Of Things Cosmic (John 1:1 - 14)

     In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . So begins what is for my money the most beautiful passage in the New Testament.  And perhaps the most puzzling, too . . . We kind of skate over it, we’re so used to it, but there’s more cosmic talk, more mind-bending ideas stuffed into this one passage than just about any I can think of, off the top of my head, anyway.  In the beginning was the Word . . . In the beginning of what, for Pete’s sake?  The world?  The universe?  And how can anything be there in the beginning?  How can something be there before anything else?   Where did this Word come from, anyway?  Who—or what—made it? Just thinking about it makes my head hurt, I get this little pain, right between my eyes  . . .

But wait . . . there’s more!  The Word was with God and the Word was God?  What is that supposed to mean?  How can a person be somebody and be with that somebody at the same time?  Now the pain is getting stronger, and it's throbbing, as if somebody’s driving an ice-pick into my brain.  And all this in just the first sentence, too.

To paraphrase a certain Midwestern girl, we’re not in Kansas anymore, and why should we be?  We're dealing with the eternal here, with things of the divine, our puny minds aren't supposed to get this stuff, God is way beyond us so we might as well just go with it,  etcetera, etcetera . . .  But perhaps part of it . . . Certainly not all, but part . . . is how we’ve been conditioned, how we’ve been taught, as much as anything else?

As I've said before, Western reasoning—and by “western” I mean Greco-Roman, which holds sway in Europe and the Americas—western reasoning is based on the notion that if something is one thing, it can't be another.  That the answer to any yes or no question is either . . . yes or no, and nothing in between.  It's how computers function, as a series of binary operations, and how we've all been taught to think.  “Rational” thought is a series of “if-then” statements: if A is true, then B must be true.  If not-A, then C, and so on.  And thank goodness without this kind of reasoning, which might be called dualistic, we wouldn't have computers, or space flight, or cold medicine.  All scientific and technological and advancement depends on this kind of thought.

And yet . . . In Eastern thought there is another way.  In Buddhism, it's called advaita, the non-dual, and right here at the outset, in the very first verse, there is a statement right in that groove,  a “non-dualistic” statement or, as Richard Rohr might say, a “both-and” declaration: this “Word” both was God and was with God.  And following close on its heels is another claim: all things came into being through him and at the same time, in him.  In and through . . . all things, the entire creation.  This Word who was God and was with God . . . everything was created in and through him, the whole shebang.  Things were created in him and through the Word, but that selfsame Word was God, was it not?  So all things were created by him as well . . . weren’t they?  Are your heads starting to hurt too?

Let's just stop there a moment to catch our breath . . . or our heads . . . we’re talking about a cosmic being here, are we not?  A cosmic entity . . . And we often conflate this entity with Jesus, do we not?  But note carefully: this entity is not Jesus, not yet anyway.  It is the Word, which is what we use to translate the Greek word logos . . . but “Word” doesn't really compass all the nuances of logos . . . It is full of inference and meaning.   It could mean a single word, or an idea, a concept, or it could mean a reckoning, a settlement of accounts.  In Stoic philosophy it was the rational principle of the universe, by which all the cosmos was ordered, but John was a Jew, and in Jewish thought it was rich with significance . . . the word of God spoke creation into existence . . . God's word ordered Jewish lives in the form of the law, and through the prophets it spoke out in comfort or in judgment . . . it is related to Lady Wisdom, who is called Sophia, who in Proverbs works alongside God, accomplishing God's plan for humanity . . . all of these associations – creative force, rational principle, law, judgment, wisdom – all are bound up in that one word Logos, which we translate as "Word."  And when John uses it here, all these associations come along with it.

And what came into being both through and in this Word?  What came into being was life itself.  But not life in the narrow, biological sense—as in something with ribonuclease acid that reproduces itself—but in the sense of all created things, for where would we biological things be without rocks and carbon and oxygen?  Where would we be without silicon and soil and sunlight?  What came into being through the Word, what came into being in the Word was everything, it was indeed life.

Others in the New Testament have recognized this eternal, cosmic nature of the Word as well.  There, he is called the Christ, and in Ephesians, Christ is “all in all,” in 1 Corinthians, Christ is the power and wisdom of God . . . In Revelations, Christ is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end.  But nowhere else—besides John, that is—is the notion as well-developed as in the Christ Hymn in Colossians’ first chapter, where Christ “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him.”  Sounds remarkably like our passage, doesn't it?  Yet it was written considerably before, and there’s little evidence that John had contact with Colossians . . . but once again, all things were created both through Christ and in Christ.  Further, Colossians claims that “in him all things hold together.” That is, Christ is both superstructure and infrastructure, endoskeleton and exoskeleton of the whole shebang.  Christ is the organizing principle of the universe, the fundamental particle, the superglue that keeps all things together . . . only this superglue actually works.

Finally, Christ “is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell . . .”  The fullness of God . . . poured out into Christ . . . an important thing to note, about all these things, that it's not Jesus they are talking about, but Christ . . . It wasn't Jesus there at the beginning of things, it's not Jesus who holds all things together, it is not Jesus who is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end.  It is the Christ, which is Greek for anointed one, who is eternal.

As some of you know, I’m involved in a two-year Living School, and one of my instructors is Richard Rohr, who used to be here in Cincy . . . And when he was asked what he wanted to get across in one particular unit of study, he said he'd love it if he could get folks to stop thinking so much about the little baby Jesus.  And by that he meant not only that Jesus had a ministry as an adult, but that Jesus was a particular instantiation, which we call incarnation, of the divine Word, and that it's not Jesus up in the sky, in a what a friend we have in Jesus kind of way.

What Rohr was talking about is what many theologians call the Cosmic Christ, or the Christ Principle, and it is what John describes in this first breathtaking, confounding, wonderful chapter, and though John goes on to describe the particular instantiation as human—which we think of as the incarnation, and which as we will see next week might be better thought of as an incarnation—it is worth considering the Christ Principle, for it is that Cosmic Christ that is the divine spark that underlies all of creation.

It is also that cosmic Christ, that cosmic ordering principle that holds all things together, that divine spark that I believe underlies and ties together the world faiths, East and West . . . What we call Christ, Buddhists call karma . . .  Hindus call Devanagari . . . All describe eternal ordering principles, fundamental divine particles that hold all creation together, that are intertwined, suffusing all of reality.

Now, before you accuse me of heresy, and I have to beat a hasty retreat—feets don't fail me now—let me say that what is unique about Christianity, what is our ace in the hole as Jim Finley likes to say, is the notion of incarnation.  Which John describes next and which we take up next week.  What gives us our power, what gives us hope is that we believe that this divine, eternal being—co-existent in the beginning, who was with God and was God—emptied himself of his God-hood for you and me.  And that's where we take up the story next week.  Amen.

John the Who? (Luke 3:1 - 6)

      And our third reading is from the Second Book of Presidents, the fourth chapter and the 15^th verse: In the eighth year of the reign of President Clinton, when Alan Greenspan was chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Jeb Bush was ruler of Florida and his brother George ruler of the region of Texas, during the high priesthood of Clifton Kirkpatrick and Attorney General Janet Reno, the word came to Peter Jennings, anchor of ABC News in the City of New York.  And, Lo!  It went into 7 million homes across the land, proclaiming the victory of Albert, son of Gore, in the region of Florida. And jubilation arose in the camp of the Democrat warriors, and there was wailing and gnashing of teeth in Republican lands, until lo, an hour later a different word came and Albert son of Gore was cast into the fiery pit of undecided,  adrift in the sea of “too close to call.”

      And behold! This was a warning unto the nations, that the prophets Dan and Diane and Matt Lauer should not be trusted in their pronouncements, that they are not true prophets of the Lord God of Israel, and that yearning and longing for the coming of the President would be long upon the land.

      Well, enough of that . . . you get the picture. At just this time of year fifteen years ago, in a time normally reserved for waiting on Christ, we were in fact waiting on a President. And the first warning sign wasn't a star in the east, or an angel whispering in the ear of the Virgin Mary. It was Dan Rather, prophet of the technological age, rushing to judgment on “Election 2000" or “Decision 2000" or whatever it was called, declaring Florida going to Gore, then retracting it barely an hour later. And in the hours after that, it happened not once, but twice more, driving Gore to first concede, and then un-concede to then-Governor Bush.

      And according to the media, the candidates had a few choice words to say to each other. But who really knows?   The press, with their million-dollar polling, and their billion dollar satellite links weren't exactly on top of their game that night.  If the wise men had been the media, they would have followed a 747, instead of the star, and they would have ended up in Turkey or Bulgaria instead of Bethlehem.  Thank God that God’s prophets are a little more reliable than ours.  Take John the Baptist for example. As far as we know, he got it right the first time.  There’s no “At this time, the polls are closed in lower Judea, and Jerusalem Broadcast Corporation is able to project that Jesus is the Messiah . . .” or if there was, Luke doesn’t tell us about it . . . he’s too busy telling the story, too busy quoting Isaiah, telling us that John’s is “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord’”

      Luke interweaves the stories of Jesus and John – one of whom is the Son of God – and it's clear we’re meant to compare the two, so similar are their stories. He begins it with a story of a birth almost as miraculous as Jesus', when John was born to Elizabeth, who was barren.  And an angel comes to Zechariah, her husband, but he doesn’t believe it – and does that remind you of Sarah?  Laughing?  – so he’s struck mute, not a particularly good thing for a Temple priest, who has to say the ritual words and chant the ritual chants.

      And right here, we’re pointed in those two Advent directions, to the past and to the future, for the Advent of King David was also marked by a miraculous birth, as was the Advent of Israel, when Jacob was born to Sarah. In fact, all through the scripture, such births are signs of divine transformation, symbols of God's radical acts, as new life is brought forth, and new hope springs into the world.

      And so angels come to Mary, and say to her – as they said to Zechariah – that a child will be born. And right off the bat, we know that this child will be great, even greater than John, because Mary was a virgin, and a virgin birth trumps a barren birth, any day of the week.  If John was great, Jesus would be greater still, as signified by that greater miracle.  Jesus would be the super-John, John raised to the umpteenth power, magnified again and again. John was born of a barren woman, but Jesus would be born of a virgin; and in all Hebrew and Christian scripture, there are many opened wombs, but only one virgin birth. So John's very birth is a pointer, a looking-forward, to the coming of the Lord. Not only would he proclaim it in his ministry, but enact it in his very life, even in the manner of his own coming.  And even before he was born, John proclaimed the advent, the good news of Christ, leaping for joy in his mother's womb.

      And with that long laundry-list of rulers, Luke tells us when all this took place – about 30 AD, give or take a year or two—but more importantly who is in charge.  It was the time of Emperor Tiberius, of Herod and Pilate, when Philip ruled in Ituraea and Annas and Caiaphas were high priests.  And although it seems like just one more list of rulers or ancestors—like who begat who, who begat someone else—it places John's ministry within a historical framework. It shows the divine breaking into human history; it shows the kingdom coming near.  And there’s something else, too.  Luke's stress on the powers that be – his monotonous recital of political movers and shakers – emphasizes the counter-cultural nature of the Gospel.  It was a time of all the great rulers – Tiberius, Herod and Pilate. Philip and Lysanius. Annas and Caiaphas. All these powerful people, in all their powerful splendor, with all their powerful armies and police and temple guards, and where does the word of God go?  To whom is the gospel given to proclaim? To a crazy, wandering Judean, who lived in some cave or another in the wilderness. And although Luke doesn’t describe the Baptist, Matthew has no such qualms – he says he wore camel-skin clothes and ate locusts and wild honey. You could probably smell him a mile away.

      All the glittering stars in the world – all the Herods, all the Caiaphas's, all the Caesars, all the Barbara Steisands and Beyonces and Barack Obamas –  and the word of God made flesh comes to an unknown prophet, out in the wilderness, no less.  Where’s the satellite feed?  Where are the media outlets? How do you make deadlines in the wilderness?  Surely God could have done better than that.  Surely the Gospel could've been sent to, say . . . a senator with access to the Roman mail.  Or a TV anchor, someone who could get it heard around the world.  But the word of God, like the Spirit, goes where it will, and we cannot guess where that will be.

      I can only imagine what would happen today . . . without a press agent, you’re nothing.  Without spin-doctors, you can’t even get to first base, can’t even get near first base, when it comes to media coverage.  I can see it now . . . CNN Atlanta gets a call from someplace called Chill-cote, or Clear-coat, or maybe Chilly-coffee –  something like that, anyway – saying there’s some half-crazed chicken farmer wandering the fields, proclaiming the end of the world, and the first thing out of Wolf Blitzer’s mouth is . . . “who’s he killed?”  Uh, nobody . . . “Is he holed up, then, with a bunch of hostages?”  well, no . . . “Well, what about suicides?  Have his followers committed suicide yet, like those, whatchamacallums . . . saucer people did?”  No . . .  he’s just roaming around the woods alone, predicting the end of the world . . . and you know he wouldn’t be given the time of day . . . especially since his proclamation isn’t all sweetness and light, isn’t some new-age, feel-good personal self-actualization . . . it’s a harsh, uncompromising message of repentance, of “turning away” from old, sinful paths “For the kingdom of heaven has come near,” he says.

      And the Baptist’s quoting of Isaiah is more than just prophecy-fulfilling language, although it’s certainly that – at a time when the world was filled with exclusive religions, which actively sought to exclude outsiders, John says that “Every valley shall be filled, Every mountain shall be made low.” All the lands, everywhere, will participate in the Kingdom of God.  And in the last line of our passage he spells it out: “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” All flesh – not just the rich and the powerful. Not just the Jews or the Greeks or the Baptists or the Catholics or the Presbyterians, or maybe even Christians—last time I checked, all means all—but all people, all flesh shall see the salvation of God.  In this age of religious freedom, it's hard for us to realize just how radical this message was. We're used to believing – or at least professing to believe – that salvation is for everyone, regardless of race, creed or color.  But in Luke's day, a religion which offered salvation to all smacked of revolution.  The priests and scribes and temple-hangers-on jealously guarded the keys to the kingdom, and kings and princes and potentates regulated who got the goods.  But the Kingdom of God, which John proclaimed, was freely available to all . . .

      And as a sign of that inclusiveness, as a sign of that revolutionary, stone-cold grace, the word of that grace didn’t come to the Emperor, or the Governor, or the head priests in Jerusalem – although they were all around – neither did it come to the President, or the media moguls or the stated clerk of the PCUSA – God could’ve sent it there, you know . . . instead, it came to an unwashed, hair-shirted locust-eater, out in the worthless wilderness lands, beyond the edge of social acceptability.  Is that a sign, or what?

      Well . . . what about today?  Things are different now, aren’t they?  After all, there’s a certain shortage of virgin births and demon-oustings and other assorted miracles . . . where are the signs of the good news?  These are enlightened times, where we don’t believe in no ghosts, where everything must be logical and provable to be true . . . how do you proclaim the Gospel without any flash and dazzle, without any special effects, without any proof?  Signs of the kingdom, pointers to the word of God, are in short supply.

      But . . . I know a man who was cured, against all odds . . . I know a family that was fed, when they had nothing to eat . . . I know a wanderer – like John! – that was sheltered and given food . . . and I know the church that did all these things,  a 75-year old church that was on the edge, but now is a lot closer to the middle . . . We are a pointer to the kingdom, just by our very presence in this community, in this nation and in this world.

      Like John, the Word has come to us, in this church, here in this time and place, it’s been given to us, and it will burst upon us anew -- fresh and green in just a few short weeks.  In the seventh year of Barack Obama, when Joseph Biden is vice president and John Kasich rules in the region called Ohio, the word of God has and will come to Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian.  And like John, we are called to proclaim that Word, to prepare for the coming of God’s reign, within us and without—when all the valleys will be filled, all the rough places made smooth and straight.  We’re called to be a sign of that Word, of that on-rushing, already-here, already inside of us, kingdom of God, where war and poverty and hunger are no more, where homelessness and abuse and loneliness are erased as if they had never been.

            This Sunday and every Sunday, we will be a sign of the all-inclusive hospitality, the overwhelming, open-hearted welcoming that is God’s Kingdom.  And as the coming year progresses, I challenge each and every one of you to open your hearts, and renew your commitment to living into that hospitality, and by so-doing spreading the Gospel . . . the Word of God has come to us, here in the state of Ohio, in the land of the Bengal Tigers, and that word is wild and precious and saving and true, and it is our duty – and privilege! – to pass it on.  Amen.

A Once and Future Hope (Luke 21:25 - 36; Jeremiah 33:14 - 16)

 

In the Sunday Lectionary, that three-year cycle of scripture readings a lot of us mainline churches use, the longest bunch of readings is called Ordinary Time. It’s time that’s . . . Ordinary.  That is, it's not Advent or Christmas - or Eastertide, nor is it Pentecost.  It’s just ordinary, and it spans 34 Sunday's in two separate chunks.  And last week was the 34^th and final Sunday, and as usual, I breathed a sigh of relief, because I’ve gotten mighty tired of Ordinary Time. Every Sunday I look up the number, and it says twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time.  Or thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time.  Or four-hundred and seventy-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time.  (OK . . . so I made that last one up.) But you get the picture . . . it seems to drag on and on, numbing in its sameness, wearying and gray, like the gift that keeps on giving well past its welcome.  Maybe it's just me, just some preacher-crankiness rearing its ugly head.  Or maybe I'm just tired of preaching about Jesus' trip to Jerusalem, I don't know.  But whatever it is, I want Ordinary time to go away.

 

It's not always that way, though . . . right after Pentecost, I'm glad to be in Ordinary Time.  After reading and hearing and preaching about Jesus' death and burial and resurrection and ascension, I'm ready for a rest.  Ready to sit back and relax, and hear stories about living.  Jesus calming the seas.  David killing Goliath.  The feeding of the five thousand. Stories we grew up with.  The old, old stories.

 

But 'long about October, after a Summer of ordinary weather, our late-eighties-early- nineties, rain-as-scarce-as-hen's-teeth weather, I begin to get restless.  I begin to fidget and fuss, and look forward to the cool, to something new.  And September rolls around with its hint of fall and I know something's up.  I know things are about to change, and they've gotta be for the good, because it's been a long time, a long, dry ordinary time and hope chokes the air like wood smoke from the season's first fires.  And while color slashes the trees, and snowflake leaves layer the ground, I begin to believe that deliverance is coming, deliverance has come, and that deliverance will come again.  I begin to believe in the possibility of Christmas.

 

In both passages this morning, there's a yearning, a longing for deliverance, a hope for change.  In Luke, Jesus foretells his own second coming, and he describes it in vivid detail.  “The Son of Man will come in a cloud, with power and glory,” he says and “when these things take place your redemption draws near.” Jesus spoke of his return to earth, and whatever he meant by it, whatever he meant by a kingdom on earth, Luke's audience took it as comfort, as rescue from oppression.  The people were cowed, uncertain, beaten-down physically and spiritually by the Romans.  When Luke wrote, Jerusalem had been sacked and the temple destroyed and Christians were an outlaw sect, despised and marginalized.  Luke's readers would have been comforted by Jesus' words, and yet longing, aching for release.

 

Seven hundred years before Luke, Jeremiah witnessed a catastrophe.  The Babylonians had overrun Judah and carried its people off to captivity.  As in Luke's time, the great temple on Mt. Zion had been destroyed.  The center of their lives, the ground of their identity, their being, had been burnt out, reduced to a blackened shell.  All the furnishings and opulent fittings had been carried away to Babylon by the destroyers.  Jeremiah sat in Babylon—a captive himself—and wrote this oracle of hope, looking forward to a time when God would cause a righteous branch to spring up from the house of David.  A time when Judah would be delivered, and Jerusalem would live in safety.

 

Jeremiah yearned for the coming of a savior, the coming of deliverance.  He predicted a King, a branch of David, a shoot of Jesse.  And our Jewish brothers and sisters still await their Messiah, and a time when Jerusalem will live in peace, and Jews will be safe again.

But for us, Jesus is that savior.  He is the Messiah, the anointed one, in the direct line of David.  For us, the Son of Man’s first coming brought deliverance from sin, and began our access to the Kingdom of God.  We believe that Jeremiah spoke of that first coming, that first Christmas long ago, when wise men journeyed and shepherds watched their flocks by night.  But in Luke, Jesus speaks of a second coming, his own, when he will arrive in might and glory, and sweep the powers and principalities before him like so much chaff in the wind.

 

In our readings this morning, we put together passages that evoke the past and the future, that point to Christ's first coming and to his last.  Two points in time—the beginning of the coming kingdom, and the end, its fulfillment.

 

At Advent, we have this double vision, this looking backward and forward in time.  We sing “O come O come Emmanuel” and “Watchman Tell us of the Night,” and point in two directions at once, like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.  We point to things past and things future, but what about the here and now? What about the present?  Do we merely remember at Advent? Do we only re-enact an historical event, and look forward to a future hope?

________________________

 

In the spring of every year, along about Easter, observant Jews celebrate Passover.  It lasts 8 days, and is bookended by Seders, elaborate feasts where God's deliverance is celebrated and retold.  And in the retelling, it's remembered and re-called, and brought into the present.  It's made new, fresh, and immediate.  It’s like it happens all over again—like it did happen, like it’s happening now, like it will happen again.  At the Passover table, God constructs a new reality . . . in which the past, and the present, and the future are somehow there, all at once.

 

Theologians call this kind of re-membering “anamnesis,” a Greek word for a Hebrew practice.  As an event is actively remembered, actively re-enacted, it becomes real and present, all over again.  In a sense, it happens anew and is immediately available to the participants.  Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann views the Psalms as engines for anamnesis, poetry sung in daring acts of re-creation.  He claims that as Psalms were sung at worship, God used them to invoke an alternate reality.  What was sung about came about, right then and right there.

 

Closer to home, the Lord's Supper is just such an act of charged remembrance.  As Presbyterians, we believe that it’s more than remembering in an ordinary way.  As we break the bread, and pour the wine, we are drawn into the presence of Christ.  As we eat his body and drink his blood, we are nourished for the journey, fed along the way.  We are made part of the body of Christ all over again. 

 

At Advent we are poised on the brink of hope, but still mired in despair.  We hope, we ache for deliverance from pain and sin and all our creaturely cares.  We remember past hope—I will cause to spring up a branch of David”—and anticipate the second coming, when Christ will come again.  But at the same time, we are here, today, not yet delivered, yearning for his coming, hoping for his coming, looking for his birth.  And in the bleak midwinter, when all is dark, and all is calm, Jesus will be born in a manger. 

At Advent, we're at the crossroads of past and future.  Between the depressing, violent, excessive now and the ghostly past.  Between marching ancestors and coming generations, unknown and yet known.  Imagine:  crowding around us, waiting with us for deliverance, for salvation, all of God's people, right here in this room, tense and expectant, quivering with anticipation.  Can you hear them? Can you feel them?  Aunts, great-aunts, great-great-grandfathers, all God's people of times past, times present, and times future.  Breathing, sighing, waiting.  Can you feel their breath on the back of your neck?

There are slaves here—Miriam and Moses and Sojourner Truth.  Ezekiel and Jeremiah and Grandma Moses.  Aching, yearning, crying to be free.  Victims of apartheid, cancer, and imprisonment, sickness, poverty and addiction.  All wait to be delivered by the righteous hand of the Lord.

Others are with them—I hear them stirring in the gloom—inner city children, malnourished and undereducated, hopeless in the blasted tenements of Portland.  Alzheimer patients strapped in their beds, closed up in the silence of themselves.  Shooting victims, heart attack victims, rape victims, incest victims.  Folks without money, folks without clothes.  People without food or hope from anywhere on earth, all right here with us in this room, grasping at Advent, looking for his birth, longing for his truth.  All creation is here at this moment, groaning with anticipation for the coming of the Lord.

And now, at Advent we can see a light, far away, flickering in the darkness.  Our companions stir—they can see it, too—a time when the lion will lie down with the lamb.  When swords will be beaten into plowshares.  When justice and righteousness fall down like rain, and all are redeemed.  We see the Sea of Reeds, parting to let the Hebrews pass.  We see the temple, rebuilt and shining, and a rock rolled away from a hillside grave.  Apostles gathered around in fear and wonderment and joy, hands thrust into a wounded side.  We see God's final victory over death.

We see the future, taste the hope.  Nelson Mandela, singing in freedom and light; Miriam, whirling before the Lord.  The Apostle Paul, Desmond Tutu, Mother Theresa—in our vision, all have been saved, all have been delivered, all have been redeemed.  We see our loved ones, that have left us behind, or are bound by chains of earthly limit.  Beaming at us, restored, reclaimed.  There's my grandfather, freed from the cancer that killed him, and my father, stroke free and as I remember him as a little boy.  And all are redeemed, all are whole, and all are free.

Brothers and sisters, at Advent, all creation sighs in hope and yearning for the coming of the Lord.  For God's deliverance from the powers of evil.  And as we wait and as we groan, and as we tremble in longing, we know that when it comes, when it bursts among us in the dead of winter, all of God's redemptive acts, all of God's transformation, all of God's righteousness will be present, bound up in that blinding-white act of love.

But for now, all we can do is wait, and watch.

Come, Lord Jesus, Come.

Amen

Getting Her Penny's Worth (Mark 12:41 - 44)

So Jesus sits down opposite the treasury of the temple, and here he is opposite again, here he is apart . . . he’s not part of the temple apparatus, not part of the scheme, the great engine that keeps the whole thing running . . . For no matter what else controlled the Jerusalem Temple—whether it be the Lord in his holy of holies or the high priest just outside—you couldn't buy calves without copper, you couldn't burn doves without dollars, couldn't pay priests without pennies.  So while God may have sat on the cherubim throne, the seat of the temple’s secular might was right there in the treasury, in front of Jesus and his disciples.

And I like it that our translation says he sat opposite, ‘cause wasn’t he about as opposite to the wealth that kept the whole ball rolling as you could get?  Wasn’t it he who drove the money-changers out of that same Temple?  Didn't he tell the rich young man to sell everything he had to the poor?  Weren't the rich and famous the fall guys in a much of his teaching?

And so he sits there watching the crowd putting money into the treasury, and he’s not just seeing them, he’s observing them, he’s taking it all in, not missing a beat . . . “watching” is too passive a translation of the Greek, which implies more that he is absorbed in it, even fascinated by it . . . I couldn't swear to it, but I suspect that Jesus the man was like that, whatever he was looking at, whoever he was looking at, got his total attention . . . Can you imagine being observed that way, receiving the observer’s whole attention?  Nothing in the other’s mind but you, all her cares, all her thoughts, all her dreams put away, shunted aside, so she can contemplate only you?  The Greeks had a word for that: it's kenosis, emptying, and Jesus’ whole life was one of self-emptying, self-kenosis. As Paul put it, Jesus “though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness.”  Jesus the human being lived his entire life that way, constantly emptying himself—or as he himself put it, dying to self—so that he might be filled up with us, contemplating only us in the perfection of his unity with the divine.

And that's how I imagine Jesus observes the scene before the Temple: not only missing nothing, but seeing into everything, seeing beyond the surface, and it is a seeing of infinite compassion, a complete seeing, full of understanding . . . And look! although Jesus talks in dualisms, about the behavior of the rich as opposed to the widow, he does not condemn them for it. Like the rich young ruler, who couldn't give up his stuff to follow him, Jesus looks at them and loves them, just the way they are.

He sees into the hearts of everyone putting coins into the treasury, it's as if there is a field around him, an empathy-field, a heart-field, and what does this deep seeing tell him about the widow?  What does he perceive about her act (in the Greek she’s throwing money into the pot)?  Well, he doesn't say . . . He just states the obvious, or what should be obvious to anyone with any brains, that she’s given more than all of those they’ve spied on up to this point, ‘cause she's given all she has.  He doesn't condemn her for it, asking the same questions I just did, but he doesn't praise her for it, either.  Nor does he condemn all the others contributing out of their abundance, either, not really—he just states the obvious, that she’s contributed more.  He leaves his disciples—including us modern-day ones—to figure out what he's getting at.

And so, this passage has been a blank slate, a great tabula rasa upon which preachers can write whatever we need at the time.  Most of which, of course, revolve around stewardship; a version of it comes up every year about this time, just by coincidence, I'm sure.  And most sermons take one of two variations—first, as a call for sacrificial giving, which she certainly does: giving up all she has is certainly a sacrifice.  The other variation is an intensification of the first—we’re called to give up our life.  And Jesus might have had something like this in mind, because though our translation has him saying she put in “all she had to live on,” a more literal reading of the Greek is that she put in her entire life.

And many of you can certainly feature that . . . Many of you put in long hours and gave large chunks of change to keep this church afloat over the years . . . And every hour you gave, whether in money or in sweat, is an hour of your life, which you could have been spending on something else, on dinner or cars or sleep.  Thus, in a certain, real, sense the church—this building, it's programs, it's people, even—have become your life, or at least a part of it, and here’s this widow, giving it all . . .

But, to what is she giving that all?  Jesus has made it pretty clear that the Temple, hub of the Israelite religion of the time, is a corrupt institution.  After all, he marched into that very Temple and overturned those money changers’ tables.  He criticized them for being in bed with their Roman oppressors, and in the episode right before this one, he warned his disciples about the Temple scribes, who devour the houses of widows just like this one.  And to top it all off, in the passage right after this one, right after she gives her life for it, he predicts the Temple’s destruction.

So it makes me wonder: just what is Jesus trying to say here?  The picture of the widow giving her all is surrounded by bad things about the temple: first, that it is full of corruption, that it devours the houses of the most vulnerable, then that it's headed for imminent destruction.  The widow is shown giving her life to a corrupt institution that is going to be destroyed anyway by—his disciples would assume—God.

Let's look at in a slightly different way: first, Jesus warns his disciples about scribes in the Temple, who devour widows’ houses.  Next, he points out one such widow, giving all she has to that corrupt institution.  Then, he predicts its destruction.  It seems to me that the widow giving her life to the Temple is simply another example of its extortionate nature, that induces a widow, in that culture a symbol of the least of the least of these, to give to it more than the rich—remember: that's what Jesus says, that what she gives is greater, as in more, not better.  And because she gave all she has to live on, she presumably starved.

Another thing to remember is that giving to the Temple was not optional for Jews.  For example, the Temple Tax, which Jesus indirectly protested by turning over those tables, was required of every person, and Jesus’ disciples—and the people for whom Mark wrote 35 years later—would have been aware of this, they would've known that what the widow did was not voluntary.

And so, far from being a picture of stewardship, where the widow’s small sacrifice is more faithful than all the rich’s giving from their abundance, what we have is another example of the corruption of the religious institution that would make one of the most vulnerable of society pay the last of her money.  And then it was destroyed.

This was likely a great comfort to the folks for whom Mark wrote this, Mark’s congregation, who were likely more like the poor widow than the rich folks, but this is stewardship Sunday, and where does it leave us looking for a model of faithful giving.  Well, I don't think it's the widow who gave her life for a worthless institution, but just as she's not a model for us, the Temple isn't exactly a model for our church, either.  Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian, has been a faithful outpost for Christ for over seventy five years.  It has served and ministered to this community, and to its own members, for three-quarters of a century.  And, as I always say, we’re all adults here: we know that the lights must be kept on, the heat fired up, and the staff paid.  We're all adults, and we don't need to be reminded that our pledges are the main things that keep this operation afloat.

And there’s another thing: we don't need another model of stewardship, we don't need another model of faithful service.  Because we worship and study and praise the ultimate model in Jesus Christ, who like the widow, gave his all for us.  So once again, as I do every year, I ask you to prayerfully pledge what you will give for the coming year.  Amen.

Rumors of Our Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated (Mark 13:1 - 8)

      Sometimes, I have a hard time believing that any disciple – after following Jesus around while he overturned temple tables and preached against the rich and famous – would say “Look, Teacher, what large stones! and such large buildings!”  like a child taken into the big city for the first time on a field-trip . . . teacher, teacher, look at that big building . . . or a tourist at Mount Rushmore – look at the size of that Schnozz on Washington . . . or “Master, what big buildings they have!,” but Jesus doesn’t say  “the better to serve the people with, my dears” or “the better to sacrifice pigeons with, my pretties” . . . he says “You like those great big buildings?  You like that huge treasury, that ‘holiest of holies’ in there, that vast Temple Mount?  Well, better like ‘em while you can, ‘cause not one stone is gonna be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”  And notice he doesn’t say that God’s gonna do it, either, he doesn’t tell us who or when, just that its gonna happen . . .

      And sure enough, forty years after our episode, the Romans took Jerusalem and crushed the Israelite rebellion, and they burnt the city and razed the temple to the ground.  Kaput.  End of story.  And to this day, nobody’s rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem, and in fact, at the present time, the Moslem Dome of the Rock sits right smack dab on its spot, right there on Herod’s Mount.  This, of course, has given end-time predictors fits, because how could the temple be destroyed in the final days if it was already obliterated 2000 years ago?  And so what they do is, they predict the rebuilding of the Temple, so they can prophesy its final destruction . . . and as our Jewish friends might say . . . “Oy!”  So let’s get this straight right from the start: Jesus is talking specifically about the Roman destruction during the Hebrew revolt, which occurred in the year 70 A.D.  What else he’s talking about, we can only speculate.

      Mark, writing at about the same time as the revolt – at about 65 or 70 A.D. – may have had a pretty good idea of what was coming down, or already knew about it, and so it must’ve seemed pretty cool to him and his readers, his little band of early-day Christians, that Jesus did in fact predict the present situation, the current hard times . . . it must have helped confirm in their minds his identity, that he was truly Son of God.  But it must have done something else, as well, it must have been comforting in a way, that the one they worship, the one they call Lord knew all about their problems, their situation, that he was somehow there with them, that even though his words were in the chronological past, they spoke to them in the present crisis.  And that because he had predicted it, had known all about it, that somehow it was all part of a plan, that God was still somehow in charge.

      But for the disciples at the time he said it – remember our old tri-focal Gospel reading glasses – for the disciples at the time, it was a sharp object lesson, or the punctuation thereof . . . remember the widows mite?  Where Jesus points out that the rich – who give from their surplus – were not as faithful as the widow, who gives her all?  Remember?  Well, this follows directly on its heels, Jesus admonishes them about the idle rich, they walk out of the Temple, and the disciples prove they’re still in awe of all the power by acting like a bunch of country bumpkins.  And Jesus’ response was that these stones are to no avail, because they will not remain standing. All the things of the world, all the riches, all the apparatus of the rich and famous, all are to no purpose, they will all pass away.

      And so they left the temple and the city itself – probably through the Golden Gate, through the Eastern wall – and climbed up the Mount of Olives, past the garden, past Gethsemene, and sat there among the olive trees, peering out at the great Temple Mount, directly across the Kidron Valley.  They sat watching the people, moving about like ants on its platform . . . and there was a great symbolic divide between Jesus and all the religious apparatus, a great chasm . . . from here the Temple indeed looked puny, it looked human-scaled compared to God’s mountain glory.  And as they sat there, four of the disciples asked him in private “Tell us when all this is gonna come down, what will be the sign that all this is about to happen?”  And two of these disciples – the Zebedee brothers, James and John – were the same ones who asked – also in private – to be first in the Kingdom, so I can’t help but think there might be more behind it than a simple thirst for knowledge . . . maybe they wanted to know when to cash in their stocks and bonds, maybe they were looking for a little insider-advantage-action like ol’ Martha Stewart, or maybe they were gonna write a book, “The Late, Great City Jerusalem,” or something, make a bundle on subsidiary rights, but if they were, Jesus doesn’t make it easy for them . . . “Beware that no one leads you astray,” he says. “Many will come in my name and say ‘I am he!’ and they’ll lead many astray.”  They’ll write books claiming to know when the time is, they’ll have you squirrel away food, lead you up into the mountains, they’ll go on television and ask for monthly contributions . . . but don’t be afraid, don’t panic . . . even if you hear of wars and rumors of wars, the end is still to come . . .

      The end is still to come, Jesus says, these aren’t signs of the end times, they’re yet to come!  Nation will rise against nation, kingdom against kingdom, earthquakes and famines . . . these things are just the beginnings of the birth pangs . . . and in every age, whenever things get a little dicey on the world stage, certain Christians get caught up in apocalypse fever . . . wars and rumors of wars!  Nation against nation!  Earthquakes and famines and revolutions, oh my!  And every time, the world doesn’t come to an end, Jesus doesn’t return, and the kingdom doesn’t get fully realized here on planet Earth.

      Jesus was talking about specific times, the revolt and all the turmoil that surrounded it, but it applies to almost any time you can think of . . . nations are always at one another’s throats, earthquakes are part of life, particularly in earthquake-prone areas, and there is always a famine somewhere, but these are all just the beginnings of the birth pangs, the start of the coming of the kingdom of God.

      Let’s look at this metaphor of “birth pangs” a little more . . . as any of you females out there who’ve experienced it know – and us males can only imagine – contractions come in waves.  They’re periods of intense pain and struggle – and between them relative calm – as the time of delivery draws closer. Each contraction may seem like the end, but there are often many hours – or even days! – of labor ahead, and the time varies with every birth. It’s unpredictable in its onset and unpredictable in length once onset begins.  Thus, labor is a particularly apt analogy for the upheavals that will transform the earth into fully the new creation . . . the birth of the New Earth –  AKA the Kingdom of God – will come upon us, Jesus is saying, like birth of a child, and who can predict that?

      And so we in the church should be especially suspicious of anyone claiming the ability to predict the end times . . . many will come in Christ’s name saying “I am he” – as in I am the one who knows these things – and we should be suspicious of their motives, not just their accuracy – many a person has made a tidy sum selling apocalyptically-toned hokum, from Hal Lindsay to John Hagee to Tim LaHaye. Jesus’ did predict that, and it was right on the money.

      But what’s the problem, you might ask?  What if a few Christians do make a few bucks?  What’s the harm if we enjoy sifting through end-times puzzles, whiling away an afternoon or two reading speculation about the meaning of Revelations?  Nothing, on the face of it . . . although I think most of it’s pretty bad theology . . . but think of all the millions of dollars spent, think of all the emotional and physical energy used up, all the flat-out time spent on it, when Jesus clearly says – in more than one place – that we aren’t to know?  Now think of all the people we could feed, all the Bibles we could distribute, all the blind and lame we could heal with this time and money.  Jesus clearly defined the mission of the church, and he didn’t include figuring out who the bear in Revelation is or who the Anti-Christ was or is or will be.

      Worrying about the future damages the mission and the body of Christ, it impedes it, slows it down . . . why do you think Jesus told us to consider the lilies of the field?  Why do you think he sent his disciples out, without a bit of money or scrap of bread?  Why did Paul counsel the same thing?  If our minds and our resources are fixated on the future, then they can’t be on discipleship, they can’t be on mission, it’s as simple as that.

      Now does that mean we’re not supposed to plan for the future, that we’re not supposed to look toward it at all?  Of course not . . . but it’s a matter of balance, and that’s not something we do well, sometimes.  We all know folks so worried about their retirement incomes, so worried about a possible terrorist attack, or something, that they spend all their time thinking about it, planning for it, and have no time or energy to enjoy, to cherish, to live for today, in the here and now.  And that’s how it is with living the Christian life . . . if we worry about signs of the end, if we worry about portents and omens and things in the sky, our attention isn’t where it’s supposed to be, right here on Earth, on today and our mission, which is to proclaim the Gospel in thought, word, and deed.

      And you know, I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to apply this to our own situation, in little ol’ Greenhills Community Church, Presbyterian.  Attendance has been a little . . . thin . . . in recent months, we’ve lost some members to death and other stuff, and so some of us are a little worried, a little concerned . . . and that’s natural, you know?  It’s normal to be a bit uneasy when our beloved church seems threatened, and we don’t know what to do.  But you know, Jesus says we’re not allowed to dwell on it, we’re not allowed to let it paralyze us, to compromise the mission of God in this place.

      Which is why I’m happy to report that we’re not doing that . . . Through our participation in Transformation 2.0 we are learning to look for where God is working in our neighborhood.  Through our Coffee For a Cause events, we are introducing our church, extending our hospitality to a new group of people, forty or fifty at a time.  And through the Christmas Bazaar, happening right now, we’re extending that hospitality to even more people, and making a little change to further the kingdom to boot.

      Notice what’s going on here . . . we’re doing evangelism, plain and simple.  By inviting our friends and associates and acquaintances to share with us, by extending our hospitality, we are doing the mission of the church!  We’re proclaiming the gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ.  Instead of panicking, instead of spending our time fretting over what might be, we are responding just as we should – by practicing the mission of God.  And because of that, I think I can safely say rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated!  Amen.