tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-334406332024-03-07T03:53:25.456-05:00Old FirstThe blog of Reverend Doctor Daniel Meeter of Old First Reformed Church, 729 Carroll Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215, (718)638-8300Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.comBlogger511125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-63642147211567992442020-06-25T12:55:00.001-04:002020-06-28T18:25:49.310-04:00June 28, Proper 8: The Binding of Isaac<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Genesis 22:1-14, Psalm 13, Matthew 10:40-42</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">I love the story of the Binding of Isaac, and I was happy that it showed up in the lectionary for my last Sunday with you. It’s one of the great stories in all religious literature. In its artful simplicity it captures the greatest issues of the human experience of God.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">But on Tuesday Melody told me she hates the story. She said not because the human experience is not true, for we often sacrifice our children, like when we go to war, and we claim God’s blessing. But it’s rather how capricious God is, like God plays with us. And there’s no getting around that part of it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>“God tested Abraham.”</i> Why? Why should God do that? Why the set-up—why did God play this trick on him, deceiving him? Does God test us this way? We know we are being tested all the time, by life, and we pray “lead us not into temptation,” but should we believe that God tests us like this?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">God said, <i>“Abraham,”</i> and he said, <i>“Here I am.”</i> In Hebrew, <i>Avraham</i>, and <i>Hinneini</i>. A first time. And then, “I want you to sacrifice and roast your son on a mountain I will show you.” Well, not “roast,” but that would be the result. The gods of Abraham’s neighbors, the Canaanites, required them to roast their children in sacrifice. And all the gods and goddesses of the empires were capricious, and tricked and played with human beings like toys, but wasn’t this God supposed to be different?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">Early in the morning, like Hagar had had to, Abraham sets out with Isaac and the servants. Again he does the servants’ work, and saddles the donkey and cuts the firewood. He heads north, 43 miles. What was he thinking those three days? The story keeps silence, but here’s a hint: <i>“On the third day he looked up and saw the place far off.”</i> Yes, “he looked up and saw,” a first time. What did he see? Just the place?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">What God had been seeing all along. I think, because when he tells the servants to stay there and wait, he says, <i>“we will return to you”</i>—not “I” but “we.” Maybe he is tricking them in turn, but I think he has seen something, with maybe prophetic vision. After all, in a previous story he was called a prophet (with Abimelech).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">He loads the firewood on Isaac’s back and carries the knife and fire himself. <i>“So the two of them walked on together.”</i> A picture of quiet affection. Isaac says, <i>“Poppa,”</i> and he says, <i>“Here I am, my son.”</i> In Hebrew, <i>“Avi,”</i> and, <i>“Hinneini b’ni,”</i> an echo of God with Abraham, but affectionate. And then the tragic question: Where is the lamb? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> And the answer, <i>“God will see to it, my son.” </i>The verb is the verb “to see” (ראה)</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> again, but in a conjugation that means “provide”. God will see to it. So yes, I think Abraham has seen something—not all that God sees, but enough of what God sees for Abraham to come to his resolution. His answer to Isaac is the hinge of the story, that <i>“God will see to it.”</i> And <i>“the two of them walked on together,”</i> a second time; that intimate affection.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif; font-size: large;">Then he dutifully carries out his part in the drama, and he’s not just acting, so a part of him must be raging inside that God will not provide, and he’ll have to kill his son, and this God really is no different than the other gods. Do you see what I see going on? This testing of Abraham is now Abraham testing God. Yes, Abraham is testing God, and how wonderful of the Torah to bring us here. This is the climax of the whole life of Abraham, everything else has led up to this.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">And God says, <i>“Avraham, Avraham,”</i> and a third time he answers, <i>“Hinneini,”</i> “Here I am.” God says, “Don’t lay your hand on the boy, for now <i>I see</i> that you fear God.” That verb “to see” again, but this time in the sense of “to recognize” or “to know,” like, I see! But didn’t God already know? Doesn’t God know everything, doesn’t God see the future before it happens? The story doesn’t answer that, and we who fear God have to work it out. You can’t work it out unless you also say, “Hinneini, here I am,” and put yourself into the presence of this God, this sometimes troubling God.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Then Abraham <i>“looked up and saw.”</i> A second time he sees what God saw, the ram in the bushes, and that is what he sacrifices. But it's a bit anticlimactic. The tension’s already been resolved, and now it’s reconciliation. Which of course is the whole purpose of the substitutionary sacrifice, an atonement, a reconciliation, and right here is the root of the difficult doctrine of the Substitutionary Atonement, which is another thing that takes a lot to work out, and also requires, “Here I am.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif; font-size: large;">So Abraham names that place, <i>“the Lord will see to it.”</i> Again the verb “to see,” and again with the meaning of “provide”. Do you hear in the words “provide” and “provision” the roots of “video” and “vision”? This story is all about vision, and Abraham has seen what God sees, at least enough of what God sees. He passed the test of seeing that God will see to it, of seeing the vision that God provides. And so to this day, says the story, it is said of that place, “On the mount of the Lord is<i> vision</i>.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">Both God and Abraham have passed the test. Abraham is proven by the test as fearing God, and the idea that fearing God is something positive is one more thing you can work out only if you start from “Here I am.” And Abraham’s been proven faithful, just as God has been proven faithful, and not capricious, even if the times of trial of our lives might tempt us to think otherwise.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">I invite you to believe this even with our troubling questions: Is God always faithful? Why doesn’t God always provide? Why does God expect our sacrifice? Is God ever cruel? Does God ever trick us? Does God have the right to ask whatever God wants of us? Does God still test us? You can wrestle with such questions whenever you say, Here I am.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">So now I have three messages for you, my three last messages for Old First. The first is that you will be tested, you will be tested as a congregation in the times ahead. I don’t say that you will be tested by God directly, as in the story, because God does not test us that way, at least not since after the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. But God does test you indirectly, by the interaction of what God has given you to believe against the circumstances that you face. How you apply what you believe to the circumstances that come at you is your testing. And because your belief is your vision of God’s promises, you will have to test God as well. If you answer “here we are” whenever God speaks to you, you will be testing God as much as God is testing you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">But in your testing God will provide, and that’s my second message for Old First, that God will see to it. And in order for you to see what God sees you have to look up. Look up and see how God has provided for you already. In the circumstances that come at you there will be much that you can’t see, but you can look up and see some of what God sees. You can be prophetic as a people, a congregation. The vision has been given to you by the Gospel of Christ, and your power of sight by the Holy Spirit. <i>But you have to look up!</i> And whenever you remember and believe that God will see to it, you will pass the test.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">Before I get to my final message I need to mention the subsequent interpretations of our story. The Jewish sages have seen in Isaac the whole identity of their people, who are bound to the covenant as both a privilege and a burden, a people living out their whole long history with all the risk of God. Christians have seen in Isaac a type of Christ, with God the Father being both God and Abraham, and the ram is Jesus too, whose substitutionary sacrifice frees us from our own being bound.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">That interpretation is why this story shows up on Christmas Eve, in our liturgy, as the second lesson. For fifteen years we’ve been having that second lesson chanted in Hebrew by someone from Congregation Beth Elohim, some of whom are here with us today. One year Rabbi Andy Bachman said to me, “What is it with you guys and sacrifice?” Even on Christmas Eve!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">If you attend that service, maybe you noticed that what’s chanted there was not in the First Lesson that we read today. The lectionary has left out the last three verses of the story, the verses that are the last words of God to Abraham in Genesis. I’m not going to read them now, or quote them, but I will paraphrase them now, as my very last message to you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia, times new roman, serif; font-size: large;">In the name of the Lord Jesus, because of how you, Old First, have so welcomed me and my family, and have welcomed me as a prophet, and you have not withheld your souls from me-- your souls that you love--that in God’s blessing you I bless you, that God multiply your seeds that you sow as the stars of the heaven, and God prosper the works you do as the sand upon the sea shore, that the works you do bear fruit beyond your gates, and in your works and your witness, Old First, shall the all the people be blessed by you, because you have obeyed God’s voice. You precious people of Old First, I bless you from my soul, and from my heart I love you as you have loved me.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved. </i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-43819139695925542992020-06-19T07:50:00.000-04:002020-06-19T15:41:44.337-04:00June 21, Proper 7: The Weeping of Hagar<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Genesis 21:8-21, Psalm 86:1-10, 16-17, Romans 6:1-11, Matthew 10:24-39</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Is Hagar a character from <i>The Handmaid’s Tale</i>? Hagar was a slave who had been made use of to bear a son for Abraham, because Sarah could not. Hagar had had no say in the matter. And now fifteen years later, when Sarah gives birth to a boy of her own, as we saw last week, Hagar’s boy is inconvenient, and gets disinherited, which Abraham has the right to do.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Abraham has all the rights here, including the right to free his slaves, which he does to Hagar, but her freedom does not give her any rights. Her freedom is dangerous to her. Every woman has to be under the protection of some man. Every village will be dangerous for Hagar and her boy, so she takes her chances in the desert.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Abraham does Hagar no favor by setting her free. And the story depicts him as shameful, for all his distress over his son, his only son for fifteen years. He sends them out before dawn, by himself, surreptitiously, and he packs their provisions, which is a servant’s job, and he does it on the cheap, with just some bread and water, after the lavish feast to honor little Isaac. He puts the skin of water on her shoulder, that once he had embraced in something like love. She has to yield to him one more time. This is how he treats the mother of his firstborn son—dishonorably and shamefully.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">How can good people treat other people so poorly? Well, the system allowed it and everyone accepted it. The system allowed good people to treat certain other kinds of people poorly with impunity. Back then it wasn’t skin color, but economic class, the haves and the have-nots, and Hagar was allowed no economic power of her own, nor any social power. And now she is getting punished for having obeyed her mistress by yielding her body to her master. As long as she was a slave her life had value, but now that she has her freedom, to Abraham her life and her son’s life do not matter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We are troubled by God’s complicity. God tells Abraham to do what Sarah said. True, God was not complicit in their having used Hagar to begin with, which they had done because they doubted God. True, God promises Abraham that Hagar and her son will survive and someday flourish, but imagine him telling her that as he casts her out in the dark. True, God rescues them, but we are troubled by God letting them suffer first. True, God answers their cry, but not hers, only the boy’s.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The story ends well enough for all, but let’s not skip over her wailing and weeping. It’s crucial to the story, as the opposite of Sarah’s laughing. And what so angered Sarah was to see her slave’s son laughing too; in grammatical terms, his jesting is an intensification of her laughing. But a day later his mother is wailing and weeping, with him under a bush, a bowshot away, lifting her voice in fear and grief and anger. “I just did what they made me do, and all is lost, and my child will die.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">It’s wonderful to me that the Book of Genesis is not afraid to show us the underside of God’s great plan. Yes, there is the official story of the great covenantal history developing from Abraham to Israel, the providence and promises of God to these patriarchs who live by faith and walk with God. But the Bible also shows us the underside, like in the misery of Hagar that resulted from the joy of Sarah.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I wonder if it’s also suggesting the weeping that Abraham should have been doing for his firstborn son. And is it also the weeping that Abraham should be doing in our story next Sunday when he’ll be asked to sacrifice Isaac, but shows no visible emotion? Or, maybe—why not sacrifice Isaac, since he’s already given up his firstborn son and exposed him to death in the desert!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In these Genesis stories, the lives of the children are so close to death. And the fear of that is always lurking in the back of every parent’s mind. We make our kids wear helmets just to ride their scooters. I’m not big on helmets, but when I was caring for my granddaughter I used to have these terrible images of us crossing the street and her getting hit by a car, before my eyes. Do those kinds of things come into your brain? And I’d imagine myself screaming at the driver and doing whatever damage I could manage to punish him, even though it would do no good for my granddaughter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">So I can well imagine the violence and destruction in the demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd. I think it’s partly about children. It’s not just that store windows are symbols of an economic system that serves others well but treats us poorly, it’s also fear and anger for the future of our children, and, watching from a bowshot, we know they could die, simply by exclusion from the benefits of the system, good people or no. I can imagine our lashing out, doing what damage we can manage, with the only power available to us, even if it does no good.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Every great story has an underside, and the story of America is no exception. We who treasure our great stories prefer to keep the underside covered. But to honor the world-significant greatness of America is also to expose and bewail its cruel and shameful underside, for <i>“nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known.”</i> I thank God that the Bible story shows us its own underside, and it invites us to weep for it and for our part in it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But she persisted! Go Hagar. She made honor out of their dishonor. Abraham acted shamefully, but her son will have reasons to be proud of her. She reveals her strength and determination. She determines to keep her freedom. She does not submit to some other man to be their protection. She determines freedom for her son, and that he be expert with the bow, which frees him from the culture of his rejecting father. She gets him a wife from Egypt, which frees him from obligation to some local chieftain. This woman is mother <i>and </i>father to her son. She’s a fugitive slave with nothing but her own determination, and then God’s blessing. So thank you, O God, for the story of Hagar.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I am not discrediting the official story of Abraham. I am not disavowing the sovereign choice of God to draw the line of the covenant through Sarah and Isaac and not through Hagar and Ishmael. But even the Lord Jesus in our Gospel exposes salvation’s underside. <i>To find your life, you must lose it.</i> If you <i>follow him</i>, you can expect resistance and even suffering. If you stand for peace, you will face the <i>sword</i>. If you follow him, your foes will be from <i>your own family</i>. To follow him, you must <i>take up your cross</i>, and in the Roman Empire, that means to take on the punishment of a slave condemned to die. Not unlike Hagar and her son being cast out by Abraham.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Abraham walked with God and lived by his faith. And yet his old and shameful self lived on him, to use the language of St. Paul in our second lesson. We all of us have our own undersides, we who are baptized into God’s people and the communion of saints. We have our <i>body of sin</i> that we must daily put to death, the sin to which we are enslaved. And to carry your cross is to expose this and bewail ourselves and grieve our fallen natures that live on in us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But you are also invited to not live there, down in your underside. From your enslavement you are called to freedom, albeit a freedom that the Lord Jesus has told you can be dangerous. Yet he calls you to <i>not be afraid</i>, because you <i>share in his resurrection</i>, which means you are living already in your future, already beyond your death. And you are able to walk in your <i>newness of life</i>, when you walk by faith, as we will see Abraham do next week.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And in your freedom from servitude you are called to a freedom for service, to weep with those who weep, to bear their anger, to lift up their voices in your voice. <i>Shout from the rooftops what you hear whispered</i>—whatever grievous whispers from the underside’s experience—lift up your voice and proclaim it. Because the final salvation is <i>for </i>the underside, that it be brought into the light.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I love it that the Torah gives us Hagar, and I love it that the Bible is so written that it lets you be her voice. In your remembering her you give voice to her fear and grief and anger, and also to her final vindication as the mother of her own nation. I love it that the story speaks to our own situation, that light from Hagar shines upon America today.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And I don’t mind how troubling God can be to our own sensibilities, because if God is worthy of being God, then God should trouble us. God is free from us, and sovereign, and not accountable to us. But yet it is God who inspired this story, with Hagar’s inclusion, and in that I read the inspirer’s ultimate morality, for the story itself loves Hagar and her son. In our very reading and repeating this story is the expression of the love of God for her, and her son, and in your remembering them, God’s love for you as well.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved. </i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-7631945019796344852020-06-12T07:43:00.000-04:002020-06-12T07:43:11.729-04:00June 14, Proper 6: The Laughing of Sarah<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7, Psalm 116:1, 10-17, Romans 5:1-8, Matthew 9:35-10:23</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I have three more sermons to give you. My gift is not topical sermons on the issues of the day. My gift is these ancient Bible stories that have formed God’s people for 3000 years. But I don’t pick the stories. I accept whatever stories the ecumenical Lectionary has chosen for all the churches. That means I have to wrestle with them too, on your behalf, and I believe that is my gift to you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Our three next stories are about Sarah, Abraham’s wife, and then Hagar, their slave, and then Isaac, their son. The Laughing of Sarah, the Crying of Hagar, and the Binding of Isaac.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The two constant characters are God and Abraham. God is treated as a character who acts in ways we might not like. Abraham varies. In the final story, he is tragic. In the middle story, he is shameful. Today Abraham is comical, with his rushing about and his exaggerated hospitality, even though he offers his guest <i>“a little bread.”</i> How much can three men eat? Eight pounds of flour makes how many hotcakes, and how long will that take Sarah? The three men have to wait and wait for their little bit of bread while the calf is selected and slaughtered and dressed and seasoned and roasted.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">When does Abraham figure out that this is the Lord, and how can three persons be God? They play with him a little, and there’s the back-and-forth with Sarah in the tent. But even though it’s she who laughs, she isn’t comic. She hears what God predicts as a cruel joke, and her laughter inside the tent is bitter–we call it sardonic laughter. And yet she’s ashamed, so she denies that she laughed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">She carries shame. Her childlessness is blamed on her, as Abraham had been able to impregnate his slave-girl. What use to having been beautiful. When she was younger and Pharaoh saw her, he took her from Abraham, but God made him give her back. Over the years of her disappointment, when Abraham told her that God had promised them many descendants, did she laugh at him?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">My two grandmothers both carried shame, sexual shame, body shame, for what they were innocent of. They lived in the Dutch immigrant community of North Jersey, which was very religious and very judgmental, which they both had to endure.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">My mom’s mother, my Grandma Hartog, had that inside laugh. She could be sardonic. She was smart and funny and a cut-up. She was a devout believer but she rarely went to church, and that was from her shame. Her husband, my Grandpa, was an adulterer. For forty years he had a girlfriend, a married woman, and people knew. I’m sure the good people of this conservative community suspected that it must be partly my grandma’s fault.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">She had been attractive in her youth. Back in the Netherlands, at the age of fifteen, she was sent out as a housemaid for a pastor, and in just months she was sent back in a hush, and she never trusted ministers again. If that story came up, her eyes froze and her face hardened. But she told us many other stories and sang songs and cooked great food and entertained us and teased us and giggled with us, and our Christmas presents she always made by hand. My mom says Grandma would take the bus downtown, study a dress in the store window, and then make the dress without a pattern.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Just before I was born my grandpa left my grandma to move in with his girlfriend, which didn’t work out, so he moved in with us. He repented and my grandma somewhat reluctantly took him back. But in his last year she cared for him like a professional nurse, even at the hospital. She could do anything. I adored my Grandma Hartog. But her laughter was always an inside laugh.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">My dad’s mother, my Grandma Meeter, carried double shame. The first was my grandfather’s disability. He was crippled, and so he was never put up for deacon or elder. He didn’t marry till he was 37, and then to my Grandma, who was not a prize, as she was illegitimate, born out-of-wedlock. That was her deeper shame, a sexual sin of which she was innocent but yet the proof of.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">When she was three months old her mother fled with her to America, and never told who the father was. Her step-father beat her. Her mother eventually lost her mind and ended her days in a mental hospital. My Grandma Meeter was always self-conscious, and never broke the rules. She loved to go church, twice on Sunday, and was in the Ladies Aid and did good works.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">She bore her shame with dignity, and not only because she was blameless in the causes of her shame. I think it was more the depth of her faith and her love of God. I am proud of how relatively progressive she was on racial matters. She was proud of my dad as a pastor in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and she had no fear of taking the subway on her own, and she made friends in our congregation. She didn’t do handicrafts, and she didn’t tell jokes and stories, but she enjoyed them, and she had a loud and hearty laugh, with a high hoot. She had an outside laugh.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And so did Sarah, at the end, after the birth of Isaac in her old age. Her inside laugh became an outside laugh, and she invited others to laugh along with her. There is redemption in this story, even though there is misery to come. I see in these three women the cycle that St. Paul writes of in our second lesson, from <i>suffering to endurance to character to hope</i>. Of course the cycle so often runs the other way, from suffering to breaking to bitterness to despair. So what makes the difference?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Well, this passage from Romans is personal to our own Michael Cairl, and I call him as my witness, that what makes the difference is love, especially <i>the love of God that has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit</i>. It is the presence and power of love that helps you to endure your suffering, and the presence and power of love that converts your endurance into character, and from your character it’s love that generates your hope, and your hope allows you to laugh out loud, even in your suffering. I invite you to believe this. I have four witnesses: Michael, my two grandmothers, and Sarah.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In 1982 we hosted an African Dutch Reformed domine who pastored a church in Soweto. He was doing graduate study in America, and during the Soweto Riots his congregants were suffering for fighting Apartheid. It pained him terribly, but his hope did not disappoint him. He told me, “We will be free, soon, and it’s up to us when, it just depends on how many of us are willing to die for it.” The great thing about this Domine was his laughter, despite the suffering, how frequent and buoyant his laughter was. God’s love had been poured into his heart, and that love could laugh out loud.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">It’s not that suffering is good. Suffering in itself is never good. But if God’s love has given us hope that does not disappoint us, and character, and endurance, then from out of our own suffering we can voluntarily enter and endure the suffering of others. Of course I’m speaking about Black Lives Matter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">It has not been difficult for us to share the suffering of people from the coronavirus, where there is no shame, nor rage, nor years of guilt of which people may be innocent but yet the proof of. And we are right to honor our doctors and health-care workers and those who put their lives at risk. But it is proving difficult and challenging for people to share the suffering of generations of Black Lives, for whom our happy lives and our prosperity have been mostly a cruel joke.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">To share their suffering is not to preach about their need for hope, nor to encourage yet more endurance, nor judge their characters, but humbly to ask how to share their suffering on their terms. And with their words, not our own, as our consistory had to remind me of last week. It will cost us, and we don’t look forward to it. We will have to question ourselves, and start all over. We will get it wrong, and when we’re told we’re getting it wrong it will hurt, but we will endure it, and adjust our characters one more bit, and whatever hope we hold out is for ourselves, if we believe God’s love.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In sharing this suffering, even if you cry—and you must cry—you are not to have a long face nor act as if you’re a martyr or in pain, for we’ve only just begun to feel the pain. You are rather to keep joyful and keep on laughing. That’s how I interpret what Paul says about <i>“boasting in our suffering”</i>—laughing within it. Not sardonically, not derisively, and not self-righteously, because the joke’s on us, but with relief. The joke is our obstinate foolishness and the laughter is of judgment recognized. The joke is the riddle of God’s undeserved grace and the laughter is the joy of God’s love.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved. </i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-32335232195377193042020-05-28T14:26:00.002-04:002020-05-28T14:26:41.688-04:00May 31, Pentecost. The Signs and Wonders of the Holy Spirit<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Acts 2:1-21, Psalm 104:25-35, 37, 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13, John 20:19-23</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">A couple years ago I told you that before I could retire, I had to do three things. I had to lead you back into the sanctuary, I had to help you get used to the sanctuary, and we had to bring the public back into the sanctuary. Which all we did. But then a virus came. And now you’re going to have to do all three all over again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">So it’s like my legacy is cancelled—that is, if you’re one of those who have said that the return to the sanctuary is my legacy. But I don’t think it ever was my legacy. It’s the legacy of Jenn Cribbs and her team. She and they deserve the credit, not me. And even now their work is not in vain. You will get back in there, and the public too, I have no doubt, in less than seven years!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I admit that it’s premature to be speaking about my legacy, and I had not dared to think about it, until a consistory member brought it up this week. We were having coffee, six feet apart, my first live meet-up with a consistory member, in the flesh, since Lent. Remember Lent? She told me that my legacy was not the sanctuary, but something else. She said that what I gave you was “a vision of the kingdom of heaven.” Well, I was gratified. And I do think Jenn Cribbs would agree that the sanctuary is an expression of that vision, if you use it that way, which you will do.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I want you to see the kingdom of heaven as something big and over-arching and spacious and welcoming, and all the way down to the ground. I want you to see it as rich and colorful and vibrant and vital, right now, not just for when you die, but for now so that you can engage it and rejoice in it. And I want you also to see it as tiny and fragile and vulnerable and hidden and patient and generous.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I want you to see it as embracing you but not controlled by you, and enriching you but also beyond you. I want you to see it as both dependable and constantly surprising—because it is of God. I want you see it for the sake of God. The kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of God, the realm of God, the reign of God, the rule of God, the dominion of God, the sovereignty of God. It’s about a sovereign God and it’s for the glory of God.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But it’s also for you, and for your salvation and your flourishing. It was for you that God did all these things in history that we’ve been celebrating since Lent, from the Passion to Pentecost. The death of the Lord Jesus and his resurrection—he did that for you. His ascension in his body and his gift of the Holy Spirit—he did that for you. The Kingdom of Heaven does not belong to you but it is <i>for </i>you. We don’t build it, it is not ours to build, its builder and maker is God, but you receive it because God gives it to you. The Kingdom of Heaven belongs to God but it is for your flourishing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And that’s partly why a human being is in charge it. Last Sunday when I preached about the Ascension, I said that it was hard to believe that an embodied human being, an earthling, should now be seated in heaven at God’s right hand. Well, it gets further complicated today, at Pentecost, when that earthling is in charge of pouring down the Spirit of God, God’s inner self. And that’s what the Holy Spirit is—not just a third of God but God’s inner self, God’s very soul. And poured out by an earthling!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">A human being in heaven sends God down to earth! All this up and down, all these exchanges. The Son of Man goes up to inhabit God, and the Soul of God comes down to inhabit you people. It’s all quite hard to believe, but I invite you to believe it for the praise and glory of God, and also for your good and for the good of the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">How do you feel this Spirit within yourself? What are the signs of this Spirit within you? Fire on your head? Speaking in tongues? Ecstatic prophecies, the thrill of healing? Something supernatural or inexplicable? People do look for that—impressive manifestations sharply contrasting to ordinary experience. “Oh yes, I felt it, and there is no other explaining it.” They want the Spirit to draw attention to itself, to prove the Spirit’s presence in them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But the Spirit does not like to draw attention to herself. She likes to be hidden within the baptismal water, and hidden within the broken bread and poured out wine. She prefers to be known for doing such wonders as the forgiveness of sins.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">What kind of signs you want for the wonder of the Holy Spirit dwelling in you depends, I guess, on how deep and wide and all-encompassing your vision of the kingdom of heaven is. Both how all-pervasive the Holy Spirit is and yet how hidden, not drawing attention to herself but to her work.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">So let me return to my conversation with that consistory member. I said that the legacy I had always wanted was a strong consistory, not only competent and capable but also spiritually strong. I learned that from my dad, and what he did with his consistory in Bedford-Stuyvesant. That consistory was the joy of his ministry. Our Old First consistory is a joy to me as well, and full of the Holy Spirit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And then we talked about our zoom worship services. I compared them to those of my pastor colleagues. Their services are broadcast from their sanctuaries, and because of social distancing it’s always the same two or three professionals who do everything. But in our service we have half a dozen different leaders every week, and you read and you pray and you sing and you testify and you set your table and break your bread each in your own creative ways. I said that I’d like that for my legacy, that I’ve left a congregation that does all this.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">And she said, Well, that’s because you support us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">And I said, Thanks, but actually I’m the most privileged pastor I know, when I consider the power of the people I serve.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">That’s you! In your power hides the power of the Holy Spirit, whenever you exercise your power in the name of Jesus Christ and you experiment for the kingdom of heaven.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The legacy of the Lord Jesus was the Holy Spirit. Notice that Our Lord had to leave for heaven for the Spirit to come down. If the risen Lord Jesus had remained among us, he could be in only one place at a time, though any place he chose, and we’d be tempted away from the expansion that the Holy Spirit loves.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The wonder of the Holy Spirit is the sheer multiplicity of her actions and investments. She likes manifold pluriformity. Many languages. Many cultures and many creatures. She likes to come down on physical things like water and oil and the human body and she likes to ride the column of your breathing down into your soul. She likes your mind and she loves your creativity. She likes experiments. It was right for the Lord Jesus to be perfect, but the Spirit does not mind passing ventures and only momentary monuments as the results of your experiments.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In both Judaism and Islam, the authentic Word of God is confined to just one book in just one language. But if you love someone, you want to speak their language, and so at Pentecost the Holy Spirit expressed God’s love for the many nations and cultures of the world. We Christians too have just one book, but in any language it’s just as much God’s Word. And even our preaching from that book in many languages becomes the passing and experimental Word of God again each week. The churchly gift of tongues is a sign of the Spirit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And prophecy is a sign of the Spirit, because she likes your minds when you use them. And she likes physical things, so physical healing is a sign of her, even when done with ordinary medicine. But she’s just not into being impressive or spectacular. She isn’t into proving God, and so she’s hiding in plain sight. You will see no sign of her unless you seek her with a humble and repentant heart. So you look for her from out of the forgiveness of sins.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">She loves to give the forgiveness of sins. That’s a real sign of the Holy Spirit, and she delights in peace and the giving of peace, as when Our Lord gave it to his disciples and breathed on them. You don’t win peace, you give it, as a gift of the Holy Spirit. And you give understanding, as a work of the Spirit, and you cultivate wisdom, yet another sign of the Holy Spirit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But as you knew I’d eventually come to, the greatest sign of the Holy Spirit is love, the miracle and wonder of God’s love. The energy of God is love, passing between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God’s inner self is love, for God is love. So when you see a miracle of love, that’s a sign of the Spirit. When you just try to practice that love, you signal yourselves as experiments by the Spirit. You know that fire upon the heads of the disciples? That fire is the heat and passion of God’s love.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-9494249970561970592020-05-22T07:52:00.000-04:002020-05-22T07:52:10.189-04:00May 24, Easter 7, Signs and Wonders #6: The Wonder of Glory<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Acts 1:6-14, Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36, 1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11, John 17:1-11</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">For the nineteen years I’ve been with you I’ve been firm on having us repeat the Creed every week. Usually the Apostles Creed and during the Easter Season the Nicene Creed. You could say I’ve been rigid.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Many Protestant churches don’t repeat the Creed. Or they make up their own, or borrow one, which usually is easier for modern people to believe. But the real Creed is full of things that are hard to believe. And that’s the point. If something’s not hard to believe, it’s not worth having in a Creed. A Creed is a challenge as much as a comfort. And it reminds us that truth is a gift to us, and not our own. Designer religion is one reason I’ve been rigid about the Creed. But soon that all will be up to you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The Ascension of Jesus is in both Creeds, and that tells us that it’s one of the essentials, and that we are expected to believe it, and that it’s hard to believe. The disciples who watched it were totally surprised. The Epistles claim it but never explain it. It’s not in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, and St. Luke is the only one who depicts it. At the end of his Gospel he does so briefly, and he does it more fully at the beginning of The Acts. My sister-in-law suggested to me that St. Luke wants to make sure that we know that the Lord Jesus ascended not just as a spirit but in his body, and that even in heaven he remains in his body, his resurrected body, still with skin and bones and muscles.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">His Ascension does not undo his Incarnation, although in a way it is the opposite. For thirty-three years he walked with us as the infinite God contained within a human being. And now, with this, he is a human being with the infinity of God. A human being now unconstrained by time and space. Still about five foot six or so, still ten fingers and ten toes, and how can this be true? Why should I invite you to believe such a thing? Why not a purely spiritual God, philosophically more sensible, no conflict with science or physics or biology, much easier to believe?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Touch your forehead. Feel your body. Skin and bone. There’s a body like yours in heaven. Touch your head where you were baptized. There’s a baptized person on the throne of God. Your body will die someday. There is a person who died at the center of the future of all things. Is this only metaphor? How literally do you want to take it? Well, how valuable is the physical reality of the world? How important should it be to God, with our plague and pandemic and suffering? Our world of skin and bone and muscle and blood?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">How far shall we push the story by St. Luke? Did Jesus float up like Mary Poppins, minus the umbrella and a hat? How high up did he go? Up to the clouds, or did a cloud come down? How far away is heaven? Does heaven come down, or is it all around us, but closed to us, unless it opens up? This is a specialty of St. Luke. He says that on the night of Jesus’ birth, an angel stood among the shepherds and their flocks, and the glory of God shone around them. He says that at Our Lord’s baptism “the heaven opened.” He says that at the Transfiguration Jesus lit up with glory and a cloud enveloped them, in which God spoke. So did heaven come down or was it just opened, or both?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You see it already in the Exodus, at Mount Sinai, when God spoke to the people from the cloud on the mountain. And God led the people in the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire right up there in front of them. It’s technically called the Glory-cloud, capital G-Glory, with the Glory that belongs to God alone. The cloud both hides God and reveals God’s presence. But isn’t God everywhere? Well, yes, but the God who can be everywhere can also focus and concentrate particularly here or there—like in Jesus. Just so, heaven is immense and high and all around us, and when God wants it to, it opens up.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">When Jesus is lifted up and enters the cloud, that is the sign of his enthronement. “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory.” He is seated at the right hand of God the Father. But hadn’t he always been there with his Father before all worlds? Well, yes, but this is new, now he’s also a skin-and-bones human being, one of us, and seated at the right hand of God of the Father.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The Bible doesn’t explain this theoretically, because probably it can’t, as it’s such a mystery and wonder, but it’s offered to us as being very good for human beings.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">It means that someone with first-hand knowledge of being human is there with God to intercede for us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And it means that he governs all things in the world for our good, which he knows first hand about.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And it means that he limits God’s unlimited power in order to do only the sort of things a self-sacrificial human being would do, so no more plagues, for example, as punishment, or to teach a lesson.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And it means that a human as God is always with us, as one of our Deacons passionately reminded us on Monday night. Not just the general presence of a spiritual God, but the spiritual presence of an embodied God, the son of Mary, who is always with us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Now, what about the two men in the story, robed in white? St. Luke calls them “men,” not angels, like the two men who just forty days earlier had met the women at the empty tomb and told them Christ had risen. I take these two as humans like us, but from the other side of death, and sent back from our future as messengers, as emissaries of the Life of the World to Come, when Jesus will come again, in glory.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This glory is ahead for us to share with Christ, as St. Peter says in his Epistle, which is to encourage us during the fiery trials that we suffer today. Apart from that I have only a vague idea about what it means for us to share that glory.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You know, in nineteen years I’ve never preached about Glory, even though it’s a big deal in the Bible. It’s hard to relate to in our lives, unless we’re watching the Olympics. But in church our language is full of it. By the end of our service today you’ll have used the word “glory” twenty times. We hardly notice it when we’re saying it. It’s abstract and disconnected. We might have things in our lives that are somewhat glorious, but the actual, singular, capital-G Glory of God is not in our experience, not like for people in the Bible. So we relegate it to a distant mystery, like a wonder to believe in but a wonder that’s far off from us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">So St. John makes this move in his Gospel. He reports the Lord Jesus saying that he will be glorified when he is lifted up—on the cross! For St. John, the cross was already Our Lord’s ascension. The Lord Jesus made his crucifixion his enthronement. From his shame he made his majesty, his curse his holiness, and his humiliation his glory. In the injustice against him he justified the world, the hatred against him he turned to love, and the malice around him he filled with grace.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">So I think it’s grace that is your sign of glory. Glory is the wonder, and grace is the sign—the capital-G Grace that you live by, the grace that you practice, the grace that you extend. As Jonathan Edwards said, “Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected.” The wonder and the sign.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Grace is but glory begun, and glory is but grace perfected. That’s how the Lord Jesus, upon his throne, is now signifying glory—by grace. That’s the only glory the church has the right to, that we are held by grace. That’s the glory of your community of Jesus, that you are so gracious to each other and to the world. In God’s eyes you are robed in grace. Look it you. Did you know that you are like those two men, that just by your graciousness you are ambassadors of the Life of the World to Come!</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-14726778967528718602020-05-14T11:52:00.002-04:002020-05-14T14:32:53.980-04:00May 17, Easter 6, Signs and Wonders #5: The Sign of Love<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Acts 17:22-31, Psalm 66:7-18, 1 Peter 3:13-22, John 14:15-21</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">St. Paul is the intellect, St. Peter is courageous, and St. John is the lover. St. Paul is the Scarecrow, St. Peter is the Cowardly Lion, and St. John is the Tin Man. Yes, I know, that’s a out of order.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">St. Paul is the Scarecrow who did have a brain. He loved philosophy. He was educated in both Greek and Hebrew literature. He was trained in rhetoric and argument. So when he gets to Athens he makes his case to the intellectual elite. He appeals to their religion and he quotes their authors. But the Book of Acts reports that his speech was unproductive.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Not that he shouldn’t have done it. We should <i>“always be ready to make our defense to anyone who demands from us an accounting,”</i> and the intellectual coherence of the Gospel deserves demonstration in the court of public opinion. But intellectual argument doesn’t win people over.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Gospel did not compel the urban elites. The early church grew in the ghettos and villages among wives and servants and soldiers. And not by evangelistic crusades. The sociologist Rodney Stark has shown that the church grew slowly, one by one, by treating women better than their neighbors did, by rescuing unwanted babies who were thrown out on the rocks, and, during plagues, by taking in the sick whom their neighbors abandoned. They modeled a new kind of humanity, caring and compassionate. And gradually, over 200 yeas, their numbers were finally exponential. Against the power of the Empire they demonstrated the long, slow power of love, even during persecutions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Imperial systems of power resist the rule of love. The persecutions were mild when St. Peter wrote his First Epistle, but already they were suffering. If you love, you will suffer. You suffer from doing wrong, and you suffer from doing right. They suffered from social dislocation and cultural exclusion. Maybe like gay folks have to endure, or a black man in a white suburb. Always the potential for exclusion or for harm.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">So St. Peter’s question that opens our second lesson is not rhetorical but real. Let me translate it literally: <i>“Now who is the one who will be harming you if you are zealous for the good?”</i> Because you will be harmed. History is full of examples of those who do good getting harmed by the prevailing powers that preserve their power by doing harm.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">St. Peter tells them, <i>“Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated.”</i> Well, he should know. St. Peter is the Cowardly Lion who did have c’ourage. After Easter and Pentecost he was the fearless leader of the church. And earlier, when the police arrested Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, it was Peter who said, “Lemme at-em, lemme at-em,” and Jesus had to tell him to put his sword down.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But! Only hours later, he denied his Savior three times, from being intimidated by a serving-girl and fear for his own skin. And every Good Friday thereafter he’d have to remember his cowardice. He knows whereof he writes: <i>“Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimated.”</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Are you afraid of the world right now? I am. Do current events intimidate you? They do me. I’ve got abiding fear right now. Not just for my health, but whether I’m not up to this, that I’m afraid to do the good I should do. For other people, like the early church did. I could say that I’m over 65, with a history of asthma, so I should protect myself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">But my conscience says, “Really?” And what about you? What is your conscience asking you? About anything good you might be doing better?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The issue of conscience is what leads St. Peter to that strange passage that careens through some obscure Jewish mythology about <i>spirits in prison in the time of Noah</i>. In the legend these were the offspring of angels that had intercourse with human women. What St. Peter means by this, no one knows any more. He is mixing metaphors and jamming thoughts in the fluid and pulsing rabbinic style that you can still hear in synagogues in Brooklyn. But his main point is clear, which is to put you on the ark with Noah, with the Flood as your baptism, and your baptism is for your conscience.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Your baptism is your <i>appeal to God for a good conscience </i>when your conscience accuses you of not doing enough good, or having compromised. It’s for the Christian wife of a Roman husband, who had to compromise her faith. For the Christian slave of a pagan master, who had to do wrong things. For the Christian soldier in the Roman army, who had to break the Ten Commandments. For the parents protecting their babies during a plague and not taking in a dying pagan. Your conscience accuses you, but you can appeal to God on the merits of your baptism. Your baptism is your certificate, your birth certificate of being born again, your passport, your ticket for passage on the ark, even when you are an unclean animal.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Which brings us to St. John. He reports that Jesus said, <i>“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”</i> What the Greek actually means is this: <i>“If you love me, you will be keeping my commandments.”</i> Jesus says it for your comfort, he is your Advocate, your Comforter. It’s a confidence-builder, it’s a conscience-clearer. Oh St. John, you’re the Tin Man, but you certainly have a heart.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">St. John is the lover, the one whom Jesus loved, Our Lord’s best friend. All four gospels speak of love, but love is largest by far in St. John. And love is largest in the Christian faith among the world’s religions. In the novel </span><i style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">The Life of Pi,</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"> the author says that compared to the real virtues of Hinduism and Islam, what Christianity offers is the bottomless love of Jesus. On Good Friday at our St. John’s Bluegrass Passion I noticed that those old gospel hymns are love songs. “What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;"><i>“They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me.”</i> You keep his commandments just by loving him. <i>“And those who love me will be loved by my Father.”</i> You love Jesus just by being loved by his Father. <i>“And I will love them, and reveal myself to them.” </i>You just be open to God’s revelation of love in Jesus, and trust that love, and you’ll be loving God back, and doing God’s commandments, with your conscience clear. Does that sound too passive? But the Holy Spirit of God is doing the acting within you, and is your Advocate and Comforter.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">That’s the sign, the community of love, like you, the sign for the world around you watching and needing and doubting. The sign of the resurrection is your community practicing the love of God as best you can in small and gradual terms on matters right in front of you, supporting each other and bearing each other in your inevitable compromises and even denials, but of which your conscience can be clear. It is not sentimental love, not hippy-dippy love, but God’s love, God’s divine and sovereign and sacrificial love among you. Your community of love is the sign of the wonder of God’s love among you and within you.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-28358081942155756172020-05-07T11:32:00.000-04:002020-05-07T11:32:35.735-04:00May 10, Easter 5, Signs and Wonders #4, Living Stones<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10, John 14:1-14</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You are a people. Once you were individuals, but now you are a people. You were always persons, and you belonged to other people, and you still do, but now you are a people. You are more than members of a church, you are more than adherents of an institution, <i>you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people. Once you were no people, but now you are God’s people.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And <i>you know the way.</i> You are a people who know the way. You know the <i>way </i>to the <i>truth</i>, and you know the <i>way </i>to the <i>life</i>. You are a people who know where to go for truth and where to get your life. You know his name, who is the way. The life in him is God’s life, and the truth in him is God’s faithfulness. You know him to be the way, and not a wall around the life and truth. His way has no walls along it, and his life and his truth spread out from his way, and all across the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You know the way to God the <i>Father</i>. There are many ways to God. Jews and Muslims know the same God we do, they pray to the same God we do. I have prayed in synagogues with Jews more times than I can count, and I can sing <i>Avinu Malkeinu</i> with gusto, but only occasionally do they call God “Father,” as one of many metaphors. I have prayed in mosques with Muslims, and I have felt their matchless devotion to the same God I pray to, but they never, ever call God “Father.” They have 99 names for God, and “Father” is not one of them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But you know the way to God as <i>Father</i>, because you go the way there with God’s Son, God’s only son. And only because of him is God a Father. The God of Jesus is not some general father of mankind or some <i>uber</i>-father of the world. The Romantics had it wrong, Schiller and Beethoven had it beautifully wrong, Michelangelo had it gloriously wrong; that way leads to all kinds of dangers, not least were World War 1, and then Fascism. That way is not to the truth of God the Father. To get to the <i>truth </i>and the <i>life </i>of God as Father you have go there in the <i>way </i>of Jesus.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In the way of Jesus it’s about intimacy, the intimacy of a little child with a parent, and of a parent with her child. It’s about safety and security, like you’re in your mother’s arms. It’s about God feeding you with God’s own life, like a mother nursing you with <i>“pure spiritual milk,”</i> as St. Peter dares you to imagine. It’s about the truth of God as faithfulness, like the passionate loyalty of a mother, and God’s care for you like the unshakable protection of a father. That’s the kind of God as Father that Jesus is the way to, and he takes you with him deep inside the intimate, inner life of God.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You are a people who know the way. And you know the way God comes to you. You know that God comes to you as your shepherd in the valley of the shadow of death. You know God comes to you in the oil on your head and in the breaking of the bread. In the mark of the nails in his hands you meet your Lord and God. You know these ways, and later this month, on Pentecost, you will remember how God comes to you in the Holy Spirit, and how the Spirit stays and dwells inside you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You are God’s <i>house</i>. And in God’s house are <i>many dwelling places,</i> many rooms. How many rooms do you have today? How many of you have logged in? In your house for God are many rooms. There were rooms in the Temple in Jerusalem. Each rebuilding of the temple made more rooms. In those rooms you sat and ate your sacrifice with God. In the glorious and final temple of the vision of Ezekiel, there were 120 rooms, where even the Gentiles could come and eat with God. That’s what Jesus means, that the communion of his people is God’s new temple for all the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In the days of St. Peter’s First Epistle the only buildings the Christians had were their own homes. Their only altars were the tables they ate on. They had no images, no shrines, no priesthood, and the Romans condemned them as atheists, because they could see no signs of any gods among them. The Jews at least had a temple and a priesthood, and the Romans tolerated them as long as they kept their God to their own people. But these Christians were welcoming everybody in without regard, and all withdrawing from the service of the Roman gods, which put them in danger of the Empire.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">How to deal with that danger is all through First Peter, but in our lesson for today St. Peter rises to affirmation. His rhetoric is unschooled and his metaphors mashed, but with power he tells them who they are: you are <i>a people</i>, you are a <i>priesthood</i>, you are a <i>temple</i>, you are a dwelling place for God, a house for God built of yourselves as <i>living stones</i>. Stones that live. An awkward metaphor.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Unless you are a structural engineer. Take our church building for example. Do you know much is going on within the stones of our building? With its arches and pinnacles and flying buttresses? Those stones are not just sitting there—they carry great forces of tension and compression.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The stones in our flying buttresses are living stones indeed. An engineer told me that if we took the pinnacles off the corners of the roof, the whole vaulting beneath them would eventually collapse! Those stones in our building are working stones, and you might call them stones that live.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You are a people, you are the living stones, and the wonder is that God dwells in you, that’s the wonder, and you are the sign. You are a sign for the world. The other signs we’ve looked at these last few weeks are signs for you, and for your faith and hope and comfort. But for the world the sign is you (as I said two weeks ago).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">No, you are not the proof! There is no proof of God for the world, but the best sign to the world of the life and truth of God is nothing other than vital communities of believers, like you, quietly building each other up, and opening yourselves in welcome and service, to exhibit to the world God’s love. You are the sign, and God's presence in you is the wonder.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>You know the way</i>. You know the way from the world to God, and you are the way from God to the world. You are God’s way and you are God’s people. God loves you.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-73538064840807261152020-04-24T08:38:00.001-04:002020-04-24T08:38:57.505-04:00April 26, Easter 3, Signs and Wonders #2, The Breaking of the Bread<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Acts 2:14a, 36-41, Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17, 1 Peter 1:17-23, Luke 24:13-35</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In our second lesson, Saint Peter is writing to the scattered little congregations of Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey. He calls them “<i>exiles</i>”, even though they’re all from-there, and live at home. What makes them exiles is their Christian faith, so they’re not at home anymore within their native culture, as its values and ideals are celebrated with the gods and goddesses.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Although, if they are slaves or wives, they still have to participate in the culture, which the Apostles take into consideration, and so they allow them to “obey their masters and husbands as to the Lord.” (It's a strategy, not a principle.)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Especially for slaves and wives it’s often impossible to get to whatever house it is where the church is breaking bread that week, so eventually the deacons develop the practice of delivering fragments of the broken bread to whomever is forced to stay at home.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Do you feel isolated in your own home? Even exiled? Are you a slave to the internet and your computer? Are you cut off from your relatives and friends? How do you feel about the way we have to do Communion? Does it feel less sacred when you break the bread in your own home? But that is so much closer to the experience of the Christians that St. Peter was writing to. They would have found strange the way we celebrate it in our sanctuary, although it feels more sacred to us and is more welcoming to outsiders.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">We are cut off from that, our congregation is scattered, fragmented, and broken apart. So it’s fitting that the breaking of bread is a symbol of the body of Christ, who was broken on the cross. And yet it’s also our sign in which to recognize the presence of the resurrected Jesus, as at Emmaus.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">So it’s a wonder that a symbol of his death is the sign of his resurrected presence. Why not expect to recognize him as something like the other gods and goddesses—his superpowers, or his being more handsome than Apollo, his splendid musculature, and to be celebrated in a classic temple. It must have been a challenge for those early Christians to believe in a God whose presence looked so unlike a god, but maybe it was a comfort to them in their own experience of social brokenness and fragmentation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In our Gospel lesson, St. Luke is specific in his terminology for the breaking of the bread, that Jesus <i>“took, blessed, broke, and gave.”</i> That specific formula of those four verbs appears eleven times in the gospels and St. Paul. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">At the feeding of the 5000, he took the bread, blessed it, broke the bread, and gave it, in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (with one small variation).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">At the feeding of the 4000, in Matthew and Mark, he took, blessed, broke, and gave.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">At the Last Supper, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he took, blessed, broke, and gave.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">On Easter evening, at Emmaus, he took, blessed, broke, and gave.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In First Corinthians, St. Paul says that he got it directly from the Lord, that he took, blessed, broke, and gave.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Eleven times. It is not a coincidence, it’s an important pattern, and a sign determined by Our Lord himself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I was teaching this in seminary once, thirty years ago. The next week one of the students raised her hand and asked to speak. She said, “Dr. Meeter, I just want to tell you that your lecture last week changed my life.” Nice! “Not actually what you taught!” Oh.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">She said, “I know why Jesus did that with the bread. Because that’s what he does with all of us. He takes us, and blesses us, and then breaks us, and then gives us. I didn’t understand that but now I do. After he first took me when I got saved, I got very blessed, and it was great. But then things happened and I was broken, and where was my blessing? I thought something was wrong with my faith. But now I see that God broke me in order to give me, which is what he’s doing now. If he hadn’t blessed before he broke me I would have given up, but I guess he had to break me in order to give me.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The best thing in teaching is to learn from your students, and what she said I recognized as true for my life too. I’ve been blessed and broken, and being broken I’ve been given. How about you? Does it help you to make some sense of your experience? Yeah, we’d all like to be blessed all the time, but it’s God’s way to give us after God has broken us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And this is true about the Lord Jesus himself. He <i>took </i>our humanity in his incarnation, he <i>blessed </i>it by the way he lived, he <i>broke </i>it on the cross, and he <i>gives </i>himself to us in his Holy Spirit. And every Sunday he <i>gives </i>himself to our community in the breaking of the bread, in which we recognize him.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And we recognize our congregation too. In our own recent experience we can see the pattern of take, bless, break, and give. A year ago, on Palm Sunday, God took us from our exile in the Lower Hall, and God blessed us on Easter in the sanctuary, and for months afterward. And now we’ve been broken by the virus, fragmented and scattered. So I wonder, is God giving us?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">God did not send the virus. It is simply nature, or nature out of whack. God did not send it, and yet our Heidelberg Catechism (for a number of reasons) advises us to take our health and sickness as from God’s hand. So we accept our breaking as from the hand of God. Which means that our challenge now is to wonder how God is using this to give us, to give us in greater mission.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">So if our being broken is the sign, then our being given is the wonder, and we wonder how God will give us and to whom. Already these last five weeks you’ve been wonderful in giving yourselves. How long can you keep this up?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Yes, we are right to want to return to our sanctuary, not only for its sacred beauty but also because of our mission to our neighborhood, but our next great challenge is to leverage what we’ve gained by being broken into new ways of giving our church in mission beyond ourselves. It is not for me to be a part of this. But already you’ve shown I do not need to be!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">How will you know what to do? Just work the signs. The more you work the signs the more you get from them. Look for the signs, don’t look for proof. A proof settles, a sign opens. Be open to wonder and imagination. Recognize the blessing and do not fear the breaking. Don’t fear feeling like exiles. It’s in the signs of a stranger that the Lord Jesus comes to you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But even as a stranger he does keep coming to you, and in ways that are not apart from you; he always comes in human ways and human actions and relationships. Indeed, it has always been true, from Saint Peter’s day till now, that the very best sign of the resurrection of Jesus, the best sign to the larger world, is the quiet vitality of congregations, of communities of Jesus, whose binding principle is simply to share the love of God.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-89869770591638324502020-04-18T07:29:00.002-04:002020-04-18T10:18:41.407-04:00April 19, Easter 2, Signs and Wonders #1: The Mark of the Nails<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Acts 2L14a, 22-32, Psalm 16, 1 Peter 1:3-9, John 20:19-31</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">For the Easter season my sermon series is called “Signs and Wonders.” The sign we get today is the mark of the nails in Jesus’ hands. This sign leads Thomas to exclaim, <i>“My Lord and my God.”</i> This is the climax of the Gospel of John, that the author has been aiming at from chapter one, verse one.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Right after the climax comes the summation: <i>“These things are written that you may believe.”</i> That’s aimed at you. St. John wants <i>you </i>to believe. But don't think that "belief" is just a given.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Some believing is required by all religions, but only Christianity makes it central. Islam is about submitting, with submitting as a good thing. And Judaism can be practiced without believing in God at all. It is Christianity alone that has creeds beginning with “I believe” and “We believe.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Can we attribute this to the Gospel of John? The verb for believing is used ten times by St. Matthew, ten times by St. Mark, nine times by St. Luke, but <i>ninety-eight times</i> by St. John. Believing is big in the Gospel of John. And what the Lord Jesus actually says to Thomas is not, “Do not doubt,” but <i>“Do not be unbelieving but believing.”</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The issue with Thomas was not doubt, but that he did not want to be a second-hand believer. I mean a second-hand believer like us. First-hand believers are witnesses with their own eyes. Like the other disciples who told Thomas, <i>“We have seen the Lord.”</i> The believing of first-hand believers is not so hard. But we second-hand believers have not seen with our own eyes, and we have to depend on the witness of the first-hand believers, which is more demanding, and takes a leap, and requires our imaginations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I could say it this way. We second-hand believers have to learn our belief from the Community of Jesus, which Thomas did not want to do. He demanded the privilege of individual truth. This demand for individual truth is thought by some to be noble and even heroic but it isn’t blessed. The blessing comes with getting your truth through the Community of Jesus.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Well, as Thomas is one of the Twelve, with the job of being an eyewitness, he’s granted his demand. Jesus offers it to him freely. But then he doesn’t take it. He does not stick his finger into Jesus’ hands or his hand in Jesus’ side. Rather he says, <i>“My Lord and my God.”</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I think Thomas surprised himself. All he’d wanted was the physical proof of a dead man come alive again. But now he leaps past that, with the climax of John’s Gospel. No one has ever called Jesus this before. They’d called him “Son of God,” and “Messiah,” and even “Lord,” but never yet, <i>“Lord and God,”</i> the combination that is the highest title of divinity in the Jewish vocabulary. So then, what signs of God did Thomas see?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">None of the normal signs. No fire, no glory, no cloud, no burning bush, no seraphim or cherubim. This was their guy, Jesus of Nazareth, yet not the same. By the marks on his hands he had the body of the one who died, but this person can pass through walls and doors. This person has no boundaries to limit him. His will and his action are the same, his intention is his execution, his desire is what is, and whatever is, is his desire. Like the God of Moses and Isaiah, no less. Does Thomas see all that in front of him, does he see the great “I am”?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I wonder, does Thomas recognize the grace, the grace that judges him without condemning him? Does he see in the marks on his hands the union of grace and truth, the grace that accepts him, in the truth that does not excuse him? The past is not undone when the past is reconciled, the scars are healed but the scars remain, for grace <i>and </i>truth!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Or, was it something else, some other insight that led him to exclaim <i>“My Lord and my God?” </i></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">We can only wonder at what he saw—we can’t see it directly, we are second-hand believers, but we can wonder and imagine, and even imagine more than Thomas imagined, in the signs that Thomas saw, which is why we are blessed. It was for second-hand believers like us that Jesus appeared to these first-hand believers. It is us whom Jesus wants to believe in him.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">What would you look for in someone to see the living God in her? What signs would you be compelled by? If you imagine the mark of the nails, what signs would you see in them? For myself, I’d see the signs of faithfulness, absolute faithfulness, faithfulness unto death, and a faithfulness that is stronger then death. That kind of faithfulness is a work of love, and I would also read love in the mark of the nails, great love, self-giving love, abiding love, and that kind of love and faithfulness I would imagine to be the signs of God.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Did you know that the words “love” and “believe” are descended from the same Old Germanic root? It’s the root-word that means “to esteem, to hold dear, to trust.” You esteem and hold dear and trust when you love, and you esteem and hold dear and trust when you believe.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Well, of course, belief can simply be assent, just saying, “Okay, that’s true.” But belief is also what lovers give each other and parents give their children, when they say, “I believe in you.” In that level of belief is love, and in that kind of love is belief. This is the kind of believing that St. John has in mind in his summation. Relational belief. Self-investment. Not just that you believe that Jesus is somebody special, but that you can say with Thomas, <i>My </i>Lord and <i>my </i>God!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">To say it that way is both belief and love. In fact, believing in Jesus is how you love him. That’s why St. Peter can say in his first epistle, <i>“Although you have not seen him, you love him.” </i>Which at first is a little off-putting because you probably don’t feel like you love Jesus. But this love is not a feeling. You can’t love Jesus like you love other people, he is too far away, and as much a stranger as familiar.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">How you love him is by your faithfulness to him, and what your faithfulness requires of you. By believing in him is how you love him. That’s the kind of love he wants from you, always in terms of believing, and a belief that’s always expressed by loving.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">And that’s why he designed it so that you have to get your belief from the community, instead of with the privilege of individual truth. That’s why you are blessed to be a second-hand believer and why you have to get your signs and wonders from the Community of Jesus, which is the community organized for your love. It’s because your believing has the works of love in it that you are blessed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Believing as a form of love is why we can be rejoicing even as we suffer various trials. St. Peter wrote to small congregations, at distance from Jesus, who had no social benefits from their belief. He was telling them that their best benefits were for the future of the world, and thus were being kept on hold in trust for them, and that took some believing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">So too for us, especially right now as the world is turning to what we’ve never seen or even imagined. But if our loving each other in this community of Jesus means believing in each other, well, that’s still joyful. Whenever I believe in you it generates joy back to me. And a whole small culture of this is the indescribable joy that St. Peter writes about.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Dearly beloved, I have seen this joy developing among you as you’ve believed in each other these last few weeks. This joy that you have in each other is a sign and the wonder of the love of God that is alive in you.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-88019961100020078422020-04-12T07:12:00.002-04:002020-04-12T07:12:48.972-04:00April 12, Easter, An Opening in the World<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Jeremiah 31:1-6, Colossians 3:1-4, Matthew 28:1-10.</i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This Easter is a gift. And it does not belong to us! “Easter is not church property.” I have said that every year in order to welcome the visitors not from our church and our friends not from our faith. This year it’s still true, and in a new way, because this Easter is not what any church would have chosen.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">No organ, no choir, no trumpet, no glory, but quiet, as quiet as the original Easter in Matthew, when the followers of Jesus were alone, or in twos or threes. They had to face a new reality they had not prepared for, and come up with answers they did not know the questions for. The quiet was broken by only an earthquake, and this pandemic has been one long, slow shaking and rattling of everything we’ve always counted on. This Easter is manifestly not church property.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.</i> So did I. This week I went to see Green-Wood Cemetery, as much for inspiration as for exercise. I made five trips and I varied my routes through it, but I always included the Old First graveyard, in the middle of Green-Wood.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">Let me remind you that our old church cemetery was moved there, and our Dutch gravestones are the oldest in Green-Wood. It’s ironic. Our sanctuary may be closed but our graveyard is open; well, our graveyard is a sanctuary too. And it is unique in its design, like no other spot in Green-Wood that I have found.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I enter the Green-Wood gate at Prospect Park West. Here there stretches a wide open field, with the gravestones all in rows. This is the public area, with everyone the same, the general population without definition.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Then I walk up across an open ridge, and it’s breezy, and one grassy area has no gravestones. Are there bodies hidden underneath? I keep walking across the field and then I enter the woods.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This is not like other woods, because there is no undergrowth—because of the graves. There are no straight rows here. Everything twists and turns with the hills and valleys, and the avenues are a labyrinth. In the woods are the family plots, and monuments, and imposing tombs, some built into the hillsides and others like small temples.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I look for names I recognize and I read the inscriptions. The names are for remembrance and the inscriptions for hope, and in between remembrance and hope is silence, their past lives hidden beneath these stones. However important these people may have been before, the only importance they have now is that they are dead.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You know, the early church built no monuments to the apostles, nor even marked their tombs. Not even Jesus’ tomb was regarded with significance. It wasn’t till the Fourth Century that the so-called Holy Sepulcher was fabricated as a place of pilgrimage. It’s also notable that, apart from the death of Jesus, the New Testament shows no interest in the deaths of its main characters.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I think I know why. Why talk about their deaths when they were already living in the resurrection? They were already <i>raised with Christ,</i> and that larger truth superseded the deaths they still must die. Where they were <i>buried, was with Christ.</i> Where their lives were <i>hidden, was with Christ, in God</i>. I am sure this was believed by many of those whose graves I pass. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">In the center of Green-Wood, you turn left onto a path and cross a ridge, and opening below you is a spacious, level glade within the trees. It is the lovely circle of the Cedar Dell, and its rim is a gentle slope that lowers to an entrance. This is our Old First graveyard.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">The surprise is that the stones are in a large circle, not in rows. So this is not the public undefined, nor a family plot, this is a congregation, gathered around its center, a community at rest, and yet open to the world around it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In the center is no monument, but it doesn’t feel empty, with all the gravestones focused in on it. This is our own little Stonehenge. This circle is a <i>communion of saints</i>, its quiet rest is the <i>forgiveness of sins</i>, its hope is in the <i>resurrection of the body</i>, its sanctuary is the <i>Holy Catholic Church</i>, and at the center is the unseen air of the <i>Holy Spirit</i>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This place is a gift. As a place of the dead it reminds me that I <i>have died with Christ</i>, as a place of remembrance it reminds me that my <i>life is hidden with Christ in God</i>, and as a place of hope it reminds me that already <i>I have been raised with Christ.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">One of you told me that you visited this place last week and you found it “fulfilling.” What I heard in your word “fulfilling” was also: satisfying, and encouraging, and inspiring, and that you can see the Kingdom of God. It lifts you up. Me too. I find the place uplifting. It’s wonderful how this piece of ground can <i>“set your mind on things that are above, not things that are on earth,”</i> as St. Paul says. <span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">What St. Paul means by <i>“things that are above”</i> is not celestial space nor a static heaven, but the dynamic government of Our Resurrected Lord, who sits at the right hand of God, and the coming of his Kingdom on earth as it in heaven, both present and future.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This will be the restoration of all things, for which the resurrection of Jesus is the pledge, and already that includes you, even though you still must die, because <i>you have been raised with Christ</i>. Already it includes this earth, and your bodies, even our dead ones, and so this graveyard is quietly prophetic, when it is fulfilling and uplifting.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And it’s instructive. It offers us a message, for how to live our lives in the present and the future, we who need this pandemic to be done. We want to close it off, and get back to life as it was. That’s only natural. But the temptation is to close our future off, to go back to the same closed systems of power and possession, like back to the same destructive economy of endless consumption for material prosperity. We want to defend our way of life and repossess it!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But the resurrection calls us to lives of openness. Not to the undefined openness of the big public field at the entrance, but to the focused openness of this glade within the woods. Just so your open future centers on Our Lord and is defined by the rim of the Kingdom of God, and yet it has no walls and you can see into the woods around you. This sanctuary has no ceiling and heaven starts just above the ground and it’s heaven all the way up. Your choices are both open and defined. You are guided by the definitions of the Kingdom of God and you keep your center on the Lord Jesus.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You know, in St. Matthew’s telling of the story it’s not so much that the tomb is empty as that the tomb is open—the tomb is open to the world. The resurrection of Jesus has made an opening in the world, this world. When you are raised with him, you go through his opening out into this world, in love and hope and empathy into all its closed-off places. And notice that it was as Jesus went into the world that the women met him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">He was the same, but not the same. He was both familiar and a stranger, both their friend and someone they would worship. And if <i>you have died with him and been raised with him,</i> it’s also true of you within the world, that you too are something of an alien friend and familiar stranger. You’re even sometimes a stranger to yourself, and an alien to your instincts and your comfort.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">When this unsettles you, take relief in knowing that <i>your life is hidden</i> even from yourself, <i>with Christ, in God</i>. You do not fully belong to yourself, for Christ has made an opening in you and in the closed-off parts of you. This will unnerve you, but (I’m hardly the first one to say it) that that’s how the light gets out of you.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Our church has been forced to open up. We always wanted people to come into our sanctuary, and now we’re going out into your homes. And just as the two Mary’s had to leave the tomb and go back home to meet Jesus on the way, so now we will expect him to keep his promise to meet you at your home in the breaking of the bread. And as the Resurrection has opened up the world, even a simple human action like breaking bread is open to the creative power of the Holy Spirit, and that extends to all the other daily actions that you do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This sacrament in your apartment will be both strange and familiar, like Jesus, and it might feel awkward, though less so for those of you who live alone, but in your broken bread there is a miracle that is <i>hidden with Christ in God</i>. On this Sunday this sacrament is not church property, and we receive it as a strange and lovely gift.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The supper is for remembrance and for hope. By it we remember him, and in it we hope for the feast of love of which we shall partake when his kingdom has fully come. In between, in the meantime, we are not hidden from each other but alive to each other, one body, a temple, living stones, and we open ourselves to each other in this feast of love.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.</i></span></div>
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Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-27345442076182676872020-03-27T08:10:00.000-04:002020-03-27T08:10:02.700-04:00March 29, Lent 5; When Jesus Wept<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Ezekiel 37:1-14, Psalm 130, Romans 8:6-11, John 11:1-45</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>“Unbind him, let him go.”</i> Mic drop. That’s it. No “Hello, Lazarus, dearest friend, and welcome back!” No joy, no laughter, no embracing. Does Jesus just turn away? “Look, I did it, what else do you want? You think I did this for me? Don’t you know how soon I’ll be losing him again?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This story is the last of our Lenten dramas by St. John. It’s in three acts. You didn’t hear the third act because it was left off by the lectionary. The third act is the denouement, the aftereffect. It takes place in a council chamber in Jerusalem, where the Judean leaders decide they must get Jesus killed. The third act is crucial to the larger story, but we we’ll not get into that today.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Act One takes place outside of Judea, where Jesus is keeping safe with his disciples, across the border of the Jordan River. Act One sets up the issues that the second act develops. I won’t say more about Act One.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Act Two takes place four days later, back in Judea, near Bethany, a suburb of Jerusalem. It has three scenes: the Martha scene, the Mary scene, and the Lazarus scene. With each scene St. John gathers more characters on stage.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">First, Martha meets Jesus, on the road outside of town, with his disciples in the background.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Second, Mary meets Jesus, at the same spot, plus the crowd of mourners right behind her, and the disciples.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Third, the whole lot go the tomb, and the last to make his entrance is the dead man, at the command of Jesus. Then, <i>“Unbind him,”</i> and the dead man comes alive. Lazarus, born again.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The three scenes are in tension. Martha, Mary, Lazarus. Belief, grief, relief. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Positive, negative, resolution. Discussion, emotion, release. The unbinding is less a triumph than a letting go. It’s not for jubilation but for vindication, for demonstration. Yes, it’s a miracle, it’s a wonder, but it’s only a sign, because Lazarus will die again someday. It’s a sign to demonstrate what Jesus says to Martha, and to vindicate what Martha says to Jesus.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The conversation of Martha and Jesus is the thesis. It goes: Martha, Jesus, Martha, Jesus, Martha. So, Martha: <i>“If you’d been here.”</i> Jesus: <i>“He’ll rise again.”</i> Martha: <i>“I know he’ll rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”</i> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Mind you, she did not mean the Christian vision of resurrection but the resurrection that the Judeans believed in. It’s not in the Torah. It got started with Ezekiel’s prophecy of the dry bones. That prophecy was intended as metaphorical, for the revival of the Judean nation after the catastrophe of Babylon. But in the six centuries following it came to be taken more literally—that at the end of time, God would raise up every Jew who had ever lived, to live a second time around, this time with the blessed kind of life that God had always promised them. And it was for Jews.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Jesus answers her and changes it. He makes it universal, and for the present, not the end of time, and he makes it a claim about himself. <i>“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believe in me, though they die, they’ll live, and will never die. Do you believe this?”</i> Martha confirms what he says in her own way: <i>“Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world.” </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Well, Martha, there’s a faith-claim, the strongest one so far in John’s Gospel. Only Thomas will make one stronger, and only after Jesus’ resurrection. And to vindicate what she says and to demonstrate what he says is why Jesus uses the sign of Lazarus. The strong claims of the two of them are the thesis.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And just as strong is the antithesis, the Mary scene. From the positive to the negative, from the belief to the grief. I think that when Jesus weeps it is the strongest moment in the whole story, even stronger than the miracle. I assume that’s by design, by St. John’s dramatic and theological design.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>When Jesus wept, a falling tear</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>in mercy flowed beyond all bound.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>When Jesus groaned a trembling fear</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>seized all the guilty world around.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">This past week was the week of weeping. The previous week we were frantically adjusting—making plans, changing plans, taking stock, stocking up, getting ready. But last week you started crying. When you had to let employees go. When you got laid off. When you felt your isolation, when you felt how much you would be losing. Now, stuck at home, your feelings hit you and you wept. We have not yet wept for a death in our congregation, but we all have lots for us to grieve about.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And in our grief is anger too, which is often true of grief. An anger we can’t pin down. Notice that Our Lord was angry too. Twice it says that Jesus was <i>“disturbed”</i> and <i>“greatly troubled.”</i> Disturbed is putting it mildly. The Greek word has heat in it—groaning and growling. What is Jesus angry at? The whole situation. The power of death in the world. The resistance of unbelief. The mendacity of the leadership. How this situation is putting his own life at risk. He growls in his grief.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You hear people say that the weeping of Jesus shows how fully human he was. Okay, if that corrects our tendency to underplay his humanity when defending his divinity. But honestly, I think that gets it exactly wrong. I think it’s showing something about his divinity. St. John is telling us that God weeps. Indeed, it’s partly so that God could weep that God became incarnate. In Jesus God is one with us in all our grief and suffering. It was the grief of God when Jesus wept.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">God grieves our mortal weaknesses and illnesses, even when they’re natural and morally neutral. This virus is just a weird form of life that is trying to maintain itself, as every life-form does. And as usual, God does not intervene. As Jesus let his best friend die. God does not intervene and yet God loves us and suffers with us, and God grieves our natural suffering, when Jesus wept.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But the anger in God’s grief is over the more grievous suffering that results from unbelief and sin. God grieves our violence and dehumanization, our pollution and desertification, our wanton destruction and our destruction of God’s image in us. This too God grieves, when Jesus wept.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And Jesus weeps for himself and his own death. He knows the price that he must pay, that the sign of Lazarus will be the death of him. He growls and groans for what he will lose, like his friendship with Lazarus. That’s why the mic drop, and why at the climax he turns away. To gain his friend he’ll lose it all, when he gets killed. His miracle of life does not cancel death, nor soften it. Where Jesus shines his light is in the valley of the shadow of death. The sign of Lazarus does not ameliorate our suffering nor soften death, rather it stands up in the midst of death and dramatically against it, and the mic drop is the angry NO of God to the proud pretensions of death in the world. For now.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But the mic drop is not the very last thing in Act Two. The last thing is that <i>“many of the Judeans who had come with Mary and had seen what Jesus did believed in him.” </i>That’s why he did all this—and he said so, that the crowd could <i>believe that his Father in heaven had sent him</i>, and that <i>if Martha believed, she would see the glory of God</i>. He did this demonstration and vindication that you too might believe, even you who are looking at your computer screens, even in this strange Lent enforced on us.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Who of us knew what we’d be giving up this Lent? That I’d be giving up my last Easter service in the sanctuary? That we’d be giving up Holy Communion, and the pipe organ? That you’d be giving up your social life, and employment, and income and security? Some of you have had to give up far more than I have, during this unexpectedly grievous Lent.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I have no good news to tell you about this pandemic. My good news is for your belief. My news is that your grief and anger are not the denial of your belief, but your proof of it. That your losses and your fear of greater loss are not the negation of your belief, but your reason for it. That this Lent enforced on you is not the repudiation of your Easter faith but your preparation for it. And that you can believe this kind of news is why you are watching your computer screens right now.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">When Jesus wept, the crowd said, <i>See how much he loved him.</i> That is why God grieves and why God groans. Not because God is powerless, but because God is love, and God so loves the world. You are watching right now because you believe this and you want reminding of your belief, that in this trial of the world your belief in the love of God is what sustains you in your hope for the world.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-39941736233162819472020-03-21T09:13:00.001-04:002020-03-21T09:13:10.808-04:00March 22, Lent 4: Are We Blind?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>1 Samuel 16:1-13, Psalm 23, Ephesians 5:8-14, John 9:1-41</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I feel like we are driving blind. We don’t know what’s ahead of us a week from now, or even a day from now. I remember driving blind. We were driving on Interstate 80 in Pennsylvania, in the mountains, Melody and me and the kids. A snowstorm hit us and it was bad. So I got behind a semi and we followed it for miles. I remember him going faster than I liked, and I remember the tension in my body as I held the wheel, and being scared, but it seemed less dangerous than pulling off somewhere. That same tension I felt again this week, and a lower version of that same being-scared.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I feel like we are walking blind through <i>“the valley of the shadow of death,”</i> the shadow from the pandemic, and though the Psalm says <i>“for thou art with me,”</i> begging your pardon, I can’t see you, O God. I can see my <i>enemies</i>, and right now there is no <i>table God is spreading in the presence of our enemies</i>. We can’t do our healing station to <i>anoint our heads with oil</i>. The Psalm says that <i>“he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake,”</i> but those paths right now I cannot see. I feel like we are walking blind.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">At the end of our Gospel story, the Pharisees ask if they are blind. Their moral blindness is the judgment of the Lord Jesus on them. But when I feel blind this week, I do not want to be judged for it. I don’t think it’s a moral failure, it’s just my creaturely limitation. I’m supposed to lead this congregation, but for the first time I can’t see where to lead us. That’s the tension I can feel in my body, and the being-scared. When I was driving on the highway I assumed we would get through it, as I think we mostly all do now, but who can see what’s coming and what unthinkable choices we might be facing?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I have to say that the Consistory has been amazing. Their extremely hard-working and creative response is an inspiration to me, and convicts me that I have no right to sulk with God. I have to confess and guard against my tendency to self-indulgent anxiety, which would disrespect them. But maybe you yourself have felt this way these last days, and as you anticipate the next few weeks. Are you anxious? Are you scared? Do you feel like you are walking blind? Does your faith give you any help or any assurance? If you have any testimony here, I would love you to share it with me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">At the beginning of our Gospel story the Lord Jesus says something which I have always noticed but never preached on. <i>“We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”</i> Well, if the night is coming, it is not yet, and we can still work. (Thanks to electricity we can even work at night, not to mention online!) We do have the light, we have the light of the world. How does the light of Our Lord help us to see, when we feel like we are blind? If I feel like I am walking blind into these next few months, how does his light help me to see? What does he want me to see? What should be visible to us, as a congregation?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">So let’s go to the second lesson, from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. It uses the same metaphors as the Gospel, but differently. And I had never noticed before that St. Paul says that <i>“we are light,”</i> we ourselves. <i>“Once we were darkness but now, we are light.”</i> That is very positive about us. How can we be blind if we ourselves are light?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Then St. Paul adjusts the metaphor to <i>“we are children of light,”</i> which adds an emotional appeal. Our kids love to sing this as “I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light!” And then St. Paul extends the metaphor when he says that the <i>fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true</i>. For “fruit of the light” think of fruit trees in the sunlight. The fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true, which is very also very positive, this time about the world, and encouraging. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">It’s encouraging because although our creaturely limitations may blind us to the future, we are not blind to all the things around us that are good and right and true. So in these next few months, we do have signs to direct us, the signs are all the good and right and true things in the world, no matter who does them or under what name!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Okay, there are signs that are not good and right and true, and we’re supposed to<i> “expose the unfruitful works of darkness, and take no part in them,”</i> but we expose them just by being the light and the children of light, not by digging in the darkness to attack them. Notice that Jesus did not judge the Pharisees who asked if they were blind, he simply let them judge themselves as they were exposed within his light.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">As St. Paul says, <i>“Everything exposed by the light becomes visible, for everything that becomes visible is light.”</i> Which is a curious thing to say, that “everything that becomes visible is light!” How can that be? Or is it possible that in the ancient world they already understood how optics work. When your eye sees a visible object, what your eye actually sees is light reflected from that object. Your mind tells you that you are seeing the visible object itself, but actually it’s only light itself that is visible, so it’s true that everything that becomes visible is light. Did St. Paul understand this? I don’t know, and I haven’t checked my Aristotle, but the point is that the Epistle is very positive and hopeful about our seeing what we need to see within the world.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And yet we have to see the world not as the world sees the world. That’s what our first lesson tells us, the well-known story of Samuel anointing David. <i>“The Lord does not see as humans see, for they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”</i> And yet, despite this, the writer of the story winks at us by telling us how good-looking David was! We see the world <i>both </i>as the world sees the world <i>and not</i> as the world sees the world! We’re not exempted from how the world sees the world. We have to do both, and see the world both ways.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">For example, our church is a public institution, and though the Consistory is responsible to God, it’s also responsible to the public in many ways. So we have to operate with a double vision—as the world sees, and as the Lord Jesus sees.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Back to the Gospel story: the blind man came to see as the Lord Jesus saw. That was Our Lord’s gift to him, when he recreated the man from the wet clay that God had used to create Adam in Genesis. The man was born again, and he saw when he believed. His belief was his sight. We are told that seeing is believing, but the Gospel story tells us that believing is seeing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Your believing is your sight to see ahead. And so for this church, as we chart our way forward in the challenging uncertainty before us, we can move forward because of our belief. Your only necessary sight forward is your belief. You don’t have to see into the future, your belief is how you aim yourself into the future. You drive through the snowstorm by faith, not sight.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">And yet, you are not blind, Do you know how the eyes of cats seem to shine in the dark? Well, they actually do shine. You know how it looks like light is coming out of their eyes? Well, it actually is, even though it’s reflected light. I want you to imagine that your own eyes give out light. Even in the daytime. Reflected light, generated light, whatever. As St. Paul says, <i>You are light!</i> You have the power in you to light up what you see. You light up all that is good and right and true in the world just by your looking at it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This is how we will make our way. As we have to make new decisions and adjustments, having to make choices that we’ve never had to make before. We will look into the future by our belief, and we will look all around us in the present to light up all that is good and right and true, and we will see all we need to see. You know, that’s pretty much what you’ve been doing already, I’ve been watching you.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-53827948885052847582020-03-12T12:15:00.000-04:002020-03-12T12:15:11.383-04:00March 15, Lent 3: Jesus Talks to a Woman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Exodus 17:1-7, Psalm 95, Romans 5:1-11, John 4:5-42</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Once again the Gospel of John uses an encounter to advance some metaphors, and again the Lord Jesus opens the conversation with wordplay, and again the wordplay is missed. When he says <i>“living water”</i> the woman takes him literally, not metaphorically, because <i>“living water”</i> was the term they used for spring water as opposed to standing water in a cistern.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I had an Aunty Betty and she had a key to a spring of living water. She was my mom’s older sister; her Dutch name was Bartje, but she went by Betty. She lived in Haledon, New Jersey, an old suburb of Paterson. And over on Tilt Street was the Haledon Spring. The water was very good, especially compared to the local tap water, which was rather bad. The Haledon Spring had been enclosed in a concrete shed, for which you needed a key. And my Aunty Betty had a key.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Haledon is a Democratic town. My other relatives were all Republicans and did not live there. Haledon was mostly Roman Catholic and pro-union and it allowed liquor stores and bars, and stores were open on Sundays. My Aunty Betty was a Democrat. She had been the wild one, growing up. She was pretty, and always had boyfriends, and not from church. My mom remembers her dating a rich guy with a convertible.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And then she went and married a Catholic. They had four kids. She didn’t go to church, but she sent my cousins to the Presbyterian Sunday school, not Dutch Reformed, and we looked down on them. But my Aunty Betty had that key. So I remember that my other relatives would bring her their empty bottles and she would go and fill them up for them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The Samaritan woman is the first evangelist in the gospel. Her relatives and her neighbors got the benefit of the fountain that started welling up in her, and Jesus had the key that opened up her heart. The fountain flows out of her when she tells the villagers to <i>“Come and meet a man who told me everything I ever did.”</i> But all he had said about her life was just one thing, just that embarrassing comment about her five ex-husbands and her current boyfriend. When he said that she tried diverting their talk away from herself, and towards theological disputes, and mission, and the Messiah coming.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">He surprised her. <i>“I am he!”</i> And that’s what opened her up. The whole truth of her life welled up inside her, and the truth made her free. He did not have to tell her much to tell her everything. He just used his key. Her life rose up in her, and poured out for the other villagers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Her name we are not told. But she’s one of the five women in the Gospel of John who are a big part of the story. She, and Martha, and three Mary’s: Mary his mother, at the wedding in Cana and then at the cross; Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, raised from the dead; and Mary Magdalene, who on Easter Day met Jesus in the Garden, whom the later tradition suggests had been a prostitute, although the Bible never says that.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This woman-at-the-well seems more like Mary Magdalene than Jesus’ mother. But she is like the Virgin Mary in giving birth to a new life that has been conceived in her by the Holy Spirit. She is a model for you all. As I said last week, to be <i>“born from above”</i> is for you to give birth to the new you whom the Holy Spirit has conceived in you. You are simultaneously the new you in the old you, your new nature conceived in the womb of your old nature by the Holy Spirit and being born again. Each one of you is a Virgin Mary, even if you think of yourself as a Mary Magdalene or a Samaritan.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Jesus does not require that you deny your past, nor does he help you escape it. Your old nature lives on in you. What he does is free you from the guilt of your past and the grip of your old nature, and the Holy Spirit makes your old nature the virgin mother of your new nature. All your sin and your pain and your frustration and mistakes and loneliness and suffering give birth to your character and your hope and your love. Not the stagnant pools of love you thought you had to accept, but God’s love, poured into your heart and overflowing out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The woman has tried to love, apparently, maybe too much, and in her frustration given up, and her current lover is a lover only physically. The sign of her frustration is her coming to the well alone, at noon, not sociably in the morning with the other women. She’s not respectable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This well is the well of Jacob—Jacob who came as a stranger to a well and asked a woman for a drink and then it got romantic. She knows that story. And here is this stranger who is crossing all the social boundaries, who wants to put his lips upon her jug, and she thinks, “the story of my life.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">She doesn’t serve him silently, she engages him. Not done! Their engagement would have been seen as flirtation, and the disciples are embarrassed. But her flagrant openness allows her to run back to her village and shamelessly tell her neighbors to <i>“come and meet a man who told me everything I ever did.”</i> “But we already have a good idea of everything you ever did!” How close to the old self is the new self.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Your two natures always come together and they are both in everything. They are as distinct as life and death but they also are as inseparable as life and death. Don’t look at yourself and say, “that good thing I did there was my new nature, and that bad thing there was my old nature.” There are both of you in everything, no matter which of the two is at the moment in control. So you have to believe in the new one. Your old nature claims all the evidence, so you have to believe in your own new nature when you believe in Jesus. Believe in it and go with it. The villagers believed in her and went with her, they could sense new water rising up in her.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">What’s the key? The truth that Jesus told about himself, which propelled the truth about herself that he told her. When he told her to go get her husband she answered him with a half-truth, but he responded with the whole truth. That’s when she diverted the conversation to theology. Jesus patiently goes with her, but still engages her. He does not judge her to condemn her, but as he talks about his mission she can sense the judgment in his words. <i>Spirit and truth.</i> Energy <i>and </i>solidity. Vitality <i>and </i>fidelity. Movement <i>and </i>commitment. Novelty <i>and </i>faithfulness. That’s her issue. She recognizes herself. She thinks, “the story of my life,” but now in hope instead of resignation. His talk of himself is what unlocks her. That’s what Jesus does. He tells his truth, for us to learn our truth.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">People say they “tell the truth in love,” but the deepest truth is the love, the truth about the world is the love of God for the world and for every one of you within it, no matter how Jesus finds you at the well. The deepest truth about yourself is the love God has for you. Whatever else you say about yourself when you talk about yourself, the deepest truth about you is the love of God for you.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">So back to my Aunty Betty. She endured some suffering in my family. One of my cousins still hurts from the shame she grew up with. When I was ten my uncle died of cancer, and my aunt had to raise four children on her own, including a three-year-old. To make ends meet she had to take in boarders. When I was a teenager my brother and I lived in her apartment for a while.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Our family had moved from New Jersey to Long Island, and to finish our year in high school, we needed a place to stay. There was no question, she took us in. I came to learn her generosity, her sense of humor, her candor and her openness, how direct she was and without pretense, and how, unlike everyone else in our family, she was not always judging everybody all the time. I learned the other side of her. I came to love her.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Years later my Aunty Betty went back to church, where she was the only Democrat, because it was the very conservative church of her childhood, which meant that she had to forgive those people of all their years of judging her. She had to believe in her own life, and I think she could do that because she believed in Jesus.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">She died a few years ago, and I am still proud of her. To me, she’s an example of what St. Paul says,<i> that suffering produces endurance, and endurance character, and character hope, and hope does not disappoint us, for God’s love has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.</i></span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-38502285309780271832020-03-06T07:45:00.001-05:002020-03-06T07:45:11.522-05:00March 8, Lent 2: Jesus Talks to Nicodemus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Genesis 12:1-4a, Psalm 121, Romans 4:1-5, 13-17, John 3:1-17</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The four gospels are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The first three are a trio, and John is a soloist.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I believe that Matthew was written first, and it is the basic gospel, the one that sings the melody that the others depend upon, and the others know that we have Matthew already. But then Mark adds his own sharp, percussive harmonies. And Luke adds his own elegant harmonies with lovely extra flourishes. Finally John takes their music and completely redoes it, with much new music of his own.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">John was able to be this soloist because he was Our Lord’s intimate friend, an eyewitness, who had many years to think about what Jesus said. John condensed his memories into a sequence of encounters with specific people, named and unnamed, a succession of conversations developing a set of metaphors: word, voice, light, darkness, water, wind, spirit, life, birth, body, blood, flesh, vine, house, abode, abiding. The metaphors evolve in interweaving through the successive conversations.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">For the next four Sundays of Lent we’re getting four of those encounters. Today it’s with Nicodemus, next week the woman at the well, Lent 4 is the man born blind, and Lent 5 is Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. To give us these lessons from John, the lectionary has interrupted our weekly reading of Matthew. The lectionary is a three-year cycle. Year A is Matthew, year B is Mark, and year C is Luke, with John inserted at the high points all three years. If I were Matthew I might be a little put out, because his account has lots of passages appropriate to Lent, but there you have it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In this story about Nicodemus, the words of Jesus are suggestive and ambiguous and as hard to pin down as the wind. There’s wordplay in what Jesus says, and his words have double meanings.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Is it <i>“born from above”</i> or <i>“born again”</i>? The Greek can be taken either way, and maybe the Lord Jesus means both. Does Jesus mean the<i> “wind”</i> or does he mean the <i>“spirit,”</i> the <i>“breath”</i>? Or both? And does he mean <i>“birth”</i> or <i>“generation”</i>?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And what does it mean to be <i>“born of water and the spirit”</i>? You got born after your mother’s water broke and then you breathed your first breath. Is the water for the womb of your mother, and the spirit for the breath of God? Or is this a metaphor for baptism? It’s the Gospel of John, we can’t pin it down, or we’ll end up as frustrated as Nicodemus was.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I was that frustrated this week. I have written a dozen sermons on this passage in my career, and I wrote three more this week. This one is the third. On Tuesday I scrapped the first one and on Wednesday I scrapped the second one. In some desperation I went to the books in my study for help, and there, lying on top of my commentaries, was a photocopy of an article from the <i>Scottish Journal of Theology</i> that I had no memory of, by a David F. Ford, whose name I did not recognize. And it was a revelation.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Whether it was a coincidence or it was delivered to me by the owl from Harry Potter or by the wind of the Holy Spirit I will let you decide. But it showed me something I had been missing all this time, that all my commentators missed, that the translation in our lectionary inserts misses, and that Nicodemus missed. From right off, Jesus is talking about himself. And to get that, I have to translate it more closely than the insert does.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">What Jesus says is this: <i>“Amen, amen, I’m telling you, unless someone is born from above, he can’t see the kingdom of God.”</i> Well, who can? Jesus can, he is the one born from above, he is the only one who can see the kingdom of God. Of course Nicodemus can’t see the kingdom of God, it’s not his fault, he’s not born from above, he does not come from heaven, he is not born of God. Only Jesus is. Do not be hard on Nicodemus for not getting it, it takes the whole rest of John’s Gospel for anyone to get it, it takes nineteen more chapters for John to develop his metaphors.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Then Jesus repeats it with more intensity: <i>“Amen, amen, unless someone is born of water and the spirit, he is not able to enter into the kingdom of God.”</i> Again, Jesus can, and so far only Jesus can. He’s the one who is in the kingdom of God, and the kingdom is personified in him. He’s the one who is born of water and the spirit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">First, he is born of the water of Mary’s womb, as you already know from Luke, from her womb on which the Holy Spirit descended to conceive him there, without the sexual involvement of any man, without the will of the flesh, but born of God.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And second, from the water of baptism, as you already know from Matthew, the Jordan River where the Spirit came down upon him and the voice from heaven said, You are my son. Jesus is the one who was born of water and the spirit, doubly so.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Then Jesus brings it back to Nicodemus. He says, <i>“Don’t be amazed when I tell you that you must be born from above, that all of you must be born from the spirit!”</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>“How can these things be!”</i> says Nicodemus. Then Jesus launches into his long speech about what he knows and what he’s seen, and only he, because he’s come from heaven, because he’s come from God. And that’s when he makes a shift in his language. He shifts from speaking of the kingdom of God to speaking of <i>eternal life</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You already know about the kingdom of God from the trio of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but now in the solo of John, Jesus redefines the kingdom of God as <i>“life,”</i> eternal life, life in his name, abundant life, a life of flesh and blood, of eating and drinking, of water turned to wine, of healing and vision and joy, the life of the Spirit of God come down to earth, and taking flesh, and dwelling among us, because <i>God so loved the world, and God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world but that the world through him might be saved</i>, the life of the world. Even St. Paul says that we <i>inherit the world.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Nicodemus came to Jesus because he wanted Jesus to help the other decent Pharisees reclaim the kingdom of God for Israel. And what Jesus offers instead is life for the whole world. Nicodemus is a good man, with good religious sensibilities, and what he wants from Jesus is something particular for his religion, but Jesus makes it universal, and organic, and as basic and secular as life itself—life, that peculiar power that we share with animals and plants and debatably with viruses. He offers not religion but life within the world. He makes it universal and also personal and individual.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This story is about God’s love, but there’s also resistance in it. Nicodemus is a good man, but he encounters resistance in Jesus. He’s a religious man, responsible, loyal, conscientious, educated, supporting institutions, doing the best for his tradition, yet also willing to cross boundaries, and seeking fairness. Later in the story John tells us that Nicodemus defended Jesus before the other Pharisees, and when Jesus died, Nicodemus donated a great amount of spices for his tomb. He’s a sympathetic character, but he stays in the middle, he stays in-between, he won’t go all the way. Is he like me?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">What’s wrong with my birth the way I am? Why do I have to be born again? Doesn’t God love me the way I am, if God so loves the world? If God so loves the world, and if we inherit the world, then why do I have to be born from above? Why do I feel this resistance in the words of God?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The resistance is the gift of Lent. The resistance is not the whole story, but that you take your time with the resistance is the purpose of Lent, and take your place with Nicodemus in the middle and in-between, unfinished, unborn, still in the womb.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You are in the dark and not yet ready for the light, and shy of your exposure. When Jesus meets you, you hesitate. Will you defend your framework that limits what you want God to do? Can you more fully imagine and embrace God’s radical and surprising initiatives? Can you be more open to the fresh starts of the moving of the Spirit? Is your desire utterly for the kingdom of God, for birth from above, for life in his name, eternal life, God’s love and light, or for only some of that? Are you in this for religion with safe boundaries? Are you in this to be good, or are you in this for God? Hesitate, breathe, consider. The gift of the resistance is to set you back a bit to consider all such things, and that’s the gift of Lent.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I am inviting you to your own Virgin Birth. You are the virgin mother of your being born again. There is no father, just the Holy Spirit in you to conceive your new self in you. From God’s Spirit you are born from above, and from yourself you are born again. Your new birth is the child of yourself. You are to love your new self, as fragile and unsteady and needy as it may be, and your new self is to love your old self—not hate you, nor be ashamed of you, but love your silly self. All these birth metaphors are love metaphors. All these metaphors are the exploration of God’s love.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved</i>.<br />
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I need to credit David F. Ford (2013), "Meeting Nicodemus: A Case Study in Daring Theological Interpretation,"<i> Scottish Journal of Theology</i>, 66, issue 01, February 2013, pp. 1-17.Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-87136362381062131532020-02-28T09:37:00.000-05:002020-02-28T11:11:14.961-05:00March 1, Lent 1: Jesus Talks to the Devil<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-78, Psalm 32, Romans 5:12-19, Matthew 4:1-11</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">In the Genesis story, I take the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as the gift of God for human freedom. The freedom was that the man and the woman were able to say No to good food—a freedom from nature that other animals do not exercise.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Every time they walked past that tree, by being able to say No to that good food, the two of them were maintaining their enjoyment of God’s gift to them of freedom from nature. They were able to maintain their freedom and their special status among the creatures by remembering God’s Word to them every time they walked past that tree. They got their freedom and, indeed, their distinctive humanity, from their loyalty to God’s Word.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">I do not take the serpent as the devil in disguise. The serpent rather gives voice to the attraction of the natural world, to the appeal of creation in its compelling possibility. It is the lure of the flesh, the draw of our appetites, all innocent, that we could simply satisfy if we were just ordinary animals. But God has called our species to freedom, for that special relationship with God, for which we must resist the voice of the inevitable temptation of the natural world with its naive concupiscence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">So the Genesis story is always true. The point is not whether it actually happened, but that it’s always true. It’s paradigmatic, we keep repeating it. In the garden it was a serpent, today it is economic growth, or political necessity, or the free market, or sexual freedom, whatever, the “why not” of the world. It is beguiling and attractive, reasonable and convincing. It never actually tells a lie, just never the whole truth.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Genesis story is always true because we cannot sort out good and evil from only within the world. It can’t be done. The only way to sort out good and evil is by reference to something outside the world, by reference to the Word of God, by reference to the will of God.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The Genesis story was true for Jesus. He had to sort out what was good and evil in his life, and even Jesus could not do it from within himself, he too had to sort it out by reference to the Word of God. Even Jesus. Our gospel story takes place just after his baptism, when that voice from heaven had called him the <i>“Son of God.”</i> Well, now what? How shall he figure out how to be the Son of God? Into a garden to contemplate? No, into the wilderness to fast and pray, in the desert to seek the will of God, and how to do this thing that no one had ever done before.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">These temptations were not three easy choices. The temptations that most compel us are not to do what is sinful or evil, but to choose the wrong good, what might be good in other situations. Had Jesus not had these thoughts himself? If he is the Son of God, should he not act like a god? Twice the devil dares him to: “<i>If you’re the Son of God, </i>then act like it. Why not use your superpower? Just as your Father did for the Israelites in the wilderness, miraculous manna and water from a rock! If you saw five thousand hungry people and you had only five loaves and two fishes, wouldn’t you do a miracle?” The devil only asks him what we pray to him ourselves. “Use your power, O Son of God. We are suffering, O Lord, use your power, relieve our suffering.” What could be wrong with that?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">As Jesus determines how to be the Son of God, he makes two choices. He will not do miracles to save himself, and he will not break the laws of nature to prove himself. Yes, he will do miracles, but he will prove himself as the Son of God by human obedience, by faithfulness to the Word of God, even at great cost. His superpower is his moral power, not in being superhuman or invulnerable, but in his faithfulness. So Jesus answers, <i>“A human being does not live by bread alone—a fully-human human-being, like me—but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.”</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">By refusing the first temptation he brings on the second. “Oh, every word of God? Well, how about this one: <i>it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you.’</i> Live by that word, Jesus, give yourself in to God’s incredible promises, I dare you. Why aren’t you jumping? Do you doubt the promise of your Father to rescue you?” Where is your God? Where is your faith?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This test is artificial, even if it uses scripture verses. This is not a true-to-life example of how you have to put your trust in God. It’s not for getting rescued whenever you’re in a scrape or for having a nice and easy life. God’s special care for you has the specific purpose of enhancing your mission, it is your incentive to risk a life of love and service, the love and service that might well <i>increase </i>your suffering! The purpose of God’s special care for you is to get you through the suffering that is the by-product of your mission, not to keep you comfortable.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Jesus does not accept this artificial test. Three years later, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he will pass a harder test in the same subject. And he will take his final exam upon the cross, and enter the cold, dark tunnel of death instead of his Father’s warm and loving care. He will trust in a silent and distant God without resorting to his superpower. He will submit to all that we endure, and he will ask of God no miracle to exempt him from the burden of ordinary human existence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Our Lord’s refusal of the second temptation brings on the third. “All right then, so you’re not going to resort to your superpower, you’re going keep yourself within the confines of nature, you’re going to be righteous within the limitations of humanity. Okay, that means you’re going to lose. Because our side has the power, we are in control. We will beat you and break you, and you won’t have a chance. But look, why not be realistic and work with the powers of the world? I’ll even make you Number Two, I’ll let you run the whole thing, like Joseph did in Egypt. He was Number Two to Pharaoh. That’s how God used him to save his people. I’ll be Pharaoh, you be Joseph.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">What would this have looked like? Jesus cutting deals with the Romans and the Sadducees? Or meeting halfway the scribes and Pharisees? Casting out some demons here but tolerating bondage over there? The devil represents the powers and principalities that effectively control the world. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The devil is not a voice from hell, he doesn’t even live in hell. In the Bible the devil dwells upon the surface of the ground. The devil represents the powers of the world, the natural temptation of its possibilities, like the serpent in the garden, only no longer naive and innocent, but now corrupted by all the human sin and evil since Adam. It now has the pride of its misery, sophisticated doubt and well-developed deconstruction, angry ingenuity and bitter independence. It seems more real. Compared to this, obedience seems unglamourous, unheroic, unattractive. It feels that way to me. I don’t want to be out of it with the rest of the world. I want to get along, and I want to be included.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">What are your temptations? Well, what’s your mission? You will be tempted there. Or this: what can’t you live without? What do you depend on? What do you need in order to be happy? What commitments have you made, what vows to yourself? What are you trying to demonstrate with your life? What are you trying to prove? Can you stop all that? Be nothing? Be nobody? Be a failure? Let go. Give up. Surrender. What does that feel like? What have you got left?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This Lenten season I’m not asking you to be more loving, or more obedient, or do more mission and service. I’m asking you to do less, to be less, and be still. I’m inviting you to listen to your temptations. Not to obey them but to learn from them. When you give in to them you silence them, you can’t hear all they have to tell you, nor can you learn about yourself from their pull on you. Don’t be afraid of your temptations, so that you feel you must give in to them, rather resist them in order to keep on hearing them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Feel your hunger, keep feeling it, and discover how hungry you are and all you hunger for. Feel your thirst, don’t satisfy it, don’t fear it either, as if you must give in to it. Feel your fear, don’t fear your fear, and don’t give in to it in order to get rid of it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Yes, let your temptations be your guide. Let them show you the tunnel you must enter and keep on going through. The tunnel is Lent. At the other end of it is Easter. The journey through the tunnel is how you learn the will of God, the Word of God, it’s how you recover your power for being loving and obedient. Don’t rush it. For the next five Sundays don’t try to be happy, nor solve the problems of our suffering, but sit with your hunger and thirst and fear, and not be afraid of them, and I invite you to believe that even way down here it is God’s love that is carrying us.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-72337843428436114892020-02-13T15:12:00.003-05:002020-02-13T15:12:38.880-05:00February 16, Epiphany 6, A Hard Talk with Jesus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Psalm 119:1-8, 1 Corinthians 3:1-9, Matthew 5:21-37<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Dear Lord Jesus, you’re making it hard. We want to hear you, we want to follow you, but when you say things like this you make it hard. We like so much else that you say in the Sermon on the Mount, and then you say things like this. It’s good we got this lesson on the Sunday of school break.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Lord Jesus, I thought I understood you last week, in the Gospel lesson, with the verses right before this morning’s lesson, when you said that <i>unless our righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees we’ll never enter the Kingdom of Heaven, </i>I figured you meant a different kind of righteousness, a kind not measured by rules and regulations, but today you make it even stricter and more rigorous than the scribes and Pharisees. At least their regulations made some allowances.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Lord Jesus, I don’t want to go back to those days of the church making divorced and remarried people feel guilty and excluded. I know this was the practice of the church for most of history, and it still is for Roman Catholics, but I don’t want to go back there as a pastor. Yes, I want to be faithful as a preacher, but you make it hard when you say things like this.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I could appeal to the context and say that marriage was different back then. It wasn’t about vows between two lovers, but an exchange of property, of whom the bride belonged to and the goods and the kids. It was a contract between two men, the father and the groom, in which the woman had no say. And I could point out that when a woman with no say ends up committing adultery you make it totally the man’s fault, not the woman’s. But that also negates the woman’s agency, which is not so good, and then in other places in the gospels you do implicate the woman as well.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You make it hard when you say that if I call someone a <i>fool</i>, I’m in for hell. I could say that you didn’t actually say “<i>hell</i>,” and the translation is wrong, and what you really said was “<i>gehenna</i>,” which does not mean eternal punishment. It’s the garbage dump of Jerusalem, in which a dead body would get consumed by the constant fire, so this is your metaphor for a very shameful death. I’m sure that when you say to cut off my right hand or cut out my right eye and throw it in the dump, it is an exaggerated metaphor. But still, just being angry with my brother is morally tantamount to murder?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You make it hard with what you say about committing adultery in my heart. I remember how much trouble President Jimmy Carter got in from that interview in <i>Playboy Magazine</i> when he confessed to having committed adultery in his heart. Should I feel guilty about my feelings of sexual attraction? I could say that comparing Presidents reveals the value in what you say here, Lord Jesus, that once we give free rein to these feelings we end up with a self-admitted, boasting sexual predator in the White House.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And I could point out that once again the Lord Jesus blames the male, and not the woman. It’s not about how the woman dresses but how the man eyes her, which in terms of women’s rights is very advanced, but still, even when we keep our sexual feelings tight inside, should we feel guilty when we have them? Are we then all adulterers? Lord Jesus, you make it very hard. Can I believe you when you call this Good News, and that you don’t intend to impose on us some new legalism?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I get what the scribes and Pharisees were doing with their legalistic righteousness. They were trying to keep the people pure, and maintain a moral fence between them and the dominant Roman culture of casual exploitation and big money and violence, in which the powerful could manipulate the laws for their own interests and their friends, and take whatever sex they wanted, and Caesar could practice adultery and corruption with impunity. We have this today, so I can understand the scribes and Pharisees.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But their system of righteousness could achieve no more than social control, and only deal with external actions, and it therefor consisted of regulations and exemptions. It was righteousness as social management, to keep holding on, until the Kingdom of Heaven might someday return.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But you told them, Lord Jesus, that the Kingdom of Heaven is already among us when you are with us. So you must mean that your difficult message is for our salvation, for our comfort and our liberation. Obedience, yes, holiness, yes, devotion and challenge, yes, a higher standard of ethics and bearing our crosses and self-examination, yes, yes, yes, but also for comfort. You mean this to save us, to help us. And in the middle of your Kingdom you offer us yourself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">So, then, Lord Jesus, I imagine myself standing before you, and as you look at me, slowly I look back at myself. I lower my head, I close my eyes, I touch my chest, I breathe. <i>Yes, Yes, and No, No.</i> Yes, and No. Why isn’t that always enough? Why do I feel the need to make an oath? What is my general nervousness or my fear inside that requires me to say more than just a simple Yes or No? Why do I have to amplify my words to make myself believable, and why do I need to electrify my speech to make me impressive? Is this just a matter of rhetoric, or style, or class, or even maturity, or is it more ethical than that, a matter of holiness, that I don’t have to amplify my speech?</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Why am I sexually restless? What does my eye keep looking for? What from myself am I projecting? What do I crave that I imagine someone else will satisfy? What is empty in me and continually unsatisfied? Is it also from an inner emptiness that I insult other people? What do I get out of putting other people down, of making them feel bad, of making sure other people know they’re wrong?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I do like social control. I do like laws and regulations. I don’t like people parking in the bike lane or making u-turns in the street, which is when I call them jerks. I like not to split infinitives. I like to be right and I like my people to get things right. But I know that getting things right is not what you mean by righteousness, Lord Jesus.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">One of the hardest things you say here is that when I’m offering my gift at the altar, and I might remember that someone I’m close to has something against me, you want me to put my gift down, and go be reconciled to that person, and then come back and offer my gift. That’s hard. It’s always on me? Shouldn’t they be responsible to come to me? This is an invitation to all kinds of projection. My therapist would not agree with you. I’m going to be running around the country trying to make up to people and never get back to church. What are you asking of me, O Lord?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">One of our elders pointed to this verse at our meeting on Tuesday night and saw Good News in it. I forget exactly how he said it, but my take on it is that it’s about the same projecting energy, but channeled in love to your neighbor instead of anger or insult or lust or adultery. You desire that person, but your desire is not to put that person beneath you socially or physically but above you. So maybe this is another way of illustrating how you love your neighbor as yourself.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Lord Jesus, is that what you mean by all this, that you are giving illustrations of what it looks like and extreme examples of what it feels like for me to love my neighbor as myself? Is the law of love such a challenging law that I need to hear you lay it out like this? Is this loving kind of righteousness so contradictory to my flesh that it feels like chemotherapy? Like plucking out my eye? Is this the kind of love I have to end my sermon on this week? How hard is love? Why is love so hard?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Lord Jesus, if your Kingdom has come then you are my judge. I get that. You judge me by waiting on me to judge myself. You examine me by my use of your words by which I examine myself. You call me to truth in my heart and you wait for me to explore that truth. When I protest with my allowances and plead my exemptions, you wait for me to be done with them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Lord Jesus, I can feel this as your strange strategy for my freedom, mostly from myself. I can sense this as your method for my choosing life, life for myself and life for the world. I can feel this as your alarming way of converting me in how I love myself, that I can say No to myself and also Yes to myself, and love myself in such a way that I can also say Yes to my neighbor and love my neighbor as you love me. Lord Jesus, I want to believe that this is all about your love.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-37873833128830035542020-02-06T11:53:00.002-05:002020-02-06T11:53:35.169-05:00February 9, Epiphany 5: Salt and Light<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Isaiah 58:1-12, Psalm 112, 1 Corinthians 2:1-16, Matthew 5:13-20</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">What shall we do with these lessons? How shall we understand them? I’m going to take the Isaiah lesson first, and then the Gospel lesson, and then say just a few words about First Corinthians.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">We start with the prophet Isaiah, and we hear him rebuke his people. He says that if they want their worship to be true to God they have to match it with a communal ethic of justice and generosity; they have to express their devotion with an outward energy of sharing their blessings. Otherwise don’t bother God. Your fasting is useless unless you address injustice in the world. Look after the poor, and your light will rise like the dawn. Do that, and God will be present when you call on God.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And then in the Gospel we hear the Lord Jesus saying something similar. He calls on his people to the salt of the earth and the light of the world. This was not some general ideal but a challenge in the spirit of Isaiah. He was telling his people that they had a mission that had an outward purpose beyond themselves. Salt is for using, not for keeping packed up by itself. Your light is for the world, not for you to keep under a basket to protect its flame from blowing out. You are a people chosen by God for the mission of demonstrating God’s mercy and justice to the other nations of the world. You are a city on a hill, unable to be hidden, where the nations will stream to learn God’s law.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But God’s people were refusing this vocation in both Isaiah’s time and Jesus’ time. Of course there were many individual Jews who were devout and generous, but the nation as a whole was taking an inward course of self-preservation. Their take was not to bring God’s light to the world but that God should swiftly judge the Gentiles with righteous retribution and revenge. You can understand their stance, considering the casual brutality of the Roman Empire upon them. But even if it was understandable, it was still unfaithful to their special calling and their mission.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The Lord Jesus was appealing to his people to reclaim their special mission while there was still time. Here he was, the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, right there with him, and the time had come that the law and the prophets were pointing to, the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom is now!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The scribes and Pharisees don’t believe it. For them the Kingdom of Heaven was not at hand. It was far off, and God would not send it unless the nation first proved its worthiness by a rigorous, legalistic righteousness. Their strategy was the opposite of Jesus’. Circle the wagons, build the walls, close the gates, preserve, protect. Preserve our salt and keep it in a jar. Protect our flame within a basket. Forget about justice in the world, our only mission is to keep ourselves pure so that someday God will save us and reward us by punishing our enemies.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The Lord Jesus is contesting this. So he’s got his positive teaching and his negative teaching. The positive is for the mission rightly understood, and the negative is against the mission as taught and practiced by the scribes and Pharisees. He has to say, No, that’s not the purpose of God’s law, to build a wall around yourselves. The purpose of God’s law is for the life of the world. He has to say, No, I’m not against the law, I’m against the paranoid application of the law. We have to apply the law in mission for the world, we have to apply it in ways of generosity for the nations and justice for the poor. That’s how God will bless us, just by our doing that, and I’m calling us to do that, now.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In one sense, Jesus’ call was unsuccessful. His summons did not sway the leadership. The people in the leading towns of Galilee resisted his challenge. But for himself the Lord Jesus followed his own program. He was the salt in the culture around him. He was the light. He became the city on a hill that could not be hid, he embodied what Jerusalem was meant to be as he drew all nations to himself. His teaching was his own agenda, and he lived out what he preached.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And yet he was not successful, when the people that he preached to eventually rejected him. The powers put him out. Would they have done that if they were wise to what they were doing, that in condemning him they condemned themselves, and in defeating him they spelled their own defeat?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The powers were not wise to it, but after his death and resurrection his disciples saw it, and St. Paul wrote of it in our second lesson, that there was a greater power than the powers of the world and a deeper wisdom than the wisdom of the world. He saw that true power comes into the world in the weakness of the gospel of Christ and the deepest wisdom is the foolishness of him crucified. He also saw that the Holy Spirit was using this gospel to bring the law and the prophets out into the world to fulfill their mission of justice, healing, and peace.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">We have this mission too. And shall we express it as salt or as light? Blending in or standing out? Mercy or justice? Sheltering the poor or contesting against poverty? Feeding the hungry or fighting for a just economy? Cooking or marching? Serving or protesting? Embracing or advocating? Priestly or prophetic? Salt or light? Both, of course. Our mission means both blending in and standing out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Sometimes one thing can be both, depending on who is judging it. Nineteen years ago the Consistory decided to declare ourselves as fully open and affirming on sexual orientation. Soon I heard criticism of this by some of my colleagues who said that we were just trying to blend in with the liberal social ethics of Park Slope. Well, if that were the case we would just stop naming Jesus Christ as Lord, and him crucified, which is the really weird thing to be doing in Park Slope, so I did not bother to defend what we had done. And at the same time we were taking a stand within our denomination that has been a costly one for us. So I would say we were both salt and light.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Yesterday Steve Lappert led his group of volunteers in cooking for CHiPS, as he’s been doing for years. That is both salt and light. It’s salt for the people who are being fed, and it’s light for the rest of us in this congregation. It’s salt for the hungry and light for the church. Our summer respite shelter is salt for our guests and light for us who serve. Letting James sleep on our front stoop is salt for him and light for our community, as some of our neighbors tell me they don’t like it that he’s there, and others tell me that it’s a real credit to our church and what we stand for.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">It’s not like we have some grand strategy. It’s not that we have this great wisdom of how to deal with homeless men or solve the problems of hunger, it’s more like all we know is Jesus Christ and him crucified, and that’s enough to tell us how to treat the man on our stoop. And if the prophecy of Isaiah is right, that yields a kind of righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">It’s a responsive kind of righteousness, even a kind of giving-in. It’s not that we are trying build the Kingdom of God, it’s rather that the Kingdom of God is already here, on our stoop, and in our kitchen, and in the whole new world of sexual orientation and gender identity. It’s a receptive righteousness and therefore a risky righteousness, which is why it takes faith and hope and love to do it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The mission is a challenge and it’s also fulfilling. It’s an obligation that’s a blessing. It’s always a challenge for any congregation, and we’re always tempted to retreat from it towards preservation and protection. But this congregation is blessed with leaders who get the mission, you are blessed with people who welcome its challenge and sign up for its obligations.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You have elected elders and deacons who get the mission, and you will install them onto consistory to keep this congregation on mission for the next three years. They will do that. You are blessed, Old First, you are blessed. You are blessed because God loves you, so you love them as a way of loving God back.</span><br />
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(Disclosure: this sermon restates and quotes the interpretation of N. T. Wright, particularly in his Twelve Months of Sundays: Reflections on Bible Readings, Year A, SPCK, p. 28.)<br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-33716048203444696922020-01-31T08:44:00.001-05:002020-01-31T08:44:41.066-05:00February 2, The Presentation: The Consolation and the Piercing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Malachi 3:1-4, Psalm 84, Hebrews 2:14-18, Luke 2:22-40</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>“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.”</i> 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In that time the characters sang four new songs, the new birth songs, the Canticles of Luke: the <i>Magnificat </i>by Mary, the <i>Benedictus </i>by Zechariah, the <i>Gloria in Excelsis</i> of the angels to the shepherds, and now the final one, the <i>Nunc Dimittis,</i> the Song of Simeon.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">These four canticles have come to frame the day in the tradition of daily prayer. At Morning Prayer you say the <i>Benedictus</i>, at Midday Eucharist the <i>Gloria</i>, at Evening Prayer the <i>Magnificat</i>, and at Compline, at bedtime, the <i>Nunc Dimittis</i>. 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>“Now let go your slave, Master,</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>by your word, in peace,</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>as my eyes have seen your salvation,</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>that you prepared in the presence of all peoples,</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>a light for revelation to nations,</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>and glory to your people Israel.”</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>“glory of Israel”</i> was to put him inside God’s own glory. And to call him “<i>a light for revelation to nations”</i> was to open up new vistas with the Gentiles that they could hardly yet imagine.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>falling and rising</i> and the <i>sword</i>, 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>rising opposition </i>to her son. She will see the division of her people on his account and even her own family. She will see the <i>dark thoughts of many revealed</i> because of him. And she will watch him being killed and the <i>piercing </i>of his side. The are dark powers out there that she cannot save him from.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The <i>piercing </i>and the <i>consolation</i>, 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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>the devil</i>, which, in that epistle’s theology, <i>has the power of death.</i> Maybe so. And in that epistle’s theology, the so-called “<i>atonement</i>” is God’s moral exchange of good and evil that frees us from <i>our slavery to the fear of death</i>. 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-35446410061749495772020-01-26T07:18:00.001-05:002020-01-26T07:18:34.838-05:00January 26, Epiphany 3: The Beginning of Disruption<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Isaiah 9:1-4, Psalm 27:1, 5-13, I Corinthians 1:10-18, Matthew 4:12-23</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Jesus takes up the announcement that was made first by John the Baptist: <i>“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”</i> But unlike John the Lord Jesus does not wait for people to come to him. He goes fishing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">He catches Simon and Andrew, and he challenges them: <i>“I will make you fishers of people.” </i>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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">When Jesus repeats the announcement of John the Baptist he shifts the meaning, and stresses more the second part: <i>“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” </i>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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>the light that shines in the darkness</i>. 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Jesus says, <i>“Follow me.”</i> 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.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-39899080234316344082020-01-16T08:16:00.000-05:002020-01-17T08:24:55.339-05:00January 19, 2 Epiphany: The Beginning of Fellowship<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Isaiah 49:1-7, Psalm 40:1-12, I Corinthians 1:1-9, John 1:29-42</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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, <i>“Behold the lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. This is he before whose coming I had been speaking of.”</i> Then John turns towards us, the audience, and he breaks the fourth wall, and testifies to us: <i>“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.”</i> The scene ends, they all exit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Next scene, the next morning. Stage left, enters John, with two disciples, Andrew and Philip. Stage right, enters Jesus. John points. <i>“Behold the lamb of God.”</i> 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: <i>“What are you looking for?”</i> They say, <i>“Rabbi, where are you abiding?”</i> (The word “abiding” is an important word all through the Gospel of John.) Jesus says,<i> “Come and see.”</i> Jesus turns up stage, they follow him, and on a carpet there he sits down, and they do too, and they talk.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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, <i>“We have found the Messiah.”</i> He leads his brother over to Jesus, but Jesus speaks first: <i>“You are Simon, son of John. You are to be called Cephas.”</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">That’s our little drama for today. Let me unfold it by asking questions.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“O Lamb of God that takest away the sins of the world.” <i>“Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi.”</i> 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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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, <i>“the sin of the world?”</i> 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When Jesus said his very first words to Andrew and Phillip, <i>What are you looking for,</i> 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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">When somebody asks you directly, <i>What are you looking for,</i> 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, <i>what are you looking for?</i> Do you have to know, or can you be uncertain, open: “Tell me what I am looking for!”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">St. John unfolds the <i>fellowship of Jesus</i>. Is that what we’re supposed to have? In the last verse of our reading from First Corinthians St. Paul says that <i>you have that fellowship</i>. But how can you have the fellowship of someone who is so distant from you in time and space?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>strengthen and enrich you in every way.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>call on the name of Jesus Christ</i>, 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">Not because you achieve it but because God comes to you to have fellowship with you. God is the lamb who comes into the world. I invite you to believe that God is the dove, God is the dove who comes upon little Spiro Alzos-Benke, and on you, that God is the dove because God is love.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-30608805777368034782020-01-11T15:05:00.001-05:002020-01-11T15:05:41.754-05:00January 12, 1 Epiphany: Baptism, Beginning of Enlightenment<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Isaiah 42:1-9, Psalm 29, Acts 10:34-43, Matthew 3:13-17</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>“the eyes of your hearts enlightened,”</i> as we said last week. But my main take-home is even less pragmatic, and it’s just your picture of Jesus.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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! <i>“A bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.”</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And here comes the new Joshua, to be baptized. No wonder John wants to be baptized by him.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">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, <i>“This is my Son, my beloved, in whom I am well pleased.”</i> That’s what he needed to know, and this was when he knew it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-32057684016100207872020-01-02T08:19:00.000-05:002020-01-02T08:19:13.774-05:00January 5, Christmas 2, The Beginning of Fulfillment<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Jeremiah 31:7-14, Psalm 84, Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a, Matthew 2:13-15, 19-23</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>him </i>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.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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. <i>“Out of Egypt have I called my son.” </i>The long history of Israel begins its fulfillment in this Jesus boy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>“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.” </i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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 t<i>he immeasurable greatness of his power</i>. 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">To see your way you need <i>enlightenment </i>from the<i> Spirit of wisdom and revelation</i>. You need the <i>eyes of your hearts enlightened</i>. 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>discern what is the immeasurable greatness of his power to you who believe</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2020, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-7684511782124258592019-12-29T07:47:00.000-05:002019-12-29T07:47:06.607-05:00December 29, 1 Christmas, "In the Beginning Was the Word."<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Isaiah 61:10-62:3, Psalm 147, Galatians 3:23-26, 4:4-7, John 1:1-18</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>“the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.”</i> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">He does so audaciously. <i>“In the beginning was the Word.”</i> 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, <i>B’reshit</i>, “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, <i>“Let there be light”</i> became the light.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">St. John says that <i>“the true light, who enlightens every person, was coming into the world.”</i> 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But his coming was unwelcome. St. John writes that <i>“he came to his own, and his own people received him not.”</i> 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">St. Paul makes a similar claim in Galatians: <i>But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law.</i> 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, <i>and of his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace,</i> the grace of the Gospel upon the grace of the Torah.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">He was f<i>ull of grace and truth</i>. 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And here’s a next step that both St. Paul and St. John take: God became the child of Mary so that we become <i>children of God</i>. He by nature and we by <i>adoption</i>, adoption as the benefit of liberation and <i>redemption</i>. 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">That’s the next step, the Holy Spirit. From Galatians: <i>“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.”</i> 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, <i>grace upon grace</i>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You are adopted. <i>You have a new name</i>. And now at last we can turn to our first lesson, Isaiah: You have <i>a new name</i> <i>that he gives you.</i> And, having come naked out of your slavery you put on the new clothes that he gives you, clothes for you to rejoice in, <i>the garments of salvation, the robe of righteousness, the garland of a bridegroom and the jewelry of a bride.</i> Jewelry is a present for lovers. The adopted children get jewelry because they are loved the same as the firstborn son.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">This whole doctrine of the Incarnation is a doctrine of love. The strategy of the Incarnation is a strategy of love. The birth of the Son of God reveals that the heart of God is a heart of love. <i>No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.</i> In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh, to make real to you the love of God for you.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-70924378649669006532019-12-20T07:58:00.002-05:002019-12-20T08:00:59.270-05:00December 22, Advent 4: The Baby Is the Beginning<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Isaiah 7:10-18, Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18, Romans 1:1-7, Matthew 1:18-25</i><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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!”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">“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.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">The sign that Ahaz got was neither <i>down in Sheol nor up in heaven</i>, 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, <i>Immanuel, God with us</i>. One needs the imagination of belief to even see it as a sign!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>God-with-us</i>. And though the story of <i>God-with-us</i> 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>“the obedience of faith.”</i> Not the possession of faith, but the obedience of faith.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">This obedience of faith calls you to address what you’d rather avoid and go where you fear. In the dream the angel said, <i>“Joseph, fear not to take Mary as your wife.”</i> 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. <i>“Joseph, son of David, fear not!”</i> We are right to admire this quiet man.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>“refuse the evil and choose the good,”</i> 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?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">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.”</span><br />
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<i style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: x-large;">The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call his name, God-with-us</i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">. God saves the world through the soft inside and not from the top, and you must receive God in God’s chosen vulnerability. That’s the sign for your faith. As Joseph will receive Mary in her vulnerability. I’m wondering how it felt for Mary when Joseph somewhat shyly came up to her and said, “I take you, Mary, to be my wedded wife.” Not a typical love story, this one, is it, so full of complications, but a wonderful love story all the same, and a story that carries the love of God for people just like you.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33440633.post-40601493726538774882019-12-12T11:31:00.000-05:002019-12-12T11:31:24.112-05:00December 15, Advent 3: Can You See the Beginning<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Isaiah 35:1-10, Magnificat, James 5:7-10, Matthew 11:2-11<span style="white-space: pre;"> </span></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.” <i>Gáudete, gáudete, gáudete</i>. We’re ready for joy, so why delay us with John the Baptist?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">But the Epistle lesson says, Patience. Don’t rush. James says, <i>Be patient until the coming of the Lord.</i> 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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, <i>to cast down the mighty from their thrones,</i> and in the words of the prophet Isaiah, <i>to come with vengeance, and with terrible recompense, </i>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?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Jesus neither defends himself nor answers directly. <i>“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.”</i> 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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. <i>Gáudete, gáudete!</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Patience does not mean passivity. Our Gradual Hymn uses the Biblical phrase, to <i>“run with patience.”</i> 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.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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, <i>“The smallest (mikroteros) in the kingdom of heaven is greater than me.”</i> I had better make room for their joy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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. <i>“Go and tell John what you hear and see.” </i>He needs your witness, he needs your encouragement.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">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 <i>strengthen your weak hands.</i> If the world is worse than you think, then get up on that highway that runs through it with joy.</span><br />
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<i>Copyright © 2019 by Daniel Meeter, all rights reserved.</i>Old Firsthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02450204955608047437noreply@blogger.com0