Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Psalm 147, Galatians 3:23-26, 4:4-7, John 1:1-18
The Sunday after Christmas is called Low Sunday. Attendance is low, energy is low, and the preacher is low on inspiration. The shepherds are back at work and trying to remember how that music went. Joseph is out apartment-hunting, the cattle want their manger back, the swaddling clothes are dirty, and the family needs food. The Incarnation leads to hard facts for physical bodies in hard times on the hard ground, and thus, Low Sunday. Yet one of the most lofty passages in the Bible is given as our Gospel reading today. We might have preferred a nice cozy story, but we are given the most theoretical passage in all four Gospels. It’s the Prologue to the Gospel of John, and in it, the only mention of Christ’s birth is that “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” Of course that is the reason for the season and the theological purpose of the birth, and the Prologue is the story from a very high view, and it’s why the Prologue is the climax lesson on Christmas Eve, after we’ve read the more cozy stories from Matthew and Luke. St. John knew that we already had Matthew, and maybe Luke too, so he didn’t have to redo the story. Instead he interprets it. “St. John unfolds the great mystery of the Incarnation.”
He does so audaciously. “In the beginning was the Word.” The beginning, not of Jesus’ life, but of the world, the beginning of time. St. John is quoting the first line of Genesis, the first word of the Torah, B’reshit, “in the beginning,” and he’s putting the Son of God there, at Creation, with God, as God. Which means he’s claiming that, in the Incarnation, the God who created the creation became a creature within the creation. He’s claiming that, in the birth of Christ, the God who said, “Let there be light” became the light. St. John says that “the true light, who enlightens every person, was coming into the world.” The true light is Jesus, who came into the world at his Incarnation, and St. John is claiming that he had been coming into the world long before that, as the Word, capital W, whenever God spoke. Not yet as Jesus the Messiah, not yet a distinct person, not yet discernible from God-the-Father and God-the-Holy-Spirit, but the Son of God had come already to Abraham, already to Moses, whenever God came and spoke to Israel, whenever God’s Word came into the world to give us life and give us light. But his coming was unwelcome. St. John writes that “he came to his own, and his own people received him not.” Please understand that he means this typically, not totally, because while he was typically rejected, there were many persons who did receive him, and this was true in Israel in the centuries before his birth, and in the thirty-three years of his Incarnation, and in the church ever since. From Adam till today, whoever does believe in his name, to them he gives power to become the children of God. St. John is also claiming that there was something profoundly new about his coming at the Incarnation, when the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us. This Word who talked with Abraham, who spoke the Law to Moses, this Word went beyond just speaking to flesh and took on flesh. The Word who is the Son of God got his flesh from his mother. From his mother only. He must have looked remarkably like his mother, like a male version of his mother. The Word became flesh. St. Paul makes a similar claim in Galatians: But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law. So the Son of God received his flesh from a woman descended from the Abraham whom he had talked with, and she brought him up under the Torah that he had spoken to Moses. He is filled with all that time and experience, the fullness of time is in him, and of his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace, the grace of the Gospel upon the grace of the Torah. He was full of grace and truth. Together, grace and truth. That’s not automatic. We usually choose between them, being either gracious or truthful. You know, like, “I’m not going mention the hard truth here, I’m just going to be gracious.” But in Jesus they come together. His every truth is full of grace, and his every grace is full of truth. Which conditions what we mean by truth.
Our granddaughter Naomi sleeps over at our place on Friday nights, and on Saturday mornings she wakes up while I’m saying my prayers, and she climbs onto my lap while I pray them. She had me write down a prayer of her own, which I now pray every morning: “Dear God, I pray for all the people who have no homes and no food and no pillow and bed and blanket. Please make them have good food, and make them brave and true. And the Holy Spirit, and Jesus Christ. Amen.” I like the “brave and true” part. I figure she got it from the movie Pinocchio. The fairy tells the puppet that she will turn him into a real boy if he proves himself “brave and true.” So I would say that being “brave and true” is a moral category for my granddaughter.
A couple weeks ago she dictated a second prayer. “Dear God, please make other people good and helpful. Please forgive the people who are mean, or not true, or not happy. Please forgive them that I want them to be happy. For Jesus Christ. Amen.” There’s the word “true” again. She doesn’t mean the objective sense of “true,” as in true facts, but the subjective and personal sense of being true. We say that you are true to your convictions, and true to your word and true to your promises and true to your commitments and relationships. Integrity. You are as good as your word.
I think that’s the truth that St. John means when he says that when the Word became flesh and dwelt among us he was full of grace and truth. Doctrinal truth yes, historical truth yes, but more so personal truth. Faithfulness. Promise keeping. The Son of God is as good as his word, so that he is rightly called the “Word” with a capital “W.” The Word is as good as his word. And thus, the Incarnation of the Word in the flesh is how God keeps God’s gracious promises with integrity.
And here’s a next step that both St. Paul and St. John take: God became the child of Mary so that we become children of God. He by nature and we by adoption, adoption as the benefit of liberation and redemption. Redemption means that God buys us out of our slavery to the darkness. And God redeems us in order to adopt us, as children, and desires not our service but our freedom, and not our submission but our love, and our initiative, and in our freedom and initiative that we be true. That’s your challenge. That you be true, as true as your first-born brother is. That’s the Christian ethic that comes out of the Incarnation. Not of legal obedience but of freedom with inner integrity. Your integrity that is also gracious. That the promises you keep are gracious promises. That you are true in your relationships and gracious in them. That you are true to your convictions and that your convictions are gracious convictions. To be true like this may require you to be both brave and true—brave enough to see it through. So God gives you the power of the Holy Spirit.
That’s the next step, the Holy Spirit. From Galatians: “In the fullness of time, God sent his Son, and because you are now children, God also sent the Spirit of the Son into our hearts.” That is, when it was time, God came as the Son, as the Word made flesh, and ever since that time, God is coming as the Spirit, as the Spirit of Jesus into your own flesh and blood. The same Holy Spirit that made the child of Mary the Son of God now makes your own mother’s child a child of God. The birth of Jesus is for your own new birth and his Spirit is your Spirit. His grace for your grace, grace upon grace. You are adopted. You have a new name. And now at last we can turn to our first lesson, Isaiah: You have a new namethat he gives you. And, having come naked out of your slavery you put on the new clothes that he gives you, clothes for you to rejoice in, the garments of salvation, the robe of righteousness, the garland of a bridegroom and the jewelry of a bride. Jewelry is a present for lovers. The adopted children get jewelry because they are loved the same as the firstborn son.
Isaiah 7:10-18, Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18, Romans 1:1-7, Matthew 1:18-25
Joseph had a dream. His dream resolved a dilemma, but added complications. Let’s consider what was at stake for him. Remember that in those days a marriage was a deal between two men: for the right of one to take the daughter of the other, and it was the father’s job to deliver her as a virgin. And now Joseph’s fiancé is pregnant, and not by him, so that’s over. He is a righteous man and could demand his compensation, but he’s also kindly and wants to minimize the shame on Mary. Then he has the dream, that he should take her anyway. That forces a new dilemma. If he takes her anyway, well, people can count, they can count months, and then he loses his righteous reputation for having taken advantage of the girl before he had the right to her, or else he is the cuckold, and people will gossip and whisper who the father really is. Joseph will have his own shame to add to Mary’s shame. And in fact the people did whisper that Jesus was illegitimate (John 8:41).
When you’re a facing a dilemma, do you look for a sign? A sign to tell you what to do? And if you get a sign, does it settle things, or add new complications? Joseph got a sign that settled one problem but added many more. The baby was just the beginning. It was born with complications.
Joseph was descended from the King Ahaz of our first reading, and St. Matthew wants us to know that, for he mentions it just nine verses earlier. King Ahaz was not a good kind, and he was in trouble. His capital city was under siege, and his people were starving. In this predicament the prophet Isaiah offered him a sign, but Ahaz would not take it. He thought that would make him look weak and irresolute, and he wanted to look strong. “I’m the decider! I don’t need your sign!”
“Well, Ahaz, you tiresome poser, I tell you what, I’m giving you a sign anyway, both to save you and to judge you. A child will be born, and before he knows how to behave he will be eating very nice food. The siege will be lifted, but not by you, but by God against you and without your help.”
The sign that Ahaz got was neither down in Sheol nor up in heaven, but right in the middle of human life, the sign of a childbirth in the midst of a siege, in spite of the siege. Such a sign is easily discounted by the skeptical and rational. One has to imagine an ordinary childbirth as the presence of God, Immanuel, God with us. One needs the imagination of belief to even see it as a sign! The sign that Isaiah gave to Ahaz is quoted by St. Matthew for the case of Joseph. Not to somehow prove the Virgin Birth. That’s not the point of the quotation. The point is fulfillment, that what God did once God does again, and better, that what God begins God carries through on, and that the whole broad story of human history has another story working within it, the story of God-with-us. And though the story of God-with-us put Joseph in a predicament not of his choosing, it then required choosing of him, but God was with him in the making of his choices.
The sign he got was challenging. Do you take your dreams literally? Don’t assume that people back then were more gullible than we are today. His new dilemma is whether to believe his dream. And then, if he believes his dream, he has new complications besides taking the shame of Mary on himself. On the plus side, he can trust Mary again, that she’s not been unfaithful, but that also entails the impossible, that she is still a virgin, even while pregnant. That was harder to believe back then than it is now. In their notions of biology the embryo was 100% the seed from the man. All the woman contributed was her womb, for a man to plant his seed, and if this did not happen, well, then Joseph was the first man to wrestle with the doctrine of the virgin birth, and right up close; and did he say to himself, “What am I nuts? The Holy Spirit did it? Who is the Holy Spirit anyway?”
If he believes his dream, how will he convince his friends and family? More challenges. He is a righteous man who will have to learn a new kind of righteousness, for he will have no code of laws and commandments to be observant of. His obedience will be what St. Paul called “the obedience of faith.” Not the possession of faith, but the obedience of faith.
Critics of religion say that religious faith is how we try to solve the hard complexities of life. I don’t think so. I find that my Christian faith increases my complexities. Don’t you? You welcome your challenges, you believe it’s all worth it, and your faith does give you comfort and security and it’s fulfilling and it expands your joy, but it also expands your unknowns and your uncertainties. The baby is just the beginning. This obedience of faith calls you to address what you’d rather avoid and go where you fear. In the dream the angel said, “Joseph, fear not to take Mary as your wife.” The angel has to say it because Joseph will fear it. You know how shaken you feel when you wake up from a powerful dream. Imagine the poor guy sitting on his bed in the dark before the dawn, the dream all in his head, and he is facing all these new uncertainties—so much in his life outside of his control, that he now must take and name and raise a child who belongs to God, with a destiny beyond him for which he is now responsible. “Joseph, son of David, fear not!” We are right to admire this quiet man. He did not know that we’d be talking about him 2000 years later. Could he imagine all that God was up to with him? That the baby was the beginning of a whole new order that no one had ever yet imagined? God did not tell him very much. God told him just enough, and then God depended upon his righteousness, for him to “refuse the evil and choose the good,” to estimate the right thing and do that whenever he faced his next uncertainty. His obedience was not to an instruction manual but an obedience of stepping out in faith and not by sight. “Now what’s the right thing I can do here, despite the complications in front of me and the unknown complications still to come?” It’s remarkable in the great story of God how much God depends on the partnership of ordinary people precisely in our dilemmas and predicaments. A God who is all-knowing and omnipotent depends for God’s plan on you to make your choices right within your troubles and uncertainties. This God partners with us, God-with-us, depends on us, submits to your initiatives, and constructs a highway to Zion from the material of your fragile choices. God puts Godself into your hands. Joseph experienced the new way of God in the world, the baby was the beginning.
Well, not absolutely new, according to St. Paul, who says in our Epistle that the prophets promised it beforehand in the scriptures, but God was now fulfilling those promises in new ways beyond anyone’s expectations. Not just God-with-us, not just God along with us, but God as one of us. God submitting to childbirth. In the midst of us. In spite of us! The baby was the beginning of a new inhabitation of God with us, a new order of God’s investment in us, God invests Godself in us. “That’s who the Holy Spirit is, Joseph, who entered inside your fiancé when she said, ‘Yes, let it be to me,” and who now will come inside all of us as well.”
So your belief makes all the difference to God. You, Christian, sitting out there. God submits to your belief. You are God’s sign. When you face decisions and dilemmas, I know you might want to ask for a sign from God, and occasionally you might get one, but I’m warning you, that sign will just increase your complications, and that’s not God’s preferred practice now, anyway, because God is in you as the Holy Spirit, and you yourself are a sign from God. God says, “You choose! You estimate! I’m not going to tell you very much, just enough, but I trust your desire to choose the good. And precisely in your fragile choosing, my dear believer, is how I make myself active in the world.”
Isaiah 35:1-10, Magnificat, James 5:7-10, Matthew 11:2-11
Why do we get this gospel lesson on December 15, when we are ready for the manger? Why do we get John the Baptist on the Sunday of our Children’s Pageant? We are on the way to Bethlehem. The Isaiah lesson fits better with this Third Sunday of Advent, which is Gaudete Sunday, from the Latin for “Rejoice.” Gáudete, gáudete, gáudete. We’re ready for joy, so why delay us with John the Baptist? But the Epistle lesson says, Patience. Don’t rush. James says, Be patient until the coming of the Lord. There’s reason to wait for ten more days. The reason for the season of penitence is that you can get Jesus wrong. You can welcome Jesus, and rejoice at his coming, but get him wrong. As John the Baptist did. As we all do. That’s okay, it’s expected, but it’s why we need to be patient and penitent. What was John the Baptist expecting? He had baptized the people to prepare them for the revolution. He was expecting the Messiah, in the words of his second cousin Mary, to cast down the mighty 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. For that expectation John was now paying with his life. And he did not see it in Jesus. “So cousin, no offense, but should we be looking for someone else?” Jesus neither defends himself nor answers directly. “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor get good news.” But to John that’s all beside the point. He already knows all that. Doing that stuff is fine, but that’s not the job of the Messiah, not according to what the prophecies have told us to look for. I expect the Lord Jesus knew that his response to John would not satisfy him, but in his answer is a challenge: “Look again, cousin, look again at what you have been seeing. The problem is not my evidence, but the solution that you’re expecting.” Yet Jesus was not disappointed in John. His doubt did not offend him. It just had not been given to John to see the new thing coming down the pike. No one but Jesus had foreseen it, and no one else would see it until after his resurrection—his whole new way of being the Messiah. So Jesus doesn’t hold it against his cousin that he didn’t see it. What do you expect from Jesus in your life? What do you want from God in the world? What news will you consider to be good news? What are you looking for in the world?
Those congressional hearings on impeachment I regard as necessary, but I’m glad they’re over. What struck me is how differently the two sides viewed the same evidence. I will give the side I disagree with the benefit of the doubt, that they just see it differently. Is this not from what they want to see, what they desire to see, what they expect to see, and what should we be on the lookout for—what’s the danger, who are the enemies, what is fire, and what is only smoke?
Once I was a volunteer fireman, honest! We were prepared for fires—we knew they’d come but not when or where. We had to expect the unexpected. You can expect what you do not know. The word “expect” comes from the Latin for “looking out.” Not as in “Look out!” when danger comes flying at you unawares, but as in being on the “lookout,” like from a Fire Service lookout tower in a National Forest. You have to be very, very patient in your looking, and you have to know the signs of what you are looking for. You are actively patient and always prepared.
John the Baptist was looking for the fire of righteous retribution with the Messiah’s coming, and you can imagine that his patience was tested by his imprisonment. John was looking for an ending, but Jesus offers a beginning. John expected the Day of Judgment and a final resolution. But Jesus offered previews, foretastes, appetizers. His healings were temporary, and despite the good news, the poor would still be poor. There are ways that the Lord Jesus does not satisfy our expectations of him, until we adjust our expectations. The coming of the Lord Jesus is a judgment, on everyone, good and bad, and it judges us who welcome him, but it’s a judgment that does not condemn us. In the very judgment you have to look for joy. That’s so unexpected, but that’s the trick. Your joy comes not from avoiding judgment, but the judgment shows you your signs for joy. As I said last week, joy is not the same as optimism, because the world is actually worse than you think it is, and even the most critical among you do not judge deeply enough. The world is worse than you know, and yet you are called to choose for joy. It is a moral choice you have to keep on making, and you make that choice because it is God who judges with a perfect justice. Precisely because of God’s righteous judgment of the world, you are challenged to choose for joy. Gáudete, gáudete!
The benefit of choosing joy is that it changes what you want to see. It doesn’t change what you can expect, but how you take what you expect. Joy is not forcing an emotion on yourself, it is rather choosing how you approach the world and what you look for. In that sense joy is penitential, when you have to give up your prior rights to how you see your expectations. Joy is penitential because it changes your preparations. And joy is penitential because it forces you to be patient. Patience does not mean passivity. Our Gradual Hymn uses the Biblical phrase, to “run with patience.” Distance runners know what that means, it’s about pacing yourself, it’s about running your own race and not somebody else’s. That kind of patience, that kind of penitence. That kind of running is endurance, but then running is also exuberance, as when my granddaughter sees me and runs and jumps up on me. Let your endurance be open to exuberance. You may be looking for an ending but can you see that it’s a beginning? Get up on that highway God is building and choose for joy. Why am I speaking of exuberance when I say that your joy is not a feeling that you have to generate? I am not naturally exuberant, but I open myself to the exuberance of others. Like the native exuberance of children, which is why the Pageant is unexpectedly appropriate for the gospel lesson about John the Baptist. My penitence is in letting go of my own expert expectations to welcome the joy of others into my life. Especially children, and I can take personally what the Lord Jesus says, “The smallest (mikroteros) in the kingdom of heaven is greater than me.” I had better make room for their joy. Can you see the Kingdom of Heaven? Look for it with a double vision, as I said two weeks ago. You look for that great and universal new life of the world to come beyond the resurrection of the dead, and you look for small signs of the Kingdom now: the mustard seed, the leaven in the loaf, the little flowers breaking through the hardness of the soil, the voices of children singing their praise. Look for those small and passing signs of God’s love in your own life, and bear witness to them. “Go and tell John what you hear and see.” He needs your witness, he needs your encouragement. Like John the Baptist you are tempted to think that your witness makes no difference, and that the Lord Jesus is not performing as you were led to expect. So I challenge you to the active patience of a farmer, who knows the time for plowing and planting and the time for watching and waiting. You have your work to do, but the fruit depends on a power beyond your view and your control. You are neither to be despairing, as if nothing might change, nor self-sufficient, as if we ourselves can make the change. You do what you do and depend on God to do it. So strengthen your weak hands. If the world is worse than you think, then get up on that highway that runs through it with joy.
Isaiah 11:1-10, Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19, Romans 15:4-13, Matthew 3:1-12
John the Baptist tells the Pharisees and Sadducees to “Bear fruit worthy of repentance.” And he baptizes them. He doesn’t require them to repent first to get baptized, but to follow their baptisms with lives of repentance. He doesn’t mean specifically identifiable penitential actions, but common activities that fit with a penitential attitude. To “bear fruit” suggests positive repentance, life-giving and life-expanding repentance, life-sharing, and benefitting others. Yes, sacrificial, but not self-abnegation; rather, sacrificial rather in terms of investment and cost and risk. And pruning too, as fruit trees are pruned to bear better fruit, so that positive repentance will entail some intentional losses. Last Sunday I described positive repentance as “the self-giving works of your creativity and the live-giving actions of your imagination. Not punishing yourself but serving others, reconciling, cleansing, sharing, creating examples in your life and in the world of what you imagine may be normal in the life of the world to come.” You offer examples of human activities that you imagine will be normal in the New Jerusalem. You demonstrate human relations as you foresee them when the Kingdom of Heaven has fully come on earth.
It’s okay that these are passing and fragile, and your moral achievements will not last long. Your demonstrations and examples are first-drafts and test-cases; not marble monuments but more like lovely meals that last a couple hours. Not permanent, like the plastic fruit in our parlors of the 1960’s, but fruit that ripens and then is harvested and eaten; or it falls to the ground to drop its seed and make new life, and its genetic code lives on, so that its short and passing life is not wasted but goes on into the future. Just so, God keeps gathering into God’s future satisfaction your passing and fragile actions of positive repentance.
John the Baptist does not offer any concrete examples of positive repentance in St. Matthew’s account. But he does so in St. Luke’s version. He says that if you have two coats, share one with someone who has none, and if you have food, do likewise. Tax collectors, take no more money than what’s appointed, and soldiers, be content with your wages and don’t extort the populace. Doesn’t seem like much, but the last two examples were counter-cultural, and with wages so tight you would need self-control to resist the opportunities that your little bit of power offered you, and you’d be ridiculed by your officers. The resistance of the world to you is part of your repentance.
Where St. Matthew does offer his concrete examples is in his following chapters, in the Sermon on the Mount. He says, Be merciful. He says, Be peacemakers. Not conflict-avoiders who take no risks, but wade into conflict working peace. He says, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, and that is costly, which feels like penance. He says, Judge not, and if you must judge, then take the log out of your own eye before you judge the speck in your neighbor’s eye, which feels like physical therapy. He says to forgive those who trespass against you, which takes self-control. And he says to pray the Lord’s Prayer, which keeps you dependent on God’s initiative. I hesitate to hold up concrete examples from people in our congregation, because I will have to pass over some of you. Forgive me ahead of time. But let me mention a few of you. One of you had a stroke a year ago, and you leveraged your disability into advocacy for the disabled getting full access to our mass transit system. That’s positive repentance. One of you young mothers responded to the persecution of undocumented immigrants by sacrificing your time to help the mothers and their children that our government is oppressing. One of you has given her life to the global campaign against man-made climate change and its dire effects especially among the poorer populations of the earth. One of you is sacrificing his free time to take his turn in serving as our church treasurer, a time-consuming job, a positive penance that others of you have done as well in your own turn. I could give you many more examples.
Don’t depend on only your preacher to hold up such examples. You as a congregation need to recognize these actions and devotions among you. Recognize each other, honor each other, bless each other, encourage each other. Recognize the fruits that the others among you are bearing, and recognize your own fruit as well. Bear fruits that befit repentance, not as single trees but an orchard, shading each other, cross-fertilizing each other, and sheltering the little birds among your branches.
Encouragement is a concrete example from Romans 15. As is also living in harmony. Not in unison, but in harmony, by sharing your different voices with other, and listening to others as you sing, to get yourself in tune with the voices that differ from your own. That requires active hospitality as you welcome other voices into the same space as your own. To welcome each other is positive repentance. You give each other room, not to keep your distance, but for living room for company and hospitality. Just as Christ has welcomed you.
And if I may change the subject slightly, that welcome of Christ, that hospitality of God, is the answer to the problem of why the Lord Jesus takes so long in coming again. If it seems like he’s waiting forever, 2000 years and counting, that’s from the perspective of our own short lifetimes. But that’s no time at all from the perspective of the planet or even of the existence of Homo sapiens. And yet the real point is that God is being hospitable to us in terms of time itself. Time is one of God’s best creations, and a gift to us, and God keeps giving us time, lots of time, within which we ourselves create, and imagine, and bear fruit. Lots of time to rehearse, lots of time try out things, and try again. We’re all of us moral Thomas Edisons, with one success for 99 failures, and even that one success will soon be out of date, because none of this is forever. The Lord Jesus gives our species lots of time to make our various and passing preparations for his coming again. You are preparing, not for the end of the world, but for the beginning. You are preparing not for your exit but for your entrance. It’s positive repentance when you prepare for the beginning.
Some more concrete examples from Romans: It’s positive repentance to be steadfast in your faith, against the trials and testing of the world, especially the world’s success. For, as I said, the resistance of the world to you is part of your repentance. It’s positive repentance to choose for hope. Not optimism, because things are worse than you know, but right within the negativity, your hope is to welcome God’s initiative and God’s time, no matter how long it seems to take. It’s positive repentance to choose for joy, especially considering all the evils slung against you that then cling to your memories of your sins. But you despise the shame to choose for the joy. And it’s positive repentance to choose for love, despite the successful powers of fear and hatred in the world. But that’s why this penitential season comes down to a baby, a baby, “babies, babies everywhere,” to tell you that the greatest of all fruits that befit repentance are the grapes of joy and the apples of love. Those vines and those trees are for the healing of the nations. And your passing joys and your fragile loves are your preparations for the greater harvest still to come.
And so you prepare yourself for not the end but for the beginning. And you prepare yourself by being open to God’s preparing you. That’s why you are here today. The good news is that Christ himself prepares you. When I was a child, I had asthma. So my mother put in my bedroom a little machine called a vaporizer, with a small tank of water, and in the water she put some Vicks Vaporub, and if I breathed it I could sleep, and as I kept breathing in my sleep it opened me more and more. The Lord Jesus prepares you by his Word and his Spirit, he opens you up, and he makes you able to expand your lungs, both to give you rest and restore your strength for living in the morning. That’s why you came here today. You want to breathe God’s joy into yourself. And you can be encouraged that even your fragile fruits are planted in the fertile ground of God’s eternal love.
The Last Judgment, by Hieronymus Bosch Isaiah 2:1-5, Psalm 122, Romans 13:11-14, Matthew 24:36-44
The Season of Advent begins at the end and it ends at the beginning. Advent Sunday begins the new church year, and yet we focus on the “last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty, to judge both the living and the dead.” At the end of the season, we will celebrate that “he came to visit us in great humility,” in Bethlehem. So Advent goes backwards, from the Omega to the Alpha, from Z to A, as if to say, Keep watch for the morning, and when your patience fails, remember his birth in the night. One of you told me this week that you love the Season of Advent because it reminds you that “this is not forever.” Whatever your “this” may be—the burdens of your job, the arrangements in your life right now, or the powers that control the world right now—this is not forever. Nationalism is not forever, socialism is not forever, capitalism is not forever, Humanism is not forever, and in a real sense, Christianity is not forever. There is a boundary—on everything, a boundary in the future, the boundary of God’s final righteous judgment when Christ comes again. It’s a relief that this is not forever and will end, even if we are not told the hour, and only vaguely told what will begin.
I’ve been thinking about endings and beginnings, as I’m ending my time as your pastor, and I’ll soon begin my retirement. How will I work out these last seven months? And then, how will I spend my life with more free time and far less money? Can I find a decent part-time job? How tightly will we have to live? Will we have enough to be able to travel? First world problem, I know. How long will I be healthy? How long do I have before my new beginning becomes the beginning of my end?
I dreamt about my death the other night, which I’ve never done before. In the first dream I had six hours to live after my heart was removed from my chest, and the doctor put it on the table and there was no blood, and then he chopped it in half like a unripe melon, and he said that it looked pretty healthy, so it wasn’t heart disease that I was dying from. In the second dream we were having dinner with a group of friends, and none of them knew that I had only a few more days to live, so I was thinking maybe Melody should tell them, or I’d have to, and then what would they all think.
Is it because my life is so good right now that my dreams are telling me that I’ve repressed a fear of death? What if my life were full of suffering, wouldn’t I desire my death as my release? I remember my Grandma Meeter, in her last weeks of cancer, how she looked forward to dying and going to be with the Lord. It was Rabbi Weintraub who told me that Jews know how to suffer, but Christians know how to die. I’m not sure that’s true for me. And then, you have heard it said that the reason that people resist change is not from what they will gain as from what they stand to lose.
The traditional picture of the Return of Christ is Doomsday, the Day of Judgment, Dies irae dies illa, when all the souls that ever lived go either up to heaven or down to hell. We call it Doomsday because of what we stand to lose, even if we’re saved. By gaining heaven we lose the world, and to hell with the world.
This picture began with St. Augustine, and it’s partly why so many Evangelicals don’t care about climate change. It’s assumed to be taught by the New Testament itself, assumed as much by liberal and progressive scholars as by conservative ones, and it taints the writings of the current popular books about the Bible that you will find in Barnes and Noble. But as I study the New Testament, I’m convinced that the apostles saw the Return of Christ not as the end of the world but the beginning of the world. Not as the loss of the world but the gain of the world—this world, as it was meant to be, when the Lord Jesus returns, and God renews all things.
This means that our future hope is not to escape this ruined world by fleeing into heaven, but that heaven comes down upon this world to redeem it and renew it. It means that instead of us praising God upon the clouds we will be praising God as we work in our vineyards and our fig trees. It means the full and final answer to the Lord’s Prayer, “thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” The apostles saw the return of Christ as the beginning of the world as much as the end of it.
Did you ever see that movie from 1959, On the Beach, with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner? It takes place after World War III, the nuclear war that ruins the world, and all humanity is dead. Only Australia has survived, but the nuclear fallout is drifting there too, and they’ve only got a few weeks left until the end. You see some people partying with abandonment, and other people crowding into churches, standing on lines make their repentance before the end of the world. But what if repentance is to prepare not for the end of the world but for the beginning of the world? What if repentance is not to escape a punishment, but to get you better fit for what’s to come, by cleaning you and trimming you and training you? Remember our Reformed theology, that all of our sins are forgiven us already, thanks to the cross, so repentance is not to get forgiven but to enjoy the forgiveness already applied. Your repentance comes after your forgiveness, not before it. You repent, not to escape a penalty, but to renounce your bondage and to claim your freedom. You repent to prepare for the beginning of the world, not for the doomsday but the great birth-day.
Protestants don’t do penance, but a Roman Catholic once told me that there was nothing better than going to confession and coming out clean. But the penance was saying thirty Hail Mary’s and fifty Our Father’s. Like writing lines. They probably don’t do this anymore in school, having kids stay after and write lines, like “I won’t shoot spit-balls in class. I won’t shoot spit-balls in class.” I saw a cartoon once, with a girl at the blackboard and a stern nun standing by, and the girl is writing, “I am personally responsible for all the sufferings of Christ. I am personally responsible for all the sufferings of Christ.”
What if repentance is less like writing lines and more like handing in your homework? You do your work and you hand it in to get corrected. Repentance is saying, Correct me, teach me, train me, discipline me, disciple me, show me, let me rehearse this so I can learn it and do it better. It’s good that this is not forever, because your time of trial is a time of testing and proving, like in a laboratory class. Your repentance is not to get you out of a penalty but to prepare you for your future. At least for Advent repentance. We have two penitential seasons, Advent and Lent, and they differ. Lent approaches a death, with its pain of sorrow and remorse. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Advent approaches a birth, with its pain of pregnancy and a poignancy of expectation. It’s a positive penance of costly investment, sacrificial creativity, old life generating new life. It’s like physical therapy, discomfort made bearable by the comfort to come.
Jeremiah 23:1-6, Benedictus, Colossians 1:11-20, Luke 23:33-43
When visitors come into our sanctuary, they often ask, “Where’s the cross?” I tell them that actually there is one, almost hidden, and then I show it to them. (It's in the Pilgrim's Progress window.) So, why no cross in a Reformed Church? No, not a Roman Catholic crucifix, with a dying Jesus on it, but maybe a nice empty cross? Well, because the Lord Jesus told us that the symbol of his death should be the bread-plate and the cup. But when the cross in whatever version was put upon the battle flags of the empires and kingdoms of Christendom it was not to symbolize his death, but to claim the endorsement of his sovereignty, the Kingdom of Christ. And so the ecumenical lectionary has appointed the crucifixion story as the Gospel for the Sunday of the Reign of Christ, the Feast of Christ the King (invented by the pope). And when Pontius Pilate posted that inscription, “The King of the Judeans Is this Guy,” Pilate was humiliating Jesus and the Jews, but he was also paradoxically enthroning Jesus upon the cross.
Now in Reformed theology we’d prefer more Biblically to celebrate the Reign of Christ on Ascension Day. That’s when the Lord Jesus entered heaven to sit at the right hand of his Father, in the seat of universal power. It’s an injustice to Our Lord’s accomplishment to keep him on the cross or even to make the cross our primary symbol of his Lordship. And that’s why some of us prefer to use a different name for this last Sunday of the church year: we call it Ingathering Sunday. And the theme of gathering-in fits nicely with our other lessons from Jeremiah and Colossians.
And yet, this gospel lesson does have value today by showing us the kind of power that the Lord Jesus exercises even on the throne of heaven. It’s not a kind of power that any worldly power would expect or respect. It’s not coercive power but persuasive power. It’s not a forcing power but a forgiving power. It’s not a condemning power but a reconciling power. It’s not a conquering power but a gathering power. The Lord Jesus wields his power in heaven no differently than we see him wield it on the cross, as Jesus gathers the thief in. That thief is our man, he stands for all of us.
He doesn’t ask for much, he doesn’t argue his innocence, he accepts his punishment. All he asks is that Jesus remember him when he comes into his kingdom. It’s a very Jewish request, to be remembered, more so than in Christianity. But to be remembered properly required an honorable death and an honorable burial. Which this thief will not get. His death on a tree was accursed by Jewish law and the Romans will let his body hang there until it putrefies. He’s dying a shameful death, so all he asks is that someday Jesus will remember his partner in their agony. That’s crazy. How does the thief imagine that Jesus will ever come into his kingdom? At this point it looks obvious that Jesus will never have any kingdom at all. He has failed as the Messiah. It’s over. What could this thief be seeing in Jesus? Or has he just got nothing left to lose?
The answer of Jesus is just as crazy. “Amen, today you’ll be with me in the paradise.” What does that mean? If it's “today,” then not going to heaven, because Jesus won’t be going there for another forty-three days and the next three days he’ll be stone dead. A “paradise” was something more specific back then, it was a royal garden. Jesus uses that word not to convey so much the bliss of the place as its status: Today you will be with me in the White House Rose Garden! Or better, in my new Garden of Eden. Which in the circumstance was laughable. This wasn’t any paradise, it was a killing ground. The only fruit in this garden is the strange fruit hanging from the Roman trees.
Southern trees bear strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root. Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze; Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
The Jewish Jesus is on a lynching tree, the union of racism and anti-Semitism. And when Christian Nationalism reveals its racism and its anti-Semitism then you know it isn’t really Christian.
Now, if these strange fruits are in a Garden like Eden of Our Lord’s vision, then Jesus is the new Adam, the firstborn of that new humanity that is a theme of St. Luke’s Gospel, that new humanity that Jesus has created right within the glorious and powerful old humanity of Roman civilization, which will try to exterminate the new humanity within it. And if this paradoxical paradise is the Rose Garden of the Kingdom of God, then this thief is a cabinet member in that Kingdom. He got there by being pardoned. He got a royal pardon from Jesus, and pardoning is what kings do.
As Colossians says, “He has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” And that’s not just for the thief. The Lord Jesus pardons them all when he issues his general amnesty, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” the chief priests, Pilate, the soldiers, the other thief, and in them everybody—the whole world, as Colossians says: “Through Jesus God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross.” The pledge of God’s peace upon the symbol of Roman violence. Everybody is forgiven, but it’s the thief who believed it. Everybody standing there was stuck in their hostility and fear, but the thief acknowledged his guilt and his predicament and was free to accept God’s forgiveness. Everybody standing there was in the circle of the Kingdom of Jesus, but the thief envisioned it as a member of the new humanity. That’s what you get too, you become part of the new humanity when you accept the forgiveness of your sins and when you believe the vision of Jesus. It can be hard to see, as it was for the other thief, and the whole thing looks like a cruel joke that can only be derided. But you are here today because you want to see it and you want to believe it. And I can tell you today that in order to see the Reign of God you have to look for it with a double vision. First, envision the Kingdom of God as out there in the future, majestic, cosmic, impending, over-arching, all-inclusive, the life of the world to come, the future always pressing down on us, judging everything, keeping us always discontent. In the light of this Kingdom you examine everything and question everything. The cross judges everything. You may never be content with any human system. Every advance in church and society must be analyzed and criticized. The Kingdom demands nothing less than radical change. The Kingdom is a revolutionary magnitude that we cannot measure, and its holiness reveals the vanity of all we do. This is the source of the revolutionary vigor of our faith.
But also envision the Kingdom as already present in the world—the leaven in the loaf, a seed in the ground, a treasure in the field, the fruit on the tree, a mustard seed, the faith of children, working quietly within the world and changing it mysteriously. See the signs of it no matter how strange the fruit, as you yourself are a sign of fragile life. So you can be open, you can be patient, you can be humble, you can be joyful, you can be confident that God is working in the world right now, in fragile ways, and doing it through you, as God gathers all that you do into God’s final victory.
You keep these two visions together so that you offer a double witness, and you do your actions in the world with reference both to the future, which we cannot achieve but do receive, as it is given us by God, and to the hidden present, where God keeps revealing God’s self in your all-too-human attempts at love and mercy and welcome, so that even the hill of The Skull may be a Paradise.
You don’t have to be a strong believer, or a hero of the faith, or a soldier of the cross. Maybe all you’re doing is answering a subpoena and you’re afraid of a penalty. But this government of Jesus does not punish—it gathers, it gathers you even at your worst. In the vision of Jeremiah, God is the shepherd who gathers your wandering on the mountains so wonderfully that you end up at home.
So this is how Jesus conquers Rome and all the empires. This is how he wields his power—by his speech and in his grace. He does not use his power to manipulate events, not then, not now, even from his throne in heaven. By his Word he offers, by his Word he invites, by his Word he pardons, he rehabilitates, he promotes, he appoints, he welcomes, and by his Spirit he comforts and enlightens. This power that he wields is never other than the power of his love.
Isaiah 65:17-25, Canticle: Isaiah 12, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13, Luke 21:5-19
The gospel lesson takes place a couple days before Good Friday. The disciples have no idea that Jesus will so soon be dead. He is momentarily pausing from Messianic actions; here he’s not the prince but the prophet. And with that prophetic mix of human smarts and divine inspiration he is predicting what’s bound to happen to Jerusalem, given the seething unrest of the Judeans together with the brutal habits of the Romans. Forty years later it happened—the Romans destroyed the temple.
How many temples to the gods have been erected and then demolished over time? How many churches have been built and then torn down? This congregation has erected and demolished four buildings so far. Our first one stood from 1666 to 1776, 110 years, then our second one for 31 years, our third for only 28 years, and our fourth, a great grand temple, for just 51 years to 1886. We’ve been in this one for 130 years, which makes it our longest-surviving building. But how long before this one too comes down, in the words of the Lord Jesus, not one stone left upon another?
From an old photo we have a good idea of what our fourth building looked like on the inside, but of our first three sanctuaries we can only guess. But those beakers know. On the silver surface of those beakers has been reflected every one of our interiors, the gleam of windows, the glow of lights, glimpses of furniture, whether humble or impressive, and faces, one by one, the faces of those who have lifted up those beakers to drink the Holy Wine from them.
The silver of those beakers is worn thin by all the hands that have lifted them. They are what we call thin places, thin places between the spiritual and physical, and they carry an enduring spirituality and they draw out our souls, and as the Lord Jesus says, By your endurance you will gain your souls.
Buildings are built to endure as long as they can, but our beakers symbolize something more enduring, which is communion, that connection of our souls through Lord’s Supper to Lord’s Supper before it reaching back to our first communion service ever, the date of which we do not know, but God knows, because the Lord Jesus was there with them. Our lamp was lit before the throne of God, and it does not go out. With those earliest members you share an unbroken communion in the timeless sight of God. If you look behind you, under the balcony against the back wall, you can see the baptismal font from our fourth sanctuary. We used it a few times in the Lower Hall. In just a few minutes we will gather around that other font, there, that was made for this sanctuary, that we have now restored to use. And there, in the words of Isaiah, we shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation and baptize Pierre and John, and, as Isaiah says, they shall be offspring blessed by the Lord. Our first recorded baptism was of little Helena Brouwer, 359 years ago on October 31st, 1660, before we had a building, when we were worshiping in a barn, and she was probably baptized from somebody’s bowl, as I was. How long she lived, I do not know. The next two infants baptized both lived only a few days. Their parents did not see Isaiah’s prophecy come true.
The prophecy of Isaiah has been speaking for 2700 years, more than seven times 365, and even though it’s metaphor, still, when will it ever come true, and how much of it will come true? What is the horizon of this prophecy, how far off into the future must we imagine it? And how does it serve us in the meantime, while the sounds of weeping continue and the cries of distress?
And how shall we understand the prophecy of the Lord Jesus—as about the end of time, or that time was up for the temple? Or both? And for every temple that we build? Should this discourage us from building and from restoration? Not if Isaiah’s right, that we shall build houses and inhabit them, and we shall not labor in vain. As long as we don’t depend on them for our endurance, or in them we will lose our souls. We place our hope in that future city coming down from God, the New Jerusalem, whose builder and maker is God. The horizon of our time is very long and our personal lives are short, but we need to meet with God in the present moments in between, and so we gather our congregations to seek God and talk with God, and before we call God will answer, and while we are yet speaking, God will hear. In the same way, the scale of Isaiah’s prophecy is cosmic, with new heavens and a new earth, and our personal lives are small. And in between we build our buildings to make the space where we can be with God, especially when we baptize the smallest among us, and when we commune with the whole church on earth and all the company of heaven. In between the vast and the small we make space to meet with God.
I’m offering you perspective here, as on this morning we contemplate our peculiar congregation and our peculiar place in time and space within the mystery of God in history, and what’s our mission and our business as a church. We do soul business. We make momentarily visible some great unseen realities. We make tangible some cosmic truths. We touch things that we cannot fully grasp. That’s what we do here, and we keep on doing, and by our endurance we gain our souls.
That’s not all we do here. For my next point, let me direct you to the second lesson, to the Thessalonians. They were a small church, like most of them Saint Paul planted. At the time there was confusion about how soon the Lord Jesus would return, and what would happen when he did. And some of the believers were just stopping from their ordinary lives. So Saint Paul is telling them not to be so indulgent of the slackers and the disorderly busybodies among them. What this tells us is that the Thessalonian congregation must have been kindly and generous, even to a fault. As you are, Old First, and I skip the fault. Last Monday I came home from our Deacons meeting, and as I was unwinding with Melody I said to her how just plain generous so many of you are—generous with your time, generous with your labor, with your money, with your sympathy, and generous with your concern. More generous than you have the resources for. And I want to bless you for your generosity. This is my last anniversary sermon among you, and may I bless you for your generosity?
As Melody and I kept talking, she said how much we’re going to miss this congregation, and she said it was also because you all just know that you need this spiritual connection, that from all the different places that you come from you believe in this spiritual connection with God and with each other, and you keep working at it even beyond the resources you can muster. For that I bless you too, and let me encourage you with the promise that by your endurance you will gain your souls.
It’s a strange turn of phrase, to gain your souls. Don’t you have souls already, aren’t you already souls? I’m guessing that Saint Luke means that you are gaining your full humanity, that new humanity of Jesus’ resurrection that you already are and are not fully yet. Your congregation is a laboratory of the new humanity, a fully spiritual humanity, with your souls with full capacity for the habitation of the Holy Spirit of God. Just by your endurance you are a quiet testimony to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and to the faithfulness of God, both for you as individuals and for you together as a community of Jesus extending through the many years. Thick walls and thin places. A big space, and a long thread through the years. Baptisms and communions, a body expanding and contracting, a community of Jesus enduring, and as Jesus says, not a hair of your head will perish. Which seems to contradict what he had just said, that some of you will be put to death. What, put to death with full heads of hair? Well, his logic is prophetic logic, which holds words in tension, and, also, he’s speaking of himself, because in a couple days his own hair will be matted with blood upon a cross, and then three days later he will rise again. And that too is our business and our mission, to testify to him, who died and rose again, and testifying not least by doing our work quietly and earning our living and not being weary in doing what is right, for however long it takes for his prophecies to come all true.
I know you. I know that your endurance is powered by your love, and I watch you gaining the souls fully to bear the love of God—the love of God that has called you, and gathered you here, the love that sustains you, and inspires you, and challenges you. And that’s the last thing I bless you for today, I bless you for the love of God that you desire and for the love of God that is within you.
The gospel lesson takes place one day before Palm Sunday. Six days after this Jesus will be dead. But at this point his campaign still looks triumphant, and tomorrow the Messiah will make his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and he should take the throne of David and kick out the Romans and all their collaborators and proclaim the Kingdom of God. But of course he gets crucified instead.
That’s the tragedy, but this morning it’s still comedy. The story of Zacchaeus is comic by design. But our translation gets it wrong. Our translation makes it a conversion story, by having Zacchaeus promise to give half of his possessions to the poor, and promise to pay back fourfold whatever he’s defrauded. But he’s already doing that. What Zacchaeus actually says is this: “Look, half my possessions, Lord, I am giving to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I am paying them back fourfold.” I am giving, I am paying back. He’s already doing it. It’s not a conversion story, it’s a blessing story.
But then why do the people grumble? It’s not against Zacchaeus that they grumble but against the Messiah, that he’s going to this sinner’s house. Zacchaeus is a sinner no matter how generous he is, because he works for the Romans. His generosity only softens the system but doesn’t change the system. To change the system they want the Messiah to get the Romans out, and their collaborators.
Drain the swamp. Lock him up. The crowd displays the politics of grievance. Grievance can be powerful. You see it with Donald Trump, and with Putin in Russia and Le Pen in France and Orban in Hungary and with Brexit in the UK. But the power of grievance is destructive power. This crowd that praises Jesus on Palm Sunday, in six more days will demand his crucifixion. Their grumbling is a subtle intimation of the coming tragedy right within this morning’s comedy.
It’s classic comedy in the anti-grievance that Jesus recognizes and honors in Zacchaeus—the anti-grievance that while all governments are corrupt and compromised, yet government can still use the money from taxes directly to assist the poor, and even though all governments defraud their people, yet government can still have practices to control its natural corruption with realistic feedback-loops, and make its reparations, and provide restorative justice to people it typically defrauds.
Today salvation has come to this house. What’s salvation here? Economic policies and practices, yes, but more, or why would Jesus have to die. For Zacchaeus, salvation means the person and presence of the Lord Jesus seeking him. For this sinner, this compromised person, salvation is the presence of the Lord Jesus in his life, sitting and eating with him, with his disciples too, no doubt, a community of Jesus. Salvation is Jesus accepting Zacchaeus and blessing him. So, crowd! Stop your grumbling, stop objectifying people as sinners. The great joke and problem of the Kingdom of God is not who is out, but who’s let in! The Lord Jesus keeps letting the wrong people in. It’s a comedy. The Lord Jesus does not ask Zacchaeus to quit his job. That is telling, and a message for politics: that our governments are responsible to use some of our taxes directly to assist the poor. Not just for the grumbling middle class, and not just to stimulate the economy yielding better jobs, but what Zacchaeus did, directly to the poor. Also that governments are responsible to correct and make reparations for the inevitable unfairness that economic power generates. What Zacchaeus did. It doesn’t matter which system of government is at work, whether Roman, Jewish, capitalist, socialist, it’s all the same obligation. These are the values of Our Lord’s political economy in the Kingdom of God. Here’s what it means for all of us spiritually. The Lord Jesus does not call you out from all the corruption of the world, but keeps you in all your situations of ethical ambiguity and compromise, and even in social and economic tragedy. You could act bitter, sarcastic, or cynical, and be tragicomical, like the crowd. But the tragedy of the cross of Jesus Christ rises up again into the comedy of hope, and you shall be joyful. The world is worse than we think, but you shall be joyful in it anyway.
The comedy of the Lord Jesus is a comfort when you face the truth that everything that you do in your Christian life has some fault or flaw within it and always some complicity. Nothing you do is pure. Every good thing that you do has some measure in it of self-interest. And so you repent and you laugh at yourself, and you build into your life some realistic feedback-loops, some intentional actions of selflessness, especially of economic justice. You build into your life some sacrifice, not because God needs your sacrifice, but because you do. Not just to keep you humble, but to keep you tuned in to the grace of God. Life requires sacrifice. New life requires sacrifice. Ask any mother!
One of our feedback-loops is tithing. Speaking of comedy, it’s a bit of a joke how every year on this last Sunday before Consecration Sunday I’m supposed to squeeze the topic of tithing into whatever else my sermon might be about. But Zacchaeus really does apply to tithing. Not in the amount that he gives back—he does more than tithe—but why he does it. He does it to limit the grip and power of money in his life, to push away from himself the love of money, and to redeem in real terms the corruption of the money within his morally more-than-ambiguous situation.
Why do you give to God? To support the church? Well, that’s good. And you should, when you consider all that it gives you. You’ve heard the examples the last three weeks. But that gets calculated on what the church needs. Those are donations. Donations have their place. But tithing is subtly different, tithing is calculated not on what the church needs to receive but on what you need to give. For your own spiritual reasons, for your own self-discipline of freeing yourself from loving your money and resisting the power of your money on you. Tithing is your economic feedback-loop.
You start at one percent of your income, and you make the first break with the hold of money on your life. Every year that you can add another percent till you get to ten is how you get more free of the power of money in your life. You tithe as the cost of your freedom—that’s why you do it for yourself; and for God you do it for thanksgiving, your tithing is a sacrifice of thanksgiving.
You need some money in your life because money is power. The taxes of the Romans were used to pay the expenses of keeping them in power. And they used their power for further wealth and aggrandizement and exploitation. It was their right as the conquerors and the purpose of their Pax Romana. It was understood as only right. And into this normal humanity the Lord Jesus introduces a new humanity, to which Zacchaeus belongs.
This new humanity has power but it uses its power for the poor, and not for self-aggrandizement, and not for its own wealth but on behalf of those who have been defrauded and exploited. This new humanity is not pulled out from the corruption of the world but is kept fully in the world, so that its members cannot help but still be sinners, like Zacchaeus, like us, but what makes us holy and justified and qualified for the Kingdom of God is the presence of the Lord Jesus among you in the Holy Spirit. Your entry into this new humanity is just your desire to see Jesus, no matter how short your stature may be. Just climb the tree to catch a glimpse, and salvation comes to you.
Daniel James Meeter grew up in Manhattan, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Jersey, and Long Island. He was ordained to the Reformed Church ministry in 1980, and has served churches in Jersey, Michigan, and Ontario. He earned a Ph.D. from Drew University in 1989, and has published two technical books in theology as well as many articles. He is married to Rev. Melody Takken Meeter, the Director of Pastoral Care at the Lutheran Medical Center of Brooklyn. They have two married children.
The Old First Mission Statement:
Old First Reformed Church is a community of Jesus Christ in Brooklyn. We welcome persons of every ethnicity, race, and orientation to worship, serve, and love God, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. We embrace the following missions:
1. To offer God's word, prayer, the sacraments, and discipleship; 2. To offer outreach, education, fellowship, and music;
3. To offer sanctuary to anyone seeking spirituality and hope;
4. To offer hospitality to community groups and the arts; 5. To care for the gifts we have been given through our Reformed Church, including our historic sanctuary and building.
