Malachi 3:1-4, Psalm 84, Hebrews 2:14-18, Luke 2:22-40
Today we mark the Feast of the Presentation. It comes forty days after Christmas. The forty days is from the Jewish law that imposed forty days of ritual uncleanness on new mothers; so this was the first time that Mary was allowed back in the Temple. We Protestants do not typically observe the Feast of the Presentation, and I haven’t preached on it in thirty years, but it happens to fall on a Sunday this year, so our lectionary insert observes it, and that’s why we end up observing it too. You might notice that Luke’s Gospel never mentions the Visit of the Magi or the Slaughter of the Innocents or the Flight into Egypt. Those are all reported by Matthew, and it is difficult to harmonize their two accounts. I’m not going to try. But there are parallels. In both accounts, two or three people surprise Mary and Joseph with strange news about their baby’s identity, which they wonder at, and the glory of that news brings with it danger, division, and the sword. Here already is the hint of tragedy, the underlying tension, and the intimation of great sacrifice.
“This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed – and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” That’s what Simeon says to Mary! What a year it’s been for her, ten months and a week, from when the angel Gabriel first told her of her pregnancy. Then she visited her cousin Elizabeth, and she sang her song, the Magnificat, in which she already prophesied the falling and rising of many. Then was her forced journey to Bethlehem, and the birth, and the shepherds, who told her of the concert of the angels, which confirmed what Gabriel had told her. Now this encounter in the Temple, two months short of a year.
In that time the characters sang four new songs, the new birth songs, the Canticles of Luke: the Magnificat by Mary, the Benedictus by Zechariah, the Gloria in Excelsis of the angels to the shepherds, and now the final one, the Nunc Dimittis, the Song of Simeon.
These four canticles have come to frame the day in the tradition of daily prayer. At Morning Prayer you say the Benedictus, at Midday Eucharist the Gloria, at Evening Prayer the Magnificat, and at Compline, at bedtime, the Nunc Dimittis. The four canticles have been set to music so many times in so many ways that the history of Western Music is inconceivable without them.
The Song of Simeon was given a lovely tune by the Calvinists, and I used to sing it in Hungarian at funerals in my first congregation. It’s a shame we’ve lost it in America. And I’m sorry that our lectionary insert does not set it out as poetry, but we can tell it’s poetry by its strophic lines and by its terse and suggestive language. Robert Frost once said that poetry is that which is lost in translation. I am no poet, but let me try to do better than our insert does with it: “Now let go your slave, Master, by your word, in peace, as my eyes have seen your salvation, that you prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to nations, and glory to your people Israel.”
Those words amazed the father and the mother when they heard it. Of course they already knew their boy was special. Mary had been told by Gabriel that her son would be the Messiah. But to call him the “glory of Israel” was to put him inside God’s own glory. And to call him “a light for revelation to nations” was to open up new vistas with the Gentiles that they could hardly yet imagine.
Simeon holds the baby in his arms as he lifts his eyes to heaven and chants his poem. Then he blesses them both, and he hands their baby back to them and he says that prophecy of falling and rising and the sword, and I can imagine Mary holding her baby close to protect him from the future. Joseph is carrying their two turtledoves, to be killed, and they can smell the other sacrificial animals, and they can hear the chanting of the Levites and the bleating and shrieking of the animals as the Levites pierce them with their knives, a Slaughter of the Innocents. Mary holds on to the baby she loves in the midst of terrors larger than herself.
The piercing of Mary is the consolation of Simeon. He has seen what God had promised him, and he can die in peace. He will not have to see what Mary will witness in her life. She will see the rising opposition to her son. She will see the division of her people on his account and even her own family. She will see the dark thoughts of many revealed because of him. And she will watch him being killed and the piercing of his side. The are dark powers out there that she cannot save him from. The piercing and the consolation, the comfort and the sacrifice—is this the way that God desires it, or is it rather that God is so much “with us” that God accommodates the way of the world in the misery of its rebellion? Does God’s own heart get pierced—like mother, like father? Does mother Mary stand for God the Father? God’s piercing for our consolation. Do our grief and consolation probe the heart of God, and is God “with us” in our grief about the pain and evil in the world? We are always dealing with powers of evil out there that are bigger than our sins and that leverage our sins and cause us grief. One of those powers is what the Epistle to the Hebrews calls the devil, which, in that epistle’s theology, has the power of death. Maybe so. And in that epistle’s theology, the so-called “atonement” is God’s moral exchange of good and evil that frees us from our slavery to the fear of death. Is it possible to grieve without the fear of death? I believe so, and I invite you to believe that the final word is God’s consolation, and for all the peoples of the world.
The last time I sang the Song of Simeon in Hungarian was in 1985, at the funeral of an old man that I loved, Csatari Janos. I had been with him and his grandson at his death, at home, just behind our parsonage. At his funeral I began to sing it, and at the second line I broke down and I couldn’t finish it. I had never cried in church before. Why was I crying? Well, for Csatari Janos, and for his family that I loved, and I think also for my grandmother, my favorite person in the world, who had died just a month before, and whose funeral had been cold and correct and unemotional.
But I think I was also crying for myself, because I was feeling hurt by God, and I wanted God to let me go. I had just been turned down for two different promotions in the Reformed Church, one of them at the seminary and one at the Collegiate Church, and though I knew it was partly my fault, I still felt it was unfair, and there were powers at work too big for me. I was pierced in my heart, and I’d had about enough of God, and I needed to grieve, and this Song of Simeon brought it all out of me. “Now master, let go of your slave.” I was sorely aggrieved at God. None of us like to have our hearts revealed. We don’t like to be exposed. You like it that no one can read your mind. But I needed to have my inner thoughts revealed, at least to myself, and even to my congregation in the form of my tears. I needed to be pierced, and opposed, and fall, and rise. I needed to face the truth about myself, but also find some consolation. It turned out that the funeral was marvelous, and very Hungarian, with two days afterward of feasting and dancing with the family that I loved. Even at death, we were freed from slavery to death. And I was comforted. It was my consolation. Was God behind that consolation? Maybe so. Did I have to go through falling and rising and encounter opposition? Apparently so, to be freed from my slavery to myself. Did my inner thoughts have to be revealed? I’m glad they were. It is God’s way with us. It is God’s way to take us through falling and rising and opposition to be freed from our worst slavery, which is to ourselves, and then it is God’s way to make us an offer: the offer to be servants of love. I invite you to accept this calling for yourself, to be a servant of the love of God.
Isaiah 9:1-4, Psalm 27:1, 5-13, I Corinthians 1:10-18, Matthew 4:12-23
Jesus takes up the announcement that was made first by John the Baptist: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” But unlike John the Lord Jesus does not wait for people to come to him. He goes fishing. He catches Simon and Andrew, and he challenges them: “I will make you fishers of people.” Which metaphor is odd, because fishermen are enemies of fish; no fish ever consents to be caught. Well, the Kingdom of Heaven does involve some dying, some disruption, some repentance. Then Jesus catches James and John as well. This is the beginning, this disruption will change their lives forever, and this begins to change the world.
When Jesus repeats the announcement of John the Baptist he shifts the meaning, and stresses more the second part: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” With John, you repent first, you go down to the river to get clean before the kingdom comes. But the Lord Jesus brings the kingdom with him. You repent as a response to it. He takes it from the lakeshore up to the dry hills of Galilee, to the villagers, and their repentance is to accept its coming right there, at home, and the healing is the sign that it has come.
In their villages, not in Jerusalem. In Galilee, not in Judea. In The Bronx, not Manhattan. In the north, in the tribal lands of Zebulon and Naphtali, the borderlands of Lebanon and Syria, a region that has always been a battlefield, then as now, one army after another marching through, pillaging the crops and ravaging the women.
It was a region of Jews in poverty, and of gentrifying Gentiles moving in. The Jews were in depression, and they felt like exiles in their own land. What to do about the Gentiles?
The Galilean patriots were at first attracted to Jesus bringing the Kingdom of Heaven, but then when he didn’t tell the Gentiles to go back to Iowa they were disappointed in him. He didn’t bring it as a kingdom of independence but of interaction. It’s not for ridding your life of enemies but for loving your enemies close at hand. It’s not for getting rid of your troubles, but for transforming your troubles. It’s not the bright light of the noontime, but the light that shines in the darkness. The Kingdom of Heaven is for the mixed-up reality of your lives. It’s the light that shines before you to help you find your way. It’s the light that shines on your skin to give you hope again. Following Jesus is not magic. You do it in fits and starts, with gaps and hesitations, and doubts and disappointments. You know this for yourself. Following Jesus is just not a sudden simple thing or one nice gradual evolution. You get an experience wherein you notice God. And then there is a gap, and you wonder if it was real, and if anything has really changed. Maybe it was just your wishful thinking. The voice of God is not discrete from your own self-enclosed experience. But then something happens or somebody says something that takes you further, and you feel called again. Now God is asking more of you, a greater measure of devotion, a higher ethic, a more demanding justice, a challenging reconciliation, profounder grace. Jesus says, “Follow me.” That’s open-ended. You’d like to know first where he’s going. “Why not just tell me where we’re going, give me the directions, and I’ll get myself there? Just tell me what it is I need to repent of, I don’t mind, tell me what I did wrong, and I’ll be sorry and I’ll address it.”
Nope. Open-ended. Liberated. You are called to freedom. And that means disruption, because freedom is always a disruption. But your life is full of disruptions anyway. You manage your disruptions all the time, and you choose among them. To choose for certain disruptions is the meaning of repentance and discipleship. It’s a package: The kingdom is what Jesus brings, and to receive it is repentance, to explore it is discipleship, and to embody it is healing.
The lakeshore is a metaphor. Melody and I have a lakeshore cottage in Canada. Of course, most of the time we are not actually in the water. We are land creatures, we are only guests in the lake and we can drown in it although we love it and enjoy it. But yet the lake is always there, always present, always in our awareness, that other world right there that constantly determines our life on shore.
Discipleship feels like that to me, repentance feels like that, like living along the lake, living on the boundary of two worlds, two realms of existence. The one realm is the one we’re born into and we’re used to, where we can make our own way, where we don’t have to follow anybody. The other realm of existence is right there, always with you, as close as heaven is to earth, but it’s wide open, and you’re drawn to it but you’re unsure in it.
When you look around at this world that you’re used to from within the air of heaven, the very same world becomes a different world, a strange world, in which all of your certainties are made uncertain, where all your confidence must be humility, where you need a leader and a guide, someone you can trust. And he says, “Follow me.” It is both liberating and disruptive because everything is on the table. There are not some parts of your life that are in the Kingdom of Heaven and other parts that are exempt. The boundary runs through everything. Every action you take, every possession you have, every relationship you make, every issue you engage, every dollar you make, every investment, every interest, everything you think or hope or say, it all belongs to the Kingdom of Heaven. For everything you need instruction, in everything you need healing, in everything you need forgiveness, for everything you need repentance.
Repentance here is not that you are feeling bad or sorry, though that can be necessary, nor even a self-evaluation or a listing of rights and wrongs that you’ve done, though that has its place, but a general attitude, an attitude of total receptivity, allowing everything on the table, including your self-examination. I’m talking about freedom even from yourself. And that’s disruption. To let go of your nets is to let go of your image of yourself.
The kingdom is what Jesus brings, to receive it is repentance, to explore it is discipleship, and to embody it is healing. It’s good news. It is total but it is light. Notice how easy Jesus takes it. He takes his time, he campaigns patiently, he gives lots of room. How just a little is a sign and seal of a whole new world. The kingdom has already come, we don’t have to earn it or build it but receive it. You explore it by enjoying it. This is a kingdom where the law is love and the power is joy.
How did God call you? What were you doing when you heard that voice that brought you here? What did it sound like? God’s voice was hidden in some other voice, some other thought, or maybe an itch you had. Maybe a vague feeling that you needed to do something, make a small change, maybe simplify your life, or even add some complication. You thought, I need some more religion in my life, some spirituality, or some healing, or some ethical inspiration. You had your own thoughts in your head.
I’m telling you that behind your thoughts was the calling of God. I’m saying that God is in, with, and under your thoughts, though indistinguishable from your thoughts, and indiscernible to any objective examination, except your own imagination, I’m saying that God is calling you.
How do you determine which calls you answer on your phone? How do you know it is God who is calling you? You can tell, if it requires some new learning. You can tell, if it requires some repentance, some self-examination and some disruption of yourself. You can tell, if it means some liberation and some freedom. You can tell, if that freedom and liberation is directed towards healing and wholeness and reconciliation and community. God is giving you the knowledge you need to choose among your disruptions. God gives you the light to make your way through the darkness. God gives you companions to walk along with you to help you and affirm you and challenge you and listen along with you. You can tell, if the best single word summary for what is itching you is Love.
Isaiah 49:1-7, Psalm 40:1-12, I Corinthians 1:1-9, John 1:29-42
The New Testament offers us four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Scholars debate which one came first, but I take the traditional view that Matthew was written first, and John last, and John was written with the assumption that you already knew Matthew but also that there was more to say. St. John’s Gospel is full of dialogues and long soliloquies. I compare it to Shakespeare’s historical plays, like Richard III or Henry V. Shakespeare assumes your prior knowledge of the story, and his drama unfolds its meanings. Just so St. John does not depict the baptism of Jesus, which you already know from Matthew, but rather assumes it and unfolds it in the dialogue of his characters.
Let’s stage it in our imaginations. It’s the day after the baptism, and stage left stands John the Baptist, upstage center is a small crowd, and stage right enters Jesus. John points to him, and says to the crowd, “Behold the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. This is he before whose coming I had been speaking of.” Then John turns towards us, the audience, and he breaks the fourth wall, and testifies to us: “I had not known him, but when I baptized him I saw the Spirit descending like a dove upon him, by which I knew he is the Son of God.” The scene ends, they all exit.
Next scene, the next morning. Stage left, enters John, with two disciples, Andrew and Philip. Stage right, enters Jesus. John points. “Behold the lamb of God.” Exit John the Baptist, and his disciples cross the stage to Jesus. Jesus turns to them, and he says his very first lines in John’s Gospel: “What are you looking for?” They say, “Rabbi, where are you abiding?” (The word “abiding” is an important word all through the Gospel of John.) Jesus says, “Come and see.” Jesus turns up stage, they follow him, and on a carpet there he sits down, and they do too, and they talk. The lighting changes, it’s late afternoon, Jesus is still there, but with Philip only. Stage right are Andrew and his brother, and Andrew says to him, “We have found the Messiah.” He leads his brother over to Jesus, but Jesus speaks first: “You are Simon, son of John. You are to be called Cephas.” That’s our little drama for today. Let me unfold it by asking questions. How did Jesus know Simon’s name? Was it super-power or ordinary recognition? Why did he give him that nickname? Cephas means Peter, and they both mean Rocky. Did “Rocky” suggest what it does now? Was it a compliment? Did Simon have a reputation? Or was Jesus being prophetic? “Who does Jesus think he is to tell me who I really am? I prefer to define myself. Or does my baptism tell me who I am?”
What did they talk about that afternoon? The Romans? Taxes? Fishing? The Kingdom of God? Or, “Why did John call you the lamb of God, and how do you plan to take away the sin of the world?”
“O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world.” “Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi.” It’s now a part of the Christian liturgy, and John the Baptist said it first, and how did he come up with it? Since when was the Messiah supposed to be a lamb? He was supposed to be the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. A lamb is meek and mild and not too bright, but good eating, and fit for sacrifice. Was it because his metaphor of the lamb unfolds the meaning of the dove that John the Baptist had seen come down? In the Torah, a dove is the poor person’s substitute for a lamb, and the lamb was sacrificed to take away the sin of Israel. Of Israel. Not the world. Why did John the Baptist say, “the sin of the world?” when the Messiah was for Israel? This new combination of Biblical metaphors and expectations would give Andrew and Philip and Jesus lots to talk about that afternoon. When Jesus said his very first words to Andrew and Phillip, What are you looking for, why didn’t they tell him? Why didn’t they say, “We’re looking for the Messiah?” Why did they redirect his question, to ask him where he was staying? And, if they thought he could be the Messiah, why did they call him Rabbi? Since when did any prophet say that the Messiah would be a rabbi? Were they holding back and curbing their enthusiasm? Did they fear that some political informer might report them to Herod? Or where they just being smart, not showing their cards too quickly?
When somebody asks you directly, What are you looking for, do you take it as an invitation or a challenge? “Why should I tell you? Who are you that I should tell you?” Or maybe: “I don’t know, I wish I knew.” You who came here today, what are you looking for? Do you have to know, or can you be uncertain, open: “Tell me what I am looking for!” Is that what baptism is, the absolute gift that tells you what you’re looking for? The absolute welcome that’s also a challenge? The absolute gift of belonging that also keeps you looking? We give it to children as an absolute gift of God and work of God that for our whole lives long is both a challenge and an invitation, What are you looking for? When you ask this of yourself and testify, and you listen to others asking the same and testifying too, and you even look together, then you have the Christian community, the fellowship of Jesus.
St. John unfolds the fellowship of Jesus. Is that what we’re supposed to have? In the last verse of our reading from First Corinthians St. Paul says that you have that fellowship. But how can you have the fellowship of someone who is so distant from you in time and space? You know of him from history, and from the language of the church, you pray to him and sing to him, and you accept at the center of your religion this strange combination of a human being and God, but he is distant, and how shall you have fellowship with him?
It can’t be like it was for Andrew and Philip. The Lord Jesus is not going to be your best friend. So do not think, “What’s wrong with me that I don’t feel Jesus close to me like that?” There is nothing wrong with your Christian experience if you do not feel like you have Jesus up close or in your heart. He came to do a job, in his Incarnation, and he did it. He came to teach and to reveal and in his sacrifice to take away the sin of the world, and he did it, and his job was not to stay on to be your special friend and junior God. But there are two ways you do have fellowship with him: as absolutely human and as absolutely God.
First, in terms of his being absolutely human, you have your friendly fellowship with him by means of your fellowship in the Christian communion. When you all sit down together, and talk about what you’re looking for, and listen to each other, you are having your appropriate personal fellowship with Jesus. He is among you not as a separate character but in the body of your community itself. The Holy Spirit makes him present in, with, and under your very human interaction and conversation with each other, and also as you serve the needy and the poor.
I am inviting you to believe that when, in fellowship with each other, you discuss these stories about him and his miracles and metaphors of doves and lambs and water into wine he is among you, and that even though you cannot actually distinguish him from your own experience, you can believe that he is with you by means of the community to strengthen and enrich you in every way.
You also have fellowship with Jesus as he is absolutely God, when you relate to him as God, the One God. Jesus as God is not other to you than the whole God, the very God of very God. When St. Paul says that you call on the name of Jesus Christ, he means that when you name Jesus Christ as the center of your faith, that Jesus does his job and makes himself the medium, the means, and the way for you to have that fellowship with God that is appropriate to the Almighty and Eternal God. The form of your fellowship with God is worship, praise, and love. You love God not as some friend, but as God, who though distant to your sense experience is present to your imagination and your soul. You do not have any direct sensation of God, but I am inviting you to believe that the Holy Spirit comes into-and-under your self-enclosed experience, so that what you imagine might be true really is true, that you are having direct fellowship with this almighty and invisible God.
Isaiah 42:1-9, Psalm 29, Acts 10:34-43, Matthew 3:13-17
Did the Lord Jesus expect all this to happen to him at his baptism? It didn’t happen to anyone else. Was he surprised by the dove, and by the Voice from heaven? If he was, is that okay? What’s your picture of Jesus? How do you see him? Let’s talk about Jesus today. Pretty much just the Lord Jesus. Is that okay? Not what he taught or did but who he was. That is the point of the Sundays of the Epiphany: his coming-out, his debut, his beginnings, his introductions, his manifestations, his identity.
Of course you will want some kind of take-home, some application to your life, and I will offer you one at the end, but it won’t be very pragmatic, it will be more like enlightenment, but you want that from religion anyway–enlightenment, you want “the eyes of your hearts enlightened,” as we said last week. But my main take-home is even less pragmatic, and it’s just your picture of Jesus.
Let’s make use of one of my favorite questions. “What did he know and when did he know it?” I mean about himself. Did Jesus know that the Holy Spirit would come down upon him, right there, as a dove, or, that he would hear the Voice of his heavenly Father for the first time in his life? At this point did he even know that he was the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity? I doubt it, although I do believe he was, without him knowing it yet. I expect he knew about his virgin birth, but that did not necessarily entail that he was somehow God.
Did he know that he was the Messiah? Apparently so, already, but the Messiah expected by John the Baptist and all the rest of Israel would be a military hero and head-smasher, very unlike how the Lord Jesus was going to work it out. For that he got a signal from the dove, that the Spirit of God came down not as fire but as a dove, as both a sign of peace and the sacrificial victim of the poor. A different kind of Messiah! “A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.”
What else could he know from what happened at his baptism? That God was in him uniquely? I think so, but what that meant he had to figure out. I do think he was surprised. And confirmed. And challenged, and maybe relieved. In any case, his baptism was his new beginning. At thirty years old! His baptism was a sign for him, a sign with three signs in it: the water, the Spirit, and the Voice, and he had to read the signs in combination. These three signs combined signify beginning, new beginnings, new creations. At the first creation, in Genesis, “in the beginning,” the world was a chaos of darkness and water. Then a wind from God swept over the face of the water, the Spirit of God brooded upon the water like a bird upon her nest, and then God’s voice: “Let there be light.” There were the three signs in combination at the very beginning, the water, the Spirit, and the Voice.
We get the three signs again in the story of Noah and the Flood. The water covered the earth and washed away the sin of humanity. Then God blew a wind to dry the water off, and Noah sent out a raven and then a dove to fly above the water to and fro, and then the dove came back with an olive leaf, for peace and reconciliation. And God spoke to Noah and promised the renewal of the creation and a new beginning of the world. Three signs again: the water, the dove, and the Voice.
At Jesus’ baptism the only sign that anyone expected was the water, the water for the washing of repentance. Back then it was at streams and rivers that people did their washing. The water supply of Jerusalem was notoriously poor, but in the River Jordan you could wash the whole nation symbolically. Plus, that was where Joshua had led the Children of Israel across the Jordan into the Promised Land, and Joshua was the namesake of Jesus, that is, Yeshua. So John the Baptist was cleansing the nation to get them ready for the second Joshua to come, the second David, the Messiah, who would restore the nation to its proper purity. And that meant no Romans, and maybe no Gentiles at all, and certainly no tainted Jews. So the Spirit of God that John the Baptist expected with the Messiah was the Spirit of fire and purification and the burning of God’s wrath and judgment. And here comes the new Joshua, to be baptized. No wonder John wants to be baptized by him. Besides that, what has Jesus got to repent of? The Messiah should be righteous right off. But Jesus seems to sense that it’s not our righteousness, but the righteousness of God that is expanding with new generosity, and to fulfill that he needs to be one with us, fully one of us, God-with-us, God making us acceptable by fully accepting our human condition in all of our sins and weaknesses.
He had to work it out. In his humanity. And he was a great mind, a great thinker. He did not have the education of St. Paul, he hadn’t read philosophy, but he knew his Torah and the Prophets, much of it by heart, and he was a sharp interpreter of the human condition and a gifted teacher with a knack for metaphor. He wrote nothing down, but neither did Socrates. It was Socrates’ disciple Plato who did the writing, just as Our Lord’s disciples did the writing, and St. Paul. St. Paul was a great mind, but the Lord Jesus was the one who had to work it out and create a whole world.
But even Jesus needed enlightenment, which he got it at his baptism, and now he knew for sure, more than before, about himself, and he understood better his first thirty years. The signs confirmed him and inspired him and set him free and got him going. Of course, the signs added new problems to his life. Just as with his father Joseph, they didn’t make things any easier, in fact, quite dangerous, but through the next three years of his life, with all the highs and lows, and the increasing opposition, he could remember his baptism, and the dove, and the Voice that said, “This is my Son, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.” That’s what he needed to know, and this was when he knew it.
What do you need to know and when do you need to know it? I did not know that I was called to the parish ministry until after I couldn’t get out of it. My colleague James Brumm says that God doesn’t tell you all that you’re in for until it’s too late; even Jesus only realized the full magnitude of what he let himself in for, and said “take this cup from me,” when it was already too late, and he knew it. You too accept God’s call on your life based as much upon what you don’t know as what you do, because if you knew it you’d run for the hills. What you do need to know is that your life has meaning, and purpose, that your life is not a waste, and you need to know that now.
What can you know about your life by looking back? What other people tell you. When someone tells you something about your past that surprises you, you suddenly feel enlightened, for better or worse. What you know can save your past and present life and set you free. It’s never too late to be surprised. It may set you free and get you going despite what you cannot know about the future.
You need to know that people love you, particularly some people in your life. Once my therapist told me that all my life I’d been waiting for my father to tell me that I was his beloved son and that he was pleased with me. Eventually my dad did, indirectly, but I have friends whose fathers never told them at all. And for me, it’s not the approval of God I doubt as much as the approval of you. I confess that when I give a sermon, I’m more concerned about what you think of it than what God thinks of it. I’m more secure with God than with you. Or maybe if I were truly secure with God I wouldn’t care so much about your approval. Maybe I need to know better that I am God’s beloved.
If you want to have some religion in your life you need to know that you are God’s beloved. The way you know this is by enlightenment, and your enlightenment is your baptism. That’s an ancient Christian take on baptism, not typically Protestant. It means that when you look out at the world as one who has been baptized, and claimed by God, from that stance looking out you get more light into your heart, and the Holy Spirit inside you energizes your receptors to register that light as God’s love and to hear it as God’s voice, telling you that God is well-pleased with you, right now. For a life with God, for contending with good and evil in the world, you need to hear that every day. Every day is a new beginning of knowing that, because you have changed a bit since yesterday. You need to know that you are God’s beloved for charting your choices for the days ahead, and also for accepting and understanding your life in the past, who you have been and what you have done that you cannot undo. You have been baptized. Your whole life behind you can love again, and who you are today you can love, because you are God’s beloved.
Jeremiah 31:7-14, Psalm 84, Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a, Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23 Two Sundays ago I preached about Joseph, and his first dream, when the angel told him that Mary’s baby was from the Holy Spirit, so he should marry her and accept her baby and call him Jesus. I said that his dream did not make things any easier, even more difficult, yet Joseph decided to believe his dream and act on it. As he has to do with his second, third, and fourth dreams in our lesson today. His second dream gets the Holy Family down to Egypt. It is not coincidental that Joseph shares his name with the original Joseph in Genesis, he of the coat-of-many-colors, whose dreams got him sent down to Egypt. The third dream of Joseph brings them back, and his fourth dream gets them to Nazareth in Galilee. How did Mary like it when Joseph woke her up and said, “I had a dream.”
And little Jesus gets bundled about from place to place. Not in a car-seat, but in a sling or a papoose or a basket. Like Moses in the basket, also in Egypt, also rescued from the raging of a king and the slaughter of baby boys. Moses was in the care of Miriam, and the name “Mary” is a later form of “Miriam”. To Matthew it’s not coincidental, it’s all fulfillment. Miriam for Mary, Joseph for Joseph, Pharaoh for King Herod, and Moses the Prince of Egypt for Jesus the Prince of Israel. “Out of Egypt have I called my son.” The long history of Israel begins its fulfillment in this Jesus boy. The word “fulfillment” means several things. The first is that the Old Testament story is so true that it keeps coming true again. The story is paradigmatic and typical. By the word “typical” I mean both senses, that while human behaviors are not inevitable they are so typical that you can expect them, and also that individual characters are “types” within the paradigmatic stories. Jesus is a type of Moses in the paradigmatic story of children being the innocent victims of the powerful. Both Pharaoh and Herod are the types of rulers who will sacrifice children and families to preserve their power. Can you think of any rulers in power who are doing this today? Despite their power and their greed and pride, what really drives them is their fear, and they exploit their fear.
Both Miriam and Mary have more to fear than rulers do but they are not driven by their fear and they choose for life. They are the type of women who protect their children at risk to themselves. And Joseph is a type of Joseph in how God worked salvation in the world through him by his reading the signs and making hard choices and investing his life in the right thing, regardless of his interest. As Mary also had to do. It’s an old story that gets fulfilled in new ways because it’s a true story.
The second meaning of fulfillment is that the names and details in the story reach behind the story. The particulars are the icons and the links to the great and comprehensive story behind it that is poking through it. The names are hyperlinks to connect you to the other stories within the greater scheme. St. Matthew invites you to the larger story behind the details of Joseph and Joseph, of Miriam and Mary, of Pharaoh and Herod, and of Moses and Jesus. St. Matthew is also inviting you to believe that while the individual characters are free to act as they see fit, and that nothing is inevitable, yet there is a long-range plan of God at work, a grand strategy, that is fully able to gather up our particular momentary choices into God’s design. I invite you to believe that, just as Joseph had to believe his dreams. Sometimes you believe it because what else is there to believe in?
How much did Joseph know, and when did he know it? Faith is always a projection. Faith at its best is a vision, and at its worst a fantasy, and how do you know the difference? How many nights during the childhood of Jesus did Joseph lie awake, wondering and worrying what he should do next? How many nightmares did he have, and how did he know which of his dreams to believe? I figure he must have thought about those stories from the Torah of Moses and Pharaoh and Miriam and his own namesake. Joseph must have seen those stories as paradigms for him. And you too have to see your own life in your own way as a fulfillment of the scriptures.
The greater story is true again in you, and if you believe that, and compare your own particulars to the paradigmatic stories of God’s design, you can be ready to do the right thing when you see the danger ahead. I’m thinking about that church shooting in Texas last Sunday where the murderer was killed by parishioners bearing arms. This is being celebrated, which I cannot do, although it’s not for me to judge them. There are Christians today who would have to tell Joseph and the other fathers of Bethlehem to arm themselves to protect their families. Not with guns but knives. Should the Jews at the Hanukkah party in Monsey last week have been prepared with their own knives, considering the rise in anti-Semitism? These two events are both horrible and horribly typical. Should we see them as paradigmatic? As Christians we are not supposed to see them as inevitable, lest we too resort to violence as our response to violence. Joseph and Mary should not arm themselves.
How do you know the right thing to do? We don’t depend on dreams, nor on our natural intellect, but, according to St. Paul in Ephesians, we depend on “a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may come to know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe.” That’s how. You determine your choice for the right thing by your hope, not by your fear, and not by your past experience but by your future inheritance among the saints, and not by your own power but by the immeasurable greatness of his power. The risk is that’s a fantasy, a foolish dream, but it is the vision to which God is calling you, the vision that takes your faith, and directs your choices and your responses to the dangers ahead of you.
To see your way you need enlightenment from the Spirit of wisdom and revelation. You need the eyes of your hearts enlightened. Now that’s a strange metaphor. Hearts with eyes. It’s because your heart is at your center, between your head and your guts. Your heart is where you combine your mind and your feelings into your convictions, where you merge your thoughts and your desires into purposes. Your heart is the home of your will and of your wanting. Your love comes from your heart because your love is the combination of your thoughts and your emotions into your willful purposes. The Holy Spirit opens and illuminates the eyes of your hearts. Not what you look at, but what you look for. Not your observations but your investments, what you desire, what you want. It’s from your heart and within your love that you will discern what is the immeasurable greatness of his power to you who believe.
It’s why King Herod could not see the power of the baby. Nor Pharaoh. They were strong rulers, both of them, but they operated out of fear, not love. It is why Miriam and Mary could both operate so fearlessly in caring for Moses and Jesus.
It’s why Papa Joseph could keep on moving through the world and trusting his direction, despite his being on the run from fear of death and persecution, because he was navigating from his heart. His heart told him more than he could think and understand, his heart told him more than he could feel, and what it told him was that there was something immeasurably great behind the small and risky choices he was making.
That’s the right move coming out of Christmas. That’s the Incarnation’s proper follow-through. You must see your own small life and your own small choices as another particular fulfillment of this great story. Which means that you too must address this world and all its agony in love. Yes, please do think about it with intelligence and sober analysis and critique, and yes, do fully feel it, from pleasure to anger and from happiness to grief, but then only from the choices of love do you make your way into the world, or else the world will be cruel and bitter, no matter how much power you have. But you have been enlightened. It’s to your eyes of love that the great riches of your glorious inheritance begin to show themselves, and the immeasurable greatness of his power is for the greatness of your hearts and for the power of your love. What you are fulfilling in your personal particulars is the never-ending story of God’s 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.
