Standing Your Ground, February 23, Proper 2, #2 in A Series on Sin

 Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18, Psalm 119:33-40, 1 Corinthians 3:10-11, 16-23, Matthew 5:38-48

Listen to this compact summary of this gospel lesson: You disciples must love your neighbors just as you love yourselves, and no less must you love your enemies. When you do this you are imitating God, who loves his enemies no less than his friends, who blesses the righteous and the unrighteous without distinction. You imitate God because you are children of God, and children imitate their parents. Your imitating God is what distinguishes you among the peoples, who all love their friends but not their enemies. In your distinction lies your specialness, your holiness, your godliness, your god-like-ness. Your imitating God is not merely your obligation; it is your goal: "be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (from Greg Carey).

There’s a challenge: to be perfect. Sure, God may be perfect, but how can we be perfect too? The challenge of the Lord Jesus echoes the prior challenge of Moses in Leviticus: "You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy." Is that what perfection is, is it the same as holiness? How do you get this holiness?

In other religions holiness is a state of being, of being set apart, it comes with a special status or a special closeness to divinity, like when we say, "His Holiness, the Dalai Lama," or "His Holiness the Pope." But in this religion of Leviticus it is intended for everyone, and it’s not a state of being but a habit of action. It’s not for being set apart, but how you engage the world, the real world, including agriculture and commerce. I should be able to address every one of you as "Your Holiness," or how ’bout, "Your perfectness."

What Jesus means by perfection is not flawlessness, but a thoroughgoing integrity and unity of action and intention. Elsewhere the Bible calls this doing something with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your strength. This thoroughgoing integrity and unity of action and intention is true of God and natural to God. Your goal is to get there too. You do what is right because you want what is right. You have developed your moral character to such an extent that the reason you do not sin is because you don’t want to sin, and not because you are afraid of the penalty. You just don’t want what it offers. You do what you do out of love and not out of fear. You certainly must calculate the consequences of what you do, because innocence is not the same as naiveté, but your calculations do not drive you: you do what you do even when it looks like you will lose.

This is what Jesus just two weeks ago called "the righteousness which exceeds that of the scribes and pharisees." Which righteousness you want, which is so reasonable and desirable and yet so unattainable, so that every week you come back here and confess that you "have sinned, that you have not loved God with your whole heart nor have you loved your neighbors as yourselves," that you have not attained that thoroughgoing integrity and unity of action and intention, and you are "truly sorry" and you "humbly repent."

You’d like to attain it, you’d like to imitate your Father in heaven and act how God acts, but you settle for an ethic of what human nature can accept and attain on human terms only. So that while we say that terrible sinners are guilty of crimes against humanity, we also say of ordinary sinners, "Well, he’s only human." We settle for a tolerable level of sin. Jesus says, "No, don’t settle." You don’t have to settle. Sin is neither essential nor inevitable. Sin is not a necessary way of life.

I will tell you a story I’ve told you before. I knew a farmer in Michigan who farmed black dirt, what they call muck, you get it when you drain a swamp. All along the ditches were rows of trees. In order to increase the efficiency of his machines, and get a few more rows of carrots in, he cut down all those trees. The resulting absence of birds increased the number of bugs, and he had to increase his use of pesticides, which then burned and desiccated the soil, which then was blown away by the winds, which were no longer hindered by trees, and he lost another foot of soil every few years.

So I’m saying that the laws for the poor in Leviticus are rooted in the laws of creation. You treat the poor and the alien a certain way because of how God made the world. God created the biological world with superabundant inefficiency and generosity. The fruits by which one species propagates itself provide the food for other species too. Pine cones and red squirrels, pollen and bees, springboks and leopards, and the examples are infinite.

So to imitate God in farming is to "not reap to the edges of your field nor gather the gleanings of your harvest nor gather the fallen grapes" but with generous inefficiency to leave them for the poor and the alien, "I am the Lord your God." To love the Lord your God who is the creator and sustainer of the earth is to love the poor and the alien in structural terms. I’m saying that structural generosity to the poor and the alien is not charity but integrity.

On the other hand, not to honor the creator and sustainer of the earth, but to live within nature as if you could do with it as you please, is sin. To regard your property and wealth as yours to do with as you please, without regard for how God wants you to use it in the interest of your neighbor, is sin. It may be legal, but a standard of only legality is to settle for human-level goodness.

Of course this is costly. You lessen your profits, because your profit is in the extra beyond your expense, in the abundance beyond necessity, in what might be gleaned. Discipleship is costly. Take Jesus’ examples here: When a Roman soldier orders you to carry his pack a Roman mile, you have no choice but to obey. He can’t demand from you the second mile, but if you offer it, though it cost you, you are now free, you are empowered, you are not the victim. You are now hosting a Roman soldier in your land instead of being occupied. For disciples, such hospitality is worth the cost.

It costs you mightily to stand your ground and turn the other cheek. When you get struck it’s cheaper to give in and back away. To stand your ground and offer up the other cheek but not strike back is a daring thing. Because now he might strike you worse and knock you down. The stand-your-ground law which Jesus offers is non-violent, with no weapons, because you must love your enemy as you love yourself. Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis would still be alive. To stand your ground with a gun in your hand may be legal, but you’d have to say that it is sin.

Don’t give in to evil. Stand up to it. Violence is neither natural nor inevitable. Challenge it with all your life. Not foolishly, not heroically, but in community, with strategy, protecting the weak and defending the abused and relieving the oppressed, not letting them be sacrificed again.

It’s a very tall order and I am scared of it. What about the larger evils of the world, what about Syria, what about Ukraine. The Ukraine has been heavy on my mind this week, as I know it has been for some others of you here. Do we just sit back? Would our intervention serve our economic interests or the sanctity of human life, and would we pay the terrible cost of the latter, by sacrificing our lives for the lives of others? Are the foreign policies of nations exempted from what Jesus says here? How can we say they are?

Over the centuries Christian thinkers have wrestled with this and given us much painful wisdom. Is there such thing as a just war, a right war? No, not absolutely, not after what Jesus says. War is always sin, but it may be the lesser sin. When we go to war we dare not celebrate our might, nor can we confidently calculate the consequences. We can only say that we go to war with penitence and repentance and heavy hearts, and God forgive us.

But what about you? In your own life where you have power and discretion? How do you deal with your personal enemies, and how do you handle your own prosperity? You want to be realistic, but not sin. You want to be perfect, but not a Pollyanna. You’d like to imitate God, if that’s feasible. You’d like to be holy, if that’s available. You’d like to love as far as Jesus has challenged us.

You do have to start with yourself. You perfection in love is to love your own inner enemy. You recognize yourself in your persecutor. Your enemy is a mirror for yourself. As you love them you love yourself and you forgive yourself. Your holiness is not from having no sin but from recognizing your sin and processing it, just as God has done with you. You confront your sin within you, you stand your ground against your sinful self. You love the sinner inside yourself, neither naively nor heroically but humbly and because God does. This is the unity and integrity of action and intention which is love, and you love yourself in imitation of God’s love for you.


Copyright © 2014, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

February 16, Sixth after Epiphany: A Series on Sin #1: Choosing Death

Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Psalm 119:1-8, 1 Corinthians 3:1-9, Matthew 5:21-37
 
The Gospel of Matthew is considered the driest of the four gospels. It doesn’t have the emotion of Mark, or the music of Luke, or the drama of John. It’s considered the most rabbinic, because it emphasizes teaching and it frequently quotes the Torah and the Prophets. It emphasizes righteousness and piety. Matthew is a strict teacher who is no fun in class and grades low but still you learn a lot.

Two months ago I was scanning through Matthew and our future scripture lessons in order to plan my preaching, and I was inspired, let’s say, to do a series on Sin. Yes, Sin, your favorite topic. Every week I hear you tell God that you "have sinned against him in thought, word, and deed, by what you have done and by what you left undone," and I believe you when you say it and I’m sure God does too. So I checked with the consistory, and they all agreed that a series of sermons on Sin was a good idea, especially as we get into the penitential season of Lent: Just what is it that you keep saying you are sorry for?

So from now through April 6^th, I will ask the same question of the scripture lessons every week: What can this next set of lessons tell us about sin? We will gradually develop a picture, maybe sharp, maybe fuzzy, some insight, some wisdom, a challenge, conviction, and we will believe that through our considering these scriptures God will be talking to us and Jesus will be teaching us. 



First off, from Deuteronomy, we see that to sin is to make the wrong choice, to choose for death instead of life, and to choose to not observe God’s commandments, decrees, and ordinances. Which tells us that sin is a consequence of having freedom. If there is no freedom there is no choice, but only compulsion.

We humans have a measure of freedom unique among the animals. Eagles always act like eagles, and never like blue herons. Loons never choose not to act like loons. They never choose for their death and adversity against their life and prosperity. But we humans have the freedom to make this choice.

It is obvious from history that we frequently use our freedom to choose for death and adversity. Animals work by instinct, whatever that is, but their instincts always serve their life and prosperity, whereas we humans have this strange instinct to choose the bad instead of the good. And we would choose the bad even more than we do if not for the limiting sanctions of God’s commandments, decrees, and ordinances.

So from Deuteronomy you could define sin in two complementary ways: You could say that your sin is your failure to choose the good, when the good is offered to you in terms of God’s commandments, decrees, and ordinances. You could also say that your sin is your strange instinct to misuse your freedom, an instinct so strong it’s a compulsion. You have freedom, but you fail your freedom.

Listen again to this quotation from last week: "Freedom is responsibility for your every step and gesture, freedom is for choosing to act honestly and honorably or dishonestly or dishonorably, freedom as in life." 


That quotation was from Masha Alyokhina of the Russian punk band Pussy Right. She said, "Freedom as in life." And Deuteronomy says, "Choose life."

The choice for death is Sin. Death is a penalty for sin, but not as if God were a traffic cop or a hockey referee handing out penalties. It’s more like sin is extremely unhealthy. Death and adversity are the inevitable and cumulative consequence of sin. Like poor health from a poor diet. God has made the world to be a certain way, with consequences over time, despite however free you think that you can be. On the whole and over time, there are two roads, with divergent ends, and the road you take makes all the difference.

From First Corinthians you could define sin as immaturity, a failure to grow up. You know, like an infant who is nursing needs to have a natural selfishness, but it’s wrong for an adult to act with that same selfishness. A twelve-year-old should act like a twelve-year-old, but it’s wrong for a thirty-year old to act like a twelve-year-old.

Your immaturity --- because you are given freedom --- your immaturity will descend to immorality, however harmless or harmful your immorality may be. You are responsible --- because you are given freedom --- to rise to spirituality, the true arena for which your freedom is designed. You are given freedom in order to be spiritual, truly spiritual, that is, to live in communion with the Holy Spirit of God, and to get your cues and signals for your choices from God’s direction instead of from your appetites and your compulsions and your fears.

Over time, your choices develop into your character. Every choice you make, for good or ill, does not stand on its own, but is influenced by an earlier choice and sets conditions for your next choice. Choosing X today instead of Y makes it just that little bit more likely for you to choose X again tomorrow. Your failure to develop your character towards God’s direction, then, is sin.

Sin is not so much the discrete bad thing you do, but your general direction, your inclination, your inertia, your momentum, your habit, your condition, your nature. So choose your character, choose your life, choose what you hear me pray every week at the communion table — choose to "grow up in all things into him who is the head, even Christ our Lord."

Now from Matthew. We get some sins according to the Ten Commandments as interpreted by the rabbis and then as intensified by Jesus. The rabbis considered it possible to make your way along the straight-and-narrow of obedience and blessing and life. But Jesus makes everybody guilty. You’re all on the way to death, you’re going to be tossed into that smoldering garbage dump called the Gehenna, which is his metaphor for a shameful death. Or at least a piece of you, like your eye or your hand, tossed into the garbage in order to save the rest of you.

This lesson caused the church to consider divorce a sin more negative than it is in Judaism and Islam. Right. But think about it. Jesus was speaking to a context in which women had no choice in their marriage or divorce. A marriage was a contract between a bridegroom and the bride’s father. The bride never said, I do. Nor did she have anything to say in the case of her divorce. Her husband could end the contract at will, and just give her his certificate. He could marry someone else and not be guilty of adultery.

Jesus says, "Uh-uh, not so fast, big boy. No matter your new legal status, you’re still committing adultery against your ex. And if she gets caught in adultery, it’s your fault." So Jesus makes the man responsible for any and all of the woman’s guilt. Because the man has the freedom. That’s the force of what Jesus is saying here — not to prevent remarriage after divorce, but to challenge the man’s responsibility that comes with the power and the freedom that he has.

Or this: both orthodox Judaism and Islam make the women responsible for whether they are attractive to men. If someone other than your husband looks on you to desire you, it is your fault, you did not suitably cover yourself. The Holy Koran is explicit that women must cover their attractiveness in public in order to spare the weakness of men.

But Jesus lays it on the male! (It would be anachronistic to call the Lord Jesus a Feminist, but he is remarkably pro-women in terms of his context.) Jesus is saying that if you as a man look at a woman to desire her, it is your problem, not hers. If you need relief, don’t make her cover herself, but you cut out your own eye. You deal with your instinct when it’s descended to compulsion. You deal with your own character. 
 It’s about character and rising to spiritual maturity. It’s about being able to just say Yes for Yes, and No for No, without making all kinds of guarantees or promises or vows or corroboration or excuses. Just Yes or No. When someone does wrong, you don’t need to hate him or insult him. Just make your Yes, Yes, and your No, No. If someone is foolish, you don’t have to mock him or knock him down. Just make your Yes, Yes, and your No, No. Character is about how you use your freedom, and how you take full responsibility for yourself, in God’s direction. To do that is to have a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. And to not do that, is what we call Sin.

It’s about character and it’s about life and about freedom and so once again it’s about love. For you to look at each other with pleasure but not lust, with delight and not desire, and with honor, as each one of you is living your own life in your own way but all in God’s direction, that is to look at each other in love.

(PS: Particular thanks to the commentary by Marcia Riggs in Feasting on the Word.)

Copyright © 2014, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.

Pussy Riot and the Prophet: Sermon for February 9, Fifth After Epiphany

Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 112:1-10, 1 Corinthians 2:1-16, Matthew 5:13-20

This week I was wrestling with three problems. First, one of you members had asked me a theological question: "Why aren’t we adding more books to the Bible, and how come we don’t have a Third Testament after the Old one and the New one?" Good question.

My second problem was trying to make a sermon that would speak to the new elders and deacons we are installing today as well to the whole congregation.

My third problem was that my sermon wasn’t going anywhere. By Thursday morning all I had was a moderately interesting lecture on Biblical themes that was all head and no heart. I got up from it to start my breakfast and I said to Melody, "I can’t get this week’s lessons to talk to me."

And then as I was finishing my omelet and listening to Morning Edition on NPR I was caught by a story. It was an interview with two members of the Russian protest punk band Pussy Riot. They had been at the Barclay Center in a concert for Amnesty International.

Well, I’m not fan of punk bands and this band’s name made me uncomfortable. I didn’t like what they had done that got them in trouble two years ago in Moscow. They entered the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of Christ the Savior and right in front of the altar they staged a provocative musical protest. Of course they got arrested and convicted of hooliganism and put in prison for two years—actually a labor camp. That was terrible, of course, and it’s not their cause I did like. They were protesting the loss of free speech under Vladimir Putin and also the Orthodox Church’s collaboration with Putin’s government. But I didn’t like them desecrating a church. Any church.

Well, I got converted. As I listened to their story on NPR, all of a sudden our lesson from Isaiah 58 came to life. It’s like they got their protest strategy right out of Isaiah, as if God were saying, "What to me is your magnificent cathedral? What to me is your beautiful icon screen and your altar? What to me is your glorious liturgy and your fasting twice a week? Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free?"

The conflict between the freedom of the Gospel and the yoke of organized religion that we hear of in Isaiah 58 is also the conflict between the Lord Jesus and the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 5, and between Martin Luther and the Roman hierarchy during the Reformation, and in every single church today if we honestly examine ourselves. I represent organized religion. I keep asking you to serve on this committee and that, and devote your time and money to the cause of this old church, and maintain this building as a sacred place, and follow our liturgy, but does this all truly serve the freedom of the gospel?

I was so taken by the story on NPR that I posted the link to it on my Facebook page. You might recognize the voice of the interviewer, David Greene. He interviewed the two band members who had just been released from their two years in the labor camp. They were Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, along with their interpreter. He said to them, "You are both mothers, and you both have young children. If you had known what your punishment would be, would you have done this protest? Do you have any regrets?"

It was Masha who answered: "This might be hard to understand, but I am actually grateful to the leadership of Russia for providing me with this experience of being in jail. I think I became a freer person as a result, and understood many things that will now enable us to work on fixing this prison system." David Greene sounded surprised. "You feel ‘freer,’ you say, what do you mean?" She said, "Freedom as responsibility for your every step and gesture, freedom for choosing to act honestly and honorably or dishonestly or dishonorably, freedom as in life."

I could have been listening to Ruby Bridges or Rosa Parks. Or the Apostle Paul. And now the epistle lesson was coming to life. I could hear the freedom in it, the radical freedom of the Apostle Paul when he came to Corinth. You see, the Corinthians were prosperous and sophisticated, but he did not tailor his message to their expectations. He did not calculate for his success. He was free of what might impress them. He decided not to know anything among them except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. I could hear the freedom in that, because of what Masha Alyokhina had said.

Even in the labor camp those two young women were free. Their story judges all our talk of freedom in American when you consider what we use our freedom for. "Don’t tread on me." For so much self-indulgence and individual independence. Their freedom is for the cause of justice in their land and their greater service in dangerous places. Freedom does not reduce the sacrifices in your life, it just changes that for which you sacrifice. Like with Jesus Christ, and him crucified. The Lord Jesus said, "Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven." He means the righteousness not of obeying the rules or even keeping clean, but of getting on God’s bus, of siding with God in what God is doing in the world, as in Isaiah, as in the prophets and the Torah, as the Kingdom of Heaven has its way within the world.

I know I do get sentimental, but I believe that on Thursday morning I was spoken to by God. Not through NPR. I’m not that much Park Slope. But through the Bible as it was conversing with the morning news. The great theologian Karl Barth said that a preacher has to have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. And that is the third testament. That’s the answer to your question.

This old Bible that we have is sufficiently rich and relevant to engage with freshness all the other words around us in the air, and in your magazines and meditations. God still speaks, through the harmonies between the gospel and the news, or in the contradictions between the prophets and the book you are reading, or in the interplay between the epistle and you just heard on the phone. The third testament is the Bible’s conversation with our culture and with your mind and your life.

In just a few moments I will be asking five of you if you believe that you were called by God into your sacred offices. It’s a problem. Can you believe that God was behind it when you were contacted by someone trying to fill some vacancies in the interest of organized religion? Was God behind it on Thursday morning that I happened to  make my omelet at 8:15 AM instead of at my usual 7:45?

You can’t know for sure, and there is no proof. It would be nice to just hang it all on God. But you can’t, and you shouldn’t, because the point is your freedom even when God calls you, that you answer the call in freedom, and you have to make the choice, and you take responsibility for your choice without being able to prove it. As Masha Alyokhina said: "Freedom as responsibility for your every step and gesture, freedom for choosing to act honestly and honorably, freedom as in life."

I am asking the five of you to do what seems to be rare in organized religion. Please keep this 359-year-old monument to organized religion open to the freedom of the gospel and therefore a light for the world and a city on a hill. Guide this congregation to be a communal conversation with God, a living third testament, the conversation between this old Bible and every latest thought and motivation. With your bodies and your emotions. With politics. With science. With literature. With painting and art. With breaking the bonds of injustice and sharing your bread with the hungry and bringing the homeless poor into your house.

I know that’s what you want, what you have heard, what you have seen, that’s why you are here, that’s why this congregation has elected you. God has given you the Spirit of wisdom that you may serve this congregation in doing these good works, so that this part of Brooklyn might see your good works, and give glory to your Father in heaven.

You all have so much freedom here. No one forces you to do anything, except the IRS. You will not be put in jail for using your free speech. Be worthy of the gift that you enjoy. You have so much freedom in this church. Your freedom is for responsibility. And your chief responsibility is to love. I want you all to love these elders and deacons. And I want you to love them because God loves you.


Copyright © 2014, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
The NPR link is here: http://www.npr.org/2014/02/06/272359826/pussy-riot-russian-prison-sentence-will-help-us-fiix-system

February 2, The Feast of the Presentation, "Children of Light 9: The Light in the Temple"

Presentation 2014, Malachi 3:1-4, Psalm 84, Hebrews 2:14-18, Luke 2:22-40
 

We were just getting started with Matthew’s account of the career of the Lord Jesus in Galilee, so why are we interrupted with this story from Luke about his infancy? It’s because today, February 2, is the Lesser Feast of the Presentation. The lesser feasts are not observed by Protestant churches, except for the Episcopalians, but our lectionary inserts cater to the Episcopalians, and so, for the sake of your having the lessons in print, we too will observe the Lesser Feast of the Presentation.

February 2 is forty days after December 25. The forty days comes from the Torah, specifically Leviticus 12, which rules that for forty days the mother of a newborn boy is unclean, and that on the fortieth day she is to present herself with a sacrifice for her purification. That’s what Mary and Joseph were doing here, combining it with the sacrifice for the redemption of a first-born son as required by Exodus 13. And then the little family went back home to Nazareth in Galilee.

And right there is a problem. How do you make that jive with Matthew? Matthew says they had their house in Bethlehem until the Magi came, and then they went to Egypt as refugees, and only after that did they return to Nazareth. Conservatives try to line these stories up, like defense attorneys with conflicting witnesses, and Liberals, like prosecutors, say it shows you can’t trust either story. I suggest that you live with the contradictions in the Bible but always accept the lesson in front of you as having authority in the moment, and that it authoritatively makes a claim on your life or authoritatively offers you a promise or a challenge or comfort.

This story has comfort. Simeon takes the baby in his arms, and I’m thinking how a grandpa gets comforted just by holding his little granddaughter. In the baby’s swaddling Simeon feels the consolation of Israel, so he knows his watch is done, his vigilance complete, and he sings his farewell song: "Lord, you now have set your servant free to go in peace as you have promised; for these eyes of mine have seen the Savior, whom you have prepared for all the world to see: A light to enlighten the nations, and the glory of your people Israel."

The song of Simeon is the last of the four songs which frame the Incarnation in the Gospel of Luke. First is the song of the young maiden Mary: the Magnificat, which has become the traditional canticle for evening prayer. Then comes the song of the old man Zechariah: the Benedictus, the canticle for morning prayer. Then comes the song of the angels to the shepherds: the Gloria in Excelsis Deo, which we sing in church in different ways during Christmastide and Eastertide. Today you get another old man’s song. The Nunc Dimittis is the canticle for night prayer, before you go to sleep. It’s the lullaby of the Christian soul.

Now master let me go
in peace at your command.
My eyes have seen the Savior
you gave the world to see:
for Gentiles to be light,
for Israel our glory.

(sung to the Genevan tune, 6. 6. 7. 6. 6. 7.)

There are layers of prophetic meaning here. Simeon’s language is both emotional and technical. To call this baby "the glory of Israel" is a very big deal. It’s more than just calling him "Messiah". He’s saying that the glory of God has just returned to the Temple. The Temple had been lacking this glory internally, despite its external magnificence from the extravagance of King Herod. The original Temple, back in history, when Solomon had erected it, was filled by the shining and burning glory-cloud come down from heaven, the sign of God’s "real presence" here on earth, the demonstration of God-with-us.

Tragically, that First Temple got burned and demolished by Nebudchadnezzar and the Babylonians, the great catastrophe. A century after that, a Second Temple was built by the Jewish exiles who had returned from Babylon. But the shining cloud of glory did not return to it.

The Second Temple was empty of the "real presence" of the Lord. As if God was keeping his distance from his people. So Israel was always disappointed and depressed. They needed consolation. This is what the prophet Malachi was speaking to when he said, "The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple." But for very many years the promise of Malachi was empty and unfulfilled.

So Simeon kept vigil. And with his prophetic eyes he saw the baby as the sign that God was coming back. He saw the Presence in the Presentation. He saw the presentation of the baby as the presence of God. At this extravagance of insight the parents were amazed. That their baby should be the Messiah was one thing, the future king, but to fix on him the Glory, the sign of God’s real presence, well, what would you do with that?

The comfort is a challenge. Such a promise. Such a claim upon their lives. "Welcome, O God, of course, but please back off a bit!" Who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? In their thrill they also feel a sharpness. The knife of the priest will soon be killing the turtle-doves in Joseph’s arms, and the soul of Mary will be pierced by a sword. This child will be the cause of much effect, and opposite effects, with painful consequences to himself.

The salvation of God is not a pretty thing. When God is with us God doesn’t smile politely. For he is like a refiner’s fire. The sunlight you need for life and warmth and sight will burn your eyes if you look at it and burn your skin if you’re exposed to it. God’s light is a surgeon’s laser beam that cuts you open to reveal your inner thoughts. When you embrace the Lord you cannot help but expose yourself. When you engage the words of Jesus in the gospel you cannot help but expose your prior commitments and belief, and expose how far you will go with him, and reveal how much you’re willing to believe of what he says. There will be some pain in it.

Will you comfort me, O God? You challenge me, you cut me, you batter my heart. Will you massage the heart that you have battered? Will you mend the soul that you have cut? Will you heal the flesh that you have burned? Will you console the child you have challenged?

Life is hard enough without God’s presence in our lives. You get battered enough already, just from life itself. You have pain enough, and there are easier comforts close at hand. You have guilt enough without needing God to remind you. Your errors and mistakes keep coming back at you. You bring enough of your own hurt and pain upon yourself. You recognize what we are doing to our planet and other species and other people. You are disappointed in your discipleship. You doubt the divinity you believe in and your faith in God has as much depression as delight. If God is going to challenge you, then God had damn well better comfort you.

You have heard it said that God will never send you any suffering more than you can bear. But you know that plenty of people get suffering that is more than they can bear, and it ruins them. But that suffering is not sent by God. God does not send suffering. That suffering comes either from the cruelty of humanity or from Nature and its unconcern with fairness and its utter lack of sympathy for your pain. God could stop it or prevent it, I suppose, but none of the other animals demand this of God, and they seem to find life worth living, and even enjoying to their capacity.

But we human animals have moral imaginations, so for us it is a test. And so what’s offered for comfort is the promise from our second lesson that the Son of God is tested as we are. The soul of Mary’s son gets pierced as well, the Son of God gets cut, and the soul of God is pierced. It’s God who is carried in with the turtle-doves. God suffers your suffering. Is that cold comfort? It is a little on the cool side. It’s a hard comfort, not a soft one, it is for strengthening, and you must rise to it. The comfort is a challenge and it only works by its claim on you. God is with you, and so you have to be with God. God suffers with us and you suffer God, and the world God made, and the way God is with the world.

And God suffers you. That’s the atonement part. God is pierced to fully pay for all your sins and set you free from the tyranny of the devil, which tyranny is only the grip of your guilt, the guilt that you deserve, the mess you made, the hurt you cause, your familiar greed, your deep regret, which troubles your conscience, but which he keeps cancelling. The Lord is the pair of turtle-doves who are pierced and cut to purify your uncleanness and cancel your guilt and comfort you. "Yes, yes, I know, I know what you did, it’s okay, it’s okay, don’t worry, I took care of it, hush, little child, hush dear, your mommy loves you. Your heavenly father loves you."


Copyright © 2014, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.