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Sermons - Advent & Christmas 2010


December 5, 2010 – Second Sunday of Advent
Year A – Revised Common Lectionary
    Isaiah 11:1-10
    Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
    Romans 15:4-13
    Matthew 4:1-12

Prepare!

That is the message, loud and clear.

“Prepare the way of the Lord.”

We heard it twice in our readings today. First in the Advent Wreath passage and then in the Gospel.

“Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,” says St. John the Baptist to his followers.

This event was so important it was recorded with the exact same sentence in three of the Gospels-- Matthew, Mark and Luke-- and in almost the same wording in the Gospel of John.

John the Baptist was telling his followers that they should get ready for a major change, a paradigm shift of all paradigm shifts, the coming of Jesus, the coming of God to be with us, live as one of us.

As John says in the Matthew version, “the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

The four week season of Advent is the time to prepare for change.

How do we prepare for major change? If you are like me, you like to do a bit of preparation, if at all possible, before a major change.

Of course, often we have no warning, no time to prepare. Sometimes change, both good and bad, just hits us, and we are left reeling, trying to find our footing.

But other times we actually get a heads-up. And if we heed the heads-up, we can often meet the change with excitement and open expectation, rather than fear and denial.

Change is most certainly in the air here at St. Giles. We have lost our beloved Fr. Duane to retirement. That is hard. It is certainly hard for me.

And in a year or so, you all will be greeting a new priest to be your shepherd into the future.

But right now we are in that in-between time, an Advent time of expectation and preparation. It is what theologians and spiritual teachers call a liminal time, or a borderlands time.

It is by its nature, unsettling.

But it is also the place, the time, where we are most likely to meet the Holy.

This is the space/time which my New Testament professor Fr. Bill Countryman calls the Borderlands of the Holy. Prof. Countryman says that the Borderlands of the Holy is where we all do our priestly ministry, “which is the lay or ordained ministry that illuminates and relates the secrets of the universe.” Some of those secrets are deep, like mystical experiences or theological insights or coping with serious illness, and some are more mundane, says Prof. Countryman, “like how to roast a turkey or ride a bike.”

Oftentimes the deeper borderland experiences are filled with suffering, challenges, doubt and difficulties.  Those experiences are not necessarily to be avoided because it is here that we meet the Holy, where we are most likely to do God’s work in this world.

In the borderlands of the Holy we find our mission, our call, our vocation, the road map for our journey with God.

As I said, this can be a bit scary or at least daunting, but it can also, if we let happen, be a time of great excitement and adventure.

I have a couple of friends, one an Episcopal priest, and the other a Buddhist chaplain, who both get very, very excited when they are in a liminal, borderlands space. The Buddhist is a hospice chaplain who is honored and excited about accompanying people in their borderlands journey from life to death.

And a priest friend of mine once gave this really uplifting speech about how exciting it was that his diocese—not this one, but another one—was undergoing serious financial challenges. He was totally convinced, and managed to convince his audience as well, that far from being something to be feared, the financial difficulty was showing them a new way to be together as The Church.

In this Advent time for St. Giles, this interim period, you can, if you are brave and open to the working of the Spirit, have a wonderful, exciting adventure in the Borderlands. I say you because I can only be a guide, for this is your journey.

So as your guide, what is my advice?

How then do we journey in the Borderlands? The desert? The wilderness?

St John the Baptist tells us to repent.

What does that mean?

There is the familiar sense of repentance as feeling sorry for our sins and making changes that will help us to avoid sin in the future.

But repentance is bigger. In fact in the original Greek “to repent” meant to turn in another direction, to start over in a new life. John is evoking that image of new life by repeating the words the prophet Isaiah preached to his people, the people of Jerusalem who had been captured and taken to Babylon.

Listen to Isaiah:

“A voice cries out:
‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
     make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
     and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
     and the rough places a plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
     and all people shall see it together,
     for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.’” (Isaiah 40:3-5)

If I may, I will quote the Oxford Study Bible,

“The prophet begins by calling on the reader to bring a message of comfort to Jerusalem. Her period of servitude is now complete and freedom is at hand (v.2). This message of hope pictures a great highway stretching across the desert and leading to Jerusalem (vv. 3-5), providing a way home for those scattered remnants of the former Israel who have been captive among the nations, particularly in Babylon. God will strengthen the weakened survivors who feel that they cannot make the journey."

I truly believe that if you all are brave, and I am brave as your guide, we will be able to have an exciting journey into the borderlands of the Holy, strengthened by God, and by the hope of a bright and beautiful future.

Prepare!



December 12, 2010 – Third Sunday of Advent
Year A – Revised Common Lectionary
Isaiah 35:1-10
    Psalm 146:4-9
    Canticle 15 (The Song of Mary - Magnificat)
    James 5:7-10
    Matthew 11:2-11

What kind of person do you think of when you hear the word prophet?

A wild-eyed, crazy guy standing on a street corner shouting about the end of the world?

A guy like John the Baptist, full up from his latest meal of locusts and  honey, standing hip deep in the Jordan River, baptizing people and urging them to repent?

A guy like St. Paul, running around the Mediterranean, frantically trying to bring all to the Good News of Jesus?

Do you always picture a guy? A slightly wild guy?

Well, today I want to offer you a different vision of a prophet.

The prophet Mary. Mary the mother of Jesus. Mary, the bearer of God.

It isn't really all that strange. After all, Mary fits the HarperCollins Bible dictionary definition of a prophet to a "T."

Let me quote the definition: A prophet is "A person who serves as a channel of communication between the human and divine worlds."

As GodBearer, Mary is a superb channel of communication between God and ourselves.

So what does Mary the prophet communicate to us about God?

First, at the most basic level, Jesus' birth through Mary makes him as much human as he is divine. Through bearing Jesus, Mary tells us that God understands what it means to be a human being.

God in Jesus has been born, lived and died as one of us.

Second, because of Mary's status as GodBearer, we are told that God values the least important people in the world as much as the richest prince. God chose as his unique prophet a young teenage girl, from a poor family living in a backwater corner of the Roman empire.

In that time and in that place, there were few people less significant than someone like Mary.

Essentially then, as a starting place, simply by taking the risk to be the mother of Jesus, Mary is a prophet.

But wait, there is more, Mary also gains prophetic status because she was possessed by the Holy Spirit, a requirement for any certified, genuine Middle Eastern prophet. Phrases like "the hand of the Lord fell upon" so and so is a common description for Biblical prophets. This possession by the Holy Spirit would involve visions that included a message for the world.

Surely the Annunciation, in which Mary sees and hears the Angel Gabriel tell her she will be the mother of the Saviour of the world qualifies for us Christians as the most important instance of possession by the "hand of the Lord."

This is prophetic show and tell, big time!

Let's look take closer look at the tell part.

Today we heard Mary's longest speech in the Bible, known as the Magnificat.

Let's go through it again listening for her prophetic voice.

Mary doesn't mess around. Right off the bat she says "…my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour," making it clear that the coming child, Jesus, is our saviour.

Next she gives us the very reassuring news that God has mercy on those who fear him, that is, those who turn to him.

Then she goes radical, she goes rogue. There is really no other word for it. This is Mary, practically a wild-eyed street-corner preacher.

Mary forcefully tells us that by choosing her as his vessel, God has shown that he is on the side of the poor and the weak. That God favors the least and lost, because no one else will.

She declares that God has "cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly."

Mary also warns that the hypocrisy of those in power will be exposed by Jesus' mission to us. That is the meaning of that strange line “he has scattered the proud in their conceit." The inner evil of those in power, both religious and political, will be revealed in the persecution, trial and execution of Christ.

This is tough stuff. Stuff that should rattle us a bit if we take it at all seriously.

As Franciscan priest and spiritual writer Richard Rohr says, “The amazing thing is, as soft, tender, beautiful, and lyrical as this prayer is…it is in fact a most radical kind of prayer. For in it she talks about religious, political, social and economic liberation. The Magnificat, this prayer of Mary, has become one of the favorite prayers of the Third World.”

Which brings me to today. Today is the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, one of the most important holy days in Mexico and also for Mexican Americans. Guadalupe is the name given to the appearance of Mary to Juan Diego, an Aztec Indian peasant in Tepeyac, near modern-day Mexico City. This happened in 1531, ten years after the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire by Cortez.

And in this event Mary is super-prophet, complete with cape.

Picture this: You are a middle aged Aztec Indian man. Your people have been conquered by the Spaniards. They are depressed and almost destroyed. Your Aztec Indian religion has been suppressed. Suddenly one day a beautiful woman appears to you and tells you she is the Virgin Mary. She speaks in your native language. She looks like an Indian maiden but is pregnant. She tells you to go to the Bishop and tell him about her.

How would you feel?

Well I’m guessing Juan Diego was actually pretty freaked out, sure he, an Indian, would never be believed. And indeed, he was not. The bishop told him he needed a sign.

Ultimately the sign came in the form of roses blooming in the middle of winter. Juan Diego gathered up the roses in his cloak, called a tilma. When he came to the bishop and laid open the tilma, there was an image of the Virgin etched into his cloak.

That image still resides in her cathedral in Mexico.

How was Mary a prophet in her appearance as Guadalupe? Because she appeared as an Indian, spoke in the Aztec language of Nahuatl, and wore Aztec symbols. In addition, she appeared to an Indian, not to the white, Spanish, church officials.

All of this affirmed the Aztec peoples as loved by God.

God had chosen Mary has his prophet to the Aztecs.

The result was profound: Her appearance brought over 8 million Indians to Jesus in the years immediately after.

Mexican American theologian Virgilio Elizondo has said that the events at Tepeyac had “the most revolutionary, profound, lasting, far-reaching healing, and liberating impact on Christianity since Pentecost.”

Mary the prophet is a channel who gives us much Good News: that we are loved by a God who knows what it is like to a human being and who comes to us when we most need Him.

And she tells us that God values all of us, even those of us who seem to be totally insignificant.

Even though most of us here are not oppressed or poor, we all feel flawed inside. Maybe not all of the time, maybe not in any paralyzing way, but flawed nevertheless; that we don’t measure up, that if anyone ever knew who we really are, they would run the other way.

God through Mary tells us otherwise, that we are loved like a good mother loves her children—unconditionally, relentlessly, perfectly.

Thank you God, and thank you Mary for being one of his prophets.



December 19 – Fourth Sunday of Advent
Year A – Revised Common Lectionary
    Isaiah 7:10-16
    Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18
    Romans 1:1-7
    Matthew 1:18-25

This is a special time of year for television. It is one of two times annually that you can watch Jesus movies. The other time of course is Easter.

Generally they are a dismal lot. Dismal because the Jesus portrayed in them is no one I would want to hang out with. He is usually shown as insipid, pretty, perfect, barely a person, who never dances or laughs and for some inexplicable reason, always speaks in King James Bible English.

The King James Bible English may be annoying or humorous but the “barely a person” is actually a serious problem.

A serious problem because Jesus WAS a person. A real, live human being.

For a while my favorite Jesus film was Franco Zefferelli’s 1979 Jesus of Nazareth. It is still worth watching because, while the Jesus has these scary blue eyes and bible English, in it at least the disciples act like real people, with real motivations. For instance, Judas is portrayed as being driven to betray Jesus because he is disappointed Jesus isn’t acting to incite violent insurrection against the Romans. While not actually put forth as a reason in Scripture, it is at least historically defensible.

Later I grew to respect Martin Scorsese’s 1988 Last Temptation of Christ. This film caused many a fundamentalist to have a cow over the supposed blasphemy contained in the film.

In it Jesus actually considers getting down off the cross to live a normal life, complete with marriage to Mary Magdalene.  The hysterics that ensued because the film showed Jesus as having normal sexual relations with his wife Mary were ridiculous in the extreme.

There are other aspects of the film that are quite alarmingly unorthodox; such as the fact that Jesus is shown as compromising his values to make crosses for executions. But the hysterics never focused on that aspect. Instead it was, as always, the sex.

The idea Jesus might fanaticize about sex is actually so orthodox. How can Jesus be a real human if he is doesn’t have our same basic human drives? He may have never had a sexual relationship but certainly, if he was fully human, then he thought about sex. We can also bet with certainty that he used the toilet, (actually more like the outhouse since he was poor), vomited if he was ill, and cracked jokes.

Which brings me to the movie I wish they would make. I would love to see the book titled Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal made into a film pronto.

This novel by absurdist humor writer Christopher Moore is outrageously irreverent, complete with Jesus using potty language, having sexual thought, occasionally getting tipsy and engaging in teen pranks.

However irreverent, though, it is rigorously orthodox for two reasons:  First: Jesus, here called Joshua, the Hebrew for Jesus, is portrayed as revealing God in a way ordinary mortals do not—we see him perform miracles galore, make a consistent choice for love and compassion, and come to an understanding that he must remain celibate so he can concentrate on his role as messiah.

The second reason it is so orthodox is that Jesus, aside from the aforementioned God behavior, acts like a real live human adolescent and young man.

The wonderful result is that when the story moves into the last terrible days in Jerusalem, the reader actually cares about these people and especially this Jesus. The horror and tragedy, as well as the inevitable betrayals, redemptions and Resurrection, are far more affecting because these characters are like people we actually know, not stiff mannequins in a Renaissance painting—much as I actually love Renaissance religious paintings.

No matter what you might think about the novel’s irreverence, and of course it is not for everyone, one cannot deny that it takes the idea of the Incarnation seriously, far more seriously than the insipid, mannequin Jesus flicks.

What is the doctrine of the Incarnation?

It says that through his mother Mary and the action of God, Jesus was born as fully human and fully divine. As today’s Gospel passage says: “she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit.”

The very foundation of our faith rests on the belief that God came to be with us in the human flesh of Jesus of Nazareth. A man, a man who was born like all of us, from the body of a woman. We call this miracle the Incarnation, which comes from the Latin word caro, and means flesh.

“God in Jesus”, or Emmanuel, “God with us” had a physical body that must have felt heat, cold, sexual desire, hunger, probably got the flu, danced and laughed.

And from the Gospel stories we know, for a fact, that he ate, drank wine (enough wine that he was accused of being a drunkard and partier by his enemies Luke 7:33-34), that he got exhausted, touched and healed people, walked many, many miles, and at one dramatic point got so angry he turned over tables in the Temple. He even cried when his friend Lazarus died, and later in complete terror before his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Ultimately his body was brutally beaten and then he was crucified.

This is an intensely physical story.

If you were to take out all the things Jesus did with his body and were left with just his words, there would be no Good News. It would be no more than an empty lecture. It is his life, in his body, doing what he did with his body, together with his words, and then the death of his body and finally the Resurrection of his body that make up our salvation.

So what happens when we really believe that Jesus was both God and Man, what happens when we really take the Incarnation seriously? What happens when we really understand that in Jesus God is Emmanuel, “God with us”?

What does it mean for us if God is with us, if God is one of us?

Well, for one thing it means God is for us, not against us. It means God understands human pain and suffering. It means God understands human relationships.

And perhaps most importantly, in Jesus as a human being, we get a glimpse of who God really is and he isn't vengeful or scary, t though he is quite demanding that we refrain from judging, from clinging to our stuff, and above all that we love and care for one another!!

This is basic: if we believe in the Incarnation, then our humanity, and all of humanity, is important, holy. All humans are important. All humans are worthy, all humans are to be respected as loved children of God.

This is where Christianity, I believe, actually demands that we actively try to make this a better world for all humanity not simply ourselves.

How often do we hear people say,  “I’m spiritual, not religious.” If that means someone is rejecting fundamentalism, I am all with them. But if it means simply meditating and working on one’s personal relationship with God and not much else then I’m a bit troubled.

Why?

Back to the Incarnation: because Jesus had a body.  I believe the highly physical nature of Jesus and his story tells us that the way to best express our faith is through our bodies, together with other bodies, other people. Through action.

In fact, we the church are called The Body Of Christ. That is why I think the church, our church, is worth being a part of. Jesus on occasion sought solitude for prayer and communion with God, but the majority of his ministry was done in a group context, with his disciples. He never operates as a lone ranger.

The church at its best, is like Jesus and his motley crew of disciples, human beings showing the face of God in compassionate acts of healing and kindness towards fellow human beings.

That is why I am part of the church and not sitting on some mountaintop in contemplation.

And it is why I feel passionately that the church, this church, is worth supporting in any way we can-- by our time, our talents and our treasure.

That, in spite of the fact that the Church, this church, any church, is far from perfect. In fact, it is worth it BECAUSE it is less than perfect, because it is human. The church cannot be thoroughly and purely divine because it is filled with flawed human beings, not gods; human beings who nevertheless are trying, however imperfectly, to follow the way of this person, this human Jesus, who is also God.

Today is our Stewardship in-gathering day and I bless all of your contributions and pledges, your support for the church, no matter how large or small.

I also bless all of the time so many of you put into supporting your church by working in your various ministries: Sunday School, altar serving, choir, counting, ushering (ushing?), bread baking, altar guild, bulletin-crafting, fund-raising, coffee hour coordinating, scheduling, visiting the sick, organizing outreach efforts, going to adult Christian education classes, serving on the Vestry, and of course coming to church! Please forgive me if I have forgotten anything!

All of these physical actions are the outward sign of your dedication to the Way of Jesus. All are responses to the miracle of the Incarnation that brought God to be with us.

And so I will close with something from my name saint, Teresa de Avila : she once wrote “Christ has no body now on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours; yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion looks out on the world, ours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good and yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now.”