats, and sleeps in a world that is often without hope. Bless our festivities and our lives with a hope that can hold its head high even as the world ends, a hope that anticipates the advent of a new, unforeseeable world, a hope that relishes all the adventure, risk, and joy of birth and new life. Amen.

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[1] See, e.g., Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 213, which explains the main character’s the hope: “He hoped it would be brighter where for all he knew the world grew darker daily.”

[2] John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), ebook loc. 5379.

[3] http://time.com/4123703/pope-francis-christmas-charade/. Accessed Nov 28, 2015. Put otherwise, it is to make the same mistake that the prophets made long ago, when they said, “Peace, peace” even as there was no peace. Cf. Jer 6:14.

Not from Here (John 18:33-37)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Nov 22, 2015, Christ the King Sunday)

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When Jesus Was Lynched in Georgia

Many of you know that before I saw the light and became a Christian…I was a Baptist. I don’t know what you’ve heard about the Baptists. I’d be afraid to ask, actually, because most of the time when you read about the Baptists in the news, it’s less than favorable coverage.

But today I’d like to share a redeeming story from my Baptist heritage. A story about a Baptist saint (if that’s not a complete oxymoron), Clarence Jordan. Born in 1912, Clarence grew up in small town Georgia. From an early age, he sensed a deep hypocrisy: the same people who went to church on Sunday and embraced Jesus also comfortably embraced segregation and racism. This unease plagued Clarence until finally, after completing his doctorate in Louisville, he returned to Georgia and started Koinonia Farm, an interracial farming community. But as you might guess, not too long after the farm began, the KKK made his acquaintance. The story goes that they came strolling through the neighborhood one day with this threat, “We don’t let the sun set on people like you around here.” And in Clarence’s own words: “I gave ‘em my broadest smile and said, ‘Pleased to meet you, gentlemen. I’ve been waiting all my life to meet someone who could make the sun stand still. ’”[1]

Clarence may have been living in small town Georgia, thousands of years and miles away from Christ, but he had eyes to see an eerie parallel between the trials of Koinonia Farm, which was repeatedly threatened and bombed, and Christ’s trial before Pilate and the empire of Rome. The struggle for truth in Georgia was little different than the struggle for truth in Judea. In the United States as in Rome, the imperial powers-that-be felt threatened by the kingdom of God. Remember, it was 1942, before desegregation, before the Civil Rights Movement. Koinonia Farm was in the heart of the Jim Crow South. The truth that they were living—the truth that all humanity bears the blessing and divine image of God—was not a truth that the ruling powers of racism and segregation were ready to accept.

The distance between Christ’s encounter with the empire of Rome and Clarence’s experience in Georgia is very little. Rome had merely relocated to the Potomac, where its threat of sword and spear was just as real for anyone who challenged the conventions of the land.[2] Anyone promoting racial equality would have incurred the suspicion of others at best, a lynching at worst. So it is that Clarence, who famously retranslated the New Testament into southern idiom, put it this way: “They crucified [Jesus] in Judea”—“and they strung him up in Georgia, with a noose tied to a pine tree.”[3]

Not from the World, but for the World

As far as I’m aware, Clarence never stood trial before an official United States court. But he did endure trials and hardship at the hands of the powers-that-be in rural Georgia. And if he had ever been called to answer for what he had done, I imagine he would respond much like Jesus. “My kingdom is not from this world. If [it] were…my followers would be fighting…. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here” (18:36). Koinonia Farm was ushering God’s kingdom into rural Georgia just as Jesus was ushering it into Judea—fearlessly and without fighting. Koinonia Farm was not a part of the American kingdom. It was not part of a kingdom that secures peace and peace-of-mind through sword and spear. It was part of God’s kingdom, where peace is not an objective achieved through the way of violence, but is the way itself. 

Koinonia farm gives us a glimpse of the kingdom of God, a kingdom unlike any we know, a kingdom that does not police its own borders, a kingdom whose king welcomed even the one who would betray him to his table, welcomed even his kiss. The kingdom of God takes risks, makes itself vulnerable, exposes itself to the hooded threats and hateful bombs of this world—all in the name of love, a love that knows no fear, a love that, as John writes, “drives out fear” (1 John 4:18). The kingdom of God is not from this world, but that’s not to say that it is against this world; it is steadfastly for this world.[4] It is a dreamy kingdom hoping to come true, not through fighting and force, which would negate the dream, which would turn the dream into a nightmare, but through love.

A Foolish Kingdom

I am convinced that God’s kingdom is the steepest challenge I will ever face in my life. Because I am part of an empire. And I still live much of my life as a follower of a kingdom of this world. The kingdoms of this world make more sense to me than the kingdom of God. The kingdoms of this world are reasonable. They know that strangers pose a risk, that outsiders may be hospitable or hostile. They know that sometimes closing the door and locking it is the surest way of protecting our own lives, that taking up sword and spear is sometimes the only way to guarantee our safety. That’s just common sense.

The way of Christ, the way of the cross, the dream of God’s kingdom—is madness. Or as Paul says, foolishness (1 Cor 1:18-23). It proclaims that I find life only when I risk it, only when I lose it,[5] only when I turn it inside-out and allow the outsiders in.[6]

For Clarence as for Christ, the kingdom of God is not from this world, but it is for this world. Which means that rather than taking up arms against the threat of the outsider, it takes the outsider into its arms, into an embrace of love—even as that embrace may be its last. “Love,” Clarence wrote, “makes itself available.” And if he were around today, I imagine he might add: “to hurting people from every corner of the world.” Love, Clarence wrote, “makes itself expendable.” And today, perhaps, he would add: “expendable even to our enemies who need no second invitation.” “Love,” declared Clarence, “doesn’t quit or give up on a [person] whether [they] be a Communist or a Kluxer,” and today, I imagine, he might add a few more names to the list. “Christ,” Clarence insists, “showed us how far love would go when he prayed for those who were driving nails into his hands and said, ‘Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they’re up to.’”[7]

Long Live the King

Please don’t mistake any of this for veiled political counsel. As today’s passage makes clear to me, Jesus is not party to party politics. He is not party to a politics that operates by force and domination, where kingdom stands against kingdom, where people dream of power over others, where followers fight to make their point. 

The scene of Jesus before Pilate—which is ultimately a scene of the kingdom of God before the empire of Rome—should haunt us all the same, one side of today’s debates just as much as the other, because it reminds us all of the cost of love. Jesus before Pilate echoes the madness of a man who proclaimed a non-existent kingdom, who pledged allegiance to a kingdom that never will exist as long as the world chooses security over vulnerability. Jesus before Pilate echoes the foolishness of a fool who rushed into this world and died as a victim of his love for it. Jesus before Pilate echoes the dream that this not-from-here love—which is selfless and sacrificial and a stranger to the empires and kingdoms of this world—may one day transform this world.

Long may the foolish dream of our wounded king haunt us. Long may it grow like the tender shoots at Koinonia farm, sprouting up in the cracks and crevices of our worldly logic. Long may it drive out fear and lure us to love.

Long live our king and the kingdom of his dreams. Amen. 

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[1] Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, “Clarence Jordan and God’s Movement Today.” http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jonathanwilsonhartgrove/2012/07/clarence-jordan-and-gods-movement-today/. Accessed Nov 17, 2015. 

[2] I’m mindful of the fact that Clarence did not confront the “empire” of America in quite the same way as Jesus. His interracial farming community was not illegal and did not confront the United States in the same way that Jesus confronted Rome. Even so, I do interpret his experience as a confrontation between truth and empire inasmuch as the legal statues of segregation embodied an implicit racism, one that becomes all the more explicit when one recalls that the KKK included among its membership a number of men involved in the government and ruling businesses of the time. 

[3] Clarence Jordan, Cotton Patch Gospel: Matthew and John (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2004), xviii. 

[4] Cf. N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part 2: Chapters 11-21 (Westminster John Knox, 2004), 114-115. 

[5] Cf. Matt 10:39; Mark 8:36; Luke 17:33; John 12:25. 

[6] Cf. Matt 25:34-40; Heb 13:2. 

[7] Clarence Jordan, The Substance of Faith: And Other Cotton Patch Sermons (ed. Dallas Lee; Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2005), 176.

The American Dream Revisited (1 Sam 2:1-10)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Nov 15, 2015)

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The Self-Made Individual

During my three years or so abroad, there was one question that I was asked more than any other: “Why did you come here to study?” It was a question overloaded with curiosity and disbelief. Underneath it lay the presupposition that however good English universities were, the schools in America were just as good—if not better. The real question, in other words, was this: “Why travel all the way across the ocean for a degree when you could have gotten a better one in your own backyard?” Needless to say, this question exposed me to the high regard with which America is often held…even by the British, although their pride for tea and the queen and pubs and the most indirect way of asking a question typically masks the begrudging interest or envy that they show toward their younger, if now bigger, brother.

Besides this question and its constant reminder of my Americanness, I also noticed that certain other international students treated me as a symbolic extension of the country of their dreams. They almost made me feel like a superhero, like I were wearing a star-spangled cape and carrying Old Glory in my hand, like “Yankee Doodle” was playing triumphantly in the background anytime I entered the room. For instance, my Lithuanian neighbor never failed to mention something about America when we bumped into each other. “Is it true that you have streets lined with restaurants?” he would ask. “How many dollars would a burger cost?” “Does everybody drive a car in America?”

This infatuation with America opened my eyes to the reality of the American Dream. For many people, both here and abroad, America symbolizes the freedom and the possibility to make yourself whoever you want to be. It’s a dream that we teach in our schools and in our businesses: it’s the dream of the self-made individual, a dream that we’ve all heard presidential candidates gush about again and again. If you put your mind to something, if you expend the effort, then the sky’s the limit. Anything’s possible. In America, you don’t have to get lucky. You make your own luck. You can make yourself whoever you want to be.

America’s Split-Personality Consciousness

This is by now deeply ingrained in the American consciousness. But it’s not all that makes up our national psyche. There’s another impulse within the American consciousness, an opposing impulse that gives this nation what we might call a split personality, a Jekyll-and-Hyde consciousness. In just a week and a half, millions across the country will take a day off work to celebrate Thanksgiving. Now Thanksgiving has a checkered history, and there are many sides to its story. But at its best, it proclaims a message of gratefulness. Not for what we have done, not for how we have made ourselves—that would be like thanking ourselves, which is not how thanks is done. It’s a message of gratefulness for what has happened to us, for what has happened upon us—as though by chance. And while Thanksgiving rightfully steers clear of religious affiliations, it suggests that behind this chance is a goodness, divine or otherwise, that is somehow getting itself done in our lives.

Contrary to the message of the American Dream, which is the message that we are our own masters, that we can prevail upon the world, is the message of Thanksgiving, which is the message that we are not in complete control of our lives, that from birth onward we are always already “thrown” about by circumstances not of our own choosing,[1] and that, sometimes, the best things in our lives are the things that prevail upon us, that come out of nowhere, without our asking, like a gift. Isn’t this what family and friendship are? Isn’t this what forgiveness and hope are, the things that reconcile us in a way no glue or nailgun or advanced diplomacy ever could?

“Not by Might Does One Prevail”

Although over two thousand years of history and thousands of miles separate our text today from the American tradition of Thanksgiving, even so there is a peculiar resonance between them. In the scripture, Hannah sings a song of thanksgiving. She, who was formerly without child and presumably barren, has given birth to a son. (The story is much juicier than that simple synopsis, and it’s just a chapter long, so if you’re interested, you should bookmark 1 Samuel 1 for later reading.) Her story happens at roughly the same time as the story of Ruth, which we’ve read the last couple weeks. And like the story of Ruth, the story of Hannah exhibits a sense of wonder and appreciation for a God who lives among ordinary people and gifts them with life. In both stories, a child kicking within the womb symbolizes this gift of life—a gift that we receive too, baby or not, the kind of life that kicks within our own spirits whenever faithful relationships carry us through loss, whenever hope sustains us in times of trouble.

And at the heart of these stories is the bold message that Hannah proclaims, a message of gratitude that challenges the American Dream: “Not by might does one prevail” (2:9). And so it is that Hannah sings of crazy reversals, of the hungry becoming fat and the satisfied becoming hungry, of the strong becoming weak and the weak becoming strong (2:4-5). These reversals, she would suggest, are evidence of the reality that we are not our own masters, that there is something else going on in our lives that can determine our paths more than we can ourselves.

Perhaps in America more than in any other place, we live our lives under the illusion that we can prevail over our surroundings and our circumstances. But the gospel of Hannah, her good news for us, is a good news that dethrones the American Dream. It is the good news that, ultimately, it’s not a question of our prevailing: it’s a question of our being prevailed upon.

A Power Working on the Womb of the World:

The Divine Dream That Prevails upon Us

All of which might bring to mind a rather traditional view of God as the omnipotent, white-haired grandpa, seated on his throne above us somewhere, accomplishing feats of power through the clouds of our sky with the flick of a finger here, a nod there. So what exactly is Hannah saying? That we are to wait for God to prevail upon our lives with good things? Is hers a message of fatalism? “God will do what God will do”?

I don’t think so. These reversals of hers—the hungry finding food, the barren conceiving and bearing children, the poor and lowly raised up—they call to mind another story in the Bible. Not long from now, actually, we’ll remember the story of a woman who is said to have miraculously conceived and borne a baby in Bethlehem. And this baby will grow up and lead a host of reversals himself: he will give pride of place to widows with just a couple coins to their name and to the children who get in the way, he will preach good news to the poor and the imprisoned, he will feed the hungry, he will welcome the company of the unwelcome, the prostitutes and the unclean. All the while, many who are privileged with riches and who wear long robes and who sit in seats of power will miss out on love and grace because they will not be able to accept that life is a gift and not the work of their own hands.

The power of Jesus is not the power of the American Dream. His power was not to prevail upon the world around him by forcibly manipulating the reversals that Hannah describes. It was rather a powerless power, like the power of an invitation, or like the power of an uninvited dream that prevails upon you and makes you restless. It is the power that works not upon the material world but upon the womb of the world, where things are getting conceived; it is the power that works not upon the surface of things but upon the heart. It is the power of loving your enemies, forgiving those who persecute you, welcoming the unwelcomable, living peace amid violence. It is not a ruthless power that gets its own way but a selfless power that makes a way where there is none. The power of Jesus is a difficult power, some might even say impossible, especially in the wake of Paris, Beirut, and Baghdad. It is a power that does not manipulate or control life but gives life.

Within the good news of Hannah, then, is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Within her message is not the American Dream but the dream of God, or the God who is an uninvited dream that prevails upon us whenever we are visited with the inexplicable urge to show love to the lonely or the bitter, to build someone up with a smile or a hug or a simple word, whenever our hearts tug on us with concern for the woman begging at the corner or the old man who has no family to check in on him or the child who is forlorn in his own home. Within Hannah’s message is not only a sense of Thanksgiving—which we all of us will celebrate soon—but also the restless spirit of Christ, which intrudes on us uninvited, like a thief in the night, filling us with the memory of how he overturned the tables of this world, conceiving within us and our communities the gift of new life, which of course is a gift we do not make but rather receive. We are not self-made individuals prevailing upon the world, but rather a people prevailed upon by God, by the dream of God, by the God who is a dream of unconditional love, forgiveness, and welcome.

Prayer

We feel new life kicking within us, God. We feel it every time hope points to the future, every time love leavens our flat lives, every time forgiveness breaks us free from chains of debt and cycles of retribution. May your sacred dreams prevail upon us today, God, and may we share them with the world. May we courageously answer the death and fear and terror of our world with the grace of new life that comes from love, forgiveness, and peace. May we bear the dream of your powerless power, a power that does not coerce or manipulate life but rather conceives life in the womb of the world. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ: Amen.

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[1] See Heidegger’s idea of “thrownness” in Division 1, Chapter 5 of Being and Time. The simplest example of our thrownness is our birth, namely that we are born into a particular time and place and experience without our consent. As Kierkegaard pithily puts it, “Why was I not asked about it? … Is there no manager? To whom shall I make my complaint?” Kierkegaard’s Writings, VI, Fear and Trembling and Repetition (trans. and ed. Howard and Edna Hong; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 200. Simon Critchley offers a helpful outline of Heidegger’s concept of thrownness in “Being and Time, Part 4: Thrown into This World,” http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/jun/29/religion-philosophy. Accessed Nov 13, 2015.

"I Cannot Imagine Life Without..." (Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Nov 8, 2015)

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The Dizzying Motion of Life

It was Friday, the end of a long and lonely week. I got a text from my friend Stephen, asking if I’d like to meet up at the pub. Stephen is a Scouser, a big, cheery Liverpool lad born and bred, and we had bonded quickly over our shared love of the same soccer team, Liverpool. When I got the text, I figured that what Stephen had in mind was just a little catch-up between the two of us. Liverpool had a big game the next day, so we’d have plenty to talk about. I said, Yes, I’ll see you there.

I walked down to the pub, which was little more crowded than to my liking, and I found Stephen upstairs at a table…with eleven or twelve other strangers whom I’d never seen before. Which was a good deal more not to my liking. I’d been hoping for just a quiet pint and a little chit-chat…. (Milk. In case you were wondering.) But I stuck around and tried my hand at being sociable. The folks there were friendly. But how much can you really connect with strangers in one evening? Well, as the night wound down and I made my way to the opposite end of the table, I introduced myself to the final stranger. A Romanian student named Vlad.

That was about three years ago. In the last three years, I have shared a flat with Vlad, I have visited his home in Bucharest, I have made plans with him for the great American road trip should he ever find his way across the Atlantic. We’ve gotten lost together, discovered underground coffee shops together, tromped miles through the snow together. We’ve puzzled over our different upbringings and the ever-changing calibrations of our hearts and our beliefs. And even though it’s only been three years, now I cannot imagine life without Vlad.

Ours is a deep friendship. And just as deep is my sense of wonder that we should even be friends. Because everything came from nothing: A chance encounter with a stranger. An evening when I said “Yes” to an invitation that I would have declined had I known more.

When I look back on it now, I cannot help but feel dizzy.

The Dizzying Life of Naomi and Ruth

I share that story because I think that Naomi and Ruth and the characters of their story all have that same dizzying feeling at the end of the story, when the women proclaim, “Blessed be the Lord” (4:13). It is an exclamation of wonder and surprise. Because earlier in the story, circumstances had been quite different. Earlier in the story, Naomi—whose name means “pleasant”—had said to these women, “Call me no longer Naomi, but call me [Bitter], for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me. I went away full but the Lord has brought me back empty” (1:20-21).

And life had indeed been bitter for Naomi. First, she had lost her husband. Then, she had lost her two sons. And after that, she was left living in a foreign land with little more than a penny to her name.

And yet it was precisely in the midst of this loss that the dizzying whirlwind of life, which is another way of saying the unforeseeable currents of God’s grace, had swept her up into life again. Loss had somehow become life, and all through the least noteworthy people and the least favorable circumstances. The deaths of her husband and son had left her living with a nobody, a daughter-in-law who was a Moabite, which is to say, a person who would have been unwelcome in many an Israelite home. And yet from this unlikely pairing evolves an unfailing friendship. Together the grieving widows return to Israel, destitute and distressed. And yet it is their destitution that leads them to take the bold risk of seeking the hospitality of a man who seemed like maybe, just maybe, he would help.

And so it is that the women of the town proclaim their amazement, their joy, their dizzying sensation: amid all the bitter twists and turns of loss and grief, Naomi and Ruth have somehow found life, or life has somehow found them.

God?

This is all very good, you may think—“but why tell this story in a church?” There’s hardly a mention of God. Isn’t this the kind of story you could just as well hear on Oprah, or the sort of tale you might overhear in a coffeeshop or at the park? What does this story have to do with our faith?

If the book of Ruth could talk, I think it would respond incredulously, “What doesn’t this story have to do with faith?” The special truth of Ruth, a truth that the churches and temples and mosques of our world all too often forget, is that faith, if it has to do with anything at all, has to do with the everyday. The story of Ruth takes place before there is a king of Israel, before there is an institutional religion. In other words, before there was a Temple, before there were priests who administer sacrifices in an orderly way, before there were kings and advisors and royal intrigue—before all that power and prestige and pious presumption, there were people on the ground like Ruth and Naomi, people who felt the brunt of a brutal existence, people who encountered God not among long robes or sacrifices or prescribed piety but among the commonplace, among cooking and cleaning and working and looking for work…and even among tragedy. For people like Ruth and Naomi, God was not up in the clouds, waiting to be appeased; God was not living in some holy box in the Temple, keeping record of sacrifices. God was the breath of life, the gift of life that they discovered in their dizzying story. It was the gift of life found in a baby borne of an unlikely marriage, a marriage that came about only because of untimely deaths in an unfamiliar land which led to an unbelievable partnership between two unsettled widows, one an Israelite, the other a Moabite.[1]

The God Without Whom We Cannot Imagine Life…

The story of Ruth is the story of people like you and me. It’s a story about the everyday. Before we come to church, before we open the pages of a Bible, before utter a prayer with our lips—before all of that, God is on the ground, among the crowds, in the hustle and bustle. God is the call of life, the invitation to life that has drawn forth the most dizzying storylines of our lives. What I said earlier about my friendship with Vlad, what Naomi and Ruth may have said about one another—“I cannot imagine life without…”—is another way of saying that life is a gift and that its giftedness is wrapped up in the grace of chance meetings and dizzying proceedings.

About whom would you say, “I cannot imagine life without…”? What dizzying turn of events has gifted you with life? In what plain clothes, around what corner, through what empty or bitter or tragic circumstance has God walked into your life?

Do You Believe in Life After Loss?

The book of Ruth ends on a happy note. But the point—I think—is not that life is a fairy tale and we will all live happily ever after. The point is that, wherever it is, however much we have of it, life is a gift and its giftedness is bundled up in the unforeseeable relationships and unbelievable twists and turns that continually inspire and encourage and comfort and provoke us. The point is that the great gift-Giver is somewhere in every story, even the most tragic; that the Giver’s gifts are to be found within the ordinary clothes of ordinary people, that the Giver is always redeeming and restoring life, always regifting it afresh, even at the very moment that life is lost.

Do you believe in life after loss? The storyteller of Ruth, I know, would say yes, and would go a step further to say, “And I believe in life amid loss.”

And I dare say we would agree. In the few months since I’ve been here, I’ve heard stories of heart attacks and cancer and other significant setbacks. Most recently our hearts have been drawn into the story of Autumn, Emily’s baby niece who immediately on birth struggled just to breathe. And each and every one of these stories shares one thing in common: at the heart of them beats the pulse of life. Not just the biological life that has endured through these struggles, but the gift of life that we have found in each other. Struggle and heartache has brought us together, where we have found life in the prayer and support and hope and joy of one another.

The dizzying gift of life does not mean the absence of loss. It means the gift of life amid loss, despite loss, redeeming what remains after loss, what grows out of loss. It means that we cannot imagine life any differently than the gift that life in all its crazy glory already is….

Prayer

God, we cannot imagine life without each other…without family, without friends, without the strangers and chance happenings that mark our lives with a goodness we could never see coming. Before we knew how to pray, before we knew the ways of church, before any of that—even without any of that—there You are, giving us life, a gift packaged with the grace of moments that lift us up and carry us forward, moments that dry our tears and bring smiles to our faces. Thank you. May the gift we receive be a gift that we share unconditionally. Amen.

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[1] When the women celebrate with Naomi at the end of the book, there is a curious confusion as to the identity of whom or what exactly they celebrate. Listen to their words: “Blessed be the Lord, who has not left you this day without [a child]; and may his name”—whose? God’s? the child’s?—“may his name be renowned in Israel! He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age”—again, who is the restorer and nourisher? God? the child?—“for your daughter-in-law who loves you, who is more to you than seven sons, has borne him” (4:14-15). So they start by blessing the Lord who has given life, and yet by the end of their words, God the life-giver has transformed into the baby who restores and nourishes life. It’s a delightful disorder that speaks truth in a way that no certainty ever could. Life is a gift. From whom? God? Each other? Yes, exactly.  And perhaps this untraceability of the gift is the point.  Perhas what matters is not to whom or what we trace the gift but that we recognize life as a gift and we receive it as such.

How Life Finds Us (Ruth 1:1-18)

(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Sunday Worship on Nov 1, 2015, All Saints' Day)

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Life as a Scavenger Hunt

For the young girl, life was a like a scavenger hunt. She searched for happiness and found it in different places. As a young child, she found it among her family’s livestock. She would feed the goats every day. She would lie on her back and contemplate the clouds beside the grazing cattle. She even befriended the skittish sheep. As she grew, she found happiness in the approval and affirmation of her mother. So she learned how to knit and how to cook and how to be a good host for guests. She wanted to prove her worth as a young woman. When she felt that she accomplished this, she turned her attention to the next item on the scavenger list: a husband. In her culture, a young woman was not a complete person until she had married and had children. So she began to take extra care with her appearance when she went to draw water from the well nearby. It was not long before young men in the village were inquiring about her. But it was not a young man from the village who had caught her eye. It was an immigrant, a kind man with a strange accent. An aura of the unknown hung around him, and so quite naturally, she wanted to know more.

Before the next harvest, she was married. And happy. For a full ten years. Until all of the sudden, life happened. Which is another way of saying that the unexpected happened—and everything changed. Her husband died. And for the first time in her life, the girl was lost. There were no items left on her scavenger list.

Just as her husband had been kind, so too was her mother-in-law. The grieving widow took comfort in her company. But her mother-in-law soon told her that she would be leaving to go back home: she had no family left in the land, and she had heard that things were better back in her hometown. So the young woman, Ruth, decided to go with her mother-in-law, Naomi. The words that she spoke to her mother-in-law are by now a timeless declaration of commitment: “Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die—there will I be buried. [Even death shall not part us]” (1:16-17).

The Course That We Determine, Determines Us

I’ve embellished the story, of course. We don’t know anything about Ruth’s early life. All we know is that she was a Moabite woman who married an Israelite man, Mahlon, and that she later made the immortalized decision to leave her homeland and to follow her mother-in-law back to ancient Israel.

Even though we don’t know much, I think it’s safe to assume that Ruth’s early life was a scavenger hunt. Because that’s what life is for everyone, at least most of the time. We look for what will make us happy. We look forward to what we think will make us happy. Sometimes the scavenger hunt is as mundane as looking forward to the weekend, when we’ll outsource a considerable portion of our emotional energy into a group of 11 sweaty men who wear our colors and fight for our bragging rights. Sometimes the scavenger hunt is a bit more serious. Sometimes what’s next on the list is an item that we know will take time to find: maybe a vocation or a relationship or a place.

So whether Ruth was a tomboy or a little princess, or some inimitable mix of both, it is almost certain that she—like us—went looking for happiness in a variety of places.

But if life is a scavenger hunt, that is only one side of the story. When Ruth said to her mother-in-law, “Where you go, I will go…. [Even death will not part us]” (1:16-17), she was exposing herself to the other side of the story of life, to the side where we do not go looking for life but rather recognize that life comes to us. And we all have followed her example, whether we know it or not. There are some choices that we make, that make us even more in return. There are some moments that, whether or not we realize it, are crossroads in our lives. And the course that we will determine becomes a course that will determine us.

The most obvious example to point to would be marriage. There is a sense in which a person marries not only a husband or wife but also an entire family. You “marry into” a family. And suddenly, whether you like it or not, that family becomes a part of you. Their lives become your life. Their traditions become your traditions. Their habits of speech become your habits of speech. What Ruth says to Naomi is what gets said at almost every wedding—or at least it gets said between the lines: “Your people will be my people” (1:16).

A Long, Beautiful, Mysterious Inheritance:

Christ Lives in Us

Following Christ is another crossroads in our lives, another moment in our lives when we do not so much look for life as we let new life come to us, another choice we make that makes us even more in return. Suddenly, whether we like it or not, an entire history of Christ-followers—countless souls, most of whom we will never know by either face or name—becomes a part of us. Alexander Campbell and Barton Stone. Martin Luther. Martin Luther King. Saint Augustine. Even death cannot separate them from us. Their stories become our story. Their words become our words.

Have you ever noticed yourself adopting the expressions or mannerisms of a close friend or family member? The same thing happens with our faith.

There is a sense in which our shared faith is a language. If you think about it, nobody can claim ownership to the language they speak. Nobody owns the words they say. If anything, it’s the other way around. Language owns us. It existed before we ever did. And after we are born, language shapes us: it determines what we can say, it molds the way we think. In the same way, the faith of the Christ-followers who have gone before us—the personal saints who have blessed our lives and the many others whose memories live on in us unbeknownst—their faith shapes and molds ours. Think for a moment about the best parts of yourself. From which personal saints do those habits or inclinations come? (And maybe it’s someone for whom you lit a candle earlier today.)

All of this—I think—explains what Paul means all those times where he says that “Christ lives in us.”[1] He’s not declaring some holy magic or divine wizardry. He’s talking about how the way of Christ has found a way into our lives by a long, beautiful, mysterious inheritance. The words and deeds of Christ echo in our lives through the lives of people—whom we might call saints. This is seen in a beautiful story of our own. Betty Taylor’s husband, David, once received a teddy bear from a random saint when he was in the hospital and not feeling well. The gift lifted his spirits beyond words. And the gift lives on. This deed of love, this Christlike care, has inspired a lovely and creative repetition that we call D. D.’s Bears, in which our church gives teddy bears to hospital patients. The joy and hope that was shared first with David, we now share with other hospital patients. And so it is that the Christ who walked into David’s hospital room now walks into other hospital rooms. So it is that Christ lives in us.

The Saints Who Walk Us Down the Aisle

The good news of Ruth and the gospel of Jesus Christ is that, while our personal scavenger hunts may leave us in despair like the widowed Ruth, while we may never quite find the life we are looking for—even here, by the grace of God, life may find us…through the lives of others. Life found Ruth when she trusted in the goodness of her mother-in-law and committed to making her mother-in-law’s people her people. And life finds us through the lives of innumerable Christ-followers. When we decide to follow Christ—and it’s a decision we must make every day—we are deciding to marry into a way of life. We become, as Jesus and Paul both suggest, the bride of Christ.[2] And if we are the bride of Christ, then it’s the saints who are walking us down the aisle. Their best habits and traits, their timeless words and acts of love: their lives live on in us and lead us to walk forward into life with Christ. All of which is just another way of saying that Christ walks into our life through theirs.

Prayer

What a mystery, God, what a gift, that we should know the love of Jesus Christ. That we should see his face, feel his touch, hear his words of devotion and forgiveness. And not through some special knowledge or some secret trick, but through the personal saints who have graced our lives. Thank you for them. Thank you for all the ways they have pointed us to your Kingdom, for all the ways they have lived out your good news. Fill us and inspire us today with memories of their Christlike love. Open our hearts to the Christ who lived in theirs. Lead us by their steps down the aisle into an adventurous, abundant, and enchantingly unforeseeable life with Christ. Amen.

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[1] Cf. Rom 8:10; Col 1:27; Gal 2:20.


[2] Cf. Mark 2:19; John 3:29; 2 Cor 11:2.