In Celebration of Martin Luther King

Our Gospel passage today comes from ‘the sermon on the plain’ found in Luke.  It is a passage that expresses noble and good sentiments, but I would imagine we also think these sentiments are impractical and out of touch with the way the world really is.  But of course that is the point.  The path that Jesus sets out for us is not an easy one, it goes against the grain of the very best of us.  For me it automatically makes me imagine how these words of Christ about peace can be misunderstood as excuses for allowing yourself or others to continue to be misused, or abused at the hands of someone more powerful.  But these are merely excuses because there is a big difference between not returning hurt for hurt, and apathy in the face of abuse.  There was never anything apathetic about the way in which Jesus lived.  When Jesus ‘turned the other cheek’ it was done out of courage, not out of fear.  Nothing about Jesus’ ministry was particularly passive, what Jesus did was illuminate another path beyond violence or apathy, a path of true selfless action.  The path of the cross.

The coming of Christ into the world makes a difference.  The incarnation of God into human history makes all the difference in the way we respond to other people.

Today we are celebrating the life and ministry of Martin Luther King Jr.  Throughout his career as a leader in the civil rights movement Martin Luther King came up against opposition, not just from abject racists but from moderates who, while they agreed with Dr. King in principle about segregation, did not like seeing the disruption of the status quo by protests.  When Dr. King went to Birmingham and led non-violent direct action protests against segregation, he was blamed for the violence precipitated by his peaceful protests, and the violence of other protestors not associated with King.  White moderates could not understand why King could not wait for justice to happen in a way that was less disruptive; they could not understand why King couldn’t work through the courts and not disrupt the everyday life of the town of Birmingham. 

It is easy, I think, to tell someone else that they have to wait for justice when you already have that justice for yourself.  We do not want to give up our own privilege, our own comforts.

But I think it is pretty clear in today’s Gospel that Jesus does not want us to get too comfortable in the life we are living, because it is not the life we are called to.  Our instincts tell us that we must protect our own comforts, our own privilege at all costs.  Our instincts tell us ‘to do unto others as they do to you,’ that an eye for an eye is justice.  Perhaps it is part of our genetic make-up, part of our instinct for survival, but thankfully we are not ruled by our instincts, human-beings have the very real ability to self regulate, to do something despite what our baser selves are telling us to do. 

We may not have particularly pleasant feelings towards our enemies.  We may not want to give our cloak, much less our shirt.  We may not want to turn the other cheek, but that really doesn’t matter because to Jesus, love is not merely a feeling or emotion.  Love is action.  How we feel inside means so much less than how we express those feelings in the world.  There was never anything passive about what Jesus did in his life or calls us to do in ours.  We are not asked to just roll over and be abused, but to react to injustice in our own lives and others in a new way.

Our desire not to sacrifice too much is certainly strong, but Jesus calls us out past our discomfort, past our sense of justice, past our sense of what is fair, what we believe can be expected within a civilized society.  But imagine what the world would be like if those of us who called ourselves Christian actually lived our lives in this way?

Before he was killed Dr. King had expanded his efforts to include issues of poverty and class injustice, because he knew that Issues of inequality and injustice would not be solved merely with the introduction of anti-discrimination laws.  It is just not that simple, there is something within human society, perhaps even within our very nature, that fears the changes that lead to greater inclusion and a more even distribution of power.  Issues of race, gender, religion and sexuality are all issues that make us terribly uncomfortable, they are topics that are generally avoided in small talk, and depending on which side of an issue we stand, they are topics we would really like to forget about.  But as Christians we cannot ignore the troubles of people around us.  We must demand justice, not for ourselves, but for our struggling neighbors, we must not look at our enemies as obstacles but must learn to see the world as God sees it.  God is not blind to the pain we cause each other, God does not ignore the atrocities committed throughout the world.  God knows our selfishness and our laziness, God knows our hate and our jealousy.  But God loves us all the same.

The Rule for Christians is not ‘Do as you would want done,’ but ‘Do as God would do’  If we are to call ourselves Christians then we are meant to rock the boat, to love more by giving more, forgiving more, having more mercy, even to those that we believe don’t deserve it.

Today’s Gospel expresses quite a radical way to live.  Radical love, Radical peace, Radical sacrifice.  It is a complete turning inside out of the way in which we deal with each other.  There is a parable of sorts that was first told by a Rabbi.  It goes like this:

 There once was a man who had a near death experience.

An escort meets him at the boundary of hereafter and with a welcoming smile says, “You’re not ready yet friend; you still have another chance. But you’ll return soon, so let me show you what goes on here on the other side.”

Together they enter a great hall where a long candle-lit banquet table is laden with bowls of steaming, fragrant soups, succulent roasts, perfectly cooked vegetables, aromatic loaves of bread, the finest of wines, fruits of every kind, and a dazzling array of cakes and pies. Diners fill every chair, but shockingly, amid luxurious bounty, the scene is one of pain and anguish. Skeletal forms are twisted and moaning in starvation, with barely the strength to strike at each other with their spoons.

Looking closer, the man sees that all spoons have long handles—longer than the diners’ arms; too long for the diners to feed themselves. “So this is Hell,” gasps our Friend. “Anger and misery amid abundance. Where’s the Devil?” “Evil resides in the hearts of men,” says Escort, “But, come, let me show you something else.”

The two enter another great hall. And in that hall there is another long, candle-lit banquet table, covered with a similar incredible spread of delicious foods, drinks and sweets. Here the sounds of laughter, chatter and song fill the hall while healthy and happy diners are enjoying the company and the bounty before them.

They, too, have long spoons, but they are feeding each other.

“And this,” the Escort tells our Friend, “is heaven.”

The difference between Heaven and Hell is paper thin, and yet heaven requires a radical change in our lives.

When we hear the word extremist it only ever has bad connotations.  The extremists we hear about are murderers who use God as an excuse for their crimes. 

But Martin Luther King Jr. was also called an extremist and while he was at first surprised, even offended, in his letter from Birmingham Jail Dr. King had something interesting to say about extremism and he had some questions for the religious leaders of Birmingham, questions that 50 years later we too need to ask ourselves:

Martin Luther King wrote these words: “As I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love? -- "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice? -- "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ? -- "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist? -- "Here I stand; I can do no other so help me God." Was not John Bunyan an extremist? -- "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a mockery of my conscience." Was not Abraham Lincoln an extremist? -- "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." Was not Thomas Jefferson an extremist? -- "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." So the question is not whether we will be extremist, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate, or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?"

 Long Spoon Parable Source: http://iciclefund.org/parable

Christmas where heaven and earth meet

John 1:1-14

Last night at our Christmas Eve Mass we read in the Gospel according to Luke we heard about the Angels proclaiming the good news to the shepherds, and the holy family in the stable with the baby Jesus swaddled and lying in a manger.  It is a familiar and beautiful story, one that is reflected countless works of art and poetry and drama throughout the ages including the pageant performed yesterday by the children of this parish and our own crèche that you see before you.  But today we hear something a bit different.  Today’s Gospel is not so easily rendered into images, you won’t see it depicted in many paintings or acted out on stage, and when people do try to render this passage artistically, it invariably winds up in one of two places, the beginning of Genesis where God spoke and created life out of the chaos of nothingness or back in the manger with the swaddled baby and the shepherds.  This makes sense, in this opening passage of John these two distant parts of the bible come together.  The Word was there in the first chapter of Genesis, before creation.  “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. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.”[1]  It was with the Word that God brought light to the darkness in the beginning.  God spoke his Word and light came into being.  God spoke his Word again and again and the sparks of life were lit in creation.  Of course the Word of God is spoken throughout scripture.  The force of God’s Word is at work throughout the Old Testament because as John said ‘the Word was God and the Word was with God’.  Whenever we read about God interacting with Israel, we are reading about the Word of God as well.  Whenever we read about Moses and the law and when we read about the prophets and martyrs we know that they have been inspired by God’s Word.  The problem is that the nature of God and our nature are so radically different, at least from our perspective, the perspective of the created.  We are stuck between our natural desire to want to know God and our desire to keep God at arms distance.  We want to enshrine God in a tabernacle, but we also want God there with us in the difficult moments.  We want God to butt out and we want God to take charge.  We paint God with all sorts of different ideas, ignoring what we don’t like, twisting God into what we deem a suitable image.  Humanity is indeed conflicted about God.  We see this again and again throughout scripture, we see Israel resist the call of prophets, we see corruption and self interest drag God’s chosen people away from God.  We see it throughout the history of the Christian Church as well. 

 “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.” 

 It is true that God is not easily understood, God is so big, so far beyond our imagination that we think we cannot possibly know God, not really.  We are created, limited by our physical selves, We all have a beginning, and we certainly seem to have an end as well, at least for a while anyway.  We are stuck in time, possessing only a brief time to do anything at all, and because we are imperfect many of us tend to waste a lot of that time on petty, unimportant matters.   But God, God is eternal, God is infinite in every way, and yet after so many attempts to connect with us, his creation, God does something different.  God takes on humanity, closing that unfathomably large gap between us and our creator.  One theologian writes, “Christmas is not an event within history but is rather the invasion of time by eternity.”[2]  That is, when God brought humanity and divinity together in Jesus Christ, it was not just for that short span of 33 years during the life of Christ, the consequences of God entering history continues to resonate, continues to be felt in all of time, in all of history.  Jesus Christ is the pebble dropped into the lake of time, we shall see the ripples go out forever in all directions.

This is a lovely idea, but what does it mean for us?  What does it change?  We still act like we don’t understand.  We call Jesus Lord, but divorce our worship and Love of Jesus from what we know about his life.  We act like the incarnation was something God did despite himself, we return God to the tabernacle, calling on God only in times of Crisis, only as an outside agent acting on our lives.

We know, I hope we know, that Jesus is true God and true man, but so often we fail to see the truth of that staring us in the face: In his divinity Jesus shows us who God is, and in his Humanity Jesus shows us who we are meant to be, and they are the same.  This is the unfathomable revelation of the incarnation. 

God shows us in Jesus that his nature is to reach downward, to humble himself, when God “emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form,”[3] as Paul says in Philippians, it was not despite himself, but rather it was because of his very nature.  Such a nature is so different, so completely opposite of the order of this world, but it is the real order of things, it is God’s order.  We may want to put limits on God’s nature, say that he cannot in his divinity possibly be this way, but “it is not our right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ. Our duty is to see and understand it as being still greater than we had seen before.”[4] 

God does not forfeit his deity when he becomes a servant to humanity, God does not stop being the almighty eternal King of all creation when he becomes humanities brother in time.  Rather, the fact that God is both exalted and completely humble is a sign of his complete freedom.  God’s freedom of LOVE, is love that crosses all boundaries to bring truth and Grace to a world bound by sin.  Turning to God is an acceptance of that Love in our own lives, not just an acknowledgement of God’s love for each of us, but accepting that we too, made in God’s image, are made to LOVE in a radical and unexpected way.  The perfect image of God shown in Jesus Christ also the perfection of God’s image in us, and it is an image of LOVE given freely and completely.

This is the eternal Word of God made flesh.  It is indeed beyond any single image that can be painted, or song that can be sung.  It is beyond any single sermon that can be written, but is found whenever we clear a space in our lives, God’s Love comes rushing in. 

This is the nature of God revealed in Jesus, a meeting of something as simple as a child being born and placed in a manger, and yet as complicated as eternity itself.  And here we are, as witnesses of this miracle in the world but also bearers of God’s word as well as we accept and rejoice in the image of God in our own humanity. 

Merry Christmas.

Amen.

---

[1] Genesis 1:1-2

[2] Hans Urs Von Balthasar

[3] Philippians 2:7

[4] Karl Barth

This Sunday Sermon: Who do you say that I am?

Did you ever notice that the disciples spend a lot of time not understanding what Jesus is saying to them?  We never get to hear the first thirteen verses of Matthew chapter 16, not on Sunday morning anyway, but they deal with a situation in which Jesus becomes frustrated with his disciples because they fail to understand what he is talking about, and in the passage following to today’s Gospel (the passage we will hear next week) the disciples will fail to fully understand Jesus, yet again.

But the question that Jesus asks his disciples at the beginning of today’s Gospel lesson: “Who do people say that the son of man is?” is such a simple question that I imagine the disciples were relieved to hear it.  It is something they knew they could answer.

To give Jesus the answers he wanted, all they needed to do was repeat what they had been hearing around them. “Some say you are John the Baptist,”  “others Elijah,” “or Jeremiah”  “or one of the other prophets."  Easy peasy.

But then Jesus asks them another question “who do YOU say that I am?”

This question is not so easy to answer.  Jesus wants to know what the disciples actually think and the only one brave enough to step forward and give his opinion is Simon Peter.  Peter is not known for thinking before he speaks or acts, in the Gospels he shows himself time and time again to be the one who acts out of the passions he has at the moment, even if he ends up being wrong he does not censor himself.  And in this moment Peter’s impulsiveness works in his favor.  While the other disciples held back, pondering Jesus’ question, Peter blurts out “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God."  

Jesus seems rather pleased with Peter’s answer, saying to him “Blessed are you Simon Peter,” but then he says something a bit strange, “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.”  

Out of his impulsiveness and passion Peter is given the right answer, not by anything he saw Jesus do, but by God.  The faith inside of Peter allowed him to express something that could not otherwise be expressed.  And while Peter will almost immediately misunderstand what it means for Jesus to be “the Son of the living God,” his faith will allow him to hold onto that knowledge in the midst of his misunderstanding.

 But the question still remains, “who do you say that I am?”  is a question that we all should really answer.

Who DO we say that Jesus is?  If someone came up to you on the street and asked you “what do you believe, who is Jesus?”  What would you say?  

You of course have several options, you could give the same answer as Peter, or you could repeat the Nicene Creed.  While we do believe that Jesus was the Messiah, would we be able to explain why that’s important?  What about the Nicene Creed?  We say it every Sunday because we believe it, and it does spell out the very basics of our beliefs, but does it truly express how Jesus fits into our lives?  

Who do we say that Jesus is?  Not just in this place with our words and our music, but who do we say that Jesus is with our lives?

When we say that Jesus is the Son of God, what does that actually mean for us?  When we proclaim Jesus as our savior, what are we actually saying?  Being able to answer these questions is not merely important because someone might start quizzing us on the street, it is important because if we can’t articulate who Jesus is, then how are we supposed to know who WE are as his disciples?

If we believe that Jesus is the Word of God, the revelation of God in the world, than what does that mean for us as people who profess to follow him?

Paul struggles with this question in his letter to the Romans.  In today’s passage he tells the Christians in Rome “to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”  We gather here on Sunday mornings to worship together, to be renewed in our faith and to offer back to God all that we have, but our worship of God does not end as we walk out those doors today.  Paul encourages his readers to look at their lives in a whole new light.  As Christians, everything we say and do becomes our spiritual worship of God.  What we believe is not just expressed in words, but our whole lives are our statement of faith.  So who do we say Jesus is with our lives?  This is a question we each need to ask ourselves every day.  Like Peter we may not fully understand what we profess with faith.  God, the nature of God in the incarnation, is far too big for us to ever fully understand.  If there is no mystery in our beliefs it means our beliefs are too small, too easy.  

This can be so frustrating.  We live in an age of humanity where mysteries are not really tolerated, and in most cases I think that is right.  But faith is about transformation, not understanding.  We cannot expect to be able to fit Christ’s call to love and peace into this world.

Paul contrasts being conformed to the world with being transformed by our faith.  Choosing the latter means not being able to choose the former, we are not really supposed to fit into this world. 

Every day we should be asking ourselves, does my life reflect the love of God shown to me in Jesus Christ?  Does my life reflect Christ’s compassion and forgiveness?  Does my life reflect Christ’s encouragement to be faithful and courageous?  Does my life reflect Christ’s sacrifice? Or do I shy away from God’s calling?  Does my life reflect a belief in a god who is engaged with the world, or a god who has conformed to the apathy of our society?  Choosing not to be “conformed to this world” but instead to be “transformed by the renewing of our minds” is an every day sort of endeavor. 

We should not be discouraged with the difficulties we face, even the disciples struggled and faltered.  But it is important to always challenge ourselves in our Christian journey.  We are not expected to be perfect.  God has patience and knows how scary it can be to live by faith, and perhaps that is why we are the body of Christ in this world together.  Separately we are called to be disciples of Jesus, but together we are Christ’s body in the world.  We are here to give support and encouragement to each other; we are here to be each other’s strength when our own fails. 

Later in the Gospel according to Matthew Jesus says to his disciples “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.”  It doesn’t take much to make the body of Christ present.  When we gather together to support each other in our faith we make Christ visible to all who see us.  In the Epistle Paul reminds us that we need each other, that together we are one body.  

And together our lives will answer Jesus’ question “who do you say that I am?” 

Amen.