Category Archives: Church Seasons

When Exile and Words of Comfort Meet – A Sermon on Isaiah 40:1-11, Advent 2B

Posted on December 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

The collect and readings for today, The Second Sunday of Advent, may be found here. The following sermon focuses on Isaiah 40:1-11.

“Comfort, o comfort my people.” These are God’s ancient words to his people; spoken through the prophet Isaiah in the 6th century b.c. Their relevance and timeliness, however, are not lost on us today. It is not hard to find people in discomfort, lives in exile, and a world in turmoil. God’s words ring true in every age, place, and life because exile happens in every age, place, and life.

Exile takes us to the wilderness. In the wilderness the mountains are high, the valleys are low, and the ground is rough and uneven. Many of us have climbed the mountains of arrogance, ego, and pride. Likewise we have descended into the valleys of despair, depression, and fear. We have travelled the rough and uneven ground of sorrow, loss, and pain. The wilderness is not so much about the geography around us as it about the landscape within us.

That’s not just a description of our lives and our world. That is also a description of Israel in today’s Old Testament reading. Foreign armies have defeated the Israelites, taken them prisoner, and carried them off to a foreign land. Their home land has been overtaken by others and their temple has been destroyed. God, however, did not do this to them. They did it to themselves. Their own choices, ways of life, and sinfulness have brought this about.

Every one of us could tell a story about a time when we were in exile, alienated from life, our self, those we love, and our God. Some of us may be in exile now. Exiles live in a foreign land: a land of guilt and regret, fear, sorrow, despair. That is never where God intended us to live. It is not our true home but sometimes that is where we are. Thoughts, words, deeds, things done and left undone are the roads by which we came to this land of exile. Sometimes we intentionally choose those roads for ourselves. Other times it seems as if we have no choice. We do the best we can at the time but we are ignorant of a better way, a different way; God’s way. There are many paths into exile but only one way out, the way of the Lord.

Like ancient Israel we long to hear words of comfort. We want to know that one more powerful than us is coming. Not the one who overpowers us but the one who is able to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. We want someone to love us, forgive us, heal us, and take us home.

Imagine the darkest place of your life; the fear, the anger, the hurt. Wondering when, or whether, it will end. You carry guilt and regret like a worn out suitcase wherever you go. The days are filled with “should’ve” and the nights with “if only.” Over and over the past is replayed to the point that you can see no future. Exile, alienation, wilderness.

That is the situation into which God speaks words of comfort. Even when you see no way out, no hope, and you think that all is lost God cries out to you, “Comfort, o comfort!” Those are not sentimental patronizing words. God does not put his arm around us saying, “There, there. Feel better.” They are words of God’s presence, encouragement, and strength. They make possible what God asks of us. In those words God says, “I have never forgotten you. I heard your cries. I saw your need. My heart broke for love of you. I am sending one to bring you home, one who is more powerful than you.”

God sends Isaiah to carry his words of comfort to Israel and to us. “Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,” he instructs Isaiah. God knows that life in the wilderness is fragile. This is not a time for condemnation, judgment, or ridicule. Sometimes exiles are holding on by a thread. They need words of comfort, encouragement, and hope. Isaiah is to speak softly to their heart. He is to call them home. That is after all what repentance is about. It is about coming home. When John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness proclaiming a baptism of repentance he was echoing Isaiah’s words. “It is time to come home.” Repentance prepares the way of the Lord. It prepares the way home.

God’s promise is that the mountains will be made low, the valleys will be lifted up, and the rough and uneven ground will become a level plain. The way will be prepared. This is not so that we might get out but so that God in Christ might get in. God is always coming to us. There is no situation in which God cannot come to you. Isaiah (sounding a lot like Diana Ross) reminds us that there is no mountain high enough, no valley low enough, no ground rough enough to keep God from coming to you.

“Here is your God,” Isaiah exclaims to Israel. In the foreign land of exile “here is your God.” God comes to us in the worst places imaginable. He gathers us in his arms and carries us in his bosom. God’s words of comfort come to us in our exile. Our wilderness is the geography of new beginnings, reconciled relationships, and salvation. It all starts with repentance.

Repentance is not so much about the guilt of our past but a present hope that reveals a new future. Love and new life cannot be sustained by the same old ways, the ways that took us into exile. There must be a conversion, a change of heart. If new life and love are to last we must call into question our usual ways of being and doing. We must be willing to grow and change. We need to orient our life in a different direction and live at a new level of consciousness. We must face the truth of our life; not as the final judgment of our life but as the foundation for our hope, expectation, and longing for the one who is more powerful.

Name the places of alienation and exile in your life and your will also name the opportunities for repentance and homecoming. Repentance happens when exile and words of comfort meet. We do not repent so that we can hear God’s words of comfort. God speaks words of comfort so that we might repent. “Comfort, o comfort my people.”

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“In Those Days….” – A Sermon on Mark 13:24-37, Advent 1B

Posted on November 28, 2011 | 7 Comments

The collect and readings for the First Sunday in Advent, Year B, may be found here. The following sermon focuses on Mark 13:24-37.

“In those days….” So begins our entry into the Season of Advent. It sounds ominous and it is. Advent is not just a liturgical season of the church year. It is a reality of life. It happens in all sorts of ways. It comes at various points in life, not just the four or five weeks before Christmas.

“In those days … the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.” These are Jesus words to his disciples. The disciples have been admiring the temple and the large stones. They are impressed. Jesus, however, is telling them that change is coming. The temple of their life is coming down.

If you have ever experienced significant change in your life, whether desired or dreaded, you know about “those days.” You know about Advent. You know what it is like to enter the darkness of change. All change, whether welcome or unwanted, brings some kind of loss. It may be the loss of a relationship, the loss of a loved one, the loss of what is comfortable, familiar, safe. Regardless, the world as we have known it has ended.

The Advents of our lives set before us important questions. How will we find our way forward when the usual lights that illumined our path no longer shine? What do we do when it feels as if our world is falling apart? Where do we go when it seems as if darkness is our only companion and God is no where to be seen?

The dark times of life are threshold moments. The temptation is to do something; to fix it, to ease the pain, to escape the uncertainly, and to get back to what used to be. The God of Advent does not allow that. We can never go back to the way it was before the lights went out. God does not undo our life. God redeems our life. Advent is not so much about the losses as it is about the hope and coming of what will be. That hope and coming is the Son of Man, Jesus the Christ. The presence of Christ is the ultimate answer to every prayer, to every light extinguishing loss, to every Advent of our life.

Every time we tell the Advent story of our life we echo the prophet Isaiah’s cry, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” (Is. 64:1 ). And God does. God is faithful. God strengthens us to the end. In the midst of our losses we lack nothing as we await the revealing of Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Cor. 1:7-9).

The Advent times of life are times of waiting. They are liminal times. In Advent we live in between what was and what will be. We are neither here nor there. We are betwixt and between. They are times of transition and it is hard, sometimes even impossible, to see the way forward.

If we allow them to the dark threshold places of life can draw us deeper into the divine mystery. They remind us that we do not know everything. We do not see all possibilities. We can neither predict nor control anything. We are not in charge. Advent challenges us to give up our usual sources of illumination, to let go of our habitual ways of knowing, and to question our typical ways of seeing. Advent invites us to receive the God who comes to us in the darkness of life.

At some point our world falls apart, life changes, or the lights go out. More often than not we see this as the end. When these things happen, Jesus says, remember the fig tree. Read the signs correctly. When its branch becomes tender and it puts forth leaves you know summer is near. So also when the darkness overtakes your life know that the Son of Man is near. Christ’s presence, our healing, and salvation, are always taking place in the dark and messy parts of life. We have not and never will be abandoned to the darkness.

“Be alert,” Jesus warns. He commands us to “Keep awake.” Darkness is not our enemy as much as is falling asleep. We fall asleep whenever fear controls or life, when hope gives way to despair, when busyness is equated with goodness, when entitlement replaces thanksgiving, when we choose what is comfortable rather than life-giving. Whenever we think our life is over, that darkness is our final reality, that we have been abandoned, or that loss and darkness are our only reality then we have fallen asleep.

To often we allow the darkness to deceive us into believing there is nothing worth waiting or watching for. So we close our eyes. We fall asleep and we become part of the darkness. We refuse to see the One who is always coming to us. The danger in the darkness is that we do not give out eyes time to adjust. We do not trust our night vision. Night vision is not about the light around us but the light that is within us, a light that can never be extinguished.

The Advents of our lives ask us to trust the Coming One more than the darkness. It means we must sit, listen, wait, watch. That is contrary to what most of the world believes and what our society rewards. We must show up every moment of our lives not just in spite of but because of the darkness. To show up and be present in the darkness of life is some of the hardest work we will ever do. Run from our darkness and we run from God.

In the darkness of Advent we move slower, we listen more than we speak, we hold questions rather than answers. We wait expectantly but without specific expectations. Waiting in darkness is an act of faithfulness and surrender to the Coming One. Waiting becomes our prayer, a prayer that is and will be answered by God’s presence.

Tell your Advent story; a story of change, loss, darkness. Then sit down. Be still. Be quiet. Listen. Wait. Watch. These are the practices of Advent. Why? Because God “works for those who wait for him” (Is. 64:4).

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Immersed in Each Other’s Lives – A Sermon on Matthew 3:13-17, Baptism of our Lord

Posted on January 9, 2011 | 3 Comments

Today, the First Sunday after the Epiphany, we celebrate the Baptism of our Lord. The collect and readings may be found here. The appointed gospel is Matthew 3:13-17

Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”

 

Protesters carry Korans alongside Bibles and crosses in a solidarity demonstration in Cairo. Credit: Associated Press via LA Times

The new year began with a bang but not in a good way. It was not the sound of a party, celebration, or joy. It was, rather, the sound of death, anger, and violence. On New Year’s Eve Coptic Christians gathered to celebrate the Eucharist at a church in Alexandria, Egypt. As the liturgy was ending, in the early hours of New Year’s Day, the church was bombed killing 25 people and wounding at least 80 others.

It is another one of those headlines that can challenge our worldview, making us wonder what kind of world we live in. Is the universe for us? Is the universe against us? Or is it just neutral? For people of faith those are not just questions about the universe or a worldview; they are questions about God. Those questions are not limited to just the events of headline news. They hit pretty close to home too.

Look at the painful places of your life and you will see the place of an explosion. You know those places, right? One day life is on track and the next day it is unrecognizable, everything has changed. We stand there looking at our world unable to believe what happened. We could each name the explosions our lives have sustained. Sometimes we talk about them but other times we keep them buried deep within our heart. Either way the memories can trigger fear, anxiety, and tears. The explosions of life leave us in shock, wounded, and confused. They rock not only the world around us but the world within us leaving us to wonder, ask questions about, or even doubt whose side God is on.

These explosions become even more lethal when they are combined with some really bad teaching. Too many people have been told and bought in to the idea that Christianity is mostly about being good, that human nature is nothing but bad and sinful, and that our guilt killed Jesus,  the Son of God, an innocent man. If that is true surely God is not on our side, never was, and never will be. That combination kills not only body and soul but also the spirit of faith, hope, and love.

The best, it seems, we can hope for is that God is at least neutral, overhead somewhere at a safe distance, perhaps watching and listening. Either way we have been abandoned, left alone and defenseless. Under one scenario we live in fear and anxiety always trying to appease an unappeasable God. In the other scenario our prayers simply become pleas that an indifferent God would show up and be with us or those we care about.

That is not the life God gives us. That is not the life God desires for us. In the baptism of Jesus God has chosen sides. God has chosen us, picked us, sided with us. God did so with full knowledge of all that we are and all that we are not, all that we have done and all that we have left undone. The baptism of Jesus is more about God’s solidarity with us than it is our sinfulness.

God is always choosing to be on the side of humanity. It was a choice God made at our creation. The choice became clear, visible, and physical with the birth of Jesus. Today God in Jesus chooses to stand with, among, and as one of us. God chooses to be for us. It is a matter of righteousness. How could the God who is righteousness make any other choice?

As Jesus came up from the water the heavens opened, the Spirit of God descended like a dove, and a voice proclaimed, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” That is the Father’s recognition and acknowledgement that all righteousness has been fulfilled. That righteousness is the joining together of earth to heaven and heaven to earth. It is the joining together of divinity and humanity. It is the joining together of the created and the Creator. It is the affirmation that in Jesus God stands in solidarity with all humanity.

In baptism one life is immersed so deeply into another that they now stand as one. They live as one. They die as one. And they rise again as one. Jesus was baptized into the life of humanity and the created so that we might be baptized into the life of divinity and the Creator. That does not mean that life is no longer difficult or that explosions will never occur again. They will. There will be more explosions in our world, in your life, and in mine. It means, rather, that when the explosions happen we can trust that God is on our side, present, standing with us, as one of us, among the rubble. It means that we can trust that God is for us and that God will offer a way forward. God always does.

For the Christians of Egypt that way forward came in a very unexpected way and from people they could not have imagined. Muslims. This past Thursday night, while we were celebrating the Feast of the Epiphany, Coptic Christians, using a slightly different liturgical calendar, were celebrating Christmas. Thousands of Muslims attended Christmas liturgies on Thursday and Friday alongside Christians. Others gathered outside churches acting as “human shields.” That was an act of baptism. They immersed their lives so deeply into the lives of others that whether they lived or they died they did so in solidarity. They did for other human beings what Jesus did for all humanity. I cannot help but believe that righteousness was fulfilled, the heavens opened, the Spirit descended, and God was pleased with his children.

The solidarity enacted at Jesus’ baptism is the foundation for human solidarity that crosses boundaries of race, nationality, economics, and religions. It is the foundation from which the fractures in the human heart will be healed. Every one of us is called to live a life of solidarity, with God and each other. We can do that only because God did it first. It is the only way we will ever survive the explosions of life, the only way we can ever form new relationships and reconcile old ones, the only way in which righteousness will continue to be fulfilled.

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Becoming Epiphany

Posted on January 5, 2011 | 7 Comments

The Feast of the Epiphany is one of the seven principal feasts of the church year with a fixed date of January 6. In the Western Church it focuses on the coming of the magi and their adoration of the baby. In the Eastern Church epiphany—usually called the theophany— is about the baptism of Jesus. The West celebrates Jesus’ baptism on the Sunday after the Epiphany. The Feast of the Epiphany closes out the Christmas season and begins the Season of Epiphany.

Epiphany comes from the Greek word epiphaino. Epi means “upon” and phaino is translated as “to shine” or “to produce light,” “to become visible, appear,” “to become known, be recognized, be apparent, be revealed.”

When we think of the Epiphany we probably most often think of the star and the magi or wise men. But the Epiphany is a feast of our Lord’s life. It is a feast about Jesus not the star or the magi and their gifts. The star and the magi are simply our guides or pointers to Christ. The Epiphany celebrates the manifestation of Jesus’ divine nature and this takes place through his humanity. It is through Jesus’ humanity that we see God.

In celebrating the Epiphany we are asking God, who by the leading of a star manifested his Son to the peoples of the earth, to lead us to God’s presence where we may see God’s glory face to face, that Christ may be manifest in us, and our lives may be a light to the world. Not only are we illumined by the light of Christ we become illumination and our lives become epiphanies of Christ for each other.



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The Manger Is Not In Bethlehem – A Christmas Sermon On Luke 2:1-20

Posted on December 25, 2010 | 2 Comments

The collect and readings for Christmas may be found here.

The Cave of the Nativity of our Lord

Every one of us could probably tell the Christmas story. We know it well. A young virgin named Mary conceives a child by the Holy Spirit. She and her betrothed, Joseph, travel to Bethlehem by order of the emperor. There Mary gives birth in a manger because there is no room in the inn. Heavenly lights flood the earth, angels announce the good news. Shepherds leave the fields and their flocks to come see the newborn baby. Everyone is praising God. For many of us that is the extent of the Christmas story. It ends with the birth of the baby. That is, however, only part of the story.

There is another part of the story that we do not often hear or tell. It is the part of the story when the angels stop singing and go back into heaven and the shepherds return to the fields. At some point Mary and Joseph will gather their things, pick up Jesus, and travel home to Nazareth. That is the part of the story that is often left untold. It is that part when everything looks like it did before the birth; when the manger is again empty, the night sky is again dark and silent, and the shepherds are again living in the fields keeping watch over their flocks. That does not, however, signal the end of Christmas. It is, rather, the beginning. Christmas really begins when we quit talking about the story and allow our lives to become the story.

In a couple of days or maybe a week or so from now our family and friends will have retuned to their homes. The leftovers will be thrown out. Decorations will be taken down. Bills will be coming in. The kids will be back in school and parents back at work. Like the shepherds we will return to the fields and flocks of our lives; to the routine of daily life. Everything will look like it did before the birth.

But looks can be deceiving. Who would have ever guessed that God would become human with flesh, blood, skin, and hair, a body just like ours? Who could have imagined that a young virgin would give God human life? Who would have thought that our Savior, the Messiah, the Lord, the one for whom we have waited would come among us as a baby?

We need to hear and trust that other part of the story. It tells us that the miracle of Christmas is not in the virgin birth, the heavenly light, the angelic appearances, or the songs of heavenly host. The miracle of Christmas is in you. The invisible God is now seen in a human face. The eternal Word is now spoken by a human tongue. Sacred touch is now given by human hands. Yours is the face. Yours is the tongue. Yours are the hands. The glorious exchange of gifts has been completed in the birth of Jesus. God has given us divinity and we have given God humanity.

All of this happens, Luke tells us, in the most ordinary of places and circumstances. It happens even as a government orders a census and taxation. It happens in the midst of travels, crowds, and over-booked motels. It happens in the darkness and fear of an unknown future. It happens with the birth of a baby. It happens while working the night shift.

Jesus’s birth did not take the shepherds out of the fields or away from the sheep. Before Jesus was born they were shepherds living in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night. After Jesus was born they were shepherds living in the fields keeping watch over their flocks by night. Jesus’ birth does not allow us to escape the reality of our life and world. It is just the opposite. Jesus is born into the circumstances of our life and world. There is no place you go or circumstance you encounter in which Jesus is not being born. Look at your life. What do you see? Name the reality, whatever it might be, because that is a place in which Jesus is being born, a place where God’s divinity meets your humanity.

He is born in the joys, celebrations, and thanksgivings of your life. He is born in the sorrow, losses, and griefs of your life. He is born in times of hopes and fears, in your words and in your silence. He is born in your successes and accomplishments as well as your failures and disappointments. He is born in times of heavenly transcendence as well as earthly immanence. The salvation of God’s presence, love, and healing fills every aspect of your life.

So let the angels depart and the shepherds return to the fields. Let the sky become dark and silent. Let the Holy Family go home. Let Christmas become real. The manger of his birth is not in Bethlehem. Your life is the manger of Jesus’ birth and that, as the angel says, is “good news of great joy.”

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