Sermon: When we see the real sun it is bright but beautiful

In Jewish tradition women had to wait forty days after giving birth before they were allowed to enter the temple.  So today, forty days after Christmas, we hear in the Gospel that Mary and Joseph travel to Jerusalem to make a sacrifice for her purification and to present the baby Jesus to the temple Priests.  After paying for an offering of two turtledoves, Mary would have presented herself to a temple priest.  The priest would then sprinkled her with the blood of her sacrifice, and declare her to be clean.  Then Mary and Joseph were required to present the baby Jesus to the priest.

 All of the first and best things were given to God, and the first born son of every woman belonged to God unless that son was redeemed.  The parents of the child were required to hand over the baby to the Temple priest and then pay him 5 silver shekels to have the child returned to them again, thus redeeming the son from service in the temple.  But as they were about to do this ritual, Simeon stopped them.  He took Jesus into his arms and started to praise God.  In that moment Simeon’s life was complete.  Simeon held in his arms the fulfillment of God’s promise.  And then Simeon turns to Mary and Joseph and he blesses them and prophesies to them.  "This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.” 

Then suddenly an old woman named Anna showed up and started praising God and pointing the child out to everyone who would listen to her.

This must have been quite bewildering to Mary and Joseph, they of course new Jesus was special, but he was still a human baby who didn’t seem to look or act any different from other babies. 

So what did Simeon and Anna see that day when they looked at the child in Mary’s arms?  

Perhaps, in the middle of all the rituals and sacrifices that could be purchased for purification and redemption, Jesus stood out.  In the little baby Jesus was the true redemption given to the world, and the face of what purity truly looked like.  In that little human child was the truest and purest of all sacrifices, the sacrifice of a God who would do anything for the creation that he loves.  

I imagine that for Simeon and Ana it would have been like spending your whole life only looking at paintings of the sun and then one day seeing the sun itself.  In the midst of all that flat lifeless imitation of the truth they saw truth itself.  

Both Simeon and Ana were pious people looking for God to appear in their lives.  Their eyes and their hearts were open to see God shining through the face of that little child.  But why didn’t anyone else see it?  Why didn’t the priest in the Temple see who Jesus was?  

Perhaps no one else was really looking.  Sometimes it is hard for us to see what we do not expect to see.  It is hard to see those things we are not looking for, and it can be truly impossible to see the things that we don’t actually want to see. 

The temple rituals were part of a very large and profitable business that included animal vendors and money changers.  The temple courtyard would have been bustling with people buying and selling what was needed to fulfill the requirements of the mosaic laws.  

The vendors, the money changers and the Temple priests would not have been interested in having true redemption shine a light into their hearts or their flourishing business.  Presented in Jesus was not the kind of redemption or purification that could be bought or sold; it was far too real for that.  Like true and honest love it could only be freely given.

  Wrapped up in profits and power and maintaining the status quo, they would not have been interested in what Jesus was offering.

Simeon’s prophecy made it clear that Jesus would challenge many people in Israel, exposing their true thoughts and desires to the world.  And we know what happens.  We know that during Jesus’ ministry he challenged and changed everyone he met. Years later Jesus as an adult would enter the same courtyard to drive the vendors and the money changers out of the Temple.  

But there were other people there that day and they couldn’t see either. Perhaps some of them had given up hope.  Perhaps they were blinded by despair, or were so distracted by their many problems that they felt abandoned by God.  So they stopped searching for those places where God breaks through that mundane façade that called itself ‘reality.’

And suddenly there was Anna telling them “look!  Our true redemption is at hand” “look up and see, God is with us!”  And maybe that was all it took for them to really see the reality in front of them, or maybe they would need to be reminded again and again.

Of course we are not so different, are we?  We get so distracted with our lives that we forget to look up; we forget to see the hope and love that came to the world in the form of a little child. Sometimes we are not able to see what is really important versus what is merely a construction of our own making. Or maybe we are comfortable with how things are and fear the changes that God’s reality will bring.

The terrifying and amazing truth is that we are all loved by God so much.  God came in human flesh to show us God’s love.  But God loves us too much to let us stay the way we are.  Malachi tells us that God is like a refiners fire, like a refiner of silver.  God wants us to see the truth so badly that he became human, he came into this world to show us the truly important things in our midst.  He came to “free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death.”  We have nothing to fear, but we need to open our eyes to the things that God is telling us in the Gospels.

Today we celebrate Candlemas.  We bless the candles that will be used throughout the year.  It is a celebration of light, Christ is that light that is with us, even in the darkest places. What we do here every Sunday points to a deeper truth about God’s love for us and God’s desire for us to put our burden’s at his feet and join together in celebration of his Grace.  God works on us, not for his sake, but for our own sake.  And though it may be difficult, even painful at times, it is the pain that comes from seeing the brightness of the sun for the very first time. The challenge for us is to open our eyes and see all of reality illuminated by Christ the true sun.

Sermon: Stones of Fire, and other Epiphanies

Matthew 2:1-12

A sermon for Epiphany at Saint Clement's by the Sea, San Clemente

We don’t know much about the wise men in today’s Gospel story.  Generally Magi came from the area we now know as Iran or Persia.  Magi were men of learning:  Doctors, teachers, and especially priests.  In this story tradition tells us that there were three Magi and that these magi were not just wise, but they were also Kings.  One day, off in the distance, a new star appeared in the sky.   When the three magi saw that star they knew that somewhere, far away, a king had been born, and not just any king, but a messiah.  They did not really know where they were going, or how long the trip would take.  And they did not know what they would find when they got there.  But they knew that they must go.  The trip would not be an easy one.  They would be travelling west through dangerous wilderness and mountains.  At that time, Persians and Romans had an antagonistic relationship at best, and the magi would be walking straight into Roman territories.  Their families and friends must have thought they had all gone crazy.  What could possibly drive these men to make such a long and treacherous journey?

Wisdom is not a simple concept.  In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians he says that “you should become fools so that you may become wise.”  He says that “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.”   We see this in the story of these three magi.  The wisdom of the world would say that these men were the greatest fools ever.  There is nothing sensible about travelling nearly a thousand miles through wilderness and mountains in order to see a baby.  There is nothing sensible about a King from a completely different land and culture paying homage to a Jewish King, or a Jewish Messiah.  What could they possibly gain by doing such a thing?  Even the gifts they bring seem foolish.  Gold is a gift for a King, Frankincense is burned as an offering to God, and Myrrh is used to anoint the dead.  Gold Frankincense and Myrrh are hardly appropriate gifts for a child.  Of course, as Christians we can see how appropriate these three gifts are for the Christ child, but that only goes to show how foolish the wisdom of God, (who chose to become human and then suffer and die) must really seem to those who only know the wisdom of the world.

The question is, and you can think about this while I continue in Spanish: What makes the wisdom of God so different from the wisdom of the world?

The wisdom of the world can be static and unmoving.  It does not tolerate change very well, and it seems to fear mystery and ambiguity.  It is this way because it wants absolute and unchanging answers.  It does not like the grey areas of life and cannot tolerate paradox. 

But God’s wisdom has a different perspective.  In God’s wisdom there is room for variety, for change and mystery.  God’s wisdom encompasses the search for order and meaning, as well as all those things that cannot be easily explained, or put into words.  God’s wisdom is more than an intellectual pursuit to assign or discover order in the world around us.  It is also the perceiving of the mystery that is beyond our ability to fully comprehend or categorize.  God lives in the grey areas and thrives in the paradoxes.  

The wisdom of the world tries to replace passion and the imagination because it is a wisdom that insists on absolutes.  It insists on the world being one way or the other.  And its struggle for absolute mastery serves only to divide us and distance us from each other, from the world, and from God.  The wisdom of the world cannot abide ambiguity.  It requires that we either be dominant or submissive, active or passive, but not both.  

But the Wisdom of God needs us to be both.  We must be grounded in certain truths but always unsettled by the moral quandaries that we see in the world.  We should be awed by God’s transcendent majesty but always determined to encounter God in the world.  True wisdom ‘is the celebration of order and the cry of protest at what is without order,’ it is both the calm stillness and the burning desire.  

 Side note: I want to point out that what I call ‘the wisdom of the world’ can be seen in the harsh dogmas of religious fundamentalism just as much as it is seen in the stark materialism of certain neo-atheist movements.  In the same vein, just as ‘the Wisdom of God’ can and should shine through in the lives of Christians, it can be seen in the actions and philosophies of the non-religious as well.  God is funny like that.

The Wisdom of God is the wisdom we see in the three magi. They were led by hope and faith, but were not blind to the wickedness of Herod.    They did not travel with any absolutes, just a mysterious sign shining in the distance, and a hope for something new.  They left behind their kingdoms, and their families.  They left behind all the comforts and certainties of home.  The journey challenged them in all sorts of ways, tested their faith and their ability to hold on to hope, it must have.   It must have changed them in ways they could not have predicted, preparing them for their encounter with God.   

What the magi encountered that day in Bethlehem was the Living Wisdom.  They looked into the eyes of a child and saw God.  

In ‘The travels of Marco Polo’ there is a legend about the three magi.  The legend states that in return for their gifts Christ gave them a stone, a stone that represented the rock on which they should set their faith.  But the Magi, not understanding what the stone meant, on their way out of Bethlehem cast that stone into a well where it turned into a great pillar of fire.  Gathering some of that fire they took it with them on their journey home.  

Christ is that stone for us; that stone that became fire.  He is the secure footing on which we stand, and the passion inside that encourages us to move, to act in this world with open eyes and hearts.  He is the Wisdom of God revealed to us in all of its rich variety.

Amen.

Merry Christmas! John 1:1-14

Merry Christmas!  

John 1:1-14

Last night we heard the classic story of Mary and Joseph and their trip to Bethlehem.  We heard about the Angels and the Shepherds, and we heard about the young baby Jesus being born in a stable.  This is the story we sing about, the story of a baby born in a stable, lying in a manger.  

 It is a story about the cold political power of the elite that cares only about counting how many people and how much money it has control over.  It is a story about indifference that would leave a pregnant woman to give birth to a child outside in a stable.  It is a story of good news to those outside of society.  The shepherds who spend their nights outside the city gates, with only their flocks and each other for company, these forgotten men who wander the hillsides, they are the ones who get visited by angels, and have no choice but to go and see this miracle child for themselves.  They did not understand fully what they were seeing that night.  They knew the baby was special because the angels told them so, and they were amazed by what they had experienced that night, but how could they really comprehend who this little baby was?  Mary, as she looked down at her son, she alone would hold the shepherds’ story in her heart and wonder at what it all really meant, but could she really understand, could anyone?  

The story of Jesus’ birth is a very human story told from a human perspective.  But there is another perspective, a perspective that can never really be understood because it is not a human perspective.

So today we pull way back, back before Mary becomes pregnant, back before King David or Abraham were born, back before men walked the earth at all, before the world began, before the universe even existed.  Back before there was time.  We even go back before there were angels or heaven.  Today we go all the way back to the very beginning.  

Back then there was God. 

 And that is all we can really say because God by God’s self is completely beyond our human comprehension, beyond the descriptive ability of our language.  But God chose to create, we know that much.  And God spoke creation into being.  ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.  He spoke the earth and the stars into existence and everything that is on the earth.  And he spoke us into existence too.  God’s Word, God’s creative force, God’s very expression of God’s self, not separate from God, but God entirely and completely, this is who was born to Mary, wrapped in swaddling bands and laid in a manger almost two thousand years ago.  God.

In Christ the unimaginable, the incomprehensible becomes visible.  We do not need to speculate about who God is (though I’m sure we will continue to do so) all we need to know about God is shown to us in Jesus, and through the lens of Christ we are better able to recognize God when we see him in the people and the world around us.

We are amazed at God’s willingness to lower himself, to reach down and bind himself to human flesh.  We marvel at this because we think of it as something God does in-spite of himself, but the true marvel is that God reaches downward towards us because that is God’s nature.  In Jesus God’s love is revealed, not as some distant cold love but love that is personal and tangible, Love that gives of itself completely.  This is what perfection really looks like; this is who God is.  And this is the image that we were made in.   

Jesus shows us God in his divinity, but in his humanity Jesus shows us who we are too.  In Christ we see what it means to be fully human.  We see that our nature is not unlike God’s, to reach out from ourselves as God reached out; we are meant to love like God loves, not a cold theoretical sort of Love, but a relational love of sacrifice and self offering.  

In Christ we can see where our true nature meets the nature of God.  Christ is the true light, he does not just shed a spotlight on God, so that we might know our creator but came to shine a light on us as well, so that we might know ourselves.  

Saint Athanasius said “God became man so that man might become God”.  Though I have read this statement a hundred times, and studied at length what it might mean, I am always surprised by it.  It is an eye opening statement.  Perhaps this is what is meant when John says, “to all who receive him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of the blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”  Our true belief is belief that does not just reside inside our heads, but flows through our veins and lives in our hearts, and most of all is expressed in our lives and uncovers in us who we truly are, who God made us to be. 

I think perhaps there is this idea that striving to be like Christ is to try and be less human.  But the truth is, the more like Christ we let ourselves be, the more human we become.  

That is the miracle proclaimed to the shepherds, and the mystery pondered in Mary’s heart.  That is the incarnation of God in this world, the miracle and mystery that we should always try to keep with us in our hearts and minds not just today but everyday.  In Jesus, born a fragile human child, all that is truly God and all that is truly human is revealed to us.  And for this we should sing to the Lord a new song, for he has surely done marvelous things!

Amen.