Mountain Music (Matthew 17:1 - 9)

     When I was a boy, we lived in Kansas . . . a flat, windswept land that brimmed with wheat and corn and blue-gills, that sprouted cattle on the hillsides, and in the summer it’d be hot and sultry, and my parents would head Northwest out of Wichita through Hutchinson – it was back before the freeway – and we’d make a bee-line for the Colorado border.  I remember the towns along the way, you actually went through them in those days, and when we got to Goodland – stark white silos etched against the sky – we knew we were almost there, and coming down off the highlands into Limon you can begin to make them out – first Pikes Peak’s black slab, then the rest materialize like smoke on the horizon, and at Limon we’d pick up U.S. 40 and head on into Denver and then up into the mountains, and stay in a little motel just East of Berthoud Pass.  The air would be cool and thin, and the trees would change shape, and up on Trail Ridge Road you could see forever . . . up in that thin air, with the fierce hot sun, you felt close to heaven, close to God . . .

And of course, it’s no accident that Moses got his marching orders up in the mountains, and Elijah met God there . . .  and Jesus went up onto a mountain to pray . . . and the symbolism wouldn’t have been missed on Matthew’s readers any more than it is on us . . . you are closer to God in the mountains, or so it is believed, and odd things happen there as well . . . weird things go on in those hollers, strange women with second sight, apparitions walking the moonlit desert . . . the transfiguration itself – not exactly something you see every day – happens up there in the rarified air.  It’s a perfect setting for a little piece of holy theater, and of course, that’s what it is, complete with special effects – the mountain-top location, the whiter-than-white raiment, and over in Mark, though not in this version, an impressive black cloud.  It’s vivid and real, you can almost smell it, taste it . . . think about all the times you’ve been in the mountains . . . the sharp pine-tang, the catching of your breath in the not-quite-thick-enough air . . . if you get high enough, it’s hard to get enough oxygen, and you have to work hard, and you’re huffing and puffing from the climb up to the top, and then Bam! all of a sudden, your beloved teacher is changed, he’s transmogrified, and you don’t quite know what hit him – or you – and the white of his raiment burns your eyes, it’s so bright, it’s whiter than anyone on earth could get them, whiter than the best five-star clothes-washer could do, and you can’t hardly see it’s so bright, but you can just make out – by shielding your eyes – a couple of other figures there with Jesus . . . yes!  Sure enough, it’s those old mountain men Moses and Elijah, and they’re talking to Jesus, just as sure as you and I are talking, just as sure as I’m standing here in front of you.

Now, it’s pretty obvious what you’re supposed to think, when you look back on it, but at the time you’re babbling, you just don’t know what to think or say, because here’s Jesus talking to the two greatest prophets of all, and not just a cat, but a whole animal act’s got your tongue, and instead of saying nothing like you should, instead of keeping your mouth shut—and I can certainly understand that—you blurt out some idiocy about making three little huts – you could just shoot yourself – three shelters, one for Moses and one for Elijah and one for Jesus – you actually name them one by one, and you’re mortified that it’s all you can think of.

And looking back on it, it’s easy to see what the tableau meant, it’s easy to see what you’re supposed to get out of the set piece . . . here Jesus is, hobnobbing with Moses and Elijah, three peas in a pod, it’s clear what the take-home lesson is – Jesus is one of a kind with those other two, he’s right up there with the two greatest prophets in Israelite history, in fact he is a prophet – here’s this guy you’ve been running around all over Judea with, doing miracles, healing the lame, riling up every religious authority you can find, so you know he’s special, and now you know just how much.  And you just had to open your mouth . . .

And . . . from somewhere comes a voice, and you know who it is without being told, and it’s funny . . . for years afterward, if somebody asked you to describe it – and you were asked, over and over – you had a hard time doing it.  Somebody’d say “Was it loud, and booming?” and you’d say “No . . . not really” . . . “Well, then, was it soft and musical” and you’d scratch your head and say “Not exactly,” and the truth is, you have no idea what it sounded like, you just know it was God . . . whether it was loud or soft or harsh or musical, whether it crashed through the heavens like thunder, or floated like a gossamer thread, you couldn’t say to save your life . . . like God, it just was.

The voice says “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”  And the words prick at your memory, at something floating around the edges of your mind, and then you have it . . . you’ve heard that one other time a voice from heaven identified Jesus that way, and that was at his baptism, and although you weren’t there to hear it, you know it by heart, it’s been passed down to you from the source . . . when John the Baptizer poured water over Jesus’ head, a dove fluttered down out of the heavens.  That time the voice had said – directly to Jesus! – “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”  And you can’t help but catch the drift . . . this time, God’s talking directly to you, you and the other disciples . . .

But there’s one addition: God admonishes you to listen.  Here you are, hiking all over Galilee, observing miracles and wonderments, witnessing healings and exorcisms, seeing the lepers made clean and the paralyzed walk, and now you’re being asked to listen, to hear . . . in the aftermath of the most dazzling display of special effects you’ve ever seen – Spielberg would be proud—you’re told to listen.

Then the house-lights come up and Jesus is alone, alone on his mountain stage, and you have no doubt now that Jesus is the man, he’s the only man, entirely sufficient in his alone-ness, he diagnoses your discomfort, knows you said something stupid, but doesn’t call you on it—he just tells you to get up and not be afraid.  And as you pick your way down the mountain path, as you go from the mountain-top to the valley below, you do it, you listen, and the first words out of Jesus’ mouth tell you to . . . tell no one about any of this, not one solitary word, even though you’re bursting to run all over Palestine with the news; you’re told not to say anything until the Son of Man had risen from the dead, and here’s that rising from the dead stuff again, and you didn’t get it the first time, and you don’t get it now . . . but you don’t rebuke the master again like you did before . . . that just made him mad . . . and suddenly, the mountaintop is behind you and the heady time is past, and the land down here seems gray in comparison, flat and mundane, compared to the glory you just saw . . .

      After my family moved to Seattle, my dad and I hooked up with a group of musicians centered around a guy named Dick Dice, who was an autoharp player – and I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking of those instruments music teachers strum, or at least they used to strum – do they do that any more? – anyway, this was an Appalachian autoharp, big and golden, and it had a sweet sound forged in the Tennessee mountains, played by the likes of Mother Maybelle Carter and her husband A.P. . . . and we played and sang this mountain music for years until we lost touch with Dick – and each other, really – and so I was thrilled with the movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” which is wry and funny and made a ton of money, but more important, it revitalized old-time mountain music, which sent us fans a-wallowing around in hog heaven . . . it’s beautiful music, at its best high and ethereal . . . it sounds like it comes from the mountains . . . and it’s strongly spiritual, too – mention of God is never far from the surface.

And the movie begat the CD and the CD begat the touring show of under-appreciated and under-paid musicians.  It was called the “Down From the Mountain” tour which is a good name . . . after all, the music comes from Appalachian ridges and hollers, it’s formed there, shaped there . . . it holds all the wistful yearning and hope of that place . . . and it’s been brought down to the flat-landers of New York and L.A., to the movie folk and the record-industry people, and then on to folks like you and me . . . for though it was forged in the high places, pounded into being through lives on the brink, it was brought down from the mountain to us, so we could relish it and treasure it and sing it ourselves.

And after the music of God on that mountain – this is my Son, the beloved . . . listen to him! – Jesus leads the disciples back down, because that’s where that music is needed, that’s where it was for.  Their mission is down in the valleys, down where the lost sheep live, not up in the lonely heights.  Peter wants to commemorate the occasion, he wants to put up shelters, maybe stay up there awhile to bask in the glory, but he doesn’t understand that the Christian life is not a mountaintop experience, it’s to be lived in the world, with the people we’ve come to serve.  Although the mountains may be right for visions, though they may be perfect to make haunting, beautiful music, it’s down in the valley where the people are, down from the mountain where the work is, where the mission of the church is.

In the past, I’ve studied Benedictine spirituality, and one reason it appeals to me is that it’s very much a spirituality of the world, of the daily grind.  Even though it was developed for life in the cloister, life in a monastic community, it never forgets the larger picture, the poor of the world, the wanderers.  Likewise, it never forgets the other, the people we come into contact with in day-by-day existence.  It is the Christian vocation, Benedict says, to greet all with grace and humility, and never to begin conflict.  It is the Christian vocation, he says, to “relieve the lot of the poor, ‘clothe the naked, visit the sick’ and . . . help the troubled and console the sorrowing.” Hardly the picture most of us have of monks, squirreled away in some dark hole somewhere, fingering their rosaries.  But Benedict believed that the place of the Christian was to be apart from the world, yet involved in it . . . to be set aside for the work of God, which is in and for the world.

Once a week, we climb the mountain . . . once a week we come in through those doors back there and into the palpable presence of God.  And while we’re here – if we are lucky – we are pointed to the transcendent beauty of Christ, whiter and more dazzling than anything on Earth . . . we hear that lovely mountain music, that word from God, we hear it sung, we hear it prayed, and we hear it preached, and it’s the task of Christian worship – one of them, anyway – to point us to that white-hot reality, to direct our attention where it belongs, to the life and death and terrifying beauty of Christ.  “This is my son, my beloved!”  But we can’t stay on the mountain any more than those first disciples could . . . and whenever we’re tempted to camp out here, to circle the wagons and build those little huts Peter wanted, Jesus will remind us that our work is out there, it’s back out through those doors and in our community, in our nation and in our world.  Our work is among our neighbors, both those we know and those we don’t . . . here on the mountaintop, we’re given the word, and it’s up to us to use it properly and well when we come down.

But you know what?  Jesus doesn’t stay up on the mountain, either.  Just like with James and Peter and John, he comes down with us. When we go through those doors, he's right there beside us.  He comes into our homes and our streets and marketplaces, walking alongside us, guiding us in the right thing to do.  His voice is everywhere, in the trees and the wind and the rain . . . it’s in the dog, howling in the night and the cat rubbing against your leg.  It’s in the homeless guy who knocks on your door and the SUV that cuts you off on the way to work . . . Jesus speaks in all these things, and in all these ways . . . Jesus is God’s beloved Son . . . all we have to do is listen to him.   Amen.

Relationship Advice (Matthew 5:21 - 37)

     This is our third week of readings from the Sermon on the Mount, and one of the keys to understanding them is to remember that it is a sermon.  Our usual method of preaching it is to divide it up into manageable chunks, and the lectionary is no different . . . Thus, the first reading, two weeks ago, covered the beatitudes, the bless day and it described how things are and how they will be in the just rule of God, which in Matthew is called the kingdom of heaven.  Last week’s passage described how his followers were supposed to be in that kingdom, they were to be salt—preserving, flavoring, spicing—and light—illuminating, warming, and enabling color to be perceived.

And though we didn't talk about it, it ended with Jesus describing the relationship of his teaching to that of the law—I come not to abolish the law but fulfill it—and then a warning: “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”  And though we always think of Jesus standing on a mountain proclaiming the Sermon—and the Monty Python comedy troop had fun imagining what folks at the back of the crowd might’ve heard—the entire thing is to his disciples.  Right at the beginning, he sees the crowds and heads up on to the mount, and his disciples gather ‘round and he teaches them.  The Sermon is aimed at believers, his disciples, not the crowd, not everyone.   It is instruction about how it is in the kingdom and how to behave in it.

So in this segment of the Sermon, Jesus is illustrating (a) what he means when he says he's come to fulfill the law and (b) how his followers are supposed to live that fulfillment so that they are more righteous even than the Pharisees, who after all live for that sort of thing.  And to make sure we get it, he uses a formula: you have heard that it was said X, but I tell you Y.  The law says X but I say Y.  In other words, the Y part is how he has fulfilled that portion of the law, and we should keep fulfillment in mind as we read them.

Let’s look at his first example: “You have heard that it was said: ‘You shall not murder;’ and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.'  But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire.”  If we put aside the hyperbolic “hell of fire” thing—suffice it to note that Jesus is probably not referring to what we think of as Hell—putting that aside, you can see that he’s made it seemingly more stringent.  Not just murderers are subject to judgment, but those who are angry with a fellow Christian are as well, or those who insult another . . .

Again we need to put aside that “judgment” thing, except to say that he doesn’t specify (a) what the judgment will be, (b) when the judgment will occur or (c) who the judgment will be by.  And if we do, maybe we can notice that Jesus doesn’t make it tougher so much as he broadens it, or makes it more full.  It may be that he “completes” it, which is one of the constellations of meaning of the Greek word pleroow, translated in the Sermon as “fulfill.”

And how does he broaden it?  He includes more than just killing someone . . . he extends the Ten-commandment proscription against murder to unresolved anger and enmity.  He gives an entire mini-discourse on relationships between members of the body of Christ.  If you are angry with a brother or sister, and insult a brother or sister, and say “you fool,” you will be subject to judgment.  This is about relationships, and everything he quotes damages them.  They damage personal relationships, making it harder for folks to get along.   But of equal importance is that they make it harder for a community to function.  Animosity and bad blood impede the mission of the Body of Christ.

Here’s the upshot: if you’re offering your gift at the altar, which is an ancient way of saying “if you’re at worship,” and you know that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar—in other words, stop your worship—and first be reconciled to that person, and then come to worship. Enmity between members of a congregation spoils worship, it poisons it, and worship is the food-source, the nourishment of the body of Christ.  If you think about your own experience, you can see it’s true: if there is bad blood between you and another member, it can be hard to even show up on a Sunday morning, much less worship with any integrity.  But if we make it up with him or her, our souls are cleansed, and we can enjoy our time with God once again.

And notice that Jesus doesn’t say if your sister or brother has something against us and it’s our fault, in fact he lays no blame at all . . . he just says to do it.  It doesn’t matter whose fault it is, we’re just supposed to do it.  There is a strain of humility needed here, as there is in all of these examples.  We are to reconcile with one another not only for our own good—everybody knows how good that can feel—but also for the greater good of the worshipping community.  We’ve all been in worship where you can feel the enmity, feel the division in the air . . . well, Jesus is implying, you might as well not even bother if that is the case, you might as well not do it, because it is not doing you or the body of Christ any good.

Then Jesus makes an interesting move, as we preachers say: he expands it to outside the community, telling his followers to settle with an accuser—is it the same brother or sister from the previous verse, or an outsider?  At any rate, Jesus tells us to settle on the way to the courthouse, presumably in front of the entire community.  Not only does this make sense from a personal viewpoint, keeping one out of jail, but from a witness viewpoint as well.  Remember that “don’t hide your light under a bushel basket” line a little earlier in the Sermon?  If we settle our disputes, whether in the community or outside of it, without being drug into court, it is a witness to others outside our circle of faith.

Well.  This first example, about relationships and their healing, provides an interpretive lens for the rest of the passage . . . “You have heard it said  'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”  Jesus knew, even before modern-day sexual harassment laws, that leering at women does not good relationships make.  Or a good workplace, or a good community of faith.  We are not to treat others as objects, to objectify one another, whether the opposite sex or not.

Note that he treats it as one-sided . . . then just as now, the power balance was tipped decidedly in the male direction, in the direction of the patriarchy.  It’s not an accident that he targets men . . . men are the ones with the power.  And in a relationship based on an imbalance of power—one which I believe Jesus came to rectify—staring openly at the less-powerful is a sign of that power, a sign that one does it because one can get away with it.

I find that peoples’ views of this passage are clouded by hazy notions of what Jesus meant when he said “adultery.”  Adultery in the biblical world was defined as extramarital sexual intercourse between a man and another man’s wife. It arose out of the property laws in ancient Israel, where the wife “belonged” to her husband, and the extramarital relationship violated the rights of her husband. A man could have such a relationship with an unmarried woman and not be guilty of adultery, but if the woman was married, both he and she were guilty.  Note that this was not because of some abstract notion of what was “moral” and what was not . . . it was based upon the very concrete notion of women as property, or chattel.  One which we do not hold today.

As such, the whole basis for the divorce passage is invalidated, but it still is instructive that Jesus seemed to consider normative a loving relationship between marital partners.  And it is not an accident that Jesus addresses the divorce problem from the male perspective only.  Note that in his saying, it is the man who causes the woman to sin.  Is this not a significant turn-around from Genesis, where Eve corrupts Adam, not the other way around?

Finally, we come to the proscription on swearing . . . in a community of faith, or in any community, for that matter, a person’s word should be her or his bond.  Simple honesty is what Jesus calls for, both within and without the community.  Relations within are strengthened thereby, and we are a light to the rest of the world if we model these things outside.  And as Jesus said earlier in the Sermon, we shouldn't hide that light under a bush.

In his spiritual masterpiece, Jesuit scientist and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin describes what it means to live in the kingdom, which he calls The Divine Milieu.  He speaks of our lives as being made up of passivities and activities.  Passivities are things that are done to us, things that  we must endure, for better or worse.  Activities, then, are what we ourselves do, and they can be activities of growth or diminishment, but Teilhard isn't talking just growth or diminishment of the individual, but of the Kingdom of heaven, the Divine Milieu, itself.  There are things we do that enhance the all-encompassing, all-immersive kingdom of God and things we do that diminish it.

And I think this is a good way to look at passages like this one.  When we refuse to reconcile, when we take each other to court, or treat each other like objects—sexual or otherwise—it diminishes the Divine Milieu, it marginalizes the Kingdom of heaven.  When we do that, we are a light under a bushel, we are salt that has lost its taste.  On the other hand, when we reconcile and settle our differences without dragging one another into court, when we treat one another with respect, as the children of God that we all are, we are light and salt, our very presence and actions enhance and advance the Kingdom of God.  Amen

Salt and Light (Matthew 5:13 - 20)

     This is the second of four readings from the Sermon on the Mount . . . last week’s, of course, is the most well known.  Far from being prescriptive, far from being dogmatic, far from saying you must be poor in spirit to go to heaven, or you must be pure in heart to inherit the kingdom, the blesseds are in fact deeply pastoral, and eloquently speak to a central Gospel: we, as children of God, are blessed, for we live in the Kingdom of God.  We are kingdom people, where peacemakers are honored, not just barely tolerated, where mourners are comforted, not forgotten, where mercy comes first, and retribution is but a distant memory.  The blesseds are profoundly moving, profoundly soothing, profoundly comforting.

One thing that isn’t often mentioned is that that the blesseds are proof that this Jesus guy sure could preach.  They are a preacher’s dream: beginning  with simple, two clause declarative sentences: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.  Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”  He’s doing what preachers from William Sloane Coffin to Chuck Swindoll to Billy Graham do: building up a head of steam by repetition.  We fall into the rhythm, we rock along with it, and are in a sense lulled by it: “Blessed are the meek . . . Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness . . . Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”  All of a sudden, the pattern is broken by a sentence with only a single, long clause:  “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.”  And it wakes us up, and makes us pay double attention:  revile you, persecute you, utter evil against you.  It’s clear that this is the payoff, what it’s all about: Jesus is speaks a word to Matthew’s congregation, 35 years in the future . . . they are being reviled, they are being persecuted, they are being falsely accused.

This sets us up for the conclusion “Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in this way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”  Jesus tells them to rejoice!  Be glad!  They are squarely in the line of the prophets!  And it’s both an ending and a beginning, and it’s important for us to see this.   It’s a continuation, and it should be read as such: Rejoice and be glad . . . you are the salt of the earth . . . rejoice and be glad, you are the light of the world.  Our reward—dare I say it?  Oh why not—our reward is that we are salt and light, not pie in the sky by and by.  Or maybe we’ll get the pie, but the reward I think Jesus is talking about here is we are salt and light. Heaven, you will recall, is Matthew’s way of saying the Kingdom of God, which again Jesus says, is here and yet still barreling down upon us.  And so our reward in this new reality, this heaven Jesus speaks of, is that we get to be salt and light.

And of course we all know what that means, don’t we?  We all know what the metaphors signify . . . salt is a preservative, it’s used to cure meat, to make it last without rotting.  We’ve all had some form of salt pork, or salt-cured ham . . . bacon is salty precisely because it’s been preserved in salt.  Rejoice, Jesus says to the folks listening, you are salt!

And at the same time, rejoice!  You are light, you illuminate the dark places, drive darkness out of the corners, giving no place for evil to lurk and fester and erupt.  You illuminate the events of the day, the political landscape is made clear in the light of your witness to the Gospel.  You become the lamp by which we all read, by which we all interpret current events . . .

And reading this, we have to ask ourselves: who else illuminates?  Who else preserves?  Who else throws light into the dimmest crevices and who else nurtures and protects the world, even in all its distress and pain?  And it becomes clear, now, that the reward of the children of God in the kingdom of heaven is to do the work of Christ, to be salt and light, to be the hands and feet, to illuminate and preserve, to be good stewards of God’s good creation.   Rejoice!  Christ says, for you shall be my body, to borrow Paul’s metaphor, you shall do my work of lighting the way and preserving Creation.

But we never get any credit, do we?  In fact, we’re getting more and more discredit—if you’ll allow me to misuse and abuse a perfectly innocent word—Christianity, and religion overall, is taking more and more of the heat as we hurtle into the third millennium after Christ.  And really, Christians deserve some of it, don’t they?  Their intolerance of other faiths, their tendency to demonize those who don’t believe the way they do, their triumphalistic belief that God will reward them because they are Christians and punish the rest in everlasting fire—crackle, crackle, crackle—have caused an awful lot of grief, from the Crusades right up to the present.

But these days, the attacks seem sharper: Christianity—and religious faith in general—is being ridiculed by the likes of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.  Every week on HBO, Bill Maher, who I find to be very funny, makes fun of us, saying we believe in a magic man in the sky who we ask to give us whatever we want.  He is so fixated on this that he’s had to visibly tone it down, and when he has intelligent guests whom he respects, like Princeton professor and philosopher Cornel West, who nevertheless profess a belief in God, he just doesn’t know what to make of it.  One of the funniest things I’ve seen on his show was a few years ago, when liberal comedian D.L. Hughley, intelligence radiating out of every pore, nevertheless said he did not believe in evolution.  The genuine look of befuddlement on Maher’s face—he did not expect that—was priceless.

Folks like Maher and Robards and Dawkins avatars of a modernist world-view . . . it is a materialist worldview—that’s materialist from a philosophical point of view—wherein if you can’t see it, touch it, measure it, or prove it with a scientific experiment it isn’t real, it doesn’t exist, and those who believe differently are living in a fantasy world.  That’s the thing about a world view: it circumscribes what people believe, what people can believe, without an herculean thinking outside the box . . .  and with world-views, that’s almost impossible.

Of course, a thing that goes hand in hand with the modernist view in the West—in Europe and North America—is the profit motive.  If it doesn’t affect the bottom line, if one doesn’t get a solid return, then it needs to be culled.  Churches, of course, fall into this—it’s difficult not too, being bathed in the materialist Kool-Aid—and they get to thinking that the only measure of vitality is an increase of warm bodies in the pews, or at least a healthy endowment.  In our country, this bean-counting mentality is on the rise, and there are movements to do away with the clergy housing exemptions, and to make churches pay taxes like everyone else.  Only, of course, not “everyone else” pays taxes, do they?  Oh, most of us do individually, but corporations pay very little, and the amount is shrinking daily.  Soon we will be faced with the spectacle of churches—non-profit organizations who sponsor much of the charitable work in this country, who run the food banks and the after-school programs—paying taxes while corporations are paying none.

The late Dr. Peter Marshall told a story he called “The Keeper of the Spring.”  Here’s how it goes, in Marshall’s own elegant, poetic words: “Once upon a time, an Austrian town grew up along the Eastern slope of the Alps. It was sheltered in the lee of the protecting heights, so that the wind that shuddered at the doors and flung handfuls of sleet against the window panes was a wind whose fury was spent.  High up in the hills, a strange and quiet forest dweller had been hired years ago by the town council to clear away the debris from the pools that fed the lovely stream flowing through their village. He patrolled the hills and wherever he found a spring, he cleaned its brown pool of silt and fallen leaves, of mud and mold and took away from the spring all foreign matter, so that the water which bubbled up through the sand ran down clean and cold and pure.

“It leaped sparkling over rocks and dropped joyously in crystal cascades until, swollen by other streams, it became a river of life to the busy town. Millwheels were whirled by its rush. Gardens were refreshed by its waters. Fountains threw it like diamonds into the air.  Swans sailed on its limpid surface and children laughed as they played on its banks in the sunshine.

“But the City Council was a group of hard-headed, hard-boiled business men. They scanned the civic budget and found in it the salary of a Keeper of the Springs. Said the Keeper of the Purse: ‘Why should we pay this romance ranger? We never see him; he is not necessary to our town’s work life. If we build a reservoir just above the town, we can dispense with his services and save his salary.’  Therefore, the City Council voted to dispense with the unnecessary cost of a Keeper of the Springs, and to build a cement reservoir.

“So the Keeper of the Springs no longer visited the brown pools but watched from the heights while they built the reservoir. When it was finished, it soon filled with water, to be sure, but the water did not seem the same. It did not seem to be as clean, and a green scum soon befouled its stagnant surface. There were constant troubles with the delicate machinery at the mills, for it was often clogged with slime, and the swans found another home above the town. At last, an epidemic raged, and the clammy, yellow fingers of sickness reached into every home in every street and lane.

“The City Council met again. Sorrowfully, it faced the city’s plight, and frankly it acknowledged the mistake of the dismissal of the Keeper of the Springs. They sought him out in his hermit hut high in the hills, and begged him to return to his former joyous labor.  Gladly he agreed, and began once more to make his rounds. It was not long before pure water came lilting down under tunnels of ferns and mosses and to sparkle in the cleansed reservoir. Millwheels turned again as of old. Stenches disappeared. Sickness waned and convalescent children playing in the sun laughed again because the swans had come back.”

Like any good parable, this story admits of many applications—and Marshall, in his lifetime, used it in more than one way.  But I think of it whenever I think of these verses, whenever I think of Christians as “salt and light.”  Just like the City Council, our materialist culture, our modernist world-viewed country-men-and-women do not understand what it is we are called to be.  And just like the City Council, they ridicule us and, we are “romance rangers,” as Marshall politely put it, and they seek to cut our supports, because after all: are we not useless?  If they can’t see what we do, if they can’t touch it or feel it or measure it, it must not exist, and it should be cut from the budget, eliminated from our national discourse.

But brothers and sisters, in the face of this, we have Christ’s promises: we are salt and light, whether the world likes it or not, whether it believes it or not, whether it even knows it or not.  As Christians, our presence and our actions preserve and enlighten the world.  So you who mourn, rejoice!  Take heart, you who are meek and the makers of peace.  You are salt and light, co-workers with God, preservers and illuminators of Creation. And that is what it means to be the body of Christ on earth.  Hallelujah!  Amen.

Kingdom Conditions (Matthew 5:1 - 12)

Last week, we looked at the set-up for all of Jesus' ministry.  He hears about John the Baptist's arrest--his betrayal, his handing-over--and instead of retaliating for John’s arrest, instead of calling down angels of heaven to rescue his colleague, he withdraws to a different region, and thus becomes the "man from Galilee." And he begins to preach the same sermon as John: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!" and that's as it should be, because in a sense, Jesus is the continuation and--more--the fulfillment of John's prophetic line . . . and his calling of Peter and Andrew and James and John was the illustration of repentance--turn from your old ways, reorient yourselves to kingdom ways . . . in other words,  follow me . . . and as we look at Jesus' teachings about what that means, we should always remember the context that Matthew would have us know . . . namely that Jesus' teachings are a continuance and fulfillment of the Hebrew teachings, that Jesus' reign as King won't be like any violent, retributive king anyone had ever heard of, and that hovering, lurking always in the background is Jesus' own betrayal his own arrest, his own handing-over to be murdered on a cross.

Today we look at the beatitudes, the first section of the Sermon on the Mount.  And before we start looking at them individually, it's important to understand what they are--and also what they aren't.  They are, as their name indicates, beatitudes . . . blessings . . . a form that is not uncommon in the Bible and other ancient literature. But here--unlike in other parts of scripture--they're not moral exhortations, they aren't imperatives, they're not trying to tell us what to do, or how to behave.  Many times, they're preached that way . . . God's people should be meek, this logic goes, and if they are meek, then they get to inherit the earth.  God's people should show mercy to others, and if they do, they will be blessed by God showing mercy to them.  The beatitudes are preached as ideals, and if you reach them, you get a blessing--like a doggie-treat--as a reward from God.  But note that Jesus doesn't say any of this, he doesn't say see those grieving widows over there? Be like them and you'll be comforted. He simply says, flat out, that those who grieve are blessed, because they will be comforted. The beatitudes are pronouncements, declarations about the way things are in the Kingdom of God . . . the meek are blessed, whether it looks like it or not.

And why are they blessed? Because Jesus says so. Jesus is last in a long line of prophets, remember? And it's the job of prophets to be mouthpieces for God, to make God's pronouncements . . . and Jesus is more than that, isn't he? He is somehow the ultimate prophet, the Son of God himself, the fulfillment of all prophecy, and so not only are the peacemakers blessed because Jesus says they are, they're blessed by the fact that he says so. The action of Jesus saying it's so makes it so.  Remember?  In the beginning was the Word? And Jesus both is and partakes of that creative speech. And if this was clear to Matthew and his followers on the other side of the resurrection, it should be even doubly clear to us on the other side of the Trinity as well, where we proclaim that Jesus and God are somehow one and the same.

Well.  Now that we know what a beatitude is--and what it isn't--the only thing left is the word blessed itself--and if you look it up your Funk and Wagnall's--Greek version--you'll see that the Greek word it translates has a range of meanings, from "happy" to "fortunate" to "privileged" . . . but the meaning here is almost certainly "to be a recipient of divine favor."  It's no ordinary blessing, no ordinary warm-and-fuzzy like you might get when you see a baby smile . . . this is the real deal, the ultimate special edition . . . to be blessed is to have the favor of God laid on you.

And that simple fact is what makes the beatitudes so radical . . . it's a list of conditions that God blesses in this new Kingdom--which, you might recall, Jesus has proclaimed as being not too far away.  And these Kingdom conditions, these attitudes and attributes of God's oncoming reign are pretty surprising, especially to Matthew's readers in that day. Take the first one, for instance . . . "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."  Blessed are the poor in spirit . . . blessed are those who are not stuck on themselves, who aren't full of self-confidence, full of attitude . . . blessed are those who know that they're not the be all and end all of the universe, who know that it's ultimately God who's in charge.  So much for the take-charge kind-of-guy, huh?  Persons who are pronounced blessed are not those with healthy egos and a strong sense of self worth, they're not those who take pride in themselves . . . as Paul might say, they are those who boast only in the Lord, who realize deep down that their only identity and security is in God.

And of course, that wasn't exactly the way of the world back then, any more than it is now . . . the strongly self-confident got ahead then, just as they do now . . . "how to get ahead in six-easy lessons" parchments floated around the first century world, just as they do now, and the first step was be confident, look determined, take pride in who you are.  Nobody ever made the big bucks, or climbed that ladder of power and success by having a poor spirit . . . and even if you're literally poor, better not dress like it for a job interview . . .

And what about that blessed are the meek stuff?  Meekness never bought baby a new pair of shoes.  Meekness never made you second vice-president in charge of toadying up to the first vice-president.  Meekness never brought democracy to the Middle East, and are you starting to get the point?  Are you starting to see a trend? Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven . . . blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth . . . and who is the King of the Kingdom of heaven?  Who is the ultimate ruler of this kingdom of God, which paradoxically will be on Earth?  Of course, it's the one doing the preaching, Jesus Christ himself . . . and if Jesus is the king, then it reverses all our expectations of kingship, of ruler-hood, doesn't it?  Those to whom the kingdom belongs--the meek, the poor in spirit--are the emblems, the markers of that reversal . . . the world thinks a ruler must be strong, must be confident, but in the kingdom—which let us not forget is already here—the reverse is true.  Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed--as well--are those who mourn, in this coming kingdom of God, for they shall be comforted . . . those who lament the present condition of the earth, the desolation brought upon by over-use and exploitation, the turning of our rivers into running sewers and our fisheries into semi-arid deserts . . . the driving to extinction of thousands of species of God's created creatures . . . those who mourn and lament this will be comforted . . . those who lament the oppression of whole peoples, the exploitation of millions, the genocide and the killing of thousands of innocent men, women and children for economic and military security of the killers . . .

There are many of us in this category, aren't there?  Deeply wounded, saddened by what we see in the world, by all the inequity and hunger that haunt the earth . . . for us, this is a word of hope, a Gospel word, a good-news word . . . and we can see that the beatitudes are not merely a collection, a list of unrelated attributes, without any internal rhyme or reason . . . those who mourn God's damaged creation, who lament the fighting and feuding and fussing are likely to be the same people who hunger and thirst for righteousness, or at least their kissing cousins . . . blessed are those who hunger and thirst for right-relationships between all in the world, for they will have their bellies filled and their thirst quenched . . .

And the same might be said for peacemakers, no? What drives peacemakers is a hunger and thirst for righteousness, it can't be material gain . . . the world certainly doesn't reward peacemakers very well, does it?  Just the opposite . . . war fattens the coffers of our global economy . . . corporations build the engines of war, they feed and equip the troops during the war, and they receive fat contracts to clean up after the war. Profits coming, during and going . . . no wonder war's so popular!

But not in the Kingdom of God . . . in the kingdom of God it’s the peacemakers who are blessed . . .  the ones who prevent wars are blessed, not those who profit from them. Blessed are the reconcilers, who make peace between warring factions . . . who heal conflict in churches, who get arguing parties to sit down at the table when all seems to be lost . . .            Blessed are the merciful, Jesus tells us, for they will receive mercy.  And Jesus uses the Greek word that refers to concrete acts of mercy rather than simply a merciful attitude . . . maybe he's thinking here of acts of mercy like that of his own earthly father who, against all the rules and norms and social morés of his culture, refused to put Mary away . . . maybe he's referring to those who forgive the debts and sins of others like God, whom Jesus called Abba, who forgives theirs as well . . . it's in that prayer he taught us . . . the merciful weren't necessarily well-regard in his day, and it's no different today . . . oh, we get sappy stories on Oprah about how good it feels to forgive the person who killed their daughter, as the killer's on the way to the gas-chamber . . . forgiveness is OK as long as it's tempered by retribution . . . but Jesus is the one who would not retaliate, would not use violence, to save John's or even his own life.

But the way of the world is retributive, it's the way of the world to reward arrogance, to reward ego, it's the way of the world to reward war, it's the way of the world to reward the forward, not the meek.  It's the way of the world to reward those who like the status quo, who are complacent, who think that they can't do anything so why bother, instead of those who mourn and lament the present, who hunger and thirst and work for righteousness.

But the kingdom . . . Ah!  In the kingdom . . . it is all different.  And that's the ultimate point of the beatitudes . . . each one adds to and reinforces a growing picture of how it is in the kingdom of heaven, which has come near . . . kingdom conditions are where the merciful are blessed, not stepped on, where peacemakers are honored, not usurped and barely tolerated, where the meek and the brokenhearted and those who are pure in heart, who keep their eyes on God instead of their bank accounts are rewarded rather than reviled and persecuted . . .

And by now you've probably figured out that I was being a bit disingenuous when I said that the beatitudes are pronouncements, declarations, not exhortations.  You can probably see that even though it's true, that they simply describe what the Kingdom is like, they do cast something of a moral spell, and they make me feel a little guilty about some of the ways I fall short . . . and that's good, because the beatitudes are the set-up for the rest of the sermon on the Mount . . . they draw the picture of what the kingdom is like, and the rest of the Sermon spins out the consequences, what it means for the church which, after all, is supposed to be the living embodiment of the coming and already-here kingdom.

But there’s one more word to be said about the beatitudes . . . well, one more word I’m going to say, anyway.  And that word is comfort.  Comfort!  Comfort, comfort ye my people, that is what the prophet Isaiah said, that that is what the Beatitudes delivers.  Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.  And we all mourn, don’t we?  We mourn our lives the way we imagined them to be, our image of ourselves, carefully nurtured fed over the years, which often—not always, but often—comes crashing down around us.  We mourn what might have been and what never will be, we mourn the past, and our regrets that sometime seem to flow like water, like a never-ending stream. We mourn the church, both individual congregations and the Church in the world, as it and they change beyond recognition, as they aren’t the way they used to be.  And most of all, perhaps, most of all we mourn those who have gone before, and those whom we know will be here but a little time more.  Life slips away like the withering of the grass, our loved ones gone, too soon, too soon.  But there what remains, brothers and sisters, what remains, is the Word of God, and that Word today, is comfort.  Amen.

Called as Partners (Matthew 4:12 - 23)

     In the church, everyone talks about being called to do this, or called to do that, and that’s as it should be: call is an integral theological construct, especially in our theological tradition called “Reformed.”  We are called into singing in the choir, say, or, called to give so much per month—or week or year—to the church or called to ordained ministry, as pastor or elder.  It is an article of the Reformed faith that all Christians are called by God; it doesn’t matter if you’re doctor or janitor, teacher or social worker, train conductor or even priest.  Our theology of call says that we, as members of the body of Christ, are called by God to that service.

Notice I said “that service:” we Presbyterians believe that our calling by God extends not just into the churchy stuff, like being called to clean up the fellowship hall or called to lead a Bible study, but our mundane, everyday occupations.  This flows out of several theological streams, but most notably, I think, in the doctrine of providence, where God cares and nurtures God’s good creation.  That doctrine says that we cooperate in that effort, that in essence we are co-authors with God of God’s providential consideration, participants in taking care of the world.  As I sometimes put it, as the body of Christ, we are Christ’s hands and feet and legs in the world.

And that certainly is the sense of the disciples’ call in today’s passage, isn't it?  They are called to follow him, to traipse around with him all over the Middle East, but not just as fellow travelers.  “Follow me,” Jesus tells them, “and I will make you fish for people.”  They are to do God’s work, fishing for people, whatever that means.

Well, what does it mean?  People are pictured as being hooked, brought into the Christian boat.  And indeed, Christianity has been pictured as a boat, a ship, carrying Christians safely over the stormy waters of life, which is why so many sanctuaries are built like inverted vessels, including this one. . . although I’m not sure that the image of bring folks into a capsized boat is all that comforting.

Anyway, we have a word for bringing folks into the boat . . . It's evangelism, or e-word to us mainline Christians, and it’s telling that he commands them to do it here at the beginning of his ministry and also at the end: after his resurrection, in the very last scene he tells them to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”  In Matthew, evangelism is the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end.

And that's why the last verse of our reading is so important: in it, Matthew defines what this means, as usual by pointing to Jesus as example.  He “went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.”  Seems this fishing for people is more than bringing people to Christ, or getting them to join a church.  Being in the Christian boat means being cared for in life as well.

And it fits with Matthew’s terse summation of Jesus ministry, doesn't it?  He says that he “began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’”  The Kingdom of heaven—as Luke puts it, the Kingdom of God.  A reign, or state of being, a way of life, that’s been compared to a mustard seed, where the lion lies down with the lamb, where there’ll be no sickness, toil or danger, and where we’ll practice war no more.

So there’s another thing that the boat we land the fish in symbolizes, and that's the kingdom of heaven, or the kingdom of God, and certainly the church has been called a provisional representation of that.  This ol’ inverted hull is to provide not only shelter from the weather but from sickness and hunger and want as well.

But there's another thing about the kingdom of heaven, and that is that it’s not in heaven, not in the sky by and by.  It's among us, right here on earth.  Jesus even says elsewhere that it's within us, but wherever it is, whatever it is, it’s the major thrust of Jesus’ teaching here in Matthew.  As biblical scholar N.T. Wright notes, Jesus’ teachings here are not about how to go to heaven. They are not about “our escape from this world into another one, but to God’s sovereign rule coming ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’”

And our call is to cooperate with God, to be a motive force with God in both the proclamation and bringing to fulfillment of that sovereign rule, that Kingdom of Heaven.  Wherever we’re called to be, whether butcher, baker or candlestick maker, whether doctor, lawyer, chemist or cop, our calling is to proclaim the Gospel in thought, word and deed, wherever we practice our vocation.

Many in this room are retired from full-time employment.  You’ve run your race, and expect to be able to lay back and relax, enjoy yourself, maybe travel a little, and that's a good thing, that we rest from our labors, but it doesn't let us off the hook from discipleship, from our calling from God.  Wherever we are, whatever we're doing, we are disciples of Christ, and our calling is to be fishers of people.

Author and Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner writes that “there are all different kinds of voices calling [us] to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of society, say, or the superego, or self interest.”  Outside voices compete with the still, small one of the divine for our attention every day.  And lest you think it merely metaphor, let me assure you that “voice” is a perfect way to put it: the word vocation comes from the Latin vocare, to call, which of course is where we get the word “voice.”  Vocation means the work you are called to by God, the work you are uniquely suited for at any given time, place and stage of life.

In our passage today, those first disciples didn't seem to agonize over their call, and their story is  quite simple.  Jesus is walking by the Galilee, and he spies Simon—called Peter—and his brother Andrew, fishing.  And he says “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”  And immediately, they left their nets and followed him.  And he spies the two Zebedee brothers, James and John, and he calls them, and once again Matthew says they immediately followed him.  Immediately.

And a lot of preachers over a lot of years have made hay out of that word.  They say “be like Simon, like Andrew and James and John and answer that call immediately.”  But I’ll bet there’s not many today to whom Jesus has walked up and said “follow me.” Anybody here had that experience?  No?  Well, then, we have to hear those voices that Buechner talked about, and we have to winnow out the voice of God from amongst them.  The way Paul put it is, we have to test the spirits, to distinguish God’s true voice amid all the noise.

That process is called discernment, folks, a word that we've heard a lot of over the past few years.  Because, faith communities are called as well as individuals, called to discern God's voice among the babble of the world.  And that’s what we've been doing what with Transformation 2.0 and reading of the Paul Nixon material, we've been discerning the will of God.

But communities are made of people, committed people, who must discern for themselves what God’s will for them in their lives might be.  So listen for the still, small voice of God, wherever it may be, whether from the spirit within or without.  We're never too old, never too young, to prayerfully discern our call.  Amen.

God Claims the Child (Baptism of the Lord, Year A, Matthew 3:13 - 17)

     In the movie "O Brother Where Art Thou," the none-too-bright prison-escapees are gnawing on a gopher-carcass in the Mississippi piney-woods.  Suddenly they hear soft, ethereal, almost nonexistent, music coming from somewhere . . . "When I went down to the river to pray" . . . and Delmar, the dimmest of the three, is strangely drawn by it, almost against his will, and he stumbles through the trees, and the music gets louder, until finally he finds it's source.  It's coming from a congregation, white-robed and ghostly in the trees, and there's a preacher standing waist-deep in a river, baptizing sinners . . . and Delmar can't help himself, he just splashes on in, bulling his way to the front to be baptized . . . And as he slogs back out of the water, he says "Well that's it boys, I been redeemed! The preacher warshed away all my sins and transgressions, including that Piggly-Wiggly I knocked over down in Yazoo City!"  But Everett -- the only slightly more-intelligent ringleader -- is not impressed, and he tries to explain that baptism washes away sins in the eyes of God only, but Delmar still doesn't get it: "there were witnesses," he says, "they saw us redeemed!"  To which Everett replies: "That's not the issue, Delmar. Even if it did put you square with the Lord, the State of Mississippi is more hardnosed."

Delmar is -- to put it charitably -- confused about what exactly baptism means . . . and he's not alone.  In fact, he's in pretty good company.  Some of the major figures of the church have had the same trouble.  If you read Acts, you can see that its author Luke believed that you can't be a Christian without being baptized, and in the Roman Catholic Church to this day, baptism is considered salvific -- that is, you can't have eternal life without it.  For example, if a baby is born sickly, you'd better hurry up and baptize it before it dies, lest it go to the outer darkness where, as we all know, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Martin Luther, the father of all us Protestants, believed the same thing, but his fellow reformer Zwingli disagreed -- the way he saw it, baptism was just a bare sign, something that we do because Jesus told us to "do this in remembrance of me," but for no other reason . . . According to him, it has no power to save, or do anything else, in and of itself.  And this is the way modern-day Baptists -- and most evangelicals -- look at it: we do it because we've been commanded to, and that's reason enough.

 But wouldn't you know it, we Presbyterians take a kind of middle way -- we wouldn't want to be extreme or anything --  and it was a trail blazed by our founder John Calvin, who believed that although baptism isn't strictly salvific, it's not just something we just do, either . . . God has a hand in it as well.  According to him, it's a "means of grace," a way by which God transmits some of God's grace to us

And, now that you've fallen asleep - and is that nodding I see back there? - it begs the question -- if folks like Augustine and Luther and Calvin can't get it straight, people who spend their whole lives studying scripture and thinking about such things, what hope do we have?   Even though we're not dumber than a bag of hammers like Delmar -- we know we're answerable to the law if we knock over a Fifth Third Bank or something -- but still: how can we -- sitting in the pews, or standing here in this pulpit, for that matter -- figure out what it all means?

Well, maybe if we go to scripture it'll help . . . and this is the Sunday to do it - it's Baptism of the Lord, when we look at Jesus' Baptism, and through that lens, our own.  And if we know nothing else, we do know that he was baptized by John the Baptist, who seems mightily embarrassed to be baptizing the Messiah:  "I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?"  See, John thinks that baptizing someone indicates some kind of hierarchical relationship, some kind of power differential, between the baptiz-er and the baptize-ee.  And of course, the church has perpetuated this, hasn't it?  One of the fights in the our own denomination over the past decade or so has been over who gets to do the sacraments, including baptism . . . we've got a problem in rural areas where there are a lot of little churches who can't afford a full-time pastor, and our denomination has historically only allowed fully-ordained, seminary-educated pastors -- like yours truly -- to baptize somebody.  And this has helped stop the historical spread of Presbyterianism -- it's one reason there's so few of us out West -- and it perpetuates the image that us pastors are somehow more powerful Christians or something than our congregations.  Sort of like the Catholics believe about their priests, only our theology is all about the priesthood of all believers.

Well.  Good sense -- and demographics -- won out, and we have commissioned lay pastors who can baptize folks and serve communion . . . but not before a lot of grousing by pastors -- most of whom should've known better -- about how they went to seminary for three years, scraping and sacrificing and walking uphill through the snow to get to class, and some uneducated . . . person . . . comes along and can all of a sudden do the sacraments . . . and all this from a belief -- embedded in the church system -- that those who get to baptize do so because they're special.

And that's exactly where John is coming from when Jesus comes to get baptized . . . Israelite priests -- those with religious authority -- were the only ones who could perform acts of ritual cleansing, and John couldn't for the life of him see himself in a dominant position over the Messiah -- you come to me to get cleansed?  It oughta be the other way around . . . But Jesus knows better, and it's the first clue we get that baptism may be more than just a ritual dunking: "Let it be so for now," he says, "For it's proper for us to fulfill all righteousness."  Fulfill all righteousness . . . this language of fulfillment is important in the New Testament, it's almost technical talk, and it means for something to come to fruition, often that God's own self has made it that way, has brought it to its ripe, tasty state . . . and Jesus is saying that something foreordained by God is brought to realization by this act.

Pretty heady stuff . . . and John can't argue with that logic, can he?  So he goes ahead and baptizes Jesus, and then all heaven breaks loose . . . when Jesus comes up from the water, it busts open and the Spirit of God descends on him -- it looks just like a dove! -- and it lands right on him, and a voice from heaven -- and we just assume that it booms, that it's this big, old, deep male voice, but maybe it's not, maybe it's soft and feminine, maybe it's lyrical and magical, maybe it's the voice most dear to each person present -- but whatever it sounds like, what it says is unmistakable -- "This is my son, the beloved, in whom I am well pleased!"

And when Delmar comes up out of that muddy Mississippi river, we don't see a dove or anything, but we do see his face, and it's transformed, he just knows things are different now . . . he knows the truth, that something supernatural -- something outside the bounds of our surface, cause-and-effect world -- has happened to him . . . God's Spirit has come down from heaven and landed on him, soft as a dove, and he has been called a Child of God, he has been called "beloved."

And that, brothers and sisters is what God does for us at baptism.  We are Christian, we are Christ-like, and Christ's model for baptism -- what happened to Christ at that event -- is the model for our own.  And the key observation is that John is just a vessel, almost like a conduit, for the work of God through the Holy Spirit.  It is God who sends the Spirit, it is God who redeems, it is God who claims the child.

In my younger and more fire-breathing days, I used to say that because it's God that does the work, God could just as easily do it through my cat -- who let me tell you is not a whole lot more intelligent than Delmar -- God could work through my cat to baptize folks if God so desired, but saying stuff like that gets me in trouble, so I don't say it much any more . . . but our whole theology of Baptism flows from this one fact: it ain't the church or the pastor or the person being baptized that does the deed -- it's God working through the church and through the pastor and through the person being baptized.  It is God who sends the Spirit, it is God who redeems, it is God who claims the child.

Many protestant denominations practice what they call "believer baptism:" they'll only baptize adults who are past the "age of consent," that is, who know what they're doing.  And one of their major criticisms of Catholics and mainline Protestants like us is that we practice infant baptism, and how can a baby know what she or he is doing?  But I hope now that you can see that the practice flows naturally from our belief that it's God who does the choosing, it's God who does the redeeming . . . and it doesn't require consent or even consciousness on the part of the one being baptized; it is God who claims the child.

But there's a practical problem with infant baptism . . . most folks don't remember it.  Oh, you hear from people who claim to remember as far back as birth, but it's not the rule . . . but that's why -- or at least one of the reasons why -- baptism takes place in the community.  Every time we witness another's baptism, we in a sense remember our own.  We remember that we are redeemed, we are chosen, we are forgiven all our faults and failings and transgression, even if not by the state of Ohio.

I may have told you this story before, but I preached for a beautiful little Hispanic congregation in Arizona one Epiphany Sunday, in their pink-hued stucco church, and after the sermon there was a baptism, and lined up on one side of the copper font were the child's god-parents, and on the other were her parents, and the minister held the child and said the ancient words, and made the ancient movements, and although I have only a passing acquaintance with Spanish, I understood nevertheless . . . and although that dark-eyed child won't remember the occasion, her parents will, and her god-parents . . they'll remember the sights and sounds and the words, and they'll think to themselves: "that's how it was for me," and their child's baptism will become their own, and theirs will become hers . . .

And in a few minutes, we will relive our own baptisms, and I invite you to reflect upon what it has meant to you over the years, and how you have lived out its promise and obligations . . . reflect as well upon what God has done in and through your baptism, and remember that through it, God has bestowed God’s Spirit, forgiven our sins, and claimed us as his children.  Amen.

Dream a Little Dream (Matthew 2:13 - 23)

     Happy New Year!  Bring on 2017 and good riddance to 2016.  That's what many folks have been saying, anyway . . . First of all, there was a fractious, contentious election, which I would say was anything but presidential.  Columnist Dave Barry—who, of course, has the Pulse of the Nation—says that “it wasn't just bad.  It the Worst. Election. Ever.”  Other not-so-bright spots were that race relations seem to have reached a new low, internet hacking—including credit card numbers, personal records, and foreign interference  with the Worst Election ever—has reached an all-time high, and it was the warmest year on record, prompting many climate scientists—except the seven working for the oil industry—to say that a tipping point has been reached.  When they're not saying “I told you so,” that is.

And if all that weren't bad enough, we lost a lot of great people in 2016.  Two bona fide space heroes—Texas’ Edgar Mitchell and our own John Glenn, former First Lady Nancy Reagan and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.  Ellie Wiesel, Umberto Eco and Harper Lee.  Leonard Cohen . . . David Bowie . . . Prince.  And just last week, Princess Leia—aka Carrie Fisher—and her mom, Debbie Reynolds, and I kid you not: there is now an on-line campaign to keep 2016 away from Betty White.

But if you thought 2016 was bad here in the good old U.S. of A., it doesn't hold a candle to how the year 6 B.C.E. was shaping up for one Joseph of Bethlehem.  It began on a low note when his fiancée Mary was found to be pregnant, which wouldn't have been that big a deal in loose-limbed Galilee except for the fact that they hadn't even lived together yet.  So even though he had every right to kick Mary to the curb, thus ruining her reputation and her parents’  reputations as well as her aunts’ and uncles’ and cousins’ reputations, he resolved to put her away quietly—what a guy!—but then along came the first of four dreams that would run (some might say ruin) his life over the next couple of years.  In it, an angel of the lord appeared saying “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”  And as soon as he woke up, he did what the angel told him and married her, but didn't have relations with her until she gave birth, and they named the boy Jesus.

Well.  Things go along normally enough—unless you count that little episode with the wise men—until his second dream, when another angel—or maybe it’s the same one—comes to him and says “Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.” And I gotta say, these aren’t happy dreams, even though they have angels in them: they seem more like nightmares to poor old Joseph.  The first one had meant he'd have to undergo the ridicule that would come upon him when he married a woman who was — seemingly — pregnant by another man.  Remember: in that honor-shame society, there would have been a whole lot of shame going on.

But the second dream was even worse, so he packed up all his stuff—it was hard, ‘cause he'd grow up there, his family was there, and his livelihood—but he packed it all up, and Mary’s and the baby’s stuff, and heads out on the road to Egypt.  And though he may not have known exactly why Herod the Great was after them, we do, we know it was because he was paranoid and insecure, so much so that he maintained a private security force and built no less that six—count ‘em six!—fortresses, all in the service of keeping himself in business as the King of the Jews.  Which is why he got a little . . . defensive when the three wise men stopped in to see him, asking “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?”  So he consulted his historians and theologians and assorted hangers-on, and they all told him the same thing: Bethlehem, and he told the magi to go and find the child and tell him who he is so that he could come and worship him himself.  But after seeing the babe and giving him gifts, the wise men were warned—in another dream, no less—not to go back to Herod, so they went home by another way.

And are you beginning to get the point, that dreams are really important here in Matthew’s version of the birth narrative?  Contrast that to over in Luke, where there is nary a one.  Really—check it out.  When the angels appear to Zechariah and Mary, they just . . . appear.  The word dream isn't even mentioned.  And there's another thing: the story over there is told from Mary’s point of view.  The angel comes to her . . . she ponders the whole thing in her heart . . . There's none of that over here in Matthew.  The annunciation happens to Joseph—in a dream, natch—and the whole scenario is told from his point of view.  There are no shepherds watching their flocks, by day or by night, no heavenly choir of angels, no manger in a barn.  In Matthew, Jesus is born in a house, and unless it was a really dirty one, there were probably no barnyard animals around, either.

The point is, the two accounts of the birth of Christ (Mark and John don't have any) are very different, even though we tend to conflate them, having shepherds and wise men and cows and chickens gathered all cozily around a manger with Mary pondering mysteriously away.  But they have very different theological emphases and concerns.  Take the dreams . . . Who else do we know named Joseph whose life was shaped by dreams?  You only get one guess . . . Of course it's the penultimate son of Jacob, also known as Israel, founder of the nation of the same name.   It was a dream that got him into hot water with his brothers, and after they sold him into slavery—note that it was in Egypt—it was his prowess at interpreting dreams that elevated him to second in the land.

And likewise it is a dream that gets our Joseph to Egypt as well.  When the magi go home by another way, Herod’s plans to go to Bethlehem to kill Jesus outright are foiled, so he plans to kill all the Bethlehem children under two years of age.  It wouldn't be too hard, given the size of the town there couldn't have been more than twenty children who fit the bill.  But Joseph is warned in that dream to go to Egypt, along with Mary and the babe, so he does, and stays there until the year four B.C.E., the year of Herod’s death.  And Matthew casts it all in terms of prophecy, because that’s his thing, that’s why he’s telling us about the dreams and everything, to relate the birth of Jesus back to his ancestors, back to the stories about the great Hebrew heroes.  “This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet,” Matthew tells us, “‘Out of Egypt I have called my son.’”

And while Joseph and family are off in Egypt, Herod the so-called Great, infuriated at being tricked by the wise men, does the deed, he has all the Bethlehem children of the right age murdered, in what's been called the massacre of the innocents, and they were innocents, just like the Egyptian first-born that God killed so many years before . . . And can you see what Matthew is doing here?  He’s drawing comparisons between the birth of Christ and events more than a millennium before, when Israel was in the land of the Pharaoh.  Events that led to the founding of a nation and their release from bondage, their redemption.

And he does it not by pointing out that history has repeated itself exactly, because it hasn't, instead he points out patterns of similarity, using what literary scholars and other ne’er-do-wells call typology.  Both times there was a guy called Joseph who was guided by dreams.  Both times, there was a sojourn in Egypt and a killing of innocents, even though in Jesus’ case it was the bad guy doing the killing, while in the of the slaughter of Egypt’s first-born it was God.  And both times, they were refugees from a cruel  tyrant, even though the first time it was a whole nation and the second time only one family.

Well.  Once again, Matthew relates events to prophecy, this time to the voice of Rachel, wailing in Ramah.  Then Herod the Great dies—that's how we know it’s 4 B.C.E.—and in yet another dream, the angel tells Joseph it's safe to go back to the land of Israel, and once again he packs up and heads out, but he’s afraid to go home because Herod’s son is ruling there, and in his last dream, he's told to settle in Nazareth, so Jesus can grow up there, once again as prophesied.

And so ends the tale of Jesus’ birth, not with a bang but with a settling-in, a settling-down, so he could grow in stature and in favor with God and human-kind.  And at first it seemed to me to have little relation to our situation today, little a hard-working pastor could hang a lesson or a moral upon.  Then I started thinking a bit more like Matthew, I started thinking typologically, and one type-scene or type-event jumped out at me.  For the first two years of his life, the most formative years, Jesus was a political refugee.  He fled his little mid-eastern country from a brutal dictator bent on his destruction.  And hmmmm . . . what today does this remind me of?  Could it be . . . Syria, a small middle-eastern country where a brutal dictator holds sway?  Where millions of refugees—whole families of men, women and children—are fleeing for their lives?

And I think to myself: We're supposedly a Christian nation, and yet we're having a debate about whether to let refugees in.  Isn't it the case that Christian is as Christian does?  I mean, what if Egypt—Pharaoh and all--hadn't let in the refugee who was the Son of God?  Amen.