Star Words: Grace

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 15:1-10

Every once in a while someone asks you a question that you think you know the answer to, until you actually try to put your answer into words. That’s what happened to me a couple weeks ago when the question “What is grace” came up in Sunday Bible study. As I told you last week, that question was the prompt for this series we’re doing on words we throw around in church a lot without always knowing what they mean.  What is grace? It’s…grace. It just is.

That, of course, is not really a good answer, and it’s an even worse sermon.

I thought a bit about how we use the word grace, not just in church but in life. There but for the grace of God go I, we might say when we see a friend or neighbor going through a rough time – which reminds us that we are not better than them just because things are going better for us, but also might raise some questions about why God’s grace is apparently so selective. Another one I’ve heard a lot these days, largely from women who are trying to hold down full-time jobs and maybe homeschool kids and care for their families and themselves. Give yourself grace: it is a way of reminding each other that imperfection is allowed. Each of those phrases might give us some glimpse into what grace is; neither really encapsulates it.

The most common way I’ve heard grace defined is unmerited favor. And, in fact, every church or denomination in Western Christianity seems to use some version of this definition. Our United Methodist Book of Disciple puts it this way: grace is the undeserved, unmerited, and loving action of God in human existence through the ever-present Holy Spirit.[1] In other words, at its most basic level, grace is simply God’s goodness present and at work in our lives. It is the gift of waking up to a new day, the view of the sunrise out your window and the song of the birds as you sip your morning coffee; it’s the help of friends and neighbors when times are tough; it’s the strength you somehow find in yourself in the midst of adversity and real forgiveness in the face of real wrong; it’s the promise of hope when everything around you is hopeless.

None of those, things that we earn; none of those, things we can buy (except, I guess, the coffee); none of those, things we deserve; all, gifts freely given by a God who loves us.

I suppose that’s why grace is hard to define, because it’s all of those things, and more.

But Methodists also have a pretty distinctive understanding of God’s grace works in a life of faith. I told you last week, when we talked about the word sin, that we had to start there before we could get to grace. That’s not because sin precedes grace; God’s grace is present in creation itself. But to fully understand grace, we have to know that sin is a problem. And we have to know that it’s our problem. We are all created in the image of God, to love and be loved, but we also all have to reckon with the fact that there is this thing in us and outside us and bigger than us that has tarnished that image.

John Wesley, the 18^th century founder of the Methodist movement, believed that God’s grace – that unmerited goodness – is present in our lives even so. He called this prevenient grace. This is grace that goes before us and meets us wherever we go. It’s God’s grace that is always with you, no matter what, before you know it, whether or not you believe in God at all.

When I baptize a baby, for example, we’re testifying to prevenient grace at work. That baby doesn’t know what’s going on. She isn’t able to say that she’s sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. He isn’t able to make a commitment to a new way of life in following Jesus. But we baptize babies and children anyway because we believe that God is already at work in their lives, hopefully with our help, bringing them to the point where they will be able to make that decision for themselves.

Prevenient grace is grace that allows us to finally say yes.

But at some point we do have to say yes, and that brings us to justifying grace.

We could say that it’s the grace that wakes us up. It’s when we suddenly look around and realize we’ve been surrounded by prevenient grace the whole time, and what’s more, we needed it, because we are in fact broken, and we do not want to be. But then we also realize that we are forgiven, and accepted, and that God loves us anyway. In other words, we are justified: through the life, death, and rising of Jesus.

Last week, when I talked about sin, I described it using the example of the sin of racism – how it’s a matter of personal choices made on a day-to-day basis, but also a matter of heart and the unconscious prejudice we often hold there, as well as a matter of forces that are bigger than us. Every preacher knows that to end a sermon on some good news, but I struggled with that last week. It’s easy to talk about grace when it’s forgiveness for something little, a one-time action in the past. But racism isn’t past. What does grace look like when we talk about the sin of racism? Surely it can’t be just a pat on the back for white people, God saying, it’s OK, you mean well, while Black people continued to be murdered in their homes by misinformed police and polling sites are closed and an armed mob storms the Capitol waving Confederate flags and wearing Nazi shirts? That would be what the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer would call cheap grace, grace that makes us feel good but demands nothing from us.

In the last week and a half, whenever I’ve heard pleas for national healing and unity and moving forward, that’s the term that comes to mind: cheap grace. Because we haven’t reckoned with the things that divide us, and there is still no justice for those who are still marginalized in our society.

The same goes for me: how can I ask for grace when I know that I still haven’t fully reckoned with the privilege that comes from generations of whiteness?

But justifying grace isn’t cheap grace. It’s grace found in repentance: not just feeling sorry, but turning away. I am loved, no matter what. And I don’t have to be perfect. But I do have to keep turning.

It’s God’s justifying grace that allows something new to begin. This is the grace of which we sing: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.

In some traditions, this might have been the end of the story, but not for Wesley. In fact, something that Wesley struggled with is the fact that people who called themselves Christian just didn’t seem to be actually better or nicer or more loving than anyone else. Have you heard the quote, “Christians aren’t better people, they’re just forgiven?” Well, Wesley would have hated that quote. Grace, for Wesley, isn’t just a one-time thing; it continues to unfold through the course of our lives helping us grow in love and holiness. He called this sanctifying grace: grace that doesn’t stop at forgiving us, but can actually change us. This is the grace, for example, that allows me to keep doing the work of examining my own privilege and prejudice and to begin saying no; to become someone who embodies justice and reconciliation instead. Not a one-time event, but a lifelong process of allowing myself to be shaped into the person God created me to be.[2]

And maybe that’s a lot. So maybe I’ll go back to the beginning: grace is God’s goodness at work in our lives, in ways we can never earn or buy or deserve. Sometimes it looks like a sunrise and a helping hand from a friend. Sometimes it looks like mercy: God’s unconditional love and complete forgiveness of a wretch like me. Sometimes it looks like growth: God giving me what I need to love my neighbor better, whether that’s a word from the Bible, or the opportunity for ongoing confession, or the experience of God’s presence in bread and wine at communion.

Maybe you’ve heard of a guy named Paul. He was fervent in his beliefs, steadfast in his commitment, clear in his understanding of right and wrong. He went after early followers of Christ. He tracked them down and turned them in and, when one of them was stoned for blasphemy, he held the coats of those who did the stoning. And then one day he saw a bright light and heard a voice from heaven, and nothing was ever the same again.

We heard his words just before I began speaking. “I am what I am by the grace of God,” he said.

And from then on, Paul was God’s person, devoted to God’s work: to sharing the message with others, that they are loved, they are included, they are forgiven, that they can be God’s people, too. That is, he says, not me, but the grace of God working in me. God’s free gift, not one he ever deserved, but one that continued working and unfolding in his life to the very end.

What is grace? It’s God loving you into creation, calling you back when you went astray, calling you God’s own; it’s God forgiving you and calling you into new life and forgiving you again. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. It is by grace that we go out to be God’s people in the world.

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[1] The Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church, 2016, p. 51.

[2] John Wesley, The Scripture Way of Salvation. http://wesley.nnu.edu/john-wesley/the-sermons-of-john-wesley-1872-edition/sermon-43-the-scripture-way-of-salvation/

Star Words: Sin

Scripture: Mark 1:4-11; Romans 7:14-25

A few weeks ago in Bible study, toward the end of our journey through the Bible in a year one of the participants asked a simple question. “What is grace?” she said.

It was a question that caught me momentarily off guard. The person who asked was not a new Christian, someone who had grown up in church. And grace is a word we use all the time in church. And there I was, just bandying it about in Bible study like we all knew what it meant.

When I thought about it, though, I realized I wasn’t that surprised. There are lots of these words we bandy about in church without ever really stopping to define them, and maybe we kind of know what they mean through a process of absorption over time, but maybe also in this process we’ve been left not always knowing what we’re talking about, and maybe with questions we’re afraid to ask.

So I introduce you to our latest sermon series, Star Words, a reference to the “star words” we chose for Epiphany last week to guide us through the coming year. The words we’ll talk about over the next few weeks will be words that are basic to our Christian faith, so basic that perhaps we rarely stop to actually ask what they mean.

We’re going to start today with the word sin. And yes, I realize that sin would make a pretty bad star word; it’s not a word you’re going to hang on your refrigerator all year. But it is, in a way, our starting point: we have to talk about sin before we talk about grace and salvation and all those nicer words. And it is one of those words we bandy about in church, perhaps without being totally clear on what it is. We know it when we see it, or at least we think we do, but that’s not quite the same.

I have to issue a caveat here – and this is a drum I’ve beaten all through our Bible in a Year study – which is that the Bible isn’t written by one person. It’s written by lots of people, sometimes even within the same book, and those people have different opinions and perspectives. And so that is to say that the Bible’s not a dictionary, you don’t just look up sin under the letter s and find a definition. Nevertheless! It is good to have a working definition that can be the starting point for our theological conversation.

On a very basic level, we might say that sin is something bad you do. We could go all the way back to the Garden of Eden here. The first two humans in creation are placed in a garden, and in the center of the garden is a tree, and the tree is bearing fruit. And God says to the two humans, to Adam and Eve, you can eat what you want from any tree in this garden – except that one. And what do they do? They eat it anyway.

The word sin is not used yet in this story, and yet it has informed so much of how we think of sin. Sin, here, is disobedience to God. And sin is that: we see it over and over again in the story of God’s people, how God told them not to worship other gods, but they worshiped other gods. How God told them to be good to the poor, but they exploited the poor instead.

Maybe this is also the basic way we think about sin in our own lives. What is sin? It’s that lie I told; it’s the time I walked past that person in need; it’s the thing I said to my annoying coworker last week; it’s any number of worse things I might have done or left undone. And yes, I’d call all of those things sin, or at least they might be.

And yet to call sin simply a matter of breaking rules, of racking up demerits, sounds a little simplistic, doesn’t it? We can’t even seem to agree on what God’s rules are, or which ones in the Bible still apply to us today. Understanding how God wants us to live is important, but there must be something more to talk about than just a list of rules.

The Hebrew Bible tends to be known by Christians for its rules, but even there, we find an understanding that the problem of sin goes deeper than just bad things we do. In Psalm 51, for example, which we often read on Ash Wednesday, we hear the Psalmist pray: “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” This Psalm is linked in its heading to David and his “taking” of Bathsheba: one very bad decision that, in the story, leads on to a number of other bad decisions as David tries to cover his tracks. This Psalm, though, acknowledges that sinfulness is more than just a collection of bad decisions: it’s something about us, something that has been there since birth. When the Psalmist prays “Create in me a clean heart, O God,” it is not just about forgiveness for one act; it is the whole heart that is the problem and that needs cleansing.

As we get into the New Testament, and especially into the letters of Paul, sin starts to mean something even bigger than that. You heard some of his words from Romans before: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.” For Paul, sin is not just a human tendency but a force both within and outside of ourselves, to which we are beholden. Surely we can relate to this: the feeling of wanting to do one thing, but doing another instead, the feeling that we can’t escape our own brokenness and failing and that of the world around us no matter what we do. For Paul, sin is something that rules and enslaves us.

For me, one of the most useful ways I’ve come to understand sin in all its aspects is through the example of racism. On a basic level, I am a person who can make choices, good or bad, when it comes to how I treat people of different races. I can choose to snub someone of a different race than me, or make offensive jokes, or pass them over for a job I’m hiring for. Those are all sins, and all require repentance.

But I think most of us know racism is more than that. It’s not just a matter of simple good and bad choices. Instead, speaking as a white person in America, those decisions I make each day about how to treat my neighbors are tinged by ideas that I’ve absorbed since I was born about who is good, and who is smart, and who is dangerous. These are not things I’ve been explicitly taught; they’re in the American air we breathe. And so when I make that decision about hiring, maybe I don’t make it based on race – but that’s there, underneath, shaping my opinion of the person whose resume is on my desk. And maybe, when I call the police on someone unfamiliar in my neighborhood, I don’t do it just because they’re brown or Black, but at the same time, if I’m honest, I might have felt less threatened if they were white. This is sin, not just the sin of individual choices, but sin that requires a new heart, cleansed of all bias and prejudice.

And it’s bigger than that, too. Racism isn’t just about me or other people like me, but, in America, it’s a reality in which we live. It is not just inside us but all around us, in the monuments that line our streets, the gross economic inequality that exists between white people and Black or Latino people, our failure to come to terms with our history of slavery and Jim Crow, in policies that make it harder for Black people to vote.  We saw it this week, when an armed mob of mostly white people protesting election results broke into the Capitol waving not just Trump flags, but Confederate flags, and Nazi flags, and wearing shirts that said things like “Camp Auschwitz.” This was not just politics, but white supremacy on display, and still, and still these protestors were met with less resistance from police than many of this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, especially as they first arrived at the Capitol. This is sin, and it’s sin that we all here in America live and move within. And many of us, I’m sure, feel powerless to change it.

And yet the individual choices we make do still matter.  It matters that we call out white supremacy when we see it in our lives or on the news. It matters that we do our parts to change unjust policies. It matters that we choose to interrogate our own assumptions and biases. It matters that we repent when we fail to do these things. Sin is all these things: a matter of choice and a matter of heart and a matter of the forces over which we have little control.

But sin is not the end of the story. For Christians, sin is always met by grace: grace that doesn’t excuse us, but does change us. And yes, grace will be the next word we talk more about next week. As we find our new identity in Christ, who has died and risen, Paul tells us we enter into a new reality, one where sin doesn’t wield its power over us any longer.[1]

At the beginning of the service, we heard the story of Jesus’ baptism, and in a few minutes we will remember ours as well. Before we are baptized, in the United Methodist Church, we take some vows – or, if we are too young, someone takes them on our behalf, and we confirm them later. Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of your sin? We are asked, and we say, we do. Do you accept the freedom and power God gives you to resist evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves? We do. Do you confess Jesus Christ as your Savior, put your whole trust in his grace, and promise to serve him as your Lord? We do. We do.

In our baptism, we say no to sin and yes to grace. No to injustice and oppression and yes to justice and mercy. No to the forces of wickedness and yes to the power of the love of Jesus Christ.

It seems like a good time to remember and renew those vows.

And, in baptism, we find a new beginning. We have all sinned. We have all fallen short of God’s glory. We have all participated in evils larger than ourselves. And the good news is that our sinful, broken selves are met by a God who loves us, gives us new hearts, and empowers us to live, serve, reject, and resist in the reality of grace.

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[1] Interpretation: Romans by Paul J. Achtemeier was helpful to me in my understanding of Paul’s concept of sin and grace as two different realms we live in.

Christmas Eve: The God Who is Already Here

Scripture: Luke 2:1-20

When I was little, Christmas always meant a trip to Philadelphia, where my dad’s family lived. We’d wake up Christmas morning and open presents around my grandmother’s tree. Family members who lived nearby – and they all lived nearby – would stop in throughout the day, and at night we’d gather at my Aunt Kay’s house a few blocks over for dinner and a party. Sometime during that week we would gather with my mom’s family at my Aunt Cindy’s house an hour or so away, exchange gifts and play games with my cousins. We’d always be back at my grandmother’s in Philadelphia for New Year’s Eve, when the whole family would gather again and cook sauerkraut and watch Dick Clark on TV and go outside on the steps at midnight with noisemakers, along with the rest of the block.

As I got older, Christmas changed. We started spending Christmas Eve night at home in Virginia and opening gifts around our own tree in the morning before making the drive to Gram’s. When I was 14, Aunt Kay died, and we started having a smaller holiday meal with my grandmother and uncle. The gatherings with my mom’s side of the family persisted until my grandparents died, but the cousins grew up and had families and went our separate ways. Even then, our trips would only last a day or two; we hadn’t stayed for New Year’s in a while.

In my first few years as a pastor, I had Christmas morning services to attend to, and so I stopped going to Pennsylvania at all. I just couldn’t make it home in time. My parents and brother still went, though, so that left me on my own to make Christmas plans with a friend or boyfriend’s family. When I started seriously dating Jon, we started alternating holidays between our two families, so Christmas was different every year.

I’m sure your Christmases have looked different over the years, too. There are faces that have faded out of the picture and new ones added in; the scenery has changed; old traditions have been lost and new ones begun. I think it helps to remember that in a year when, for many of us, Christmas looks and feels different from ever before. The family get togethers have been abandoned or modified, we’re figuring out how to cook meals for ourselves, there have been no parties with the neighbors, no caroling, no trips to the mall to see Santa. And maybe for some of us there’s some relief in these changes: less family drama to manage, a less frenzied pace to the season, but for many of us, I think, Christmas feels a little deflated this year, too.

This Advent season we talked about waiting, as we always do during Advent, and how we’re not just waiting for the birth of a baby or a day on a calendar, but waiting for the second coming of Christ, and the culmination of God’s Kingdom here on earth. And Advent worked, Advent resonated, Advent made sense, this year, I think, because it’s been a year of waiting – for the curve to trend back down, for a vaccine to come, for this pandemic to be over. But now Christmas is here and we’re still waiting. And Christmas isn’t supposed to be about waiting: it’s supposed to be about promises fulfilled.

So what do we do with that this year?

Mary and Joseph, of course, didn’t have Christmases past to get nostalgic about. There were no traditions to maintain, no one on the radio crooning “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” to make them tear up, no childish sense of wonder to try to conjure. There was just real life: An inconveniently-timed journey forced by an oppressive ruler; no room to be found in a busy city; a birth that didn’t happen according to anyone’s birth plan; uninvited guests who smelled like sheep. We’ve successfully romanticized it over the years, but Christmas has never been about conforming to all our best-laid and cherished plans.

Maybe it helps to remember how much still hadn’t happened on that first Christmas night. Yes, a baby was born. Yes, angels appeared and sang to shepherds, who went to see for themselves. Yes, absolutely, something significant happened that night in Bethlehem.

But there was so much still to come. Bodies healed, meals shared, lives restored, hearts reconciled to God. Stories of God’s Kingdom told to crowds on a mountainside. Questions asked and new commandments given: love one another as I have loved you. Disciples who heard the call and dropped their fishing nets to follow. A palm parade, and a final meal, and a cross, and an empty tomb. As Mary held that baby in her arms, it was the future she saw and pondered in her heart. And as the shepherds returned to their fields rejoicing, it was this child’s future that gave them reason to rejoice.

Christmas was never the end of the story. It was always the beginning, always a promise of more to come, always an invitation to keep waiting.

But it IS a beginning, a reminder that God is at work in the brokenness and imperfection of our world, when all our best laid plans have amounted to nothing. It IS a beginning, proof that God’s story is still unfolding, and that no matter the circumstances we find ourselves in, God will find a way to be with us. That God is with us now, this Christmas when nothing is as it should be, just as God has been with us in all the Christmases of our lives.

We may still feel stuck in our Advent waiting. But we are not alone in our waiting. Because the Christ who will come one day in glory to make everything right is that baby in the manger, born to us and for us when nothing is right with the world.

We are not alone: maybe that’s the good news we need in a year of isolation. There is still so much to wait for, so many reasons to hope that next year will be better than this one. But there is also reason to rejoice: because the God on whom we wait is the God who is already here.

Advent Apocalypse: God Who Rends the Heavens

Scripture: Isaiah 64:1-4

This past Monday morning, at 9:20 am, an ICU nurse named Sandra Lindsay made history when she became the first person in the US to receive a Covid-19 vaccine after its FDA approval.[1] Since then, over the course of this week, more pictures and videos of healthcare workers receiving vaccines have been  popping up in my social media feed and in the news. I talked to a mentor on Wednesday whose husband is a physician’s assistant in a hospital outside of Harrisonburg, who had just gotten his first dose earlier that morning. “It’s real,” she said. “I keep telling people it’s real. If we have it here in Augusta County, VA, it’s real.”

Collectively, this week, it seems, the world – or at least our part of it – has breathed a sigh of relief. We’ve gotten that collective lump in our throat seeing these pictures and hearing this news. We still have a long way to go in our battle against Covid-19. Some less well-off countries undoubtedly have longer. And things will probably still get worse before they truly get better. But, for just a moment this week, it was as if there was a ray of hope breaking through a thoroughly apocalyptic year.

And it has been an apocalyptic year, in all senses of that word. Our lives have been turned upside down. There are things that will probably never be the same as they were Before, for better or for worse. And the crisis of epidemic has done a lot to reveal its truth about who we are as a society: from the social and political divisions highlighted through science we can’t agree on, to the racial disparity and economic fragility we ignore at our peril.

This week, though, we could dare to believe that maybe the world isn’t ending after all.

We have often, in the past nine months, called these “unprecedented times,” but people, of course, have lived through apocalyptic times before, some decidedly worse than these. (Worse, at least, for those of us who mostly have to stay inside and have Zoom meetings.) Once in a while I will still come across a picture of shelled-out buildings in a barren landscape in Syria or Yemen and try to imagine, or perhaps try not to imagine too hard, what it must be like to be someone in one of those places at this time.

Sometimes, likewise, I read the Bible and try to imagine, or perhaps try not to imagine too hard, what it must have been like to live in Jerusalem in 587 BCE when the city fell to the Babylonian Empire after being under siege for over a year.

It’s that history that the prophet Isaiah has in mind in today’s Scripture reading: O that you would tear open the heavens and come down! It’s part of a longer passage in which the prophet remembers God’s faithful acts in the past: how God brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and led them through the wilderness. Where is that God now? the prophet wants to know, as God’s people sit in exile and Jerusalem remains in ruins. O that you would tear open the heavens and come down. God, why don’t you show yourself? Because when it seems like the world is ending, that is literally the only hope we have left.

The prophet’s prayer contains a note of desperation that we don’t normally hear during Advent, because if all we are waiting for in Advent is the birth of the baby in a manger, we can expect with full confidence that it will come as scheduled. All we have to do is light the candles and count the days, open the little doors on our Advent calendars. But maybe at some point this year, or at another time in your life, you’ve felt it. That desperate plea has been yours. O that you would tear open the heavens; O that you would rend the heavens – I like that translation, rend. And maybe God did. Or maybe God hasn’t, yet. And so I think it’s appropriate to conclude an apocalyptic Advent with a prayer like this one, because when everything else has been exhausted, desperation is what we are left with. There’s nothing we can do ourselves that we haven’t tried, and we are forced to look outside ourselves and our own power to make anything better.

In her book Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, the preacher Fleming Rutledge writes about how the second coming of Christ is discontinuous with what has come before. “It means,” she writes, “that the hope of redemption and the advent of the age to come no longer seeks evidence of the promise from present circumstances, but only in terms of the promised future of God” (p. 20-21). God’s coming kingdom is not a matter of our own human progress, if we are in fact making any at all. We talk often in church about building God’s kingdom here on earth. I know you hear that language because I use it all the time. There is something powerful and, to me, inspiring about accepting our mission to be part of this ultimate task. This apocalyptic Advent has made me reconsider that, though. Nothing I can do is going to bring God’s Kingdom in all its glory; all I can do is live in a way that makes me ready when it comes. This Isaiah also recognizes in his urgent prayer over the fallen temple: “But now, Lord, you are our father. We are the clay, and you are the potter” (64:8). All he and his people can do is cry into the heavens, and wait for God’s response.

We’ve learned something about waiting and praying in the past nine months.  Scientists across the world, of course, have been hard at work to make a vaccine happen. For most of us, though, who aren’t part of that work, we’ve had to reckon with our own powerlessness. Yes, we have worn our masks, and yes, we’ve stayed home more, and yes, perhaps we’ve donated money or food or time to lighten the load of others, but in the end, most of us have had to wait for news that something new was coming. And it seems to me that this has been a very Advent-y season, this whole time, because one of the things we’ve had to grapple with is our inability to change this reality on our own.

Isaiah’s prayer is the prayer of someone who recognizes their own powerlessness. But it is not a hopeless powerlessness. In these past nine months, I think, we have been largely powerless, but we have not been hopeless. And that’s why we’ve worn our masks and made our donations and done our best to help flatten the curves – because we have hope that this will not be forever; because we have hope that something new is on the horizon. These things are our witness to our belief in better days to come.

Try to envision this divine entrance into the world the way the prophet does. Come down, Isaiah says, and the mountains will quake, and the nations will tremble, and it will be like fire sweeping through brushwood. It will be like water coming to a boil.

It’s quite a way to picture God coming into our world, right? This kind of divine arrival that is pictured and longed and called for is not exactly Santa Claus coming to town. It’s not even Jesus, the baby in the manger, who couldn’t manage to get a reservation elsewhere. Here, apocalypse calls for apocalypse: when it seems like the world is ending, the only thing left is for God to tear open the heavens and toss the mountains aside and make it right.

And Isaiah may not know it then, but the divine response will come. Jerusalem will not remain in ruins forever. Because the God who hears our desperate cries is a God who is desperate to come to us, knocking mountains out of their way and leaving fire in their wake.

For a moment this week, it was as if a ray of hope broke through this truly apocalyptic year, and we dared to believe that maybe the world wasn’t ending, after all.

But still we wait: for justice to be done. For right to vindicated. For the mighty to fall and the lowly to be exalted, the hungry to be fed and the full to be sent away. Still we wait: for the power of death to be vanquished; for every tear to be wiped away, for needless suffering to cease. Still we wait: for our own hearts to be remade in the image of God’s.

We wait, and are powerless in our waiting, but the one we wait on is the one with power and authority over all creation. And as our desperate cries reach heaven, somewhere in the distance, the mountains begin to quake.

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[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/nyregion/us-covid-vaccine-first-sandra-lindsay.html

Advent Apocalypse: Keep Awake

Scripture: Mark 13:28-37

If you were a kid in the early 90’s, or if you had kids in the early 90’s, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with my favorite Christmas movie of all time, Home Alone (followed by Home Alone 2 as a close second). In case it’s been a while, the movie is the story of 8-year old Kevin McCallister, who gets accidentally left behind when his large family goes on Christmas vacation. It turns out some local thieves who call themselves the Wet Bandits, because they always leave the water on, have been planning to rob Kevin’s house while the family is out of town. Kevin discovers their plan and lays an elaborate set of booby traps made out of children’s toys and Christmas ornaments and other household implements to catch them in the act. The bad guys arrive and hilarity ensues, set to a now-classic soundtrack.

I’ve realized, more recently, that while Home Alone may be one of the great Christmas movies of our time, it’s actually also a really good Advent movie, because a key theme of Advent is being ready. And not just ready like we’ve checked the necessary boxes and are ready to move on to the next thing on our holiday to-do list, not just ready for a certain date on the calendar, but ready for something big to happen at any time.

“Keep awake,” Jesus tells his disciples.

We heard part of this passage from Mark 13 last week as we began our focus on the apocalyptic side of Advent for this year. While we tend to focus on these four weeks leading up to Christmas as a time of hope, love, joy, and peace as we wait for the birth of Jesus, that’s only part of the meaning of Advent. Advent is also about waiting for the second coming of Christ, and the end of this age, when everything will be turned upside down and all that is wrong will be made right. In other words, we here in this cozy season of lights and cookies are waiting on the apocalypse. It kind of makes us sound like we should be off in a bunker somewhere, but instead, here we are, going about our lives, hoping to be caught awake when the time comes.

As Pastor Sarah from Central UMC told us last week, Jesus gives this speech to his disciples at the beginning of Holy Week, as he prepares himself and them for his suffering and death. He tells them to watch out that no one deceives them while he is gone, for false messiahs are sure to come. He tells them there will be wars, and earthquakes, and famines, and that all these things will be just the beginning of the end. He tells his disciples that they themselves will suffer, but the Holy Spirit will be with them. After all this, he says, the sun will become dark and the stars will fall and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds, to gather up his people. This is a verse that did not quite make it into most of our favorite Christmas carols, and frankly one we may rather not read as we sip our eggnog and put the finishing touches on our tree. But as Sarah and I said last week, what better year to set our hopes on something other than what is now than this one.

This week, Jesus continues his apocalyptic speech. “Nobody knows the day or the hour” when all this will happen, he says. Keep awake! “It is as if someone took a trip,” he says, left the household behind, and put the servants in charge. Keep awake! You do not know when the head of the household will come, whether in the evening or at midnight, or when the rooster crows in the early morning. Don’t be caught sleeping when he comes. Keep awake.”

It’s as if a family went on vacation and left their eight-year-old son behind in charge of the house. Keep awake! You do not know when the Wet Bandits will come. (Midnight. They come at midnight.) The Apostle Paul, in fact, says in his first letter to the Thessalonians that “The Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.” An interesting image, there, because surely when Christ comes we’d like to greet him with something other than ice on the front step and booby traps concocted from Legos. Surely we’d like to prepare a room instead, and, you, know, vacuum. Still, the point is, be ready. If Jesus is a guest, he’s not calling ahead. Keep awake, Paul echoes, for you are children of the day, and not of the night.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m already tired. It’s been a long year. It’s a busy season. Honestly, the last thing I want to be told right now is to stay awake. Mostly, I’d like to take a long nap. Of course I don’t think Jesus means it literally: it has been 2000 years, after all. So what does it mean to keep awake as we wait for Jesus to return?

Paul talks some about this in that passage of 1 Thessalonians 5 as well. This letter is the oldest New Testament writing we have, probably from around 50 CE, and even then, it seems, people were getting tired. They expected Jesus to come back soon – he does, after all, say in Mark that this generation will not pass away before he does. They didn’t understand why he seemed to be taking his time. So when Paul tells these early Christians to keep awake, he stays, “stay sober, wearing faithfulness and love as a piece of armor that protects our body and the hope of salvation as a helmet….continuing encouraging one another and building each other up, just like you are doing already.”

What does it mean to be ready for the coming of Christ? Only not to tire of all the things Christ calls us to every waking day of our lives: care for the poor, welcome for the stranger, love for our enemies, forgiveness for those with whom we live in community. Don’t lose your hope, Paul tells this tired church, that these things still matter. Don’t lose faith that this way of life will be vindicated. Keep awake.

It’s easy to grow tired, I know, when the world always seems to demand something else of us: get ahead, stock up for the future, divide into camps, let the others fend for themselves. And most days it seems like I have a long time to get it right, if I’m not right now – but I wonder sometimes what it would really look like to live like Jesus could come back anytime. What kind of urgency would that give to my faith? What choices might I make differently? How would I want to be prepared if that thief were coming tonight?

Jesus does tell his disciples that there will be signs. “Think of the fig tree,” he says. When it begins to sprout new leaves, you know that summer is near. Likewise, when things in this world seem like they can’t get any worse, “you’ll know that he is near – at the very gates.”

Fleming Rutledge, the author of Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, writes that a key image of Advent is the watchtower: “Those who serve God stand still in a dark place, but we strain forward with expectation and an unconquerable hope toward the horizon where the Sun of Righteousness will appear someday.”[1] I like that image, our eyes on the horizon. But I like this image from Mark, too: the image of Jesus already at the front gate, getting ready to knock – or to break in, as the case may be. We wait, keeping the faith, knowing all the time that he is near.

Maybe Advent is a time to watch for those signs, that Christ is near, if not yet arrived in all his glory. Signs that when the whole world seems to have gone to hell, love yet wins. Signs that suffering and division will not have the last word. Signs that oppression will cease and tyrants will not occupy their thrones forever. Signs that our hearts can still be molded after the heart of Christ. Signs that our hope is not in vain.

Maybe Advent is a time to watch for those small things, even as we wait for everything to be turned upside down.

So keep awake. Put on your armor of faithfulness and love and your helmet of salvation. Scatter your Legos in the hallways and ice down the front steps. Or, get out the vacuum and make the bed in the guestroom. Whatever metaphor you choose, Jesus is coming. When? I don’t know. But he is near, at the very gates.

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[1] Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, p. 86.

An Advent Apocalypse

This sermon was recorded as a dialogue with Rev. Sarah Harrison-McQueen of Central UMC, Ballston.

Scripture: Mark 13:24-27

Allie: Hey Sarah!

Sarah: Good morning, Allie! 

Allie: It’s really cool to be doing this series with you. Our churches have always been so close and so similar, and we’ve been able to take advantage of that before, we’ve swapped pulpits a couple times, and now “these unprecedented times” have opened up this new way for us to partner in worship. 

Sarah: Yes, I’m surprised to discover there are some hidden blessings in the challenges we face with virtual worship – and the opportunity to collaborate with you has been really fun! Planning his worship series for Advent with you really helped me get excited for this season. I was having a bit of a hard time this year because I love Advent and was feeling pretty sad about all the ways Advent would be different this year. There are so many things I love about Advent – especially the music and the decorations.

Allie: Yes, I love the whole feeling of the season, and I especially love the stories we tell. What’s your favorite Advent scripture, Sarah?

Sarah: I think it is when the Gospels quote from the Prophet Isaiah, “In the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord.” That scripture really captures my imagination. What’s your favorite?

Allie: I think mine would have to be the Magnificat, the song Mary sings when she’s pregnant with Jesus, about how God is turning everything upside down. How about this passage we just read from Mark 13? Have you ever heard anyone say that one was their favorite for Advent?

Sarah: Definitely not. It’s kind of weird to hear this apocalyptic reading during a season when we’re thinking about hope, love, joy, and peace. It’s in the lectionary, though. That means for churches who follow the three year lectionary cycle of scripture readings on the First Sunday of Advent they’ll hear a version of this story from Mark 13, or Luke 21, or Matthew 24. So, some committee of scholars thought it made sense for us to hear every year about an Advent Apocalypse.

Allie: It is kind of weird, and it’s easy to forget there is a reason it is tradition to hear these texts in this season. 

I’ve always loved this season leading up to Christmas, but growing up, as I began to learn more about Advent and how it was a season of waiting and expectation for the birth of Jesus, there was something that didn’t quite add up for me there. Because Jesus was already born 2000 years ago in Bethlehem. So what does it mean to wait for something that already happened? What does it mean to expect something that’s a done deal?

Yes, there’s value to living out this waiting and expecting and to telling the story of the birth of Christ year after year, but it began to seem like I was missing something. Fleming Rutledge, an author of an Advent book I’ve been reading, said, “For many years, I thought that during Advent, one was supposed to pretend that Jesus hadn’t been born, so that we would be more excited when Christmas came.”[1] I guess I did too.

I was in college when I learned that Advent isn’t only about waiting for the birth of the baby in the manger in Bethlehem. It’s also about waiting for the second coming of Christ. Advent is also the season that teaches us what it means to wait for and expect this thing that hasn’t happened yet. 

Sarah: That’s really helpful to remember that when we talk about “waiting” in advent we aren’t just pretending the baby Jesus hasn’t been born yet, but that we are actually waiting for something that hasn’t happened yet. But, when we start talking about the end of this age we live in sometimes that can feel a little uncomfortable. We don’t usually talk much about the Second Coming in our mainline tradition.

Allie: That’s true. Of course in our churches we all come from lots of different places and traditions, and so some of us may be more comfortable talking in those terms than others. But on the whole we don’t tend to get too apocalyptic in mainline Protestantism. I think we’re scared of sounding too out there, like those street preachers always going on about the end of the world.

Exactly. During Advent, I am usually much more comfortable talking about the Angels who appeared to Mary and Joseph – it’s new for me to consider the angels mentioned in our text today from Mark 13.

Jesus is talking to his disciples in one of his many attempts to prepare them for the future that will come following his death and resurrection. At the beginning of Chapter 13 Jesus is teaching in the temple in Jerusalem. His disciples are impressed by the setting – after all, they believed this is the place to go to enter God’s presence. But, Jesus knows that one day this physical temple will fall away. And, this could cause a crisis of faith if people expect to find God in a place and then that place disappears – where do you go to find God then?

This entire chapter takes place in Mark’s Gospel just before the Passion narrative which tells the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Jesus knew that his disciples would have their whole world thrown upside down by the events to come – and he tries to prepare them. When the world as we know it comes to an end it is easy to feel confused, and possibly be lured away from the truth by false messiahs and false prophets. So, Jesus warns them of what is to come – both the fall of the temple, and also at the end of time when it seems like the world is ending.

This text can feel a little scary to think about “in those days…” but it also can simply be a little confusing. On the one hand, it seems like Mark is telling the listener to expect to see this for themselves and to be prepared for the end of the world at any moment – on the other hand, it could be read like Mark is emphasizing perseverance through the hardships of this life because this isn’t going to happen tomorrow. 

So, our text gives us no clear indication if the Second Coming of Christ will happen in a minute or in a million years. When I was a kid, I remember seeing cars with the bumper sticker sharing a warning letting people know that, “in case of rapture this car will become driverless.” While that bumper sticker points to a theological understanding outside our tradition – the idea of a “rapture of the saved” with the unsaved “left behind” – it does still remind me that there is value to remembering that Christ has promised to return again to this earth. I think this season of Advent gives us a chance to turn our focus towards the future that God has promised.

Allie: There’s a reason I think many of us don’t usually want to focus on that future. For one thing: it seems really far away. Jesus hasn’t come back in 2000 years, so why should we think it’s going to be tomorrow? People are always trying to guess and predict these things, but so far, they haven’t been right. 

And the other thing is: maybe I don’t necessarily WANT Jesus to come back and usher in the end of the age. This age is OK, right? This year itself has been a little rough, but in general, I want to work and enjoy life with my family and my friends. I want to write a book. I want to visit Argentina someday. I want to spend summer vacations at the beach with my kids. So: I guess I want Jesus to come back someday, but not too soon. I have plans. 

In other words, I think, I’ve gotten complacent. 

Sarah: I can understand feeling complacent. I think 2020 has knocked a lot of us out of that complacency. And, I can imagine that for someone whose life is constantly filled with hardships, that this text could actually bring some real comfort. There is powerful hope in this text to folks experiencing their world falling apart, or when it feels like the whole world is on fire.

Allie: Yes, in a lot of ways this whole year has felt kind of like the apocalypse, hasn’t it? We’ve been on lockdown, hiding out from a potentially deadly disease; we’ve seen pictures of the makeshift morgues in hospital parking lots; we’ve gone long stretches of time without seeing other people; we’ve seen the continual reports of violence targeting people of color and the mass protests that have followed; and it feels a lot of the time like our country is on the verge of a complete breakdown along party lines. I agree that maybe one of the unexpected gifts of this year is that it’s shaken us out of our complacency. Nothing in 2020 is how it should be, and we need a reason to believe it won’t always be like this! And so when I pray “Come, Lord Jesus,” this year, I mean it: Come, and make this better. Come, and defeat the evil of this plague. Come, and give life back to those bodies in the hospital parking lot. Come, and judge our racist acts, and grant justice to those who have been oppressed. Come and turn things over and heal our wounds as a people.

2020 is a year when I need to be able to find hope not just in looking back at something that already happened, but in looking forward to something new. 

Sarah: Yes, one of the interesting experiences of 2020 is that all around the globe we’re all looking forward to something new – and for the first time in my lifetime that means millions of people are waiting and hoping for the same thing to happen as we wait for a Covid vaccine. 

Allie: Yes, and of course as the church that’s our job, to be waiting and preparing for God’s Kingdom here on earth, together. So, over the next few weeks, we’re going to get to talk about what it means to wait, and what exactly is this apocalypse we’re waiting for. Sarah, I hope this series will be able to lend new purpose and new reason to hope to this season. As the famous theologian Karl Barth once said, “What other time or season can or will the church ever have but Advent?”[2]

Sarah: Thanks be God, Amen!

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[1] Fleming Rutledge, Advent: The Once and Future Coming of Jesus Christ, p. 58

[2] Rutledge, p. 7

All Other Ground is Sinking Sand

Scripture: Matthew 7:24-27

It’s been a year this week. I heard Kai Ryssdal say that on NPR at the beginning of Covid and it seems to fit now as much as ever.

When I was doing my worship planning for this fall, I intentionally left this week blank with the note “pastoral response to election.” As I sat down to write this week, though, I just kept thinking – how do you respond pastorally to something when you don’t even know what’s happening? Here at the end of the week, now, we do know that Joe Biden has been declared the winner, though there are probably still recounts and perhaps legal challenges that lie ahead.

I don’t claim to know what all of you have been feeling this week, but I do know it has been a week of feelings running high. Maybe at different times this week you’ve felt anxious, hopeful, afraid, angry, relieved. I have felt all of these things this week too. I know for some of you, this election season has caused or heightened rifts within your own families. I know there are those of you to whom it has seemed like this race was a referendum on your identity, your family, or your rights. There are perhaps those of you who watched a speech last night by a vice-president-elect who looks like you or your children, for the very first time. I also know there are those of you who are worried about other things going on halfway around the world while everyone seems so riveted to this one thing. I imagine most of us, on either side, feel a little bit of despair when we realize again just how deeply divided our country is.

And what I thought was no matter what, in the midst of all of this, what I wanted to do today is to remind you that Jesus Christ is Lord: not Biden, not Trump, not anyone else we will ever cast a vote for. None of them will usher in the Kingdom of God here on earth, and what’s more, none of them will prevent it. That’s why we’re celebrating Reign of Christ Sunday now, two weeks early in the Christian year, because I think it does us good no matter whether we are celebrating or grieving or still anxious about the future to remember that this one thing holds true. And while we may have certain hopes for our country, our ultimate hope is always in Christ alone, and not in anyone else’s promises to us. As the hymn goes, On Christ the solid rock I stand; all other ground is sinking sand. Those are words that have been playing over and over in my head this week as I’ve needed something to hold onto.

But then I began to wonder if I did want to preach that today. To simply proclaim that Christ is Lord in a world that is suffering may seem like a way to absolve ourselves of any concern about what’s actually happening on the ground, here and now. And we are not absolved of that. It may sound good to think that we can stay calm and hopeful, fixed on heavenly things, while the storm of politics swirls around us, but politics are about people’s lives. For some of us the decisions made at high levels about immigration, racial equality, LGBTQ+ rights, the economy and healthcare are very personal. And for those of us for whom it all seems less personal, if we’re going to love our neighbors, we have to care about the politics that affect them too. That statement, of course, goes far beyond one presidential election.

It’s complicated, though. I’m sure we all like to imagine that our own political beliefs and values are perfectly aligned with God’s will for our country and our world. One of the frustrating things about the Bible, though, is that it doesn’t always do a lot to directly support our specific policy positions.  This was something we talked about a lot in Bible study last year when we were studying what the Bible has to say about immigration. The fact is that the Bible never sets forth a God-approved border policy. Why should it? At the time the Bible was written, borders weren’t the same as they are now. Certainly kings and nations marked out and fought over territory, but if you traveled from one land into another, there was no checkpoint where you had to stop and show your passport and your visa. At the same time, we read in the Bible over and over how God commands God’s people to treat the foreigner among them as one of their own. It’s up to us to figure out the specifics of how that applies in our modern context, but any Christian conversation around immigration has to start there.

At the same time, we’re all tired, right? We don’t need another sermon telling us yet again that we need to do more and work harder to make this world a better place no matter who’s in charge. We need a sermon to give us reason to hope in something bigger than all of us and bigger than all that divides us. On Christ the solid rock I stand; all other ground is sinking sand. I hear those words and can visualize myself, standing strong, no matter what storms may come.

I think it’s interesting, though, to hear what Jesus actually says in this passage from which that hymn borrows its image. This comes from the very end of the Sermon on the Mount, after Jesus has taught the crowds all his most famous teachings: Love your enemies. Turn the other cheek. Don’t judge. He wraps it up like this: “Everybody who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise builder who built a house on bedrock. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house. It didn’t fall because it was firmly set on bedrock.” The counter-image, of course, is that of a builder who built their house on sand, and when the storms came and the wind blew, the house collapsed.

It is striking to me that our firm foundation here, which holds up against the storm, is not our strongly felt or loudly expressed faith in Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior. It’s whether we hear his words and put them into action. It’s whether or not we actually turn the other cheek and refrain from judging and love our enemies and our neighbors. And – you know – not just the neighbors we want to be able to have over for dinner without it being awkward, but especially the neighbors who are the most vulnerable as the winds of politics blow.

And at the same time, how can we do any of those things if Christ himself is not that solid rock on which we stand – if our ultimate hope isn’t in him and this Kingdom that he invites us to be part of? If we don’t believe that these everyday acts of heeding the words of Jesus are part of something bigger, are pointing to something bigger, that really is different from anything we know?

Christ is Lord. We cast our votes and check the news and hold our protest signs and call our representatives, but in the end, every other person and every other thing in which we put our faith will disappoint us.

We cling to that hope in this midst of the storm, and then, we face into the wind and take a step, following as he leads toward justice, and dignity, and mercy, and love.

We still don’t know what’s to come – between now and January, or even after. It’s still hard to see where our country as a whole is going. But the good news is our promise is not the American Dream, not Biden or Trump, not blue or red, but in Christ and the grace he gives us to live fully as part of the Kingdom of God, right here, right now.

All other ground is sinking sand.

Jesus 2020: Citizenship

Scripture: Matthew 21:1-11

We’ve now spent the past six weeks talking about times in the Gospels when Jesus gets political. We have heard Jesus fight with religious leaders over interpretation of the law and debate with them about taxes. We’ve seen him stop a sham trial and work a miracle for an enemy officer and get political in his preaching in synagogue.

The political issues Jesus deals with in his own ministry are very often not ones we find ourselves grappling with today. I’m pretty sure that neither working on the Sabbath nor the legal aspects of divorce have come up in any of our recent presidential debates. I do hope that as the final day of voting draws near, we’ve been able to hear the more eternal values that undergird Jesus’ politics: good news to the poor, protection for the vulnerable, commitment to our neighbors’ flourishing, our ultimate commitment to God in all aspects of our lives.

Today we come to the account of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey to shouts of Hosanna. It will be a familiar one to most of you, but it is a little strange to read it at this time of year. But I thought this passage was a fitting end to our series on the politics of Jesus, because there is perhaps no more overtly political act that Jesus performs in the Gospels than this entrance into Jerusalem.

A few weeks ago we read the account of Jesus’ interaction with a Roman military officer who came to Jesus seeking healing for his servant, and I expressed my own struggle with that story – that as much as Jesus gets in the faces of the religious leaders of his own people and says “woe to you,” he never says “woe” to this Roman officer, even though this officer is part of this ultimate oppressive system of empire.

We see hints of Jesus’ own brand of resistance to the oppression of empire in the Gospels. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, when he tells people that when someone makes them walk one mile they should walk two; or if someone sues them for their coat they should give them their shirt as well, these can all be read as ways to quietly expose the cruelty of the system by taking it to its logical extreme. But it’s in this Palm Sunday text, I believe, when we start to hear clearly Jesus’ final answer to Rome.

Scholars John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg (The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’ Last Days in Jerusalem) would have us imagine that there was not just one, but two parades that day. From west of the city, the Roman army would have been marching in, ready to keep any would-be freedom fighters in line as Jerusalem prepared to celebrate its annual festival of liberation. They describe it like this: “A visual panoply of imperial power: cavalry on horses, foot soldiers, leather armor, helmets, weapons, banners, golden eagles mounted on poles, sun glinting on metal and gold.  Sounds: the marching of feet, the creaking of leather, the clinking of bridles, the beating of drums” (p. 3).

And meanwhile, from the east, one man rides into the city on a donkey colt, surrounded by a ragtag group shouting their hosannas. Save us, Hosanna means.

Jesus, intentionally or unintentionally here, is acting out a scene described by the prophet Zechariah: “See, your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” “I will take away the chariots from Ephraim and the war-horses from Jerusalem,” God says through Zechariah, “and the battle bow will be broken. He will proclaim peace to the nations.”

From the west, the war horses snort. From the east, a king enters his city in humility and peace.

One parade, you see, is a parody of the other.

And the question for everyone watching is whose entrance into the city do you hail? And the bigger question wrapped up in that is who do you name as Lord – Jesus, or Caesar? And the question that comes from that is where do we claim our citizenship – in the empire, with all the protection and security it has to offer? Or in the Kingdom ushered in by this humble, peaceful king?

Jesus never led an uprising against Rome – thought plenty of people hoped and expected that he would. But he did resist it: not just Rome itself but all of the trappings of empire. He resisted it by inviting people to live out something different. He told them it was possible to say no to the idols of power, peace ensured through force, status, hierarchy, the amassing of wealth on the backs of others: all the things on which empire is built. Instead he said it was possible to live by the values of love, mercy, self-sacrifice, a belief in God’s abundance, and solidarity with the poor.

America, of course, is not Rome – not exactly. I’m sure that many of us would say that we love this country. Some of us were born here; some of us have chosen to be here. Some of us have worked for the government. It is possible to love America, I think, and not put our trust in the trappings of empire. It is possible to love one’s country and still claim one’s ultimate citizenship elsewhere.

Whatever happens on Tuesday, we should not think that it will save us.

A seminary classmate of mine recently put it this way in a Facebook post, referring to one of the recent presidential debates: “Sure, I’ll vote,” she said, “but I prefer not to waste my one wild and precious life obsessing over political theater. I’d rather use my time, energy and power to actually CREATE and PARTICIPATE in alternative possibilities. That’s why I serve as a pastor of a tiny church, it’s why I’m so excited to be more connected to my neighbors in South Durham…: these are real, tangible, immediate spheres where another way of living is not only possible, it is ALREADY HAPPENING. Vote and then go keep living as if God’s new reign of mercy and justice were already here (because it is); we’re going to need a lot of us pulling in that direction together in the coming years.”

What happens Tuesday will not save us. But there’s one who will, and he comes now, riding on a donkey, exposing the power and grandeur of Rome for the lies they are, inviting us to join an entirely different parade.

And to him, we shout Hosanna.

Jesus 2020: Taxes

Scripture: Matthew 22:15-22

If you grew up in the US, you probably sometime in high school read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), written about his retreat from the materialism of society to the isolation and supposed self-sufficiency of the woods. One thing you may not know about Thoreau is that he once went to jail for refusing to pay his taxes. The tax in question was a poll tax, or head tax, levied on every individual without regard to income, and his objection was that this money would go to fund an imperialistic war with Mexico and a government that permitted slavery.[1]

Thoreau only spent one night in jail. A relative ended up paying the tax for him. Thoreau wrote his essay Civil Disobedience from the experience. Still, the event illustrates what we probably already know, and that is that taxes can be polarizing. We can, of course, go much more modern with this: like to the most recent tax reform enacted by Congress and the Trump administration, which some of us may have feelings about one way or the other; or we could talk about President Trump’s tax returns themselves (but we won’t!) As the saying goes, nothing is certain but death and taxes – and (I’ll add) the fact that we’re going to disagree about taxes. We disagree on who should pay them (is it right for the wealthy to pay a high percentage of their income?) how high they should be, and what they should go to. (Ongoing military action in the Middle East? Various social services? Abortion?)

Unsurprisingly, taxes were also controversial back in Jesus’ day.

The taxes in question would not have been taxes levied by a democratic government on its people, however begrudging, for the supposed common good. The tax in question was a tax paid to the Roman Empire by those in its conquered territories, for the privilege of having been conquered. It was payable by every adult male. Remember in the Christmas story when Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem for the census? No one in that story is conducting a census for the purposes of ensuring equal representation. It’s to make sure everyone pays their taxes. And obviously people in Judea who were not so keen on being ruled by Rome were not so keen on paying taxes to them, either.

It’s an interesting crew of people who approach Jesus today with a question about this tax. They are disciples of the Pharisees, who we have come to know if not love over the past few weeks, but they also add some so-called Herodians to the mix. The Herodians were a group that politically supported Herod, the local king who was underwritten by Rome. They would have supported paying Roman taxes. The Pharisees, however, were known NOT to support paying taxes to Rome. They still paid them. They didn’t actively resist. They were just grumpy about it.[2]

What these two groups have in common is they don’t so much like Jesus, so, they come together to trap him.

They begin by buttering him up. “Teacher, we know that you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth!” (We might imagine Jesus rolling his eyes here.) They continue, “So tell us. Should we pay taxes to the emperor – or not?”

It’s tricky ground. If Jesus says no, he is inciting rebellion. Not paying taxes is tantamount to rebellion, right – remember the Boston Tea Party? He would give the Roman government reason to arrest him. The risk is presumably more than a night in the county jail. If he says yes, that’s really not going to go over well with the masses of common people who follow him and see him as some sort of resistance leader.

The best way to get out of a trap is to answer a question with a question, and that’s what Jesus does. “Why are you doing this, you hypocrites?” he asks. (That’s not the main question.) “Show me the coin you pay the tax with.” It is a Roman coin, of course. They have one at the ready. “Whose face is on that coin?” he asks.

I imagine this is the point when the Pharisees and Herodians begin to suspect they are not going to win here. “…the emperor’s,” they say.

Jesus responds with this famous line: “Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” You might know it better from the old King James: Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things which are God’s.”

His opponents have nothing more to say, and they leave, leaving us to grapple with this answer.

On the one hand, Jesus seems to say, yes, pay your taxes. And that’s how many Christians over the years have taken it: we can be faithful Christians and also good citizens of the empire of which we are a part. Perhaps we read this and understand that life can divided into two spheres, the worldly and the religious. In one, we pay our taxes and vote and argue about public policy, and in the other we go to church and sing hymns and read our Bible. Caesar gets his due, and God gets God’s, and everyone is happy.[3]

But I wonder if we’re missing something there. I wonder if end up focusing too much on the first part of Jesus’ answer: Render unto Caesar – and not enough on the second half: Render unto God.

Because what is that which is God’s?

Psalm 89 puts it this way: “The heavens are yours; the earth also is yours; the world and all that is in it – you founded them.”

What is that which is God’s? Everything. The whole world. Our whole lives.

It’s almost as if Jesus says, “You’re asking me about paying taxes, but you’re missing the bigger question here.”

And it is a bigger question, isn’t it? Because no matter how we feel about it, paying taxes is easy – in the sense that we at least know how to do it. We usually know what Caesar wants from us. But what is that which is God’s? It’s not enough to just say “everything” and not have to think out the specifics. Our time belongs to God. Our gifts and resources belong to God. Our best intentions, our ultimate loyalties, belong to God. Our day to day actions and insignificant moments belong to God.

What does it matter to owe Caesar a coin, Jesus wants to know, when we owe God so much more?

We might hear Jesus’ answer as a rebuke to these hypocrites, who have Roman coins in their pockets the whole time.[4] They come with a question about taxes, but they are already participating in the whole oppressive Roman economic system. Maybe Jesus’ whole point is to show that Caesar has already gotten what he wants from them. Taxes or no taxes, they are already his.

Or maybe we are simply to understand that taxes are not the important question here. We should give Caesar his due. Not, in this case, because the emperor is good, but because there are simply bigger fish to fry than quibbling about coins that have his face on it in the first place. Maybe the claims of God and Caesar don’t always have to compete.

But sometimes they will.[5]

The hard part is that if what is God’s is everything, then that also includes the things Caesar claims for himself. Our money, in the end, belongs to God. The way we live life within a certain community or state or nation belongs to God. Our votes, and our politics belong to God, just as much as our personal lives and relationships and our prayers.

It is clear, when the two halves of Jesus’ answer collide, who wins: not a king who conquers and subjugates, but the very maker of heaven and earth and all that is in them.

I had trouble figuring out how to end this today, and I think the reason is that the statement is just meant to hang there. The Pharisees and Herodians leave because they have nothing to say. They know Jesus just said something biting and poignant and true, and they have to go figure out what it is.

I think that’s the invitation that Jesus has for all of us: to let it hang there. Give to God what is God’s. To let that statement question our days and our moments, our big decisions and our seemingly insignificant choices.

To the one who created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them and all of us, be all honor and glory. Amen.

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[1] https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/july-12/

[2] New Interpreter’s Bible: Matthew, p. 420.

[3] Interpretation: Matthew, p. 254.

[4] Interpretation: Matthew, p. 254.

[5] Interpretation: Matthew, p. 255.

Jesus 2020: Family Values

Scripture: Matthew 19:3-12

I’ve never preached on Jesus’ teaching on divorce before. I don’t think that’s been intentional – I’ve never actively steered away from it – but I’ve never felt especially compelled to wade into this territory, either. This feels like tricky ground. There are those of you here – probably more than I even know – for whom this passage is not just a theoretical debate about a matter of God’s law. It’s about your own lives and your own choices or the situations you’ve found yourselves in that you never chose at all.

I have not had the experience of getting or being divorced, but I have friends and teachers and mentors who have. Many of them are my colleagues in ministry. My mom was married and divorced before she ever met my dad, and I presumably wouldn’t be here if not for that severing of one relationship which allowed a new one to begin. I preach with all of these realities in mind.

This topic may seem like a strange choice for a series on politics – divorce really isn’t a focus of our political discourse today, for the most part, outside of the policy positions of some hardcore family values groups or perhaps the chance to comment on the character of some of our leading politicians. But the conversation Jesus has about it in today’s passage is a political one, if only because this is once again a conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees over a matter of interpretation of Jewish law. And as such, it’s a chance to learn something about the values Jesus thinks should govern life together, which after all, is a lot of what politics is.

Once again, it begins as a test. Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem, teaching and healing in in the region of Judea across the Jordan River, and our Pharisee friends – remember them? – once again show up with a question. “Does the Law allow a man to divorce his wife for any reason?” they ask. I do have to wonder what made them pick this question, in particular. Maybe, as one commentary I read suggested, it’s because at this point in the story John the Baptist has recently been beheaded precisely for opposing King Herod’s marriage to his sister-in-law. It’s a topic in the news. Or maybe, it’s just a common enough feature of life in 1^st century Judea that they think they’re sure to get some traction with the question.

Jesus answers this question more directly than usual. “Haven’t you read Scripture?” he asks – knowing they have. “Doesn’t it say that God made male and female and that a man leaves his family to become one with his wife?” What God has joined together, let no one separate. (We still say that at weddings.)

Our Pharisees seem to have figured that he would answer along these lines, and they are ready with their response: “Then why did Moses say all we needed was a certificate of divorce?”

“Moses said that,” says Jesus, “because of the reality of your hard-heartedness, but that’s not the way it was meant to be. I say to you that anyone who divorces his wife – except on grounds of adultery – and marries another commits adultery himself.”

There is, of course, lots of complicated and tricky stuff to unpack here. There is the fact that Jesus refers to marriage as between a man and a woman – and yes, he does assume that, though it doesn’t quite seem like the point of what he’s saying here to me. There is the fact that while the church today is all too happy to wax eloquent on the ethics of same-sex marriage, it is largely silent – at least on a political level – about the ethics of divorce, which is what Jesus is actually addressing here. There are accusations of hard-heartedness for those who have needed the possibility of a legal divorce and adultery for those who have chosen to remarry. A hard word to swallow, no doubt, for people who have tried their best to make it work, people who have spent hours on a couch in couples therapy, people for whom happily ever after didn’t unfold as planned.

A friend of mine got married right out of college and divorced her husband a few years later. “No one gets married thinking they’re going to get divorced,” she said once. “You get married because you think it’s going to be forever.”

One of my mentors in ministry said going through divorce was the worst pain he’d ever felt, worse even than sobering up. Is that hard-heartedness? Both of those friends are remarried now. Does God not honor those new commitments they’ve made, and the families that have come through that?

Jesus is supposed to be about grace, not judgment, right? Doesn’t this hard, unforgiving stance on the Law seem ironically more like a Pharisee kind of thing than a Jesus one?

Well, I don’t know. Jesus often raises the bar on the Law rather than abolishing it altogether. Maybe you remember this from the Sermon on the Mount. You’ve heard it said that you should repay someone only an eye for an eye, but I tell you if someone takes your shirt, give them your coat as well. You’ve heard it said that you should love your neighbor, but I tell you also to love your enemy. You’ve heard it said that if you get divorced you should give your wife a certificate of divorce, but I tell you whoever gets divorced and remarries commits adultery.

Jesus is not a legalist, but far from abolishing the Law, he wants us to hear the kind of life that the Law is supposed to point us to. Not that that makes it easier, here, to swallow his teaching on divorce.

Does God care about the promises we make to each other before God in marriage? I believe that God does. Even through hard times? Yes, of course. Is it a sign of the general brokenness of our world that we are not always able to follow through on those promises? I imagine most of you who have been divorced would agree there is brokenness involved. Does God also care about abundant life for people who are no longer able to find that in the marriage they are in? I have to believe that, too. And, honestly, I wonder if this had been a genuine question asked of Jesus by someone in pain, rather than another test from the Pharisees, if his response might not have been different.

And I also wonder what else we might be able to hear in this exchange in Matthew 19 if we listen to it again. First of all, who is the subject of the Pharisees’ question? Does the Law allow a man to divorce his wife? This is no amicable, mutually negotiated separation in question. As usual, when we’re talking politics, there are power dynamics involved here.

What happens to a woman, in Jesus’ day, who is divorced by her husband? While businesswomen are not unheard of at the time, for the most part, women are economically dependent on men – first their fathers, then their husbands. Where does that leave a divorced woman? Potentially nowhere.

So maybe what Jesus means is that it shouldn’t be as easy as that, to just fill out a form and be done with someone. Maybe we owe each other more than that, not just as spouses, but as people. Maybe our obligations to love and care for someone who has been entrusted to us go beyond just what’s formally required.

Maybe Jesus’ interpretation of the Law comes down, once again, to protecting people who are vulnerable. Maybe we’re too good sometimes at finding loopholes in our obligations to each other.

I do have to laugh a little at the disciples’ reaction when Jesus says whoever divorces and remarries commits adultery. “If that’s the case,” they say, “then it’s better not to get married at all!” Really, y’all? Jesus, however, seems to say, yeah. In some cases, at least, it’s better not to get married at all. For there are eunuchs, he says, who were born that way, and those who have been made that way, and those who have chosen that status because of the Kingdom of Heaven. “Eunuch” isn’t really a societal role we have these days, but they were people who weren’t able, either physically or culturally, to be in an intimate relationship. Jesus says it’s possible to choose this. Neither marriage nor divorce is the end-all, be-all here: there is another possibility, of choosing another primary commitment, and that is also good.

In the end, that’s the primary commitment he asks of all of us, regardless of our relationship status: commitment to God, commitment to love and care for one another and especially those who are vulnerable, commitment to the Kingdom of God.   

But those things aren’t political, right? Well, again, if they inform the choices we make about living real life with other people in community, then they are.

The Law that Jesus comes not to abolish, but to fulfill, is a law that points us time and again to our inescapable obligation to each other – all of us, in all the different ways we might live into that. And there are no loopholes. But it is the only way, I believe, to find our happily ever after.