Repentence, Judgment, Salvation: oooo, spicy.

 

                                                     Sermon for Advent II

December 8, 2013

 Matthew 3: 1-12

May the Words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight oh Lord our strength and our redeemer.

There is a lot going on in today’s Gospel lesson.  It deals with issues of redemption, judgment and even baptism.  This is a bit surprising considering that Jesus does not make an appearance in it.  Instead we encounter John the Baptist, crying out in the Wilderness “repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near."  Perhaps for us the call to repentance has only negative connotations and is too often associated with a very harsh, and unrelenting way of thinking, of a vengeful god who cares more about rules than love.  It evokes images of excessive guilt and shame.  Repentance is not a comfortable word, when I hear it I start to squirm, as I probably should.  Repentance is not merely about feeling guilty for your sins, or turning toward God in some non-descript way in order to avoid punishment.  It is actually more difficult, requires more intentionality. Perhaps it is an issue of translation, because it is clear that what John is telling the people to do is have a change of mind, he is not calling anyone to sit and wallow in self-loathing, but we are actually being asked to recognize in ourselves our priorities, our habits, our outlook on life, and ultimately, to change them.  Because , and this is the really wonderful news, “the kingdom of heaven has come near.”  God has come, he is in their presence, and without repentance, without a change of heart and mind, how will anyone be able to see him, without a change in the way we think and act how will we ever be able to feel at home in God’s kingdom?  Repentance is necessary preparation, because with God’s kingdom comes a completely different way of life. 

John’s message is not an easy one for any person to hear, but he is particularly hard on the Pharisees and Sadducees who come to John for a baptism as well, but it seems they do not come in humility.  John has only harsh words for these leaders of Jewish society.  He seems to suspect that they are not being totally sincere in their repentance.  ‘You brood of vipers’ he says to them, and he tells them that they cannot rely on their lineage to save them.  They set their pride on having Abraham as their ancestor, but their ancestry will not protect them from God’s judgment.  “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”  We would be amiss if we did not take this warning to heart.  As Christians we too are guilty of thinking that we will be spared God’s judgment, but John is pretty clear that we will all face Judgment, that we will all be judged according to our “fruits of repentance.”  While this all sounds rather harsh, it is indeed good news, God’s reign has come near and in Christ we are faced with the reality of that reign.   

John speaks of one who will bring a baptism by fire and the Holy Spirit, a baptism where the main tool is not water or oil but a winnowing fork, a tool used to scrape the chaff, or husk, separating the usable portion of the wheat grain from the unusable which is immediately thrown into the fire.  This is neither a peaceful nor a particularly comforting image. But John knew what it meant to be a disciple; he knew that inviting God’s Grace into our lives is an invitation to be constantly formed and made new and that that is not necessarily something that always brings us ease or comfort.  But rather we are asking the Holy Spirit to set us ablaze, or to paraphrase John Donne “to burn off the rust and deformity and restore Christ’s image within us.”  God became incarnate in the world to show us the Kingdom of God, and also prepare us to live in that kingdom.    

The verses following  today’s gospel story reveal that as the broken and world weary masses gathered at the edge of the Jordan river in the hope that they might find healing and renewal in baptism, Jesus, that very same healing ointment and hopeful renewal they were looking for was right there in their midst.  He did not set himself above or apart from this crowd of lost and lonely sinners like the Pharisees so often did, but stood among them, as one of them.  Our own baptisms call us to do the same.  To be marked as Christ’s own forever does not separate us from the world, but places us right square in the middle of it. 

And the world is not an easy place to be in the middle of, because it is a world twisted with sin.  The very fabric of human society is run through with corruption and even our attempts to overcome imbalance and injustice in the world is often met with resistance.  As we become more aware of how our food is grown or our clothes are made it becomes clear that in one way or another we rely upon a system that is built on sin.  Often times our instinct is to try and separate ourselves from the sin we see in the world, more often though we try to ignore it, pretending everything is just fine because it is too difficult to live in this broken world as if we were already living in God’s kingdom.  We try to put off changing too much, but we cannot let ourselves off the hook.

Dietrich Bonheoffer writes, “Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God's will.”  As baptized members of the body of Christ we are asked to follow Christ which means living in the world as Christ lived in it.  But without true repentance we will surely lose our way, without a true change of our priorities we will forget to live as Christ and the kingdom of God will only be that much harder to see.At our baptism we are handed over to God, we acknowledge God’s love for us and are committed to being a reflection of that love in the world.  The waters of our baptism commits us to following the path that Christ set for us allowing God to winnow and burn away the chaff of our lives, continually renewing Christ’s image within us.  And just as Jesus stood with the newly baptized on the Jordan River so too does he stand with us, As it says in Isaiah “for when we pass through the waters God will be with us and when we walk through the fire the flame shall not consume us.” 

Today on this second Sunday of Advent we are faced with the very difficult topic of judgment and what that means for us who call ourselves followers of Christ.  We should be careful and never put limits on God’s love by assuming that we know who will be counted as one of God’s children and who will not.  In truth I believe that everyone is a child of God, that Jesus came to save all of humanity, all of it.  I recently heard someone say that “hell is not being able to let go” It is for us, as Christians, to be signs of that love by being living testaments to God’s kingdom. By showing people that letting go of the trappings of this world frees us.  Bearing fruits of repentance, that is, showing the world what a truly changed mind and heart can do - this is how we must live our lives.

Thanksgiving Extravaganza!

Texts: Philippians 4:4-9, John 6:25-35

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

I have a friend who calls this ‘the most beautifully named holiday of the year.’  And I think he is right, there is nothing more beautiful than gratitude.  Martin Luther called gratitude “the most basic of Christian attitudes”.  The ability to truly give thanks is something that we are all called to do.  Eucharist, the sacrament we partake in every Sunday, means “thanksgiving”.  Gratitude is an integral part of being a Christian. And it is the foundation of Joy, in fact you cannot even have joy without gratitude.  And gratitude can be a true source of strength for us as we face a world that can, at times, be rather unforgiving.  That being said, I am a little embarrassed to confess that this is not something I have always fully understood.

You see, I can be rather similar to those people who followed after Jesus in today’s Gospel.  They ate, and their stomachs were filled, but they still felt empty, they wanted more.  Just one more sign, and then I will believe, just one more miracle and I will follow you anywhere.  I get that.  I can be rather distrusting, always wanting a little more certainty before I invest too much of myself.  It is a default mode of mine, a defense mechanism, I am always hesitant to get too excited, be too happy, fall too much in love.  Any time I have a sense of wonder at the world it always comes with a reminder of my own mortality.  ‘Never get too attached’ my mind says, ‘it won’t last.’   I lived like this for a long time, I put walls up around Joy, I avoided vulnerability, never let myself rejoice too much for fear of getting hurt.  Of course I often felt like something was missing, like a part of me was being hollowed out, or was slowly wearing away with time, and I never really ever felt full, or satisfied.  But one learns to live with it and focus on other things.  And even though I knew it was not the best way to live, I didn’t really know how to change it.

Paul, on the other hand, he got it, he understood what he needed to do, and he encouraged the Philippians to do the same.

Rejoice in the Lord Always, again I say rejoice!

Paul knew better than most how hard it could be to be joyful always.  He wrote these words from the confines of a prison cell and he was not at all certain if he would ever see freedom again.  Yet despite the suffering he endured, and the potential execution hanging over his head, he still knew joy and urged others to rejoice as well.   Paul understood, Paul knew what it meant when Jesus said “I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”  Paul believed, had full confidence in Christ.  And even in the midst of suffering he was thankful to God, thankful for Christ’s work in the world, Christ’s defeat of death.  He was thankful for a God who loved us enough to be present in the world in such a truly tangible way.  He was fed by that gratitude, and he was able to rejoice in God no matter what the circumstances.  

So for the longest time I found it rather difficult to relate to Paul when he talked about joy.  When he talked about being strong, that I understood, but joy…

Then one day I heard an interview with Dr. Brene Brown, a sociologist and researcher who’s main work was studying vulnerability.  Anyway, in this interview she called “Joy the most terrifying and difficult of emotions.”  Then she talked about something that she liked to call, ‘foreboding joy’.  That is a reaction we have to joy, it is when we start to think about all the bad things that can happen.   Joy brings with it vulnerability, and for many of us vulnerability truly is terrifying.  So in order to stem any feelings of vulnerability, “we try to beat vulnerability to the punch” by preparing for something bad to happen instead.

‘ Yes!’  I thought, ‘that is me, I do that.’  But then she went on to say that some people don’t do that.  Some people, when faced with joy, that oh so delicate of emotions, instead of reacting in fear, they react in gratitude.  Instead of thinking of what horrible things might happen to come and take this joy away from them, they think of how grateful they are to have that moment of joy at all.  They lean into Joy rather than away from it.  

I used to think that if God could just make me joyful then I would be more grateful, but you see, I had it backwards.  Gratitude is something that can be practiced, and not just on days like today, and not just for big things, but for everything.  Gratitude is what we need for joy to take root in us. When I looked at today’s epistle, I thought to myself, ‘well look at that, it’s all right here’ “Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.”  

Don’t let worries of ‘what may be’ plague you, but focus on the things you are thankful for.  And learn to be thankful to God for everything.  

Studies have proven the life changing ability of practicing gratitude.  Researchers have determined that all it takes is writing down three things a day you are grateful for, no matter how small, before you see real changes in your outlook on life.  And when you start to do this, it doesn’t take long before you start looking for things to be grateful for.  It doesn’t take long for your world view to change as well.  People who took part in that study showed an increase in charitableness, and happiness and became less worried about material things, they felt more satisfied with their lives as a whole.  

Paul obviously knew all this, Jesus definitely understood the power of being thankful, and the saints- it is clear that so many of them just ‘got it’.  But it took me reading about these studies, hearing Brene Brown speak before I was able to put things in their proper order

    

If being generally thankful only three times a day can be so life changing, so joy educing.  Can you imagine what it would be like if we were thankful to God all the time?  I can, and it is something I would truly love to see.

Amen

Things fall apart...

 Sermon for November 17, 2013

Text: Luke 21:5-19

By the time Jesus and his friends were there, a temple had stood on that spot in Jerusalem for over 500 years, but the building that they were looking at was a relatively new construction built under the authority of Herod the Great, and by all accounts it was a spectacular building to behold.  Towering above the rest of the city, the whole Temple plaza was about the size of 6 football fields. Its walls stood 100 feet high, and were made of stones that could be 15 feet to 40 feet long and weigh up to 500 tons.  Lining the edges of the temple mount were long porches or walkways, each one with a roof that was supported by three rows of columns standing 37 ½ feet high.  Outside of the temple building there was a court paved with marble, and the temple itself sat on a foundation of immense slabs of marble covered in gold.  I am telling you all this because I want you to have at least a vague understanding of what today’s Gospel passage is referring to.  When the disciples are talking about the beauty of the temple, it is because the temple was one of the grandest buildings of its time.  Not only was the building beautiful, it was also the center of all Jewish worship, As Jesus once said when he was 12 years old it is his Father’s house.  So when Jesus tells his followers that there will come a time when the temple will be no more, it was a shocking, perhaps even a devastating thing for them to hear. 

So they say to Jesus “what will be the signs that this is going to happen?” “Tell us what to look for so we can be prepared, maybe they thought they could even stop this awful thing from taking place if they were only able to see it coming.  I understand where the disciples are coming from.  I am constantly trying to do this, I am always imagining possible outcomes of my actions, I’m constantly trying to predict what the future holds, and when I am really unsure of something I will desperately beg for a sign, something to guide my way to help me get the outcome that I want, if only I could see the future clearly then I could manage my life so much better.  I don’t know why, but it seems so much easier to focus on tomorrow than it is to focus on today.  Staying present, in the moment, can be so difficult to do, but in a way that is what Jesus is telling his followers to do.  Telling them not to worry about what they are going to say, because the holy spirit will tell them.

Way back in Luke Jesus teaches a lesson about anxiety.  He tells his listeners that they should not worry, that God will be with them, that even the birds of the air and the lilies of the field are looked after by God.  And he asks them “can any of you, by worrying, add a single hour to your span of life?”  The answer of course is no.  Worrying gains us nothing.  Today’s Gospel relies on that teaching.  Jesus wants his disciples to stop looking to control what cannot be controlled, but instead to live faithfully and to testify to that faith through their lives and their words always trusting that God will give them what they need when they need it.

 And in 70AD, less than 40 years after the event in today’s Gospel reading the temple does get destroyed.  And the followers of Jesus are certainly persecuted, and there certainly are wars and revolutions and people who say they are the true messiah, all of this happens, but it is not the end yet.  And now here we are, almost 2000 years later. 

And the question is, what is Jesus saying to us?  What are our great temples?  Our beautiful but impermanent temples that we tend to rely on instead of God?

 

  Things happen in our own lives, and we feel blindsided by them, and we wonder why.  There are days when I feel as if one thing is piling on top of another, like I will be buried underneath the burdens that I carry, and I struggle trying so hard to fight them, but sometimes there is little that can be done.  It is in those times, when things are truly dark that we absolutely must cling to God alone.  All of the things that we have to make us feel secure, all the cars, and houses, all the money, and all the church buildings, our feelings of self-reliance and even our relationships, they will all pass away eventually.  And if we spend our time having anxieties about all those things that lack any real permanence then we are merely distracting ourselves and giving ourselves greater worry than we need.  Because our one true source of strength that will stay with us when all that we have falls away, that one source of strength is God, God who revealed himself in Jesus Christ.  And when we let God be the source of our strength, we find our lives constantly being made new.  We find that our relationship with the world and all that is in it, is put in its proper order.  When God is our strength and our focus, we are able to throw ourselves, everyday, into this world like it is both the first and the last day of our lives.  We are called by Jesus Christ, by God, to love fully, to give generously and to forgive completely and with God as our strength and guide we are able to do just that.  

Today we are celebrating the baptism of Shea Ann.  Baptism is a true sign of our commitment as Christians to listen to, and have faith in the Holy Spirit working in our lives.  In Baptism we are made new by God, and with that we are set upon a journey to live out our new identity as one who is marked as Christ’s own forever.  Thankfully though, this is not a journey we make alone, we all promise to support the newly baptized.  For even though only God can be our true strength, it is together that we become Christ’s body.  And as such we are God’s hands and mouth in the world.  I think we are all aware that bad things are going to happen in our lives, but when we stop wasting our energy in worrying about what is to come, we free ourselves to live faithfully and generously, we free ourselves to be true testaments to the great power and love of God in all that we do and say.  

Christ does not promise that we will not be faced with suffering, in fact he says the exact opposite.  But he does promise that we are not alone, that we can endure and that “By our endurance we will gain our souls." 

Amen

The italicized portion was added for the 10a.m. sermon

The parable of the Widow and the Judge: Being God's justice in the world

Sermon Preached at Saint Clement's by the Sea on October 20, 2013
Luke 18:1-8

It is common to think of this parable in a certain way.  Jesus is telling us to be persistent in prayer and tells a story of a persistent Widow against an unjust judge.  It is natural to think that in this parable we are the widow and God is equivalent to the judge. And this interpretation is true, much of what Jesus says relies on our understanding that God is so much kinder and caring than an unjust judge.  That God does not ignore the pleas of his people.  But I wonder if we looked at it a little differently we could see something else about our relationship with God.  What would happen if we added another layer to that interpretation?  What if in some very serious respects the widow is God and we are the unjust judge?  How would that change what we think Jesus is saying about prayer?  How would that change our relationship to God’s justice?

Christ tells us to keep praying, and that when we do God will grant us justice swiftly.  But what does he really mean when he says this?  We all know that prayer is not some magic spell that we cast in order to get God to do what we want.  And the hard truth is that prayers often seem to go unanswered, that even the most ardent and pious person can feel as if God is not listening to him.  But perhaps we are looking at prayer in the wrong way. 

Rowan Williams once described prayer as “connecting with God, it’s putting yourself where God can get at you, it’s giving time to God and it’s trying to align yourself with God’s own mind.”1  So often prayer, intercessory prayer in particular is seen as a utilitarian tool in which we submit our requests to God and wait for a response.  Prayer is so much more than that, it is engaging in relationship with God, letting God into our own hearts and minds.  We should of course pray for specific things, we should always pray for the healing and well-being of those we love, we should of course pray for peace in the world, such prayers express our faith in God’s good will and love for us and for the world.  So when we pray for specific solutions to problems, we are identifying our own will with God’s will for us, and yet we must not try to put boundaries on God’s will by binding it to our own “limited vision and limited love.”2  Like the widow, God is persistent, always there looking for a way into our lives.  In the life and death of Jesus Christ we see the fullness of God’s love in the world.  In Christ we see a complete openness, both to the suffering of the world, but also to God’s mercy which can and will overcome that suffering. 

When we put aside our own self-interest, our own greed and apathy, we allow ourselves to be made sensitive and compassionate.  We become painfully aware of a world in need of healing.  But we also become aware of the renewing power of God’s mercy.  We are asked to look with open eyes at a world weighed down with hopelessness, but never lose hope because we must know in ourselves the freeing, and healing power of God’s mercy.  When we let prayer bring us into a true relationship with God, we get to see just how loved we are by God and through that we are then able to carry that love with us into our interactions with the world.

There is no place where God’s love and desire for justice cannot go.  Not even the unjust judge can keep God out.  If God can bring justice out of the most faithless, how much more can he bring justice out of the rest of us?  When we pray we are clearing a space for the Holy Spirit to move in us.  In this way prayer increases and strengthens our faith because it allows us to recognize our dependence on God, and teaches us to rely less on our own will and more on the will of God. 

In prayer God gives us the ability to put aside any self-deception, allowing us to see ourselves as beloved children of God. 

But the power of prayer does not end there, because it is inseparably linked to our actions in the world.  Prayer clears our vision, and refines our motives so that we may practice God’s justice in the world.  But what is God’s justice?  Well, justice (true justice) is sometimes described as ‘love in action’.  God recognizes us in all our humanity and loves us and calls us to share and liberate in others the humanity that we have discovered in our own prayer life. 

With many voices God calls us again and again into righteousness and to prayer.  God’s call can be heard in the prophets and martyrs, throughout the world, both just and unjust, in the poor and lonely, in the judges and the widows of the world, God may even speak with our own voices.

If we are vigilant in prayer and seek true justice in our world, then the answer to Christ’s question “when the son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?”  will most certainly be yes.

1.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1RvKQU78zQ
2.   Williams, Rowan. A Ray of Darkness (Lanham: Cowley Pub, 1995), 119.