God works from places that surprise us

Epiphany 6-B             Feb. 12, 2012

2 Kings 5:1-14; Psalm 30

I Corinthians 9:24-27; Mark 1:40-45

Many years ago when I lived in New York, a woman frequently stood outside of Bloomingdale’s on Lexington Avenue. Over and over again, she would shout in a monotone, “Help me I have cerebral palsy!” This was so disturbing on so many levels. She was an embarrassing reminder of dis-ease and dis-order. Passers-by probably had no idea what they could do to help. Other people, medical people, people perhaps with cerebral palsy themselves, people who had made strides to understand this disease, and bring it under control, and live their own lives with wholeness, were similarly dismayed – perhaps by the woman’s unabashed vulnerability, perhaps by her seeming unwillingness to seek the help available to her that would make a difference.

Leprosy, which today we call Hansen’s Disease, is treatable. We know what Jesus did not know: that this is a disease so treatable that people who contract it can be cured by antibiotics. But like the people in the ancient world, where our two stories of healing come from, we know that dis-ease is a sign of a disordered creation. Something in God’s good creation has gone awry, and cries out to be restored.

Also, today, like in the ancient world, we know that the healing of disease is something powerful, and when we don’t understand what is going on, we may feel things are moving too far and too fast, that things are getting out of control.

Naaman was a really powerful man. He was the general of a conquering army. The Bible says that even God thought well enough of Naaman and his skill as a general that God gave victory to this enemy of Israel. Aram, the homeland of Naaman, is today called Syria.

Naaman, despite his success and prowess, has a flaw: he has leprosy. This is apparently not a secret; even the conquered slaves knew this, and one of them, an unnamed girl, dares to speak up and offer a solution. Naaman could be cured, she says, by a prophet in conquered Israel.

This revelation prompts the King of Aram to send a negotiator to the King of Israel, to plead for his friend. This approach of power-broker to power-broker does not work. The king of Israel does not trust this request to help his enemy.

Like the unnamed captive girl, who offers her solution through the back door, Elisha, the man of God – not the man of “the king” – similarly breaks through the official denials. “Let him in,” he says. “Let him learn that there is a prophet in Israel.”

Receiving healing must be a difficult thing. It is hard even for Naaman, who must want so much to be cleansed from this terrible disease, to drop his defenses and take Elisha’s advice to plunge into the healing waters of the Jordan. God’s mercy, and’s God’s abundance, know no bounds. Even the enemies of God’s people receive the overflowing abundance of God’s blessings.

The Gospel gives us another story about Jesus healing someone – also a leper, like Naaman the Syrian. Jesus, fresh from his experiences near Peter’s home in Capernaum, is moved – some versions say by pity, others by anger, or revulsion – and then, like Elisha, Jesus makes the man clean. To be clean, to be healed, is to be restored to society, and so Jesus sends the man to the Temple, where he can be proclaimed as a sign that God’s reign -- with its made-new-once-again community, restored, as Naaman’s skin like the flesh of a young boy – has begun.

There is a power unleashed in these healings that cannot be controlled – certainly not by humans, and we suspect, not even by Jesus. After healing the man from his leprosy, he becomes stern with him. Jesus does not want public acclaim.

Listen to these verses from the 4th chapter of the Gospel of Luke, from another episode early in Jesus’ ministry. He had just taught a lesson from the Torah in his Nazareth synagogue. All were astounded at his wisdom – “at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Acknowledging their praise, Jesus then said,

‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town. …There were also many lepers* in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’ When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

Like it or not, God worms God’s way into our midst. Captive girls speak words of wisdom. Oddball prophets say, sure, let in your enemy; give him a chance. When we ask God to heal us, we have no idea what to expect. We might think things will be the way they used to be, and all of a sudden we are in completely new territory. Someone is healed, someone else is threatened, and all of a sudden the whole world changes before our very eyes.

 Look at how God works: from beneath, below, around the corner, from the outside, from the place that surprises us. We may be like that girl who whispers in Naaman’s wife’s ear, or like Elisha who says, sure, let the enemy leader in. We too might be like that former leper, befriended by Jesus along the road, who, despite the risks that somebody powerful might be unhappy, finds it impossible to keep all this good news to ourselves.

We here at St. David’s are embarked on a new thing. Our Celebration of New Ministry was an occasion to pull out all the stops – to name blessings we didn’t even know that we had – to give thanks in the midst of the ordinary wilderness of our own lives, and, in the memorable words of Bishop Adams, to take all of this into the streets. A power has been unleashed here, and God only knows what wonderful, risky and exciting things we have in store.

Healing & Restoration: Party like the Messiah has already come

Epiphany 5 B    February 5, 2012

Isaiah 40:21-31; Psalm 147:1-12, 21 

1 Corinthians 9:16-23; Mark 1:29-39

Have you not known?

Have you not heard?

Has it not been told you from the beginning?

Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?

It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers;
who stretches out the heavens like a curtain,
and spreads them like a tent to live in;
who brings princes to naught,
and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.

When Jesus enters Simon’s house and goes to see Simon’s ailing mother-in-law, he is not going as a doctor making a house call. He does not ask about her symptoms, or take her vital signs, or make a diagnosis.

Jesus enters Simon’s house as the bringer of Good News: the reign of God is at hand, here, among us, right now.

Jesus enters Simon’s house having been baptized by John, having heard the fabric of the universe being ripped open when God anointed him for this mission.

Jesus enters Simon’s house having preached that this Good News is at hand so compellingly that a group of fishermen dropped their nets, left behind their livelihoods in the everyday world in order to follow Jesus the herald of the abundant world.

Jesus enters Simon’s house having been recognized in the synagogue by a spirit so powerful that it had trapped a man in madness, a spirit so happy in the world of the status quo that it was furious to be exposed and dislodged.

Jesus enters Simon’s house on the Sabbath, and he knows right away that the divine order of abundance, and refreshment, and hospitality has gone very, very awry. Simon’s mother-in-law is ill, and without her, the Sabbath community will not be complete.

Jesus enters Simon’s house as the bringer of restoration. Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth – that this is the way that God has always intended you to live?

Years ago a rabbi friend told me that during the Sabbath, that one day out of seven, that one-seventh in the life of a faithful Jew, you live as though the Messiah had already come. You live in a world without work, without worry, without toil. You rejoice in the beloved community of family and friends. There is always enough of everything to go around. This world of the Messiah is the world the prophet Isaiah describes, the promise that gives voice to all of our longings for a world that lives with all the blessings with which God created it.

So when Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law, he is not doing that just so she will feel better and get up and serve them dinner. He is not working that miracle as a magician or a technician or just to show off.

When Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law it is a sign that the Sabbath has come, that the abundance of creation is now restored, that the reign of God is not only “at hand” but that it is here, right now. All those princes of oppression, those rulers of the world, truly are nothing in the face of this hospitality at the very root of humanity. Those who were excluded – like Simon’s ailing mother-in-law, and like all the other people Jesus will heal as the narrative of the Gospel of Mark continues – are now restored to this blessed community.

What Good News this is for all of the rest of us on the margins of this dog-eat-dog world, where we will never be pretty enough, or thin enough, or rich enough, or successful enough, or popular enough.

What Good News this is for people who get beaten up by the police because they looked at some officer the wrong way, for people who have to stand in line on the sidewalk just to get a hot meal, for people whose only respite in life is a five-dollar bag of heroin.

What Good News this is for people who whine, and carry on, and think they will never be able to reach down deep enough in their pockets to find the resources they need to live the abundant life God has promised them.

What Good News this is that Jesus heals Simon’s mother-in-law, because now she can rise and rejoin her family, and the party can go on.

Have you not heard?

Tearing up the status quo

Epiphany 4 B    January 29, 2012

Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Psalm 111

1 Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28

Rip.

That is the sound that opens and closes the Gospel of Mark. It is the sound of the heavens tearing open as Jesus is baptized, and it is the sound of the curtain in the temple being torn in two as Jesus dies on the cross.

Rip.

That is the soundtrack Mark gives us to Jesus’ life and ministry. Jesus is breaking through – Jesus breaks every barrier that gets in the way of us, and the fullness and abundance of life which is how God would have us live. Jesus is the last, and most effective, of all the prophets God sent our way. Straight from Deuteronomy to that synagogue in Capernaum, Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the shoot that grows from the root of Jesse, is God’s ancient promise of a new beginning, the anointed leader who will begin it all again as the new David.[i] Will we finally get it right this time? Will we finally believe God’s promise that we will have life, and have it abundantly? That everyone will have it abundantly?

Things move right along in the Gospel of Mark. Jesus invited the fishermen to follow him, and they go right from the beach to the synagogue. Mark does not record what Jesus said in the synagogue, or what texts he read from; all that matters to Mark is that Jesus conveyed authority, and the first test of that authority comes when someone in the congregation rises up and challenges him. Something that Jesus has said has provoked the demons inside of him. This is a man who must have been otherwise unremarkable, a regular participant; only the “clean” could have been admitted to the synogogue. What was it about Jesus that the unclean spirit that he could have otherwise controlled screamed? What status quo, which kept this man together, was so threatened by Jesus that he had to cry out?

If we read this story literally, about someone who was crazy, or demon-possessed like in those sensational exorcism movies, then I think we miss the point. Although anyone who has ever been really ill will tell you that medicine is more of an art than a science, we human beings do understand more of how the natural world works than the ancients did. Our God-given curiosity and ability to figure things out has enabled us to make more sense out of things that were incomprehensible mysteries to our ancestors in faith. The people in the synagogue in Capernaum believed in a world of powerful spirits – spirits which were more powerful than humans, but less powerful than God – spirits that took over people’s lives, paralyzed them, prevented them from living with their families, prevented them from making a living, spirits that exploded from them in uncontrollable ways. When Jesus rebuked and silenced the spirit in the man in the synagogue, he demonstrated a power that was more than human, that was more even than these spirits. He demonstrated a power that proved that he was closer to God.

Remember: we are only in the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus has collected a few followers, and said some things in the synagogue that are beginning to get attention – some positive, some negative. We do know something about Jesus’ context: that he has allied himself with John the Baptist, whose words of prophecy have attracted people who are yearning to change the status quo, who are yearning to break free from the restrictions of the society they live in. Up until this point, the proclamations of the Good News – that there is a different way to live – have been only promises. With what happened in the synagogue, people now see that these promises have real power behind them. Something real has happened.

Let’s shift gears, then, to our reality.

This congregation is in pretty good shape. With the Annual Meeting next week, and the celebration of new ministry the week after that, we have the opportunity right now to take stock of who we are, what we have, and where we want to go. A few weeks ago I showed you a map of the spiritual geography of the Gospel of Mark; that map is on the bulletin board in the hall. Today, we are going to make our own map: we are going to map our assets. And since are assets are blessings, are all the things that God has given us, this will be a map of our spiritual geography. This map of our assets will point us in a particular direction. Maps have signs, so think about it: what signs have you seen lately of God’s grace in the world? In this place?

---

[i] Richard Swanson, in Provoking the Gospel of Mark, quoted in Kate Matthews Huey, http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/january-29-2012-fourth-sunday.html

Turning our lives in the same direction as God's life

Epiphany 3 B    January 22, 2012

Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 62

1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

The juicy parts in the story of Jonah come before, and then after, what we read today. Here’s the story, in brief:

Jonah is a prophet, sent by God, to call the people of Ninevah to repent. Jonah knows that these Ninevites are world-class sinners. He has done the feasibility study on the potential of their ever doing the right thing, and he knows for sure that they do not have, as consultants say, the capacity for much repentance. They are party-hearty sinners, and set in their ways. Jonah told God all this, and said, forget it; let’s shake the dust from our feet and move on. God said, Do it, and Jonah said, No, I’m not, and went off to cruise the Mediterranean. The ship got in trouble; the crew knew that it was Jonah’s fault, and so they threw him overboard, where God conveniently arranged for a private retreat space, otherwise known as the belly of the whale, for Jonah to think again about his assignment. The whale spits Jonah out onto the beach, where, “the word of God came to Jonah a second time.” He goes to Ninevah, the people are converted to God’s agenda, and, amazingly, God changes his mind. God decides NOT to punish the Ninevites for all their world-class sins. God sees that they have turned from their evil ways, and God realizes, hey, this is what I really wanted all along. God is pleased.

Jonah, as you might recall, is not. Jonah thinks these sinners ought to be punished anyway. He goes off to sulk that his powerful prophecy about Ninevah being overthrown was nullified. He and God have another conversation, and God, as you can imagine, because this is the Bible, has the upper hand. The people of Ninevah turn toward God and thrive, and Jonah is mad, because he is deprived of the opportunity of saying, “Nyeh, nyeh, I told you so.”

So who is this story of Jonah and the people of Ninevah about, anyway? Jonah? The Ninevites? No. It is about God. God who got mad that people were not living the good lives God wanted them to live, and then God, who changed his mind. The people of Ninevah, sinners that they were, got God to change God’s mind about the future, from wrath, punishment, desperation and misery, to … grace.

St. Paul, in this little snippet from his first letter to the Corinthians, talks about what happens when wild and crazy sinners, like the people of Corinth, like the people of Ninevah, get what God is saying – what happens when their hearts are converted to God’s way of living. Things that used to matter a lot to them – all that wild, sinful life -- does not matter anymore – for the world, in that present form, is just passing away.

Conversion is like that. You might have thought that you could change nothing about your life, or you would die – and then God gets ahold of you. You begin to read the story of your life through God’s eyes, and then, without even knowing it, a lot of stuff you thought was do or die, life or death, just passes away. A lot of other things become a lot more important.

Ok, now. So reflecting on that Reader’s Digest version of the story of Jonah that I just gave you, think about this gospel story about the call of the disciples, these fishermen who left their nets to follow Jesus. What is this story about? Whose story is this?

A conventional reading, with all the “should” and “oughts” attached to it, is that this story is about the disciples, and us – about making the choice to follow Jesus, about what we are giving up, about how hard the life is, about how Jesus comes to us everyday, asking to give up everything we hold near and dear. And well, yes, later in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus does say, “Take up your cross,” and Jesus does say there is a cost to that discipleship.

But actually, when we read this story, I think it is distracting to read this story as being only about the disciples, or only about us. I love what the preacher Barbara Brown Taylor calls “the miracle on the beach,” calling this a miracle story about the power of God to create risk-taking, committed disciples out of what was just a bunch of fishermen. That this is a story not about what good, or bad, characters those fishermen were, but about the power of God, Taylor says,

… to recruit people who have made terrible choices; to invade the most hapless lives and fill them with light; to sneak up on people who are thinking about lunch, not [about] God, and smack them upside the head with glory.[i]

Reading this story as God’s story gives it a completely different point of view – one that does not reduce the fishermen to insignificant puppets, does not take away their “fisherman-ness,” but gives them a chance at something new, something creative and exciting. Reading this story as one about the power of God to convert even the most mundane and workaday heart shows us how God gives ALL of us the chance to play a role in God’s story of the creation of a transformed, abundant and blessed world.

Like the fishermen, like Jonah, like the Ninevites, like the Corinthians, we don’t have to earn our place in the kingdom of heaven.., God just invites us to come along. We’re already in. Maybe, like the people of Ninevah, we can surprise God with just how ready we are to take up that call. All we have to do now is to begin to see this story the way God sees it.

Conversion, they say, is turning our lives in the same direction as God’s life. In our workaday world, we might be doing the same things we have always done – we might still be fishermen, for example, but as Jesus says, we are going to fish for so, so much more.

---

[i] Barbara Brown Taylor, in Home by Another Way, quoted in Kate Matthew Huey, http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/january-22-2012-third-sunday.html

Listen: What do we want the future of St. David’s Church, indeed the future of any church, to be like?

Epiphany 2-B   January 15, 2012

1 Samuel 3:1-10; Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17

1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51 

Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.

Prayer, you know, is not about reading of a list of concerns. Prayer is about, for once in our lives, sitting down and shutting up. God knows, all too well, what trouble we are in, and does not need to be reminded. God does, however, need our attention, if this relationship between us and God is going to get anywhere.

Reflecting on today’s lesson from the first book of Samuel, I was very intrigued with what a seminary professor wrote about Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Hearing God’s voice was critical for the prophetic witness of Dr. King. In January 1956, during the Montgomery bus boycott, he received a threatening phone call late at night. He couldn’t sleep. He went to his kitchen and took his “problem to God.” He was at a breaking point of exhaustion and about to give up. He spoke to God and says that he experienced the Divine and “could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice, saying, ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth. God will be at your side forever.’” His fears and uncertainty ceased because God spoke and gave him “inner calm.” God provided the interior resources for him to do his social justice work. He needed God to speak first. Then he could act. He listened prayerfully then proclaimed prophetically.[i]

This professor went on to say that prayer was “the Power behind [King’s] words and work.”

It’s not a coincidence that King regularly took a “Day of Silence” to pray, plan, and listen. Listening was his lifeline. It was a critical part of his prophetic witness. In fact, it was the beginning of it, as was the case with Samuel. King took time to listen in order to do God’s work of love, mercy, and justice in the world.[ii]

King is far from the only political figure, caught in the cross-fires of justice-work and public scrutiny, who would find regular silent retreats absolutely necessary to continuing the work they heard God calling them to do. Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor under Franklin Roosevelt, and the nation’s first woman cabinet secretary, went each month to an Episcopal convent in Maryland, often talking with no one during her 24-hour visit there.

Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.

King and Perkins, and no doubt other public servants, find the resources to do extraordinary things not as volunteers, giving a little bit extra to get the job done, but as servants. They are doing not only what God has called them to do, but doing all of it out of the resources that God alone can give. There may indeed be atheists in foxholes, where things could look bleak and hopeless. But there are no volunteers for the work of mission, no volunteers to do the hard work, the detail work, the often mind-numbing day-to-day work of bringing about justice and mercy in this world. No one would volunteer to do the kind of work King did; only a servant who sat down one night, terrified and bone-tired and silent, and in the silence found that God indeed would provide the resources to do all the work that God wanted to be done.

All our lessons today have to do with identity: our identity in the light of who God is calling us to be. 

Despite aged Eli’s just wanting to go back to sleep, young Samuel knows that it is God’s insistent voice that is waking him in the night. Psalm 139 is a psalm of creation – our creation – extolling “God’s ongoing work in bringing us to fullness of life, unwrapping the mystery of us and loving us all the while.”[iii] 

Nathanael, interested in Jesus but not yet impressed enough to become a disciple, is stunned at how perceptive Jesus is. “Where did you get to know me?” he asks. “Indeed, how did Jesus get to know him, and us?”[iv]

Surely, like Nathanael, it is easier to think of ourselves as volunteers for God, and not full-fledged servants who get woken up at night and can’t find a fig tree big enough to hide behind. Surely, like Samuel, we are too young or inexperienced. Surely we lack the skills or abilities God needs for some part of that mission. Surely we don’t have enough money or enough time, we don’t have the courage of Martin Luther King or the perseverance of Frances Perkins. There is nowhere we can go to sit in silence, even if we thought God did have something to say to us, no opportunity on our horizon for us to be big or important or to make a difference.

Oh, really?

There is a story of a young, eager rabbi, one who wanted to make his mark on the world. After diligent study and tireless preparation, this young Rabbi Zusya still felt a failure, discouraged and downhearted about all he had not been able to accomplish. Finding this young pupil down in the dumps, an older rabbi said, “Zusya, when you get to heaven, God is not going to say to you, ‘Why weren't you Moses?’ No, God will say, ‘Why weren't you Zusya?’ So why don't you stop trying to be Moses, and start being the Zusya God created you to be?”[v]

We are getting ready for our Annual Meeting, a terrific time to take stock – of the year, or years, past, and of the future in which we will spend the rest of our lives. The reports we will be reading at that meeting will show us that we have accomplished some remarkable things, but that very real challenges lie ahead. At such a moment in the 50-year-young history of this parish are we not like that young rabbi Zusya, worrying about what we have not done and what we fear cannot do?

What do we want the future of St. David’s Church, indeed the future of any church, to be like?

Would you volunteer for such a future?

Or in the silence of the night, or of a crystal-clear dawn, or a snowy afternoon, do you hear God calling you -- and us -- to something bigger, more courageous and more exciting?

Speak Lord, your servant is listening.

---

[i] Luke Powery on MLK and lessons for Epiphany 2B http://www.odysseynetworks.org/news/onscripture-1-samuel-3-1-20

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Kate Mathews Huey -- http://www.ucc.org/worship/samuel/january-15-2012-second-sunday.html

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

Caught in the sacred geography

Epiphany 1 B    January 8, 2012

Genesis 1:1-5; Psalm 29

Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-11

I have really had enough of all these primaries – or to be more precise, I have really had enough of the ceaseless “news” coverage of all these primaries. Republican or Democrat (and this thought is not original to me), they duke it out in the least representative parts of our nation: Iowa and New Hampshire, places where the unemployment rate (quite low) and the demographics (quite homogenized) make them decidedly different from the rest of the country, where the rest of us live in economic uncertainty and rich, if sometimes contentious, diversity.

The concerns these politicians play out in these small states are, however, the concerns of the center, of the political and economic elite of our society. It’s a proxy dance for who will stay in power, and at the end of it all, will those who will have to live with the consequences of all these positions and policies and politics and punditry, have much of a say in how it shakes out?

If we were telling this story in first century Palestine, say, this story the presidential primaries would be a story about Jerusalem, here, the place where the power brokers reside. In first century Jerusalem, we find the Temple, the center of Jewish religion, of the elite, the place paid for by the taxes all Jews, rich and poor, have to pay. Jerusalem is also the political center, where the leaders of the occupying Roman empire and military reside, where they hold court, where they plant their foot to dominate this part of the known world. Jerusalem, in Judea, where all the fashionable, important, educated and powerful people live.

Jesus, you will note from today’s gospel, comes not from Jerusalem, but from Nazareth in Galilee, up here, far from the centers of power and authority, Galilee where people work hard and barely make a living, a place of small towns and fishing villages, alongside routes and roadways that bring people from across the world on their way to more important places.

In the Gospel of Mark, from which we will take most of our Gospel readings this year, geography matters. Where you are in a story tells you a lot about what is going on. John is from the wilderness, Jesus is from Galilee, and it is people from Judea and Jerusalem who are coming to see THEM. John is preaching something that they just cannot hear in Jerusalem.

The Gospel of Mark tells the story of Jesus in a way slightly different from what we read in Matthew and Luke. Matthew and Luke are more concerned with telling their story so the educated elite can take it in. Both tell the story of this revolutionary Good News, but you can detect how Matthew stresses continuity with Jewish tradition, how Luke strives to make it clear to the Greek-speaking, and spiritually attuned elite, that this Jesus will not undermine but make their lives better.

But Mark makes no apologies. He doesn’t care to tell us where Jesus was born, or what his family thought of his birth, or who even bothered to notice that he was born. John comes from the wilderness, with all the markings of most ferocious and uncompromising of Hebrew prophets. John is an outsider to the power elite, and those elites have not yet seemed to notice how many people are attracted to John’s message: repent, and your sins will be forgiven. Repent, turn around, get back on that path where God led you from the wilderness to the Promised Land, where God led you when you were distracted and unhappy, and brought you into a promise of right living and abundance and a zone of connection with God. John is not preaching anything new, but it is gold to those people from Judea, fed up, perhaps, with the demands of the elite, bored, perhaps, with the superficiality of a religious culture that bends to the demands of a foreign occupying army, worried, perhaps, that that army will someday turn on them no matter how much they bend and accommodate. Using these old words of repentance, these familiar cadences of the prophets, John is giving the people something real and authentic, from the earth on his sandals to the water dripping off his hands. The elites back in Jerusalem are concerned with their politics and manners and positions and power; the people are flocking to the edge of Galilee because John is offering them the chance at something real.

In these few words, these scant verses, Mark makes it clear where Jesus stands: with John. Jesus joins John not only in his critique of the powerful – the ones who need to repent but do not know it – but Jesus also joins John in his solidarity with the ordinary people who are longing for a better way of life, and who hear hopeful words that it could happen from this strange and unsettling outsider. Jesus did not pull John aside and say, hey, let’s go and do this in downtown Jerusalem where some really important people will see us and we’ll make a big splash. Jesus, from an ordinary town in a not-so-important place, comes with ordinary people to find the waters of life at this place on the edge of the wilderness.

Reading the story of Jesus from the Gospel of Mark is very appealing, because I think we, too, live our lives in this sacred geography between the Jerusalem of the powerful elite and the Galilee of the struggling ordinary. It’s not so long ago and far away; there are many places in North American, even in Onondaga County, that can be described that way.

That’s where we are, we 21st century Christians, caught in this sacred geography, knowing that the Good News comes from the margins, and that the water of life flows in the wilderness, yet living lives that are perhaps a little too distracted, a little too comfortable, a little too worried, to venture over there. Yet to that un-comfort zone is exactly where we are called, by John, who leads the way, by Jesus, who plunges in, and by God, who assures us that when we follow on that path, we, too, will be God’s beloved, with whom he will be infinitely well pleased.

... but does a human form display

Christmas I     January 1, 2012
Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Ps. 147
Galatians 3:23-25,4:4-7; John 1:1-18

Bethlehem has come to us. God in his Son is born into our lives. John's prologue to his Gospel is true: the light shines in the darkness, and though the world cannot understand it, neither can the world put it out. Poet William Blake put it succinctly:

God appears and God is light

To those poor souls who dwell in Night;

But does a Human Form display

To those who dwell in realms of Day.

All of us come to Christmas with the same hopes and fears: we share with the prophet Isaiah the hope for the restoration of the righteousness of the Lord and the vindication of God's justice. We share with St. Paul the hope that now that Christ has come we might be freed from slavery to the law and live in freedom as the children and heirs of God. Our Christmas liturgies focus on God's entrance into history as one of us: the infant Jesus is the new Adam, and Bethlehem the site of the new creation story. Christmas, the story of Jesus' birth, is a story about us and how we come to know God.

The great secret and glory of God is the redeeming power of love given to us in the life of this person whose birth we celebrate. Jesus, son of Mary, who never traveled more than 50 miles from his birthplace, who never wrote a book, who never left any permanent memorial of his life, who was executed by civil authorities for reasons which have embarrassed humanity ever since, who was rejected by his own people: this is the babe in the manger. Following the death of this man, many strange things happened, the most familiar being that after his public execution he rose from the dead and was seen and continued to teach and be with his friends.

If this were all there was to the Christ story, we could easily drop it there, but equally mysterious was the eventual appearance of a growing number of people who called themselves followers of this man, Jesus.

Tales of strange events taking place began to travel on the grapevine: tales of robbers becoming law-abiding citizens, dishonest merchants become concerned for the welfare of others; tales of masters treating their slaves as brothers and sisters; of fanatics and bigots like Saul of Tarsus who changed their lives and began to preach an unheard-of message of love not law as the standard of conduct. The Good News spread across the Mediterranean. It filtered into the ranks of Caesar's subjects and into his own household. Wherever it went a new kind of person appeared, one who completely confused the pagans. These were people who spread joy, for whom life was exciting, who faced the future with anticipation and hope, who took care of each other and the poor and lonely around them.

When Christ enters a life, that life is changed. A new person is born. That is the Good News, and that is what we celebrate right now: not just the birth of a baby, but the Advent of Christ into the world, into the lives of men and women, boys and girls.

God comes in a form we understand. If we live in gloom or trouble, God first appears to us as light. But if we already have had a glimpse of that light, God comes to us as one of us, embodying our hopes for righteousness and justice, love and freedom, giving us something tangible to hold on to and model our lives upon until the day of the Lord comes.