Word on the Street (John 1:1 - 14)

     In the beginning . . . in the beginning . . . when I hear those words, my mind ranges back over the years, over the eons, to the beginning of the earth, for that is what John is evoking, using the same words that open our scriptures: “ In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”  The author of those words assumed that the heavens and the earth were made at the same time, and he was close . . . The Earth, according to the latest data, is four and a half billion years old and the universe is almost fourteen billion . . . only nine billion or so off . . .

But of course that’s beside the point in Genesis, and beside the point here: both Genesis and John assume God created the whole shebang, earth and all stars, loud rushing planets, as the hymn goes.  The entire universe—whether fourteen billion, four billion, or even four thousand years old, as used to be thought—the whole thing, top to bottom, front to back, the Lord God made it all.  And John ups the ante, talking about the Word with a capital W who was there in the beginning with God, and who mysteriously and at the same time was God.

And the whole universe was created through this Word—and what could that Word, that was there at the start of everything, be?  Could it be . . . “let there be?”  As in “let there be light” or “let there be lights in the dome of the sky?”  After all, in  both Hebrew and Greek it's one word—a form of the verb “to be”—and John does say that all things we're created through this Word, and what more appropriate word than being itself? 

The concept of being is wound throughout our scriptures—God called himself that when he spoke to Moses from the burning bush—and it's only natural, because if nothing else, that's what the Bible is about, the being of God and the being of us as well, AKA who God is and who we are . . . And in the beginning of his Gospel, in this magnificent poem, John ups the ante, he says that this Word “let there be,” became flesh, the stuff of you and me and Uncle Joe and Aunt Tilly, ordinary flesh, and then lived right here among us.  And he breathed the same air that we do and walked the same earth, and I think it was kind of a vote of confidence in us.   I mean, we often have a pretty low opinion of ourselves as a species, we say we're war-like, lustful, that we’re one big ball of envy and greed, etc., etc., and I guess it's true, we do have a few rough edges here and there, but how bad can we be if the creative Word of the universe, if being itself, thought enough of us to become incarnate?  We must have something going for us for “Let There Be” to want to be one of us, don't you think?

On the Borderline (Matthew 11:2 - 11)

    The Jordan River is deep and wide, Hallelujah!  Milk and honey on the other side, Hallelujah! and Moses and his people wandered in the wilderness forty years – a good long time – forty years before they got to that milk and honey, before they crossed over from their old life into the one promised them by their God . . . the Jordan’s a minor river that plays a major part in the hearts and souls and minds of the Hebrew people . . . it’s source of food and drink, of life and of hope . . . it’s that way today, too . . . the Golan Heights overlook its valley, and the West Bank is the Western bank of the Jordan River . . .

In Jesus’ day, the rich and famous lived in the wilderness along its banks.  I’m not sure why – it was wilderness, after all – but maybe it was a scenic thing . . . after all, if you have enough money around here one thing you can do is build a great big old house overlooking the Little Miami.  Or the Great Miami.  Or Glendale.  Maybe it was something practical, like for commerce, so you could get all those fatted calves and frankincense and I-phones into the house without breaking your back on the roads.  Could be it was for whatever cool breezes were to be had on those hot desert nights . . . whatever the case, Herod – governor, raconteur, and all-round king of the Jews – had not one, not two, but three palace-cum-fortresses along the river . . .

And John the Baptist was imprisoned in one of them, in the very wilderness he had wandered, along the same river where he had baptized all who came with a baptism of repentance . . . where he had baptized one Jesus Christ, son of God, as a matter of fact . . . John would be beheaded beside that river not too many days hence . . . Jordan River is chilly and cold, Hallelujah. . . chills the body, but not the soul, Hallelujah . . .

And as he sat there in his cell, John remembered one particular day on the river, when he’d baptized Jesus and the dove had floated down from the heavens, and the voice had said “This is my Son, the beloved, in whom I am well pleased.”  And it had seemed to him on that day that a new era had begun, a new time when they were gonna kick rear and take names, when they weren’t going to have to take it any more from those purple-robed rich Romans along the river-side . . . it had seemed to him that the Jordan River – the dividing line between want and plenty, between wandering and milk and honey, between life and death – had become a borderline once again, separating new realms, the old earthly one and the glorious kingdom of God.

But then, cooped up in his prison cell he’d heard stories about Jesus and his ministry, and he began to doubt everything . . . he heard about the preaching, about how the meek are blessed, the merciful exalted, how evildoers are not to be resisted and cheeks are to be turned . . . and he heard about Jesus’ deeds as well, how he’d fed five thousand people, cleansed a leper, healed two blind guys and that was all well and good and everything, but where was the winnowing?  Where was the chaff?  And where was the unquenchable fire?  The Messiah was supposed to bring judgement and doom on the oppressors, not cure their ills and heal their kids.

And so he sends his disciple to Jesus to ask him: Are you the one to come or not?  And he uses the technical term – the one to come – the promised one, the guy who’s gonna make it all better.  And I’m sure he’s hoping that Jesus will just answer once and for all, yes or no, but he doesn’t: he quotes scripture at him, Isaiah to be exact: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” What do you think, he says.  All those works of the messianic age are coming to pass, blind healed, lame walking, lepers cleansed, deaf hearing, dead rising . . . all these signs, piled up one on top of another, sign upon sign, what do you think they mean?

And then he says something that puts it all into perspective, that shows that he knows exactly where John is coming from . . . “Blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me,” but here our translation does us wrong, because in the Greek, the word is literally “scandalized,” as in “Blessed is anyone who is not scandalized by me.”  And in our passage, it has the additional connotation of “losing one’s faith.”  John is laboring under the misapprehension that Jesus is coming to be a conquering Messiah, a front-of-the-army king who’s going to restore Israel to it’s rightful place among the nations, and he’s in danger of being scandalized, of losing his faith over it.  And notice Jesus uses the same wording here as in the Sermon on the Mount – Blessed are the meek and blessed are the peacemakers, and blessed are those who aren’t scandalized because of it all.

Paul uses a form of this word to great effect in his first letter to the Corinthians.  He says “we proclaim Christ crucified, a scandal to the Jews and foolishness to Gentiles.” To good Jews like John and the Pharisees and Sadducees, the fact that Jesus died on a cross was a scandal, a stumbling block, an obstacle to their faith in him.  And well before the crucifixion, John is beginning to feel that way already.  He’s beginning to have doubts, to question his faith in the identity of Jesus Christ.

Many times, we measure faith by a lack of questioning, a scarcity of doubt . . . we’re afraid to admit we have them, we think it makes us somehow less Christian . . . but Jesus doesn’t say blessed is the one who doesn’t have doubts, or blessed is the one who doesn’t ask questions, but blessed is the one who doesn’t lose her faith over it . . . and looked at it from that angle, it certainly makes a lot of sense . . . those who don’t lose their faith over the foolishness of the gospel are indeed blessed, they’re indeed happy, to use another translation of the word blessed.  But he doesn’t forbid anyone to ask questions . . .

Well.  After John’s disciples leave, Jesus turns to the crowd and begins to teach them about John . . .“What did you go into the wilderness to see?” he says, “some reed, shaken in the wind?”  Did you go out to see some official like Herod, who is politically pliable, who blows whichever way the wind blows and – not coincidentally – whose coins have the image of a reed?  “What did you go out there to see?  Somebody dressed in soft robes?  You can go to those palaces over there to see that . . . no, really – what did you go out to see?”  And on the third repetition of the question, he gives them the answer, he tells them what they should already know:  Did you go to see a prophet?  Of course John’s a prophet . . . a prophet doesn’t blow every which way like a reed, he doesn’t prance around the palaces in fine robes and sandals . . . of course he’s a prophet . . . but he’s way more than that . . . This is the one about whom God said – through other lesser prophets – “see, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you.”

John not only preached about what was to come, he played a part in them himself.  So he is an object of prophecy as well as a purveyor of it.  He is player in salvation history, not just a proclaimer of it.  And of course, as the baptizer of Jesus, the role he played was crucial – he was a vessel, a conduit, a pipeline, of the grace of God as it settled dove-like upon Jesus.  It is the same role the church plays today . . . the technical term is means of grace: and like the church, that’s what John was: means of grace, a channel for God’s direct action.  Like the church, John preached the message of Christ, about the kingdom of heaven that was surely at hand.  Like the church, John was a sign of that coming kingdom in and of himself, in his actions – baptizing all who came to him – as well as in his proclamation.  John was a prophet and at the same time greater than a prophet, more than a prophet.  As Jesus himself says, among those born of women no one has arisen who is greater than John the Baptist.

And yet, Jesus says, and yet, . . . the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he is.  The least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than John the Baptist, greater than the one crying in the wilderness, greater than the one who baptized Jesus himself in the cold, cold river.  John was a herald of the kingdom, a signpost to it, he was one who participated in its coming, and yet he is less even than the least one there.

And this paradoxical statement is at the heart of who John is, and who Jesus himself is as the once and future Messiah . . . Do you remember reading about the Israelites in the wilderness?  They wandered for forty years – biblical code for a long time – homeless and hungry in the wilderness east of the Jordan.  The Lord had promised their ancestor Abraham the promised land, the land west of the river, and that promise was always in their minds, like a star that travels on before, or a willow-the-wisp that winks and jitters just out of reach . . . and do you remember that when they were finally ready, when it was finally time for them to cross over into the promised land, the Lord told Moses that he could not go . . . the Jordan River – the borderline between the wilderness and the Land of Canaan, between privation and milk and honey – became a line that he could not cross . . .

In a sense, John the Baptist was the same way . . . he came to the border country at a transition time, when the time was ripe or – to use Gospel language – when the time had been fulfilled to make ready the way, to smooth the road, to prepare for the coming of the Kingdom of heaven . . . but he was not a part of that kingdom himself . . . like Moses, he would not cross that border into the new reality . . . John stood on the borderline, in the border country along the river, at a border time, looking into that new kingdom, but he could not go there himself.  Thus even the least of those in the kingdom – you and me, for example – are greater than John.  This greatness is not in being better than him, but in the sense of having advantages, of being rich in what matters.

And so now we can see that – in those border times, along that Jordan River deep and wide – John was a sign of that border in and of himself . . . he had his doubts about the identity of Christ precisely because he is of the old school – he preached about the coming of the new, but could not comprehend its nature . . . as our story tells us, when he saw that Jesus was the Prince of Peace, and not some violent, conquering hero, he couldn’t square it with his own experience, with his own notion of what the Messiah would be.  And in that, he was very much a sign of the world, a sign of the old age, which equates might with right, which says that the ones with the most money, the ones with the most success, are the ones who win.  John was a borderline himself, between the old and the new kingdoms, between the kingdom of the world, and the dawning kingdom of heaven.

And now at this Advent, at this border-time, the world seems to be at one too . . . violence grows daily, we feel massively insecure within our own borders . . . the poor of the world are getting poorer, the rich seem to be getting richer, and society seems to be falling apart around our ears . . . into this border country comes John, baptizing a baptism of repentance, pointing the way to the new way, the new coming . . . and this new way is not like the old, he’s not what the world expects, in some ways, he’s not what we expect, either . . . the Son of God is coming to bring peace not war, to bring healing, not killing, to bring reconciliation, not conflict.  Blessed are we who are not scandalized, who live in that new kingdom, in the time of that coming, surprising Word of God made flesh.  Amen.

Take Heart (Revelation 22:1 - 5)

     There's a new chapter in the Harry Potter saga . . . I know, just when you thought it was safe to go back to the movies, right?  Anyway, this one is called Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and apparently it's about, uh . . . fantastic beasts and, you know, how to locate them, but without even settling foot in the theater, I can tell you where there are a lot of them, and that’s in the Bible, of course.  From the ginormous whale that swallowed up poor old Noah to the Leviathan of Job to four-faced, eye-covered babies (aka cherubim), our scripture is chock-full of fearsome critters.  And I think the folks who saw these things—whether in person or in a visionary dream—used things they know to describe things that were beyond our words, especially that eye-covered baby.

Sometimes, the author put it in words, like Ezekiel, who said he saw “something like four living creatures” or Peter, who saw “something like” a sheet lowered down from heaven, crawling with unclean animals.  Ezekiel and Peter both know it wasn't really four creatures or a bedsheet they were seeing, but you have to describe the indescribable some way . . .

And I think that’s what’s going throughout much of Revelation as well.  But although there are  plenty of fantastic beasts, our lesson this morning is from the last chapter of that book, which makes it the last book of the Bible.  All the pageantry, theology, revelation and history come together right at this point, they converge on this beatific vision of the future.  We're right in the middle of John of Patmos’ final vision, where he imagines the fulfillment of the kingdom of God as a place to settle down, a place to live, symbolized as a glittering city, a new Jerusalem.  And though it isn’t a beast, it's pretty fantastic nevertheless.  An angel is showing him around, and in the passage right before this we're told the city is fifteen hundred miles wide and fifteen hundred long and the same in the vertical dimension.  That’s sure one big city, and whoever heard of one in the shape of a cube, anyway?  And though it's made of gold, like heaven in the children's stories, it's not golden colored, it’s “transparent as glass.”  And it's clear that it's an incredible sight, in the fullest sense of the word, because John cannot credit it, he cannot register it in his mind.  So his mind falls back on what it knows, and likens it to a fabulous town.

And now, as our passage commences, we harken back to the very beginning, in the , beginning, where water flowed out of Eden, to water the entire earth.  Only here it's the river of life, bright as crystal, John says, and has anybody here been to San Marcos, Texas?  Perched on the edge of the Hill Country, a stream with wondrously clear water, that flows from a lake where there are glass-bottom boats, the water is so clear, and when I read this scene that's what I imagine, the river of life, flowing pure and crystalline, containing all the bounty of the waters of earth, bubbling with life, all the aquatic life of all the long eons of their planet, teeming in life’s river, and the waters flow through the Tree of Life, the same tree of life that got us in trouble in the first place, in the beginning, but now, here at the end—the end of the Bible, anyway—here at the end, it’s here for us in our shining abode, and that's the thing it's twelve kinds of fruit nourish us from here on out, to fill us, and there will be no more hunger, no more famine, because far from banishing us from the garden,  the fruit of the Tree of Life will sustain us all our days.

And  he leaves of the tree will heal the nations, there will be no sickness, toil or danger in that bright land, and after all the face-melting, apocalyptic Hollywood endings, John’s vision sees the end of the world, as actually a new beginning, where abundance reigns and everybody has enough to eat, and our bellies will be too full to practice war any more.  And we’ll be sitting around with all the leisure in the world, plucking on harps—we’ll all magically know how to play—and maybe plucking one of those fruits from time and popping it into our mouths like big, fleshy bon-bons.

And I’m thinking “that's ok for the first thousand years or so, but what are we going to do after that?   I mean, even though Couch Potato is my middle name, it sounds a bit of a bore. There oughta be a library or something, or at least a Wal-Mart Supercenter . . .”  Then I remember that it's a vision, a dream, that it's not to be taken literally like the John Hagees and Hal Lindseys of the world do.  And like our own dreams, it's symbolic, where things in the dream are associated in our minds with concepts, and with that in mind, there’s something about a river, something—among many—and that is that it goes somewhere. It is not static.  And even though John’s vision is of universal wellness and great plenty, a river runs through it, and this new Eden—which we're welcome in, this time—is going somewhere as well, it is moving forward into an unimaginable future.

And why not?  I don't think God, who so meticulously created us for moving forward, who inspired an entire book that chronicles our progress,  would some day up and say “ok, that’s enough, y’all stop moving now,” and we wouldn't like that too much, would me?  I mean, humankind is always on the move—some would use say on the make—always looking forward, straining its collective neck to see what’s around the bend.

The French scientist and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called this “the Omega point,” and regarded it not as a static ending but the beginning of a new phase, like how the Apostle Paul might put it, a new creation.  And that name, Omega point, is particularly apt for this morning, in this season of Advent, because of course, it comes from Revelation, as well . . . and whatever happens, we can be sure that Christ, who is after all the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, will be with us, will be in it, all the way.  Amen.

Advent Means to Come (and to Wait) (1 Advent, Year A)

     It’s a cliché to say that Christmas comes sooner and sooner every year, but it sure as all get-out seems that way to me . . . I was hearing Christmas music the day after Halloween this year, and I guess that it’s been that way for a while.  At least it’s not coming before Halloween yet . . . can you imagine hearing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” as you’re opening the doors on some little ghoul—all incisors and fake blood—begging candy off of you?  I can see it now: Zombie Santa and Rudolph the Dead-nosed Reindeer . . . I remember very clearly when I realized it was all over, when I realized that I was unprepared by the early onslaught of Christmas, when Pam and I walked into a mall in Eureka, California the weekend after All Saint’s Day, and there were big old gaudy Christmas packages and bored-looking store clerks dressed like oversized elves.  Ok, maybe the elves weren’t there, but I swear the Christmas packages were.

     Of course, it’s all being driven by the bottom line, and I guess I can’t really blame merchants for trying to bring a little extra cheer into the ol’ pocketbooks.  They do make the bulk of their money at this time of year . . . Black Friday—the day they supposedly break even—was only day before yesterday, so I guess it’s understandable that vendors would try to stretch it all out . . . and I wonder when it all tipped the scales, when a critical mass was reached.  Probably before most of us were born, even though a lot of us can remember a time when it didn’t seem to be this way . . . maybe it goes back to the very first store-bought gift and the first store-owner who realized that “Hmmm . . . there may be a profit to be made here.”  It was the first Norelco, and the Angels did say.

     And it’s even harder on us mainline Christians, who practice Advent . . . although I daresay some of us have succumbed to the secularity—is that even a word?—of the culture.  I know none of you all have, of course, but I, for one, have felt the siren song of Christmas glitter . . . Oh, yes, brothers and sisters, it’s true . . . On my way up Winton last night I was admiring the lights on Shroyer’s nursery . . . And then I caught myself humming—I’m so ashamed—I caught myself humming “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer . . . The extended cut . . . OK, so you can go overboard on the waiting, but I think it’s important to remember that it is Advent,  not Christmas, and that the season has it’s own pleasures and joys and lessons to teach.

     It seems to have been celebrated in some form or another since about four or five-hundred years after Jesus’ birth . . . for its earliest celebrants, it was a season of baptismal preparation.  In various places at various times it has lasted anywhere from two to six weeks, and even today in the Eastern Orthodox tradition it lasts 40 days, from November 15 until Christmas.  If that sounds suspicious, it is—one of Advent’s earliest meanings was a time of fasting and self-examination—a kind of lesser Lent—prior to the coming of the Messiah, and the Eastern Orthodox tradition, it’s still that way.

     The four-Sunday version we have in the Western Church seems to date to Pope Gregory VII in the waning years of the ninth century; Gregory’s the one who made the first Sunday in Advent the start of the Church year.  And it’s meaning has gradually shifted from fasting and penitence to a time of anticipation of and hope for the coming of Christ.  At Advent we long for Christ, we pine for him, we are ready after the long, hot summer, and the long, hot stretch of Ordinary Time, with its emphasis on discipleship and the Christian life, we are ready for a little magic, a little wonder, even a little mystery . . . and my favorite Advent hymns convey that mystery, they’re set in a minor key, O Come, O Come Emmanuel . . . they evoke a long, dark night, and we’re right at its end, in that cold, still time just before dawn, when the midnight spirits have silenced their rattling steps, before the roosters have shaken themselves awake, that’s where we are now, Advent, anticipation, hope and wonder . . .

     Even the word Advent evokes hope . . . it means coming, as in something’s coming, or someone’s coming . . . and Someone certainly is, and the mystery of Advent lies in part in its ambiguity, because the coming it celebrates is multi-valent, multi-faceted . . . Christ has come in the past, and we look back upon that time . . . The second week is traditionally about John the Baptist, the forerunner, the one who was not the Messiah but foretold the coming of Christ.  And we re-member that time, even though none of us were there, we remember it all the same, because to re-member something is to put the members back on it, members as in arms and legs and heads and hearts, to re-member something is to bring it back to life, if only in our minds . . .

     And so the second sense in which Advent means coming is in the present . . . we are expectant, just as our ancestors in the faith were, for the Christ who is coming as if for the first time, in 23 short days . . . Christ who is inaugurating the kingdom of God, who will come among us in a ratty old manger, a mangy little stall, who will come among us as the most fragile thing we can think of, a little, helpless baby . . .

     And it’s tempting to coo over that baby, to want to protect that child, to wrap him against the cold desert nights, to sing him to sleep at night and walk him around when he has the colic . . .  Do we have to nurture the Christ child that has come among us, who will come upon us on December 25?  Of course not . . . that’s God’s responsibility, God’s thing, not ours . . . and yet we constantly, idolatrously think that it’s all up to us, that God’s will won’t be done unless we do everything just right, but Christ is coming whether we do anything or not, whether we prepare or not, even whether we want him or not, Christ is coming in 28 days whether or no.

     And the past and the present collide at Advent, they come together for us every year at this precise point in time . . . and it’s even more poignant for us now, even more pressing that Christ comes, for he is our redemption, our new hope, in our personal lives but no less for our beloved Church.  Christ is our hope, our salvation, our transformation, and if we take our eyes off that fact for even a second, we risk losing our way.  Turn your eyes upon Jesus, the hymn says, fasten them upon him, glue them to his face, for he is coming.

     At Advent, Christ has come and is coming . . . and the third facet in our multivalent view, the third lens in our trifocled vision is that he will come again.  The past and present are fused together, and then joined by the future.  It’s Kai-ros time, God time, where chronological was, is, and will-be are collapsed into simply the now.  And it’s this future, second coming that’s reflected in the scriptures we read this morning . . . Jesus himself speaks of a time when two women will be grinding meal, and one will be taken and one left . . . when two men will be in the field, and one will be taken and one remain . . . keep awake, therefore, wait therefore, for you don’t know when it’s going to be.

     And the Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans, speaks of that metaphorical moment of Advent, the time we are at right now . . . the night is far gone, the day is near . . . and though he expected Christ to return before he died, his words resound to us prophetically at this time of year . . . salvation is nearer to us than anytime before, and so we should live like it, live as if we are anticipating Christ’s return, as if we are anticipating the fulfilling of God’s Kingdom, not just one more shopping day until Christmas . . .

     And that brings us back around to the missing ingredient in it all, the thing that our secular friends don’t understand, that even a lot of Christians don’t get, is that if you anticipate, you by definition wait.  And if you celebrate his arrival before the event itself, if you rejoice before it happens, then there is no anticipation . . . you can’t anticipate what’s already happened in your minds.  And I think we’ve all been there, we’ve all sung Christmas carols till we’re blue in the face, stuffed that same face with Christmas candy, driven around in a frenzy looking for the best light shows, and then when Christmas actually arrives, it’s a let-down.  There’s nothing left to do, because in fact for us, Christ arrived weeks ago, and when he did, it was all over but the shouting.  In another passage from Romans, Paul put it this way:  “Hope that is seen is not hope.  For who hopes for what is seen?   But if we hope for what is not seen, we wait for it with patience.”  And before Paul, the Psalmist said “Be still before the LORD, and wait patiently  . . . indeed, those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land.”

     Why is waiting on God so important?  Is it just a character-building exercise, like we say that suffering  builds strength, or humiliation builds character?  Or is it something more fundamental, more basic to our relationship with God?  Well . . . when we wait, we’re not doing anything, or at least anything pertaining to what we’re waiting for . . . waiting involves nothing but our minds.  When we wait on the Lord, we aren’t trying to do it ourselves.  It forces us to depend on God’s great providence, rather than ourselves, to let things happen in God’s good time, not our own.   It’s an attitude of expectancy, of hope, of prayer . . . waiting is surrender, it’s capitulation, it’s subsuming our will to the will of the one who created us, the one who wants only the best for us, who desires us to be at the top of our game as proclaimers of God’s coming kingdom.

     But what’s the difference, you might ask, between waiting and simply doing what we’ve always done, continuing life in the church?  We’re certainly not going to stop all the things that make us the church, we’re not going to quit worshiping on Sunday mornings the way we’ve always done, praying the way we’ve always prayed . . . we’re not going to quit S.O.U.L. Ministries or Christian Ed . . . We're not going to stop going to Matthew 25, are we?  Of course not, but waiting involves doing something fundamentally different from business as usual, it involves expectancy, it involves trust in God instead of ourselves, it involves an active openness, a vigorous receptivity, an energetic seeking of God’s will.

     And do you get the impression I’m not just talking Advent here?  That I’m talking about something in addition to the coming of Christ in a few short weeks?  Of course I am . . . Advent is a perfect metaphor for our transformation process . . . in a sense Advent is that process, that renewal that comes once a year, it’s revitalization in a nutshell . . . and here we are, at the end of the night, waiting for the dawning of a new day . . . and that new day is coming, we can sense it’s excitement, we can feel it, we can see it in the new outreaches we're going to try, we can hear it as the buzz starts to happen, but the renewal will only happen in God’s good time, we can't hurry it, even though the tendency is to quit all this waiting and jump right in, it feels urgent, after all, it feels like we’re on a precipice, after all, but we have to wait, we have to not sing of its arrival until it has come . . . but as we wait, we prepare, we anticipate, we create a space for God to work, we open ourselves up to the whisperings of God, to the moving of the Spirit.  As Isaiah says, those who wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.  Amen.

Cosmicity (Colossians 1:11 - 20; Consecration Sunday)

     The passage I just read may sound more familiar than most, and the reason is that I read the last six verses a month or so ago, when we spoke of the Jesuit priest, scientist and philosopher Teilhard de Chardin; the passage was right up Teilhard’s alley.  After all, it was he who concluded that we are all connected, bound with golden threads, and Paul speaks of a Christ who holds all things together, is at the center of all of creation, and it's not hard to conclude that what he and Teilhard are speaking of is one and the same.  We are all linked in some mysterious way, and according to Paul, that way is Christ.  As St. Patrick said, in his achingly beautiful Breastplate,

Christ be with me, Christ within me,

Christ behind me, Christ before me,

Christ beside me, Christ to win me,

Christ to comfort and restore me.

Christ beneath me, Christ above me,

Christ in quiet, Christ in danger,

Christ in hearts of all that love me,

Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

The Celts, isolated away in their Irish fastness, preserved this ancient understanding of a Christ-soaked universe, a creation shot-through and permeated with Christ while elsewhere, the very Greco-Roman, neo-Platonic way of understanding the divine slowly took hold.  An understanding that placed God away way up in the sky, impossibly, ineffably separate and apart from us.  The state of this God could be summed up by the Omnis—omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent.

I don't know if Teilhard knew the Breastplate—surely he did—but he would have immediately understood, because it treads the same ground as did his dazzling work.  But I enjoy imagining his response, his astonishment at this ancient pre-figuration, or maybe he would have simply nodded in quiet recognition, saying “Exactly!”

Others have intuited or postulated this connection . . . Carl Jung comes immediately to mind.  He believed that there is a “collective unconscious,” a notion to which his one-time mentor Sigmund Freud reacted with scorn.  For Jung, the collective unconscious explained the phenomenon he called synchronicity, which many of us have experienced at one time or another.  I myself am not all that sensitive to it, but I've had the common experience of knowing who it is on the phone before picking it up, especially when there's a deep connection between the two of us.   But others are more open to it, having the same dream on the same night as their loved ones, or dreaming about things before they happen . . . in linear time, at least.  And once again I imagine Teilhard reacting at this with delight: “Oh ho!  This Jung fellow, he is right!  This collective unconscious is transrational and atemporal, beyond measurement and time, and I wonder . . . Who do we know who fits that bill?”   And this decades before Sting decided to write a song about it.

 The most recent sign that Paul, Patrick, Jung and Teilhard weren't just whistling Dixie comes from Quantum Physics, of all places, and is a result that irritated Albert Einstein so much he called it “spooky action at a distance.”  Quantum theory says that if two particles are entangled, what you do to one has an instantaneous effect on the other, even if it's on a rocket ship at the other side of the universe.  This, of course, is what made Einsteins bust out in hives, because it seems to violate his theory of Special Relativity by exceeding the speed of light.  Just last year, however, physicists definitively proved it to be true, which no doubt has the old boy rolling in his grave.  But once again, I picture the ghost of Teilhard chortling in glee.  Because it looks like we’re all connected, it looks like he was right again . . .

But we don't have to look at spooky action at a distance to see the connections between us, or at least to sense them, to see their effects.  We are connected, we are linked by all sorts of things, all sorts of actions, all kinds of associations.  When we eat an ice cream cone we are being fed by a cow, nourished by the milk, just as if we were her calf.  But that’s not all . . . are we not also connected, are we not also dependent upon the dairy farmer who milked her?  And for that matter, are we not connected to the grass that fed her, and through that to the sunlight and water and nitrogen which made the grass grow?  And through the farmer, we are connected—dependent, really—on her parents, who gave her birth and nourished her?  Thinking about it, I am soon overwhelmed by trying to follow all the connections, and come to the realization that this web is spread over the entire earth and all that is in it.

But wait . . . That's not all!  There’s another kind of connection we can talk about . . . Whenever we help someone, whenever we do for someone, we are connected to them.  Call it a connection of care, an intentional connection of care.  And these connections have become deep in the 78 years of this congregation.  Everyone we've helped, every organization we've supported is connected in this way . . . And we can follow those connections, if we like . . .

It reminds me of that movie they trot out every Christmas . . . you know:  It's a Wonderful Life?  It’s the one where Jimmy Stewart’s character is given a chance to see what his hometown would be like if he’d never have been born . . . and the brother he rescued from drowning is long dead, and all the people on a ship he saves in the War die ‘cause he wasn't there to rescue them.  Uncle Billy is a hopeless drunk, estranged from the family because Stewart’s character isn't around to keep the Building and Loan going.  And because there is no Building and Loan, the entire town has become a hard place, no longer Bedford Falls but Potterville, named after the evil industrialist who controls it.

A lot of lives are influenced by Stewart’s character, in both obvious and not-so-obvious ways. And I wonder: what would Greenhills be of like if this church hadn't been around?  Where would Joanna Himes-Murphy be if S.O.U.L. Ministries wasn't there, if we hadn't been around to help get it going, or support it with our donations?  And what about all the folks we've given rides to the store from Winton House?  We're connected to them, and through them it radiates out to their loved ones and family.  And Matthew 25 and Habitat for Humanity, the list goes on.

All this is not so we can pat ourselves smugly on the back, saying look what good Christians we are, but it's simply to point out what a big hole would be left in this community, and in Cincinnati as a whole, if we hadn’t been here.  And our ministry rolls on, with new outreach planned for the coming year  And so in a few minutes, as we prayerfully pledge for the coming year, I invite you to think about the connections, both visible and invisible, that bind us to the community and the whole world, and think about the vital role this church plays.  Amen.

Jerusalem Blues (Luke 21:5 - 19)

     Tom Dorsey’s father was a minister and his mother a piano teacher.  He learned to play blues piano as a young man, and after studying music formally in Chicago, began to play rent parties under a variety of names.  Soon he was recording music, and in the mid-20s began to record gospel as well.  In 1928, the height of his secular career was the release of a raunchy blues song, the name of which is best left unmentioned here, which ended up selling seven million copies.  Not too long after that, he played at the National Baptist Convention and became the band-leader of two churches, effectively ending his secular career.

In the meantime, he had married a fine woman named Nettie, and she became pregnant with their first child.  In August of 1932, he left her at home in Chicago and traveled to be the featured soloist at a large revival in St. Louis.  After the first night, Dorsey received a telegram that said simply, “Your wife just died.” He raced home and learned that she had given birth to a son before dying in childbirth. The next day his son died as well, and he buried them in the same casket.

That kind of suffering is difficult to comprehend, unless you’ve been through it, and I suspect it was no different for Jesus’ disciples.  They'd come to the temple and were gawking at it and all—my, what big stones you have!—and Jesus laid a bombshell on them: “Uh . . . guys?  I hate to tell you this, but all these things you see?  There'll come a time when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”  And I can imagine the amazement, maybe even a little disbelief, because even though it wouldn't be complete for another thirty years, the Temple was one impressive structure.  The inner sanctum, the holiest of holies itself, was surrounded by successive courtyards, with all kinds of columns and such, and its outer wall soared over the Kidron valley, culminating in the pinnacle, where the devil took Jesus during his testing.

It was one imposing building, all right, so I don't blame the disciples if they were just a tad skeptical . . . “Teacher, when will this be?” they asked (maybe they wanted to make sure they were out of the way) “What will be the sign?” And we have to pause and make sure we understand exactly what Jesus is talking about.  When the disciples ask “when will this be,” the “this” they’re talking about is the destruction of the Temple, not the end times, at least in the passage we read.  He's talking about the destruction of the Temple, which we know occurred in 70 C.E., about forty years later.  It's understandable we might think it's about the end times, because in the other two versions of the story, in Mark and Matthew, it is, he's talking about the second coming, but not here.  Luke, writing about fifteen or twenty years after the destruction, perhaps heard the story differently or edited it differently, we don't know, but here he's predicting the Temple’s doom.

And they ask for a sign, and he warns them not to trust anyone who gives them one, who says they know when it's going down:  “Beware that you’re not led astray; for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’ Do not go after them.”  Don’t listen to them, he says, don't expend your time and energy following them, because they will not know.  There are going to be wars and insurrections, but don't be scared when you hear of them, ‘cause the temple’s end isn't going to happen just then.  Nations will rise against nations, kingdoms against kingdoms, there’ll be famines and earthquakes, and dreadful portents in the skies.

And the thing is, all these events took place in the run up to the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple.  Recall that the reason for it all was a Jewish insurrection against their Roman overlords; by one count, there were fifteen would-be leaders, people who said “I am he,” who tried to gain a following in the decades before the destruction.  And four emperors succeeded one another during that period, accompanied by insurrection and violence  Over in Acts, Luke himself writes of famines and an earthquake, and the historian Josephus describes  signs in the heavens in the form of a sword-shaped star and a comet, both of which appeared during the burning of the temple.

But Jesus isn’t finished yet; he begins to get personal, saying that before all this happens, before the final invasion and burning, Jesus’ followers will undergo great persecution, great suffering:  you will be arrested, he says, handed over to synagogues and prisons, and brought before kings and governors because of my name.  You will be betrayed by family members, by parents and siblings, aunts and uncles, and some of you will be put to death.  And once again, Luke describes these things over in Acts, and this kind of thing can happen during  times of upheaval, times of rebellion.  Family members split by the conflict turn on one another—recall that it happened in the Civil War—and neighbors turn neighbors over to the police.  All of this can occur in the run-up to rebellion.

But right in the middle of his description, Jesus says something odd: if they are persecuted, if they are arrested, it will give them “an opportunity to testify.”  An opportunity to testify . . . What in the world could he mean by that?  Does he expect them to start preaching to their persecutors, to try to convert their captors in the midst of their extreme suffering?

In Thomas Dorsey’s grief, he withdrew into himself and refused to write or play music for a long time, so long that his friends and relatives despaired of him ever coming out.  Then one day, a feeling of peace washed over him, and a tune he swore he'd never heard before began to run through  his head.  He went to his piano and began to play, and before the night was out, he'd written lyrics and recorded what would become his best known hymn, beloved by millions.  “Precious Lord, take my hand, lead me on, let me stand; I am tired, I am weak, I am worn . . .”  The hymn was surely his testimony about a God who could be called on to stand by us in times of suffering and pain.

 Jesus is saying that suffering is an opportunity to testify, to witness to the Good News, by means of a steadfast reliance on the mercy of God.  Tom Dorsey was paralyzed with grief, he was suffering something fierce, but from it came a powerful witness to faith in God.  Jesus predicts extreme suffering for his disciples, yet in the midst of it all, they will have an opportunity to express—in words if necessary—their trust in God.

Does this mean God is the author of suffering?  Does God engineer suffering so that the Gospel might be spread?  Of course not, as Paul might say.  Jesus doesn’t even hint at that, despite the ancient belief that God causes everything, good and bad.  He just describes what's going to happen, and notes that it will be an opportunity for witness.  And don't worry about what you're going to say or do, don't study up in it, ‘cause whatever it is, it’ll come from the Spirit, that is, it'll come from the heart, which is where the Spirit resides.

And of course, that was what Tom Dorsey experienced, wasn't it?  A melody came to him, out of the blue, and though it had been written by George Allen nearly a century before, it seemed he'd never heard it before, and maybe he hadn’t, maybe it was brought to him by the Spirit, or perhaps it came from some deep, long-forgotten memory, but what did it matter?  I'd wager that either way, it was the work of the Spirit of God.

But testimony is not the only thing in play here.  Jesus tells them that some of them will be put to death, then turns around and says that not a hair of their heads will perish.   And of course he’s talking about the imperishable part, that part that is union with God: “By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

Richard Rohr defines suffering as whenever we’re not in control, whenever we are powerless, helpless before an overwhelming force.  And we can see that in the suffering Jesus’ predicts for his followers: they had no control over what would happen to them, they would be in the grip of irresistible power.  That was what it was like for Dorsey as well, he was powerless to save his wife, powerless to alter the outcome, he wasn't even there.  And of course, that is how it feels when a loved one dies, or when when we lose a job, or are persecuted for our race or sexual orientation or religious beliefs.  We get a churning in our guts, a  feeling that we cannot do anything about it, that's it is hopeless.

Rohr writes that times like these, times of intense suffering, can also be times of transformation, of spiritual advancement.  Suffering, he says,  is a primary spiritual teacher “more than any Bible, church, minister, sacrament, or theologian.”  When we are inside of suffering, we have a much stronger possibility of surrendering our ego and “opening up to the whole field of life.”  In other words, we are much more open to being led.

I think that's what Jesus means here by “gaining our souls.”  I don't think he's talking about the sweet bye-and-bye, about what happens to us after we die.  He's talking about the deepening of our spirituality, a coming closer to God in the here and now.  The mystics speak of the spiritual journey as going inward, drawing nearer to that still, small space within where dwells the spark of God.  Through suffering and pain, we can further this closeness, this awareness, this absolute union with God.  In their words, we can gain our souls.  Amen.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Luke 20:27 - 38)

     The first thing I want to do is apologize for the title . . . Seven Brides for Seven Brothers . . . I can remember seeing that movie musical as a kid, with Howard Keel dancing around with his six other great, big, strapping brothers in lumber-jack boots, and they send away for some mail-order brides to come way up into the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth—I think it was Seattle – and they adjust to life in this wilderness and, of course, find true love . . . but I’m sorry for the title, I just couldn’t resist, even though it doesn’t really fit . . . there are seven brothers in our passage, all right, but only one bride, and that would seem really strange in the 19^th-Century wilderness, where you could order up a woman from a catalog, for Pete’s sake, but undoubtedly would be scandalized at the thought of a wife being passed down like an inherited tea set from one brother to the next . . . different strokes for different centuries, I guess.

The practice described in our passage, of brothers marrying their dead brother’s wife, is called “Levirate marriage,” and it was common in the ancient middle east.  It was described in Deuteronomy and Genesis– our Old Testament – and that’s what the Sadducees cite: “Teacher, Moses says that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother.”  Sadducees were a faction within Judaism that, as Luke puts it, said “there is no resurrection.”  The reason they said this was that there is no mention of it in the Torah, the first five books of what Hebrew scriptures, and the Sadducees held that they were the only books that counted.  The Pharisees, on the other hand, believed that the writings in the Torah were subject to ongoing interpretation, particularly in light of writings like the Psalms and prophets.  In particular, they accepted the book of Daniel, which talks about the angels Gabriel and Michael, and has one of the earliest mentions of the resurrection of the dead.  So, as weird as it sounds, Jesus was aligned with the Pharisees on this point.

 The Sadducees’ question comes just after Jesus gives an unassailable answer to another question, the one about the paying taxes, and they try to spin it out to absurd lengths, the better to embarrass him.  “What if there were seven brothers” – and of course, seven is a special number, the perfect number, and their question is just that – perfectly ridiculous – “but just what if . . . the first brother married, and then something happened, he got killed in a tragic bagel factory explosion or something, and he died childless, then the second married her, and he fell in a wine vat and drowned—childless again—and the third brother married her, and guess what?  he died childless . . . and even after Ann Rule wrote a true crime novel about it (just kidding) it went on and on until all seven had married her and all seven had died childless, then in the resurrection” – and you can almost hear the sneer in their voices – “in this resurrection you talk about, whose wife will the woman be?”

And of course, they really don’t want to know the answer – like a lot of religious folks, they think they already do . . . I was reading a newsletter from John Spong—he’s an Episcopal Bishop who makes a tidy living writing inflammatory books from a relentlessly modernist – not post-modernist, as some claim – viewpoint, books with titles like “Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Virgin Birth . . .” and “Living in Sin?  A Bishop Rethinks Human Sexuality.”  And one of the latest is: “Resurrection: Myth or Reality?  A Bishop Rethinks the Origins of the Christian Faith,” and in this newsletter I read, he’s complaining about Tom Wright, an Anglican Bishop who’s a biblical scholar, and he’s running down Wright and getting pretty scornful about it, and I’m thinking 2000 years later and we’re still doing this?  It seems there will always be folks who’ve already made up their minds on this issue, thank you very much, and on a host of others besides . . .

But Jesus isn’t falling for it, he's not going to guess how many angels can dance on a pin, and responds to it by redefining it, by putting it into a completely different light . . . he says that only those who “belong to this age” marry and are given in marriage . . . marriage only matters now, in the present age, not in “that” age, by which he means the kingdom of God, where the dead have been resurrected . . . in that age, in the resurrection from the dead, they’ll neither marry or be given in marriage . . . and why not?  Because they cannot die anymore, they don’t need to have sexual relations anymore, they’re like angels, they’re children of God . . . and he doesn’t mean they have wings and haloes and flap around heaven all day and night.  What he means is that those who belong to that age are immortal, and therefore they don't need marriage anymore, they don't need to replenish their numbers by establishing stable family units organized around a sexual relationship.  The folks in that age live forever, they’re not decimated by famine or pestilence or war . . . marriage is therefore an anachronism.

Now.  This may or may not strike you as fortunate . . . we’ve all got pet theories about what it’s going to be like “after we die” . . . one song goes “I don’t know, but I’ve been told, streets of heaven are paved with solid gold” . . . some say that all the people we’ve ever loved will be there . . . others that whatever you need to be happy will be there, if you need your little dog fluffy, then there she’ll be . . . and I can imagine that to some folks, who’ve been in committed, loving, relationships for a long time, this may sound great.  They love their marriage, and wouldn’t want to it to be any other way, and the notion that theirs might not exist in that age might be troubling.

On the other hand, those trapped in loveless relationships might welcome being let off the hook . . . their idea of heaven might be that they finally get out from under their abusive, controlling spouses.  But the point of our story is not how it’s going to be different, but that it is . . . the new age, where the dead are risen from the dead, will not be the same old same old . . . Life after the resurrection – whatever it is, whenever it is, however it works – will not simply be a continuation of life before.

I think it’s a natural part of being human to want to know how things are gonna be . . . we don’t like uncertainty very much, so we pore over books and articles – and there are tons that have been written on the subject, from deep scholarly tomes to light fluff that’s nothing much more than wish fulfillment – but we pore over them nevertheless, and though there’s nothing much wrong with it, think what would happen if we took all the money we spent on it, all the time and energy worrying over it, and plowed it back into mission?  Into the service of our risen Lord?

All I know is that if anybody tries to tell you “this is the way it’s gonna be,” either at the second coming, or in the age to come, you’d better check your wallets . . . And in truth, I think it best to live with and recognize the mystery of the unknown, the mysterion as it’s called in Greek . . . Paul likens life in this age to a childhood, where we see in a mirror, dimly . . . but, he says, in the resurrection “we will see face to face.  Now I know only in part,” he says, “then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

In our story, Jesus gives us just a little taste of that mystery . . . he affirms that those who live in that age cannot die anymore, that they are immortal. Like angels they are children of God.  And he’s shown that the Sadducees’ argument is based on a false notion – that the coming age is a continuation of the present age – he proceeds to give a biblical argument for the resurrection, using arguments from their own Hebrew bible: Didn’t God say to Moses “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?”  And we all know that God is the God of the living, right?  I mean, the dead can’t have a God, can they?  Because they’re dead . . . thus, there must be a resurrection, there must be immortality of some kind.  Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, though they have died, must be somehow alive, or about to be alive . . . And Jesus hoists the religious authorities on their own petard.  He gives the Sadducees, who only believed in the first five books of Moses, an argument from their own scripture.

And in so doing, he bests the cream of the religious crop on their own turf . . . they’d come to him with an absurd argument, designed to show him up as a piker, a hick from Galilee who lacked any authority in scriptural matters.  But in the end, the joke’s on them . . . because at the end of the day, the only authority left standing is Jesus himself.  Some scribes standing nearby – onlookers to the Sadducees’ humiliation – say it outright, like a Greek chorus commenting on what just happened: “Teacher,” they say, “you have spoken well.”  And nobody dares ask him any more embarrassing questions, for he’s bested them all.

Like all these stories about Jesus answering trick questions – and this was the third one in a row that Luke describes – like all the stories, it shows Jesus as a master of debate, of the scholarly riposté, a kind of super-rabbi who takes no prisoners.  But it also tells us something about his opponents as well . . . the Sadducees are so wrapped up in their argument, so tied up in the ins and outs of levirate marriage, that they can’t see the new age when it’s standing right there in front of their nose . . . for that’s where it was, of course, personified as Jesus of Nazareth.  They can’t see that God’s doing a new and transformative thing, that there is a fundamental discontinuity between this age and the next.

That’s why all our views on the resurrection are – in the end – inadequate.  We can’t just take all the good things we know, raise them to the n^th degree, and expect that to be what the Kingdom of God is like . . . we can’t take something we love here in this age – like cars or movies – and say that in the coming age we’ll have thousands of cars or all the films ever made . . . it just isn’t that way.  In the age to come, in the resurrection of the dead, all bets are off, God will do a new thing, and there’s no getting around it.

      But if this story is about discontinuity, if it’s about the impossibility – and undesirability – of projecting all our cares and worries and expectations upon the next age, one thing is certain.  God’s love will not be frustrated, not even by death.  It will not be denied, even though all the forces of evil seem lined up against it, though all the wars and rumors of wars, all the starvation, all the terrorist attacks eat at our very souls, God will triumph.  Even though we have no idea – really – of what the Kingdom of God is now and will become, even though all we know is that it will be different, one thing will never change: the eternal love of God.  So be not afraid.  Amen.

Saints Alive! (All Saints Sunday; Hebrews 12:1 - 2, Romans 8:26 - 39)

     Today is All Saints Sunday, but I can't resist talking about Halloween . . . It's tomorrow, you know, and we as a church are going to do something a bit different, we’re going to gather on the sidewalk at the far limits of our property to meet and greet and serve some members of our community.  Actually, it'll be technically off our property, on the sidewalk right-of-way, and that is symbolic, kind of: for millennia, it’s been kind of like Field of Dreams—when we built churches, they would come.  It was enough for churches to just throw up their shingles and air for people to show up.  Now, for a variety of reasons, that is no longer the case, and both the Paul Nixon resources and the Presbytery effort, Transformation 2.0, emphasize the same thing: getting out into the community where the people are, building relationships with our neighbors where they are, rather than expecting them to come to us, to become like us.

And so, it's symbolically important that our Halloween ministry is—even if only technically—out into the neighborhood, because that's where the people are.  Of course, going into the neighborhood and meeting the people—not just people like us, our age and our income level—is dangerous, because it might actually do something to us, it might subject us to change, and nobody likes that, especially as we get a little older.  Not that any of y’all are getting that way, but I certainly am . . .

Anyway.  Enough about Halloween.  Let's talk about the day after.  All Saints Day.  That's what we're celebrating today, ‘cause it's the closest Sunday to it . . . Our ancestors in the faith, the saints we’re celebrating today, a lot of them didn't have to do that . . . They had church services available every day, and in fact, for most Roman Catholics, All Saints Day is a day of obligation, meaning you must go.  Of course, I suppose a lot of folks don't, just like a lot skip other special times and seasons, as Paul called them.

 Even so, in some heavily Catholic countries, All Saints Day is a national holiday, and that gives it a weight that it doesn't have when you share it with another special day—if you look at our Presbyterian planning calendar, you'll notice that Reformation Sunday is celebrated today as well, which, it seems to me, gives saints a raw deal.  After all, for us, saints aren’t just those who've gone through a lengthy process of canonization, but anyone who has lived and died in the faith.  And where would we be without them?  Where would we be without all those first- and second-century Christians, who kept the faith alive when it was illegal to be followers of The Way?  Where would we be without all of those saints who met in one another’s homes, no costly buildings for them, no expecting their neighbors to come to them . . . they spread the faith by going out to their neighbors, relating to them in glistening networks of service and faith.

And where would we be without those faithful, anonymous scribes, who copied hand by hand by hand the letters of Paul, and the Gospels and Hebrews and Revelation, long before the advent of movable type?  Or the equally anonymous desert fathers and mothers who maintained and advanced the contemplative tradition in the face of increasing Romanization and increasingly rigid structures of the church?  Or the centuries of anonymous monks, who were their spiritual children, and who even today point the way to what caring communities  of Christ can be?

Our brief passage from Hebrews says it all . . . It speaks of the Saints as a great cloud of witnesses that surround us all, and in the embrace of that mighty cloud—to use the poetic line from the old hymn—in the embrace of that mighty cloud of witnesses, we are empowered to run the race that is set before us, the race of Christ’s disciples, spreading the gospel in thought, word and deed.  But the mighty cloud of our passage is not composed of Christians but Israelite heroes.  But they are our ancestors in the faith, they are our Saints every bit as much as they were to the author of Hebrews. That writer speaks of  Abraham, Jacob and Moses.  Rahab, Gideon and Samson.  David and Samuel and the prophets.  All surrounding those first Christians, all supporting them and enabling them to run that long and sometimes difficult race.

And notice that Hebrews uses the present tense, as in we, are surrounded by a mighty cloud of witnesses, a great cloud of saints.  There is a mystical, spiritual connection between us, between all who have gone before.  Whether in heaven “up above” as we often picture it or literally around us as Hebrews has it, we are somehow connected, somehow continuous with those who have gone before.  The Franciscan mystic and theologian St. Bonaventure pictured our souls—that part of us which is eternal—coming from God and returning there after death, after we have run that race.  But if God is within us, if Christ holds us together, if the Holy Spirit dwells within as the scripture portrays, then our loved ones—though in a spiritual form, a form too subtle to reliably perceive—our loved ones, along with all our faith ancestors, do surround us, and not only that, we are infused with them as well.

Can you picture it?  Can you feel it?  Our forebears in the faith, our forebears of this church, related by a common thread, with us in spiritual essence right now, continuing to support our work in ways that we can only imagine,  adding their ineffable aid to what we do.  The people without whom this church would not have survived ten years, never mind seventy eight, who worked tirelessly at the many tasks it takes to keep a congregation afloat.  These are saints every bit as much as those first, anonymous Christians, every bit as much as Teresa or Francis or Augustine.

But wait . . . there’s more!  Throughout his writing,  Paul—canonized himself—makes it clear that the saints, the blessed ones, are all who do Gods work, past and present.  Saints that even as we sit here work to feed hungry people on the mean streets of Cincinnati.  Who write great, inspirational hymns of the faith.  All who keep the great gears of God’s universal gathering turning, who love it's earthly form in spite of its undeniable frailties.  To Paul, we are the saints, all of us, and in the great passage I read, he describes the relationship we have to God through the Spirit who, he writes, “intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” with “sighs too deep for words.”

And it’s clear that the road might be rocky, the race might be long, but our God is with us, with all the mighty saints, those who surround us, whispering and soothing and communing, past, present and future, because if God is with us, who can be against us?  If the Spirit fills us and dwells within us, how can we ultimately fail?  And so as in a few minutes we remember just a few of the many saints who have enriched our lives, let's expand your consciousness to take in all the many millennia of ancestors in the faith, all those of that mighty cloud, in the flesh and spirit, who continually nourish and sustain us in our own race.  Amen.