December 26, Christmas 1: Two Kings in One Kingdom

Isaiah 63:7-9, Psalm 148, Hebrews 2:10-18, Matthew 2:13-23

Luke reports the nativity in terms of Caesar Augustus, and Matthew reports it in terms of King Herod. Luke calibrates his report with facts which can be verified in the records of the Roman Empire, while Matthew reports things which cannot be verified by any external source.

There is no report of the Slaughter of the Innocents in the historical record. Well, that begs the question, by excluding the Gospel of Matthew from the historical record. But Matthew wrote his gospel to be part of the historical record, no less than Julius Caesar did with his Gallic Wars. Oh yes, Matthew had an interest, but so did Caesar. Historians rely on the records of the Roman Empire and the annals of its puppets like King Herod, but these always represent an interest, so these records not mentioning of the Slaughter of the Innocents is not unforeseeable. It’s not the kind of thing you’d want to keep an official record of, nor was it even noteworthy. It’s the kind of thing King Herod did to keep himself in power. He was a noble thug. And as long as he served the interests of the Empire, the Romans turned a blind eye to all of his cruelties.

Who in history has ever recorded the slaughters of innocents? During the height of our war in Iraq we kept no public record of civilian casualties. Not that we were so cruel or hypocritical—we are just typical. A life along the boundaries of our systems is less valuable than a life at the center. You expect less in the colonies. It is the ordinary way of empires. The point of having military power is to keep the collateral damage away from home. If a slaughter of innocents had happened in a Roman colony to Roman citizens, then we’d have seen it in the official records.
　
How many children were killed? In a village the size of Bethlehem? All the boy babies under two, when families were large but child mortality was so high? Maybe thirty? How many children were killed last week in some country somewhere at the fringe of our economic system? Just a couple miles from here, in East New York, how many school age children are looking at the sale of drugs? Twenty? Sixty? A hundred? I don’t know. I doubt anyone of us here has any idea how many children our system considers expendable.

All of these examples are complex, none of these stories are black and white. We don’t have to assume that King Herod, in his own mind, might not have honestly agreed with the song of the angels, "Peace on earth, good will to humankind." But to keep the peace and some semblance of good will within his very troubled little kingdom, he felt he had to do what he had to do to keep control and to maintain his dynasty, even to having one of his own sons murdered in order to clear the way for another. So what’s a few undernourished kids, half of whom would never make it to adulthood anyway?

But this particular slaughter was put into history by Matthew because Jesus was his teacher, who himself will have been told of it by Joseph, to explain why he had grown up in Egypt (and why we can assume that Jesus was able to converse in Greek). That slaughter of some innocents will have been special to Jesus, not because it was so bad, for many have been far worse, but because it was on his account. Did he have survivor’s guilt? Is that part of the suffering which is mentioned by the Epistle to the Hebrews? Not that he was guilty, but that he took our guilt upon himself. That is why he became a human being: the Incarnation was not for the exaltation of humanity but for its perfection through the suffering of divinity. I wonder how much this history was always in the back of Jesus’ mind. The novelist Kazanzakis supposed that even on the cross he was remembering it. It certainly was part of what informed him as the Messiah.

We have in this story a struggle between two kings. Not two kingdoms, but a single kingdom, and with two kings. Which one is the usurper? Which one is the rightful king? Not necessarily the one who has the power or the monopoly on violence. King Herod was quite happy to have a heavenly king as long as there were two kingdoms between them—a kingdom on earth for himself and the kingdom of heaven for God. King Herod probably believed in God, and he certainly spent lavishly on the temple, and God could do whatever heavenly things God did while he did whatever worldly things he needed to do. King Herod probably prayed, but he would not have liked the Lord’s Prayer: "thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." Give to God what is God’s, give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and keep for Herod what Herod has to keep. That way everybody’s happy.

"Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven." Aye, there’s the rub, as I said the other night. That’s why Herod wants to take him out. Herod probably believed this baby was the rightful king, but that had not deterred him from killing his own son. Rightful king or not, this baby was bloody inconvenient. It’s always inconvenient when the kingdom of heaven comes on earth. Even for us, for all of us, powerful or powerless, innocent or guilty, it certainly puts us in a time of trial, and forces the issue of our temptations. You can do like King Herod, and try to dispose of the inconvenience, or like Joseph, you can embrace the inconvenience for the sake of the hope that is set before you.

The kingdom of God has its capital in heaven and its territory is, redundantly, the earth, disputed territory though it be. We feel like we live along its boundaries, at the fringes of the sovereignty and power of God. How great should our expectations be? It is possibly safer and certainly more convenient for us to live our lives as in two kingdoms instead of one. It may be that the powers in charge are usurpers, but when they oppose the rightful rule of God, how much power does God have to save us? Does it mean we’re on the run, like Joseph and Mary? Is that what it means to seek the kingdom of God? To be in flight? To be exiles in the world? Is that what I want for myself? For my kids? For my career? Lead us not into temptation.

I’m setting up these questions without an easy answer. The answer takes a while, it takes the whole gospel account of Matthew, which we will be unfolding here the next few months. My sermon series for the next few months is "Thy kingdom come." It’s because the coming of the kingdom is so central to Matthew’s gospel that we get this bad news story so quickly upon the good news of Jesus’ birth. But, as the epistle explains, the reality of the bad news is the material cause of the good news. A shadow proves the shining of a light. King Herod knew what was up. But he couldn’t imagine where Jesus would take it. Not with an imagination inspired by fear.
Yes, to be loyal to this rightful king must put you at risk with the seated powers of the world, effective and respected as they may be. Yes, against the logic of their ideologies you may feel like your belief is nothing better than a sequence of your dreams, like Joseph’s. But then you get external confirmations, like from the magi. You want to believe two things, but you yield to the belief in one. It’s a matter of trusting what you hope and feel is true.

Which king is acting out of love? Which king takes the suffering upon himself? Both of the royal families in this story have reasons to fear, but which of the two families passes the fear along to others, and which is the one which puts its whole trust in God’s protection? For all his wealth, Herod believes in a world that is far less generous than Joseph does. For all his power, Herod has far less hope than Joseph does. We support each other here in choosing for hope and generosity, and we support each other in choosing for the love of Jesus Christ.

Copyright © 2010, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

Christmas Eve 2010: Our Yearning For God's Turning

I welcome you here tonight. Whoever you are, wherever you come from, whatever your belief or unbelief or even curiosity, welcome! We are glad that you are here.

Both Judaism and Christianity are distinctive among the world’s religions by their belief in a God who makes promises, and in the promises God makes. For Jews, the promises are focused on the eternal distinction and obligation of their people, and on the promised land. For Christians, the promises are focused on Jesus Christ, the Son of God and the savior of the world.

The promises of God are not mere ideas. They promise real interventions in history, they aim at facts on the ground and the revival of souls and the resurrection of bodies. This God is a promise maker. But is this God a promise keeper?

There’s the rub. Does this God deliver? That is the pivot of belief. Not just that there is a God, or that God is good, but that God will be faithful.

If you make promises you have to follow through by making your choices and decisions in the direction of your promises. To keep your promises requires you to have some minimal control of your future, say, the future of your bank account, or of your property, or of your business. You have to be able to make your choices count towards your commitments. If this God we’re talking about is a God of promises, then this God is not merely some ideal force or the spiritual energy of the universe, but a someone who has desires and intentions and acts on them, a someone who makes choices and decisions, indeed, a someone who loves. This God is an "I" but not an ego, a lover without an id and a ruler without a superego, this is the great I-am who is the I-for-thou. This is the God who turns towards us. This is the God who keeps turning towards us even when we turn away.

In a few moments we will read nine lessons from scripture. They go from the promises made by the prophets to the promises kept in the gospels, promises kept with the Incarnation of God for your salvation and the salvation of the world. These nine lessons review the turning of God towards us. Why us? Who do we think we are? Such foolish creatures, such destructive animals, workers of such misery in the world. And yet God turns towards us, and at some cost to God’s self.

The God of promises is a God who pays for those promises at great cost to God’s self, a cost which is foreshown in the second lesson tonight, the sacrifice of his own son, a cost far greater than our own sorrow and repentance. Such is the power of God’s desiring. Even in our choosing of darkness this God keeps bringing light.

You chose to come here tonight, you chose for light within the darkness. You too have some desire. You are here tonight because you want to hear again the story of the Incarnation and to feel in the music the emotions of the story. You carry the yearning of humanity for the turning of God towards us. You hear the yearning and the turning in the promises to Abraham and the prophecies of Isaiah. You can feel it in the next hymn we will sing, "O come, O come, Emmanuel. O come, desire of nations." We desire God, we desire God-with-us, we long for the turning of God to the world.

Our yearning stems from our losses and our frustration and our misery, from our grieving and our sorrow and our repentance. But even if we were not sinners we would desire God. It is what we’re made for. Our yearning comes also from what is good in us, from our successes and our glories, at least when our glories are the glories of joy and love. We desire the light not only from being in darkness but also for the light itself. "His life was the light of humankind." We are made for the light. We are created to have this longing, we are designed for this desire. That these will be fulfilled is the promise of the infant in the manger, the fact on the ground which offers the desire of heaven. The great fulfillment is the gift of God’s own self, which is offered for your acceptance already here tonight.

Whatever your level of desire or belief, your choice to come here tonight was the right one. You knew there was something here for you tonight. I welcome you to it. The gift is free, the joy is free, the love is unconditional. Thank you for coming. I thank our musicians for singing and playing, I thank our lectors for reading, and I thank God for having this whole idea. God bless you all.

Copyright © 2010 by Daniel Meeter, All Rights Reserved.

December 19, Advent 4: What Would Joseph Do

Isaiah 7:10-16, Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19, Romans 1:1-7, Matthew 1:18-25

"Restore us O God, let your face shine, and we will be saved."

A young woman pregnant. That was the sign. For both of them. It was the same sign for both of them—for Joseph, the betrothed of Mary, and for King Ahaz, who was Joseph’s great-great-great-plus-ten-more-greats grandfather. King Ahaz was unrighteous, engaging in pagan practices and ungodly alliances. King Ahaz did not want a sign from God, because he wanted autonomy from God, to govern as he pleased and make his choices as he saw fit. Joseph was a righteous man, but he was not expecting any sign from God. When he found out his fiancé was pregnant, he didn’t know it was a sign from God. He thought it was a sign of Mary’s adultery.

We are not told how he found out that Mary was pregnant. From the social patterns of the day, I doubt that Mary told him, and he certainly hadn’t heard her side of the story. It’s possible her father told him, seeing as she still lived at home. We are not told how much it troubled him to learn of it, how aggrieved he was at Mary. Mary? "I thought I knew her, I never imagined she’d do something like this." And who’s the lousy guy she did it with? Who did it to her? What does it matter?

So what’s the righteous thing for him to do? According to Deuteronomy 22:20, he could demand that she be stoned to death. It still happens in Pakistan and Somalia. According to later rabbinic rules, he could demand a public divorce, which would protect his reputation and get his bride price refunded from her father. He could divorce her privately and quietly, and spare her the public shame, but then he will forfeit his refund from her father. What would Joseph do? He decides to do the merciful thing for her, which is costly for himself. That kind of righteousness. Joseph is a sign of the kind of righteousness by which the Savior will save the world. Not bad.
　
Then Joseph has this dream. Should he believe it? Don’t think it was easy. People did not believe their dreams back then any more than we do today. And with their understanding of the biology of conception, it was even harder for them to imagine a virgin birth then it is for us today. (They did not know about the female zygote. They believed the full "seed" came from the father, and the mother was like the earth in which it was planted.) So how long did he sit there pondering his dream. Can he take it as a sign from God? It is impossible, but it least it fits with what he thought he knew of Mary. But what will it mean for his own reputation. Everyone will count the months between the marriage and the birth, and they’ll figure that Joseph had had his way with her ahead of time, and so much for Joseph's reputation as righteous man.

He chooses to believe the dream, he chooses to believe that the young woman pregnant is actually the sign of a virgin with child, he chooses to believe that her condition is a sign from God, a sign that he can believe in Mary again, and a sign that Jesus, even before his birth, is already the savior of Joseph’s marriage and the savior of his love for his betrothed, no matter what the public might say of him. All that Joseph does here is a sign of salvation, of the sacrifice and of the reconciliation and the love. So Joseph is a very good father for Jesus, in terms of how to be a savior. When Jesus grows up he can ask himself, what would Joseph do?

I want to imagine how Joseph acted on his dream. It’s just my imagination, but this is the season that inspires imagination. First he went to Mary’s father, and he said, I still want to take your daughter Mary as my wife, it actually is my privilege, for I believe that your daughter is chaste, and that what is in her is of the Spirit of God. His face was shining when he said it. Now, whether her father thought Joseph was deceptive or a fool or telling the truth, I imagine he was grateful it would all work out, and that their respective families would be on good terms.
　
And then he went to Mary. I wish I knew better how men and women spoke to each other back then, but I can imagine that Joseph’s face was shining when he said, "I know you are with child but I will take you as my wife, for I believe that it is in you of the Holy Spirit, and we will call him Jesus, for he will save us from our sins." And when he said, "I take you Mary, to be my wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish till death us do part," then her face was shining too. I imagine she felt believed-in, she felt trusted, she felt restored, she was being saved from shame and loneliness. It wasn’t mercy that she felt, it was more like love and joy. That’s what salvation is. Reconciliation and restoration which is based on mercy and some sacrifice but which feels like love and joy. The two of them together were a sign of that kind of salvation.

And the birth of their child was the greatest sign of all. A sign that was neither down in Sheol nor up in heaven, but right in the middle of human life, the sign of childbirth. That night, in the stable. Their poverty and isolation, the painful cries of Mary’s labor, the suffering of the servants of salvation. Joseph was the midwife, the first to hold the baby, and as he slowly wiped clean the baby’s skin, he could hope that in the face of this child the face of God would shine again on Israel. The child is the sign that God is with us. God-with-us.

The reason we do Christmas pageants (and not Easter pageants) is because the Christmas story is all about childhood. The pageant was a sign for you today; how much you could read in it was up to you, and the desire of your hearts, but your faces were shining, all of you. You welcomed that story once again, as every year, the story of God with us. You can believe the sign: God with us.
　
This congregation is a sign. This ancient institution, if ancient only for America, the young community of Jesus which inhabits this institution, so full of infantile vitality, so fresh and so fragile, so rough and ready, so raw and needy, these other people here with you, with the dreams they have, the hopes and fears of all their years, your mutual desire to believe and to blessed, your mutual desire to love and be loved, your mutual desire for the shining face of God.


So I call on you this next week to let your faces shine. Go with your desire and your belief. Do what Joseph did. Believe what’s hard to believe, what’s hard to believe about God and what’s hard to believe about the world and what’s hard to believe about the other people in your life. Let your face shine on some person with whom your relationship is broken or at risk, like Joseph to Mary. Their son has saved us from our sins, so live beyond the hindering power of sin. It is your privilege to love that person, a privilege from God for you to sacrifice your own rights and reputation for that person. Let your face shine on others and you will see their faces shining back on you. Let this week be your final Advent preparation for the song the angels sand to the shepherds on the hillsides, "peace on earth, good will towards humankind." Many people doubt that it ever could be true. Let the shining of your face be a sign of it.

Copyright © 2010, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

December 12, Advent 3, Promise and Fulfillment

Isaiah 35:1-10, Magnificat, James 5:7-10, Matthew 11:2-11

We will celebrate today the baptism of Lily Faith Brooks, the sister of Joseph and the daughter of Rick and Kelly. If is altogether fitting that we should do this today, because a baptism makes visible so many of the themes of Advent in general and of the Third Sunday of Advent in particular.

The Third Sunday of Advent is called Gaudete Sunday, from the Latin word for "rejoice." The theme of joy is why the third candle in the Advent Wreath is colored rose instead of purple. Let me advise the Brooks family to always include one rose-colored candle for Lily on her birthday cakes, so that when people ask why that candle is different from all the other candles, then Joseph can tell the answer, that she was baptized on Gaudete Sunday.

On the Third Sunday of Advent, instead of the usual Psalm after the first lesson, we repeat the Canticle of the Magnificat. A Canticle is any hymn-text from the Bible that appears outside the book of Psalms. The Magnificat is the Song of Mary. She sang it in her pregnancy. She’s expecting, and her song is full of expectation. She feels powerful and joyful, she feels her femininity, she feels her womanhood, she’s about to do something no man can do, and she’s doing it at some cost to herself, because she believes the promise of the angel. Her child will bear God’s entry into the world. So let me advise the Brooks family that Kelly learn to sing some version of the Magnificat, and that she sing it to her family through the years, and when Lily is old enough to ask her why she does that, Joseph can explain it.

On the Third Sunday of Advent, the gospel lesson returns to John the Baptist, but no longer able to baptize because he’s been locked up. He had spoken truth to power, he had criticized the sexual immorality of the ruling House of Herod. But his prophetic witness accomplished nothing except his own imprisonment and his eventual beheading. Here he’s still alive, and discouraged, and thinking his witness was wasted. He’s doubting Jesus, because Jesus is not bringing about the revolution that John the Baptist had expected. He had baptized the people to get them ready for the revolution. He was expecting the Messiah, in the words of his second cousin Mary, to bring down the powerful from their thrones, and in the words of the prophet Isaiah, to come with vengeance, and with terrible recompense, and purge the land of Israel. He was paying for that expectation with his life.

There is a costliness to baptism. Yes, it is as joyful as roses and crocuses, it is water in the desert, it is the hearing of the deaf and the leaping of the lame, but it is also the scattering the proud in their designs and sending the rich away empty. The water is a sign of refreshment but it’s also the sign of the flood and of the Red Sea and of Jesus’ blood. The cost of baptism gives the value to its joy. We are bought with a price. How precious we are to God, we cost God, our own lives are even more precious than we know. So let me advise the Brooks family that on every Third Sunday of Advent, Rick should make the sign of the cross on the foreheads of your children. When they ask what it means, you can say, It means remember that you are baptized.

The season of Advent deals in prophecies and promises, and baptism is a prophetic ritual and it’s full of promises. Both Judaism and Christianity are distinguished among the religions of the world by their great emphasis on the promises of God. For Jews those promises are focused on the eternal distinction of their people, and on the land of Palestine. For Christians those promises are focused on Jesus Christ. These promises are not mere ideas, but real interventions in history, promises fulfilled in facts on the ground. Our baptisms are the landmarks of God’s promises to us, that God invests in us, that God commits to us, and that God actually binds God’s self to us.

Yes, baptism expresses our commitment to God, but more importantly it expresses God’s commitment to us, and it’s more than just an expression, it is the signature and the seal of God’s commitment. Both Jews and Christians believe that God enters into our lives, and even suffers with us, but Christians take it even further: that this God enters our lives so far as to become one of us and to commit so far as to suffer even more than us, and that the most wonderful of God’s promises is the promise of God’s self. The season of Advent ends with the gift of God’s own self as an infant, and in baptism we offer back to God our children and ourselves. Our mutual self-giving is the initial fulfilment of many promises which have greater fulfillments still to come.

To make a promise requires you have some power to influence your future, say, the future of your bank account or your property or your business, and at a minimum, the choices of your love. "Don’t make me a promise if you can’t deliver!" To make a promise means that you can bend some things to your purposes, that you have the power to make your choices count towards your commitments, to make your decisions in the direction of your promises.

When Rick reminds his children every year that they are baptized, that means that they live their lives as promisers — promise makers, and more important, promise keepers. Their promises to their loved ones and their bosses and their customers, and also the promises of God in the world. To be baptized is to learn the promises of God, and to keep those promises in your own way. To learn the commitments of God, and to choose for those commitments, to learn the direction of God’s desiring, and to decide in that direction. So you too give sight to the blind, you too help the lame to walk, you help the deaf to hear, you raise the dead, you bring good news to the poor, do what you have to do to make sure that some of the news for the poor is good news. Properly edited, I might add.

This is true of all of us who are baptized. The water ordains us to be prophets, all of us, who bring the news, who report the promises, and model them. We learn how to see, we learn to hear, we learn to walk, and even in this world of death and destruction we look for the raising of the dead to life again. We are the promise seekers, we look for signs of promise even in the deserts of the heart. In the vacancies and silences we are to find the joy of God and give voice to it.

The promises of God are over us. We live under the shelter of God’s promises, we live under the firmament of God’s commitments. Strengthen your hearts. We so often feel like. Why does it seem our witness makes no difference? Why does God not perform as we were led to expect? We are challenged to patience. Not to passivity, but to the active patience of a farmer, who knows the times for plowing and planting and the times for watching and waiting. We have our work to do, but the fruit depends on a power outside our vision and control. We are neither to be despairing, as if nothing might change, nor self-sufficient, as if we ourselves can make the change. We do what we do and depend on God to do it. So strengthen your weak hands.

Baptism means that God keeps entering into the real time of human beings, that God moves forward through the history of the world, and that God is taking a people along for company. God is gathering a people in movement, child by child, adult by adult. This is meant to be a joyful company, and the joy that it shares is generated by the joy of God, who loves every person in the company, and every traveler, and every last one of us fools who find ourselves upon God’s road. The joy that is in the season, the joy that is in this sacrament, this is the joy of God, the joy that is source of all the music in the universe. This joy is for you to share today. Do whatever you have to do to share it. Choose whatever you have to choose to embrace it. Submit it to it. Give into it. It is the joy of love.

Copyright © 2010, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

On Singleness

My friend and colleague, Rev. Dr. Chuck DeGroat, of the City Church of San Francisco, posted this on his blog, The New Exodus. He calls it "The Missional Position: Myths and Musings on Being Single." We were discussing singleness in an Old First small group last night, and how most of us at Old First (certainly not all of us) participate as "singles," even when we're married, while most churches seem to regard "married couples" as the norm.