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.
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.
