Readings

What might the Spirit be saying to us in these readings?

Some initial observations:

On the one hand, Paul’s praise and description of the virtue of love. On the other hand, Jeremiah’s commission (“to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant”) and Jesus’ words to the Nazareth congregation. Whatever love is, it’s not about being nice. Whatever love is—well, that’s the focus of this sermon.

Jeremiah’s commission and Jesus with the synagogue congregation: a visual that might accompany these is that scene from early in Genesis: Adam and Eve hiding in the trees and the Lord calling “Where are you?” There, as in Jeremiah’s time, Jesus’ time, our time, the Lord trying for a conversation. That’s love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” in spades. Any other god would have thrown in the towel long ago.

Jeremiah’s commission: specific to Jeremiah, yes, but also representative of the prophetic task. “Ah, Lord GOD! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.” Not hard to imagine Jesus feeling some solidarity with Jeremiah. Again, “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant:” not a bad partial description of the prophetic task. If we wonder why four verbs for the destruction and two for the creation, Abba Nestoros (one of the Egyptian desert fathers around the end of the 4^th century) noted that “it is twice as hard to drive out vice as to acquire virtue” (so Cassian, cited in Goldingay The Book of Jeremiah).

Anyhow, let’s move to the Gospel. Last Sunday we heard Jesus reading from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And, as we heard this morning “All spoke well of him.”

Ignoring the proverbial “Quit while you’re ahead,” Jesus tries for a conversation. To unpack Isaiah’s words there are any number of Old Testament stories Jesus could have cited that the congregation would have loved: Moses to Pharaoh: “Let my people go!”, Samson killing a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, the Lord delivering Jerusalem from the Assyrian army in the time of Isaiah. But Jesus chose two stories of prophets aiding Israel’s enemies—and the congregation goes homicidal.

It’s an understandable reaction. The Jews have been under the Gentile heel for centuries, Rome being simply the latest to fill that role. And to think that Isaiah’s God—Israel’s God—cares as much about them as about us, loves them as much as us…

What’s at stake here? On the one hand, our image of God. We might have thought that the Book of Jonah had settled that question (“O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing,” gracious and merciful even with the Assyrians! But it turns out that whether then or now we’re remarkably slow learners.

On the other hand, it doesn’t take theological training to realize that if God loves our enemies, the other shoe’s about to drop, this God expecting us to love these enemies.

“Love your enemies.” That’s the obvious deal breaker in Jesus’ good news, and it gives us plenty to work on. Here I’m thinking not of our actions or our words, which we usually have under control, but of our gut reactions to moments in our daily lives or news stories. “Bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you:” I’m not even close to these being habitual.

But “love your enemies” is only the tip of a larger iceberg, which offers us the option of coming at the challenge sideways. And for this I’m drawing on Rowan Williams’ description of the eastern monastic perspective in his book Looking East in Winter.

Williams writes: “Our problem…is not that we are embodied spirits, but that we are incompletely embodied spirits – that is, that we are as yet unable to live in this material and mutable world without clinging to our impressions, distorting our impressions, or compulsively marking out our territory. The things of the world – and our human neighbours in the world – appear either as food or as threat to the ego. Unless we become able to receive the truth of what is before us as it stands in relation to God, not to us, we are failing to be embodied in the sense of being properly part of creation: we are caught in an implicit idolatry, the effort to separate ourselves from the order of which we are a part” (p.32).

We might hear this perspective as unpacking Paul: love “does not insist on its own way,” is not trapped in the habit of seeing everything and everybody in terms of how they might threaten or benefit me. Again, this is prior to my speech or action: it’s about what my eyes or ears attend to.

This, is probably why Paul starts his description of love as he does. One can get very far in the church—in any institution for that matter—with the ego comfortably in the driver’s seat, assessing in others the potential for threat or exploitation. And as long as the ego is calling the shots, no room for love.

What do we do about this? Within this perspective, Williams again: “the dual habits of contrition and gratitude keep before us the nature we had almost lost and preserve us from defeat by the passion of lust and anger” (p.25). Contrition: genuine sorrow over my failures; gratitude: joyful recognition of all that I nevertheless continue to receive. Contrition and gratitude, in other words, aid us in living truthfully.

So, back to Jeremiah, “to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” become ongoing disciplines, part, with God’s help, of living mindfully. Here the focus is usually not on our enemies—no need to start with the hardest cases—but with family members, neighbors, colleagues. Where are my impulses to defend or use clouding my perceptions of them? Those impulses are the ones to pluck up and pull down.

Two final observations. First, Paul’s description of love is part of his advice on how to live together as a congregation that we heard last Sunday. So “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude” is not about some self-standing altruism, but about what’s necessary so that congregational life doesn’t simply mirror our society’s dysfunctional patterns.

More, recall last Sunday’s Psalm 19. The psalm celebrates the life-giving power of the Law. But toward the end it takes an unexpected turn: “Who can tell how often he offends? / cleanse me from my secret faults.” For all the power of the Law—or the Gospel, for that matter—it’s pretty much powerless against my blind spots. So how does God answer this prayer for cleansing? Until preparing last week’s sermon I’d always assumed that God answered through some sort of ethereal surgery. But reading the psalm together with Paul’s description of how Christ’s Body works… If I only listen to folk who think like me, my blind spots stay undisturbed. So God answers the prayer for cleansing by putting me in this Body with Jews, Greeks, men, women, folk all over the spectrums, many of whom I have no inclination to listen to. I can pretty much count on one of them to tell me about my secret faults. So this love that listens turns out to be necessary for my own healing.

Second, Paul’s description of love is a description of God’s behavior. Why does God keep seeking us out, trying for a conversation, sometimes directly, sometimes through another human being? God is love.

Readings

What might the Spirit be saying to us through today’s readings?

At first glance the first two readings go in opposite directions. The center of Psalm 19 celebrates the Law, the Torah: it revives the soul, gives wisdom to the innocent, rejoices the heart, gives light to the eyes… But when Ezra reads that Law the people weep.

Our first reading doesn’t explain why they weep, but its setting lets us make a reasonable guess. Ezra and Nehemiah are reconstructing the people’s common life after the disaster of the Babylonian conquest and exile. The temple’s been more or less rebuilt, the city walls restored, and now the Law reproclaimed. Love God; love your neighbor as yourself. Obey and things will go well; disobey and things will go very badly—as just experienced in the Babylonian conquest and exile. Why think that things are going to go any better the second time around? The people seem to have enough self-awareness to ask this question—and weep.

Love God; love your neighbor as yourself. That’s the path that revives the soul, gives wisdom to the innocent, rejoices the heart, gives light to the eyes… But as the prophets kept pointing out, it’s remarkably easy to stray from that path. Love God: more than I love my script for how I achieve security and status? Love my neighbor, or see my neighbor as a threat to be neutralized or a resource to be exploited? If only this were the challenge only for Ezra and Nehemiah’s audience, and not for every generation of the people of God!

We’ll come back to this. Meanwhile, attending to our other readings, our Gospel reading, like the first reading, gives us another scene of public proclamation, this time Jesus reading Isaiah in the Nazareth synagogue. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.” It’s not difficult to apply the psalmist’s praise of the Law to this good news: it too “it revives the soul, gives wisdom to the innocent, etc.” But—caution, spoiler for next week’s reading—it runs into the same problem the Law encountered: the synagogue audience goes homicidal when Jesus declares that this good news is also good news for those neighbors they consider enemies. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose birthday we observed last Monday, ran into that same problem.

Love your neighbor as yourself. As Paul’s letters remind us, this is difficult enough to do within the church. The ear, the eye, the hand: they focus on different things; by most measures they have very little in common. But what Paul’s aiming at: that “the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.” Ears, eyes, hands, feet: some of us voted for Trump, others for Biden, some of us get our news from Fox, others from MSNBC, some of us are still sorry we’re not using the 1928 prayer book, others can’t wait for a full revision of 1979. And so on. And Paul wants us to get to the point that “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.”

What’s at stake here? On the macro level, whether the good news embodied in Jesus is true and has the power to transform, or if it finally belongs in the box with the Easter Bunny and Linus’ Great Pumpkin. On the micro level, look at the ending of today’s psalm. “Who can tell how often he offends? / cleanse me from my secret faults.” For all the power of the Law—or the Gospel—it’s powerless against my blind spots. And as long as I listen only to those who think like me those blind spots stay undisturbed. In other words, God typically responds to “cleanse me from my secret faults” not by some ethereal intervention, but through a neighbor I’m too ready to write off. Cue, again, Dr. King.

This challenge of loving God and neighbor, central to both Law and Gospel: what in our readings might give us some encouragement?

Paul’s image of the body is an appeal to our imagination, so let’s stay with that image a bit longer. The ear, eye, hand: each has access to an extremely narrow slice of reality. And in God’s ordering of the body, it all works, even though none of these parts has the “big picture”—including the brain. This ordering depends on a sort of trust, the eyes, ears, etc. sending out nerve impulses without knowing or controlling what will happen to them. And, conversely, bad things happen when this “trust” breaks down. One or more cells may get together, decide “the heck with all this cooperation, let’s just grow”—which is what we call cancer. In short, Paul’s image is designed to nurture a healthy humility: our individual perspectives are necessarily limited, but that need not be an obstacle to God’s work.

More importantly, going back to Ezra and Nehemiah’s Second Temple weeping congregation, it’s going to be better this time around because God comes to us in our brother Jesus saying “Let’s do this together.” Loving God and neighbor involves some serious dying, an ongoing letting go of my impulses to neutralize or exploit. That’s scary. And Jesus is there beside me: “You don’t have to do this alone. Let’s do it together.” That’s one way of thinking about what the Bread and Wine are about: Jesus’ “Let’s do this together.”

Ezra and Nehemiah aren’t in a position to mount a strong argument against the people’s weeping, but they point in the right direction: “Go your way, eat the fat and drink sweet wine and send portions of them to those for whom nothing is prepared.” The endgame of all this is the victory banquet Isaiah described:

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken. (25:6-8)

The Bread and Wine: they’re the first course. So come to the Table, God’s dream for the new world: everyone is welcome, there’s room for everyone, there’s enough for everyone.

Readings

Then as now we’ve never lacked idiots declaring—often with sandwich boards—that the end is near. Perhaps that’s why Luke gives us two long chapters of backstory so that we take this “idiot” John the Baptist seriously.

First there’s Elizabeth’s extraordinary pregnancy when she and Zechariah are “very old” (CEB). Then Mary’s even-more extraordinary pregnancy, being a virgin. John is born to Elizabeth, and his father Zechariah responds with a lengthy prophecy speaking of “a mighty savior” and of being able to serve God “without fear.” Mary, even before Jesus’ birth, sings what we know as the Magnificat:

He has shown strength with his arm;
he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones,
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty.

After Jesus’ birth the shepherds convey the words of the angel and the angelic military chorus, and Simeon and Anna add their witness in the temple. So, John the Baptist is no ordinary “idiot.”

John’s message is, I think, three-fold: (1) “all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” God is coming to set things right. (2) Repent! When God comes it’s prudent not to be obviously part of the problem: stop hoarding, stop extorting! (3) Me, I’m just the warm-up act. It’s all very apocalyptic. The newspapers might have called it the “Apocalypse Now” tour. Things have to be pretty bad for apocalypse to sound like a good idea, and the crowds flocking to John give us a pretty good idea of life in the benevolent claws of the Roman Empire.

And, at the end of today’s Gospel: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” In those words of the Divine Voice many hear echoes of three biblical texts:

The new king’s witness in Ps 2: “I will tell of the decree of the LORD: He said to me, ‘You are my son; today I have begotten you’” (Ps. 2:7).

The Lord’s introduction of the servant in the midst of exile: “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations” (Isa 42:1)

The Lord’s words to Abraham: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you” (Gen. 22:2).

John is hardly underplaying what’s going on here! And all three of these texts continue to echo in Luke’s Gospel. Psalm 2: Jesus sorting out his messianic role, which is essentially about what it means to live as a human being. Isaiah 42: Jesus assuming the mantle of the servant—and invites his followers to do so as well. What sort of service pleases God? Genesis 22: Jesus continuing on a trajectory over which he has limited control.

There are many things that we might explore in this and the other readings. Since we’ll be doing the renewal of baptismal vows in a few minutes I’ll focus on just two.

First, this salvation that everyone’s been celebrating—Zechariah, Mary, Simeon, Anna, John—doesn’t play out predictably. Luke’s mention of John’s imprisonment brutally yanks John offstage, and signals what Jesus is getting himself into. This is probably not what John had in mind when he proclaimed “every tree…that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” And Simeon had warned Mary “and a sword will pierce your own soul too.” And the echo of the words to Abraham in the words to Jesus. Fast-forwarding to Paul, who started his career very certain of how God’s salvation was going to play out, being baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection means giving up our illusions of control.

Second, for all that Zechariah, Mary, John, etc. get right, there’s plenty that they don’t get right, plenty of room for ongoing repentance. Zechariah responds with so little faith to Gabriel’s announcement that Gabriel decides it would be better for all concerned if Zechariah would just shut up until John’s birth. The story we heard last week of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple: every parent’s nightmare, but also evidence that Mary and Joseph had no idea who was living under their roof. This pattern continues with the disciples, so that in Luke’s telling they chose the Last Supper to continue their argument about who’s the greatest (22:24-30). They all end up abandoning Jesus. So, when in the renewal of the Baptismal Covenant we say “I will, with God’s help,” Luke would probably want us to remember that “God’s help” includes graciously accepting our repentance. Jesus tells us to accept a brother’s or sister’s repentance even seven times a day (Lk 17:3-4); our firm hope is the God does likewise.

Let us close with the collect for Friday from Morning Prayer: “Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified: Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord. Amen.”

Readings (Using Gospel from Luke)

Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas—in spite of entering the new calendar year still besieged by the COVID 19 pandemic. It’s been brutal, and tends to eat away at hope. My focus on hope is inspired by Paul’s in our second reading: he celebrates the Ephesians’ faith and love, but thinks their hope could use a little support—as could mine.

Jeremiah’s vision of new exodus (our first reading) lays out an extravagant vision of hope: the Lord will again make a way through the wilderness, a way that even the lame and very pregnant will be able to negotiate. At the end, full-throated worship in the temple, with the land’s staples—grain, wine, olive oil—in abundance. That’s the Lord’s heart, the Lord’s passion, on full display.

And, by the Lord’s power, there was a return in the 6^th century (Haggai, Zechariah, Ezra, Nehemiah). But it was ambiguous enough that most readers of Isaiah and Jeremiah thought the new exodus was still to come. The editors of Daniel, for example, working in the second century, thought that when Jeremiah talked of 70 years of exile he was talking about 70 weeks of years, that is, 490 years. So Jesus’ family celebrating Passover (the first exodus) would have been hoping for the Lord to do it again.

Which is essentially what John the Baptist and Jesus were announcing: this is it! It’s no accident that Jesus focused on “the Kingdom of God” and that the first mention in the Bible of the Lord’s kinship is at the climax of the song Moses and Miriam sang on the far side of the Red Sea: “The LORD will reign forever and ever.” Or that in Luke’s account of the transfiguration Jesus, Moses and Elijah speaking about Jesus’ “exodus” “which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem” (translated “departure” in the NRSV). As the Gospels tell it, Jesus’ death and resurrection is not the derailing, but the fulfillment of the new exodus hope. “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast” (1 Cor. 5:7-8 KJV).

So we gather together every Sunday, because Sunday’s the day of the resurrection: “Christ is risen from the dead, / trampling down death by death, / and on those in the tombs bestowing life!” Or, as we say in the Great Thanksgiving: “Christ has died. / Christ is risen. / Christ will come again.” Death can only dream of having the last word, playing the last card.

As Paul tells it, the same divine power evident in the resurrection continues to work, gathering communities of believers throughout the Empire—like Ephesus. Eventually “throughout” transitions to “beyond,” so here we are in Wisconsin!

Ephesus: capital of the Roman province of Asia, home to a magnificent temple to Artemis—four times larger than the Parthenon. This is where some of the merchants started a major riot in response to Paul’s preaching on the chance that he might make enough converts to cut into their temple trade profits. Paul describes God building another temple: “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.” So the visions of pilgrimage to God’s temple, God’s glory, in Jeremiah and the psalm are not stuck in past, but descriptive of our reality—in the middle of Empire. And it’s not that the church in Ephesus simply survived. It thrived, planting churches in multiple neighboring cities, and, later, hosting a major ecumenical council (431).

One final observation from that letter. In the middle of Paul’s glowing affirmations and many specific instructions: “Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord.” That’s important: Christian life, congregational life, is not a turnkey or scripted affair: experimentation and improvisation are essential. So Jesus “sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.” This isn’t something Jesus grows out of; the Gospels are packed with Jesus’ questions. And to the degree that we’re listening we hear Jesus asking us questions, including, for some of us, “Why are you so hard on yourself?”

And sometimes Jesus asks us questions through the questions one of us asks. Here’s the thing: groups—including congregations—tend to have unwritten rules about what questions can be asked and what questions can’t be asked. I doubt that these rules serve us well. Between Jesus’ example in the temple and Paul’s “Try to find out what is pleasing to the Lord” we may well need everyone’s questions.

We’re entering a new year already weighed down by a brutal pandemic. We don’t know how that’s going to play out. We do know that Christ is risen from the dead, and that Christ has a strong track record of nurturing life-giving communities from Ephesus to Baraboo. “Christ has died. / Christ is risen. / Christ will come again.”

Merry Christmas.

Sometimes you plan one sermon and end up giving another one. This was one of those days.

Readings

Merry Christmas!

“…and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” Glory: that word shows up repeatedly in the Bible and in our liturgy: “Glory to God in the highest…we praise you for your glory…in the glory of God the Father.” What are we talking about?

‘Glory’, we might say, points to what generates awe, the gut-level recognition that things are off the scale, that—recalling that scene from Jaws—“We need a bigger boat.” The Old Testament often uses extreme weather to imagine glory: God’s giving the law at Sinai is accompanied by thunder and lightning. The prophets would have liked Wisconsin’s weather, in which we can sometimes get a snow storm combined with thunder and lightning!

My most profound encounter with this sort of glory occurred while backpacking in the high Sierras in California above tree line. There was a full moon, and the crystals in the exposed granite did wonderful things with the moonlight. So I stood facing one direction, trying to take it all in—unsuccessfully. Then I’d turn 90° and repeat the process. I probably spent over half an hour trying to take it all in. Finally crawled into the sleeping bag; too much glory to take in.

“…and we have seen his glory” John says, and in the Gospel readings throughout the year we get some sense as to what that was like. But Jesus ascended, so where does that leave us? Where does that leave the world?

Paul’s answer is disconcerting: “You are God’s building… God’s temple is holy and you are that temple” (1 Cor 3:9, 17). Paul is writing to the Corinthians, of all people! Recalling all the other things he needed to say to them, he nevertheless says this: “you are that temple.” You are where God’s glory is to be visible.

How does that work? Here are two stories from my time in World Vision in Latin America.

For various historical reasons the division between Protestants and Roman Catholics is often very sharp there. It’s common for each to define themselves as not being the other. Throw the Bible into the mix and too often the arguments coalesce around the Pope and the Virgin Mary. Since World Vision’s community development projects tryto bring the faith traditions of the community into the process and since virtually everyone self-identifies as Protestant or Roman Catholic, that’s a challenge.

Now, community development is basically about two things: power and money: how do resources get distributed, and who gets to decide? Who’s at the table; who’s not at the table? And, since as Kissinger observed, power is the most potent aphrodisiac, decisions about how sexuality gets used or exploited can come into the mix as well. Jesus, of course, has a great deal to say about money and power. So we worked at crafting Bible studies that focused on these: how did Jesus handle issues of money and power, and how might this shape our conduct and procedures? Some time later the field directors from the various counties came together (as they periodically did) and observed one of these studies being facilitated in one of the projects. They left the experience flummoxed: they couldn’t figure out if the facilitator was a Protestant or Catholic. Glory! In that admittedly limited time and space there was some healing of a very old wound in Christ’s body, some greater possibility of God’s glory being visible.

At the national office in another country the staff routine included morning and afternoon coffee breaks. In that particular context those coffee breaks were an important marker of being white collar, of having arrived. But this meant that if someone from one of the projects had to travel to the national office for some administrative issue—usually by a multi-hour bus ride—they might have to wait an additional 15 minutes while the staff enjoyed their coffee break. We’d been focusing on what Christian witness meant, that it was a witness we gave whether or not we were intending to witness to anything, and the staff came to the conclusion that making folk from the projects cool their heels was witnessing to some lord other than Jesus. So they reworked individual schedules so that while everyone got their coffee break, there’d always be someone available to attend immediately to folk from the projects. Glory. What’s important about this is that regular coffee breaks were part of the landscape, part of “they way we’ve always done it.” But Jesus’ Spirit was able to do some creative meddling and a little more glory became visible.

“You are that temple.” That’s Paul’s word to the Corinthians, and to Good Shepherd in Sun Prairie. Here is where God wants God’s glory to be visible.

There’s a corollary to that: the past is prologue. God’s process of transforming us so that God’s glory is ever more visible means that things can keep getting better. Another, small, example: this week my wife and I celebrate 43 years of marriage, and it has kept getting better. We’re two garden-variety sinners, but even with our very imperfect discipleship it has kept getting better. And that’s God’s desire for all the communities in Christ’s Body. It can keep getting better; God’s glory can become increasingly visible. That’s God’s desire and passion for Good Shepherd, Sun Prairie.

Merry Christmas.

Readings

Good morning, and Merry Christmas!

Our lectionary has set a rich feast before us; the sermon could go in any number of directions. We might focus on John the Baptist and the surprising logic of being a witness. The Word the Gospel celebrates is described as a light. Why does the light need a witness? We might focus on Jesus’ coming as opening the path to our becoming God’s daughters and sons. Or we might—and we will—wonder about the odd disconnect between the passion for Jerusalem in Isaiah and the psalm and those sober lines in the Gospel: “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.”

Jerusalem, both a specific city at a particular longitude and latitude and one of the Bible’s central symbols for God’s passion to create and preserve a life-giving community. God deals with us individually. But because to be human—as Aristotle memorably defined it—is to be a political animal, dealing with us individually means dealing equally with our communities and institutions.

For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,
and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest,
until her vindication shines out like the dawn,
and her salvation like a burning torch.

So Isaiah. And in the psalm the salvation of the individual and the salvation of Jerusalem are inseparable:

13 Worship the Lord, O Jerusalem; *
praise your God, O Zion;
14 For he has strengthened the bars of your gates; *
he has blessed your children within you.
15 He has established peace on your borders; *
he satisfies you with the finest wheat.

And in the run-up to Jesus’ birth as described in Luke’s Gospel this vision and these hopes are on full display. And then the lines in the Gospel prologue: “He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.

How do we make sense of this strange story? The convenient answer: well, what do you expect from the Jews? Tapping into the latent anti-Semitism in our culture is convenient, because it lets us off the hook. But with Jesus, the apostles, all the New Testament writers being Jews, that’s a non-starter. How do we make sense of it all going sideways?

Let’s go back to Isaiah’s words:

For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent,
and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest,
until her vindication shines out like the dawn,
and her salvation like a burning torch.

In Jesus’ time Jews argued about how to hear those words. At one end of the scale: Jerusalem’s vindication as the condemnation of the gentiles. (The Zealots were here: the only good Roman is a dead Roman.) The other end of the scale: Jerusalem’s vindication as the salvation of the gentiles. And that’s where Jesus was.

It starts already in the angel’s proclamation to the shepherds: “Do not be afraid; for see– I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people” (Luke 2:10).

Fast forward to Jesus reading Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” From a nationalistic perspective, so far so good. But then Jesus chooses examples: Elijah in the famine providing for a gentile, that widow at Zarephath in Sidon; Elisha healing Naaman the Syrian of leprosy.

That argument keeps popping up, so that at the end when the Jerusalem crowd has the choice of sparing Barabbas, who’s killed Romans, and Jesus, who hasn’t…

“He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him”—because Jesus did not offer vindication on their terms.

So God’s story ends in defeat or in a long drawn-out stalemate? Hardly. “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” Receiving Jesus, believing in Jesus’ name: beginning with Holy Baptism that’s a life-long process. We’d don’t easily give up getting vindication on our own terms. But through this process God’s glory is visible, which was and is the point of Jerusalem’s vindication. Paul writes to the Corinthians: “You are God’s building… God’s temple is holy and you are that temple” (1 Cor 3:9, 17).

Hear Isaiah again:

² The nations shall see your vindication,
and all the kings your glory;
and you shall be called by a new name
that the mouth of the LORD will give.
³ You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD,
and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

Jesus is not content that God’s glory be confined to Jerusalem, or Rome, or Washington, but be visible wherever two or three are gathered in Jesus’ name, Sun Prairie for example. That glory, that “grace and truth” that came through Jesus: the world in its better moments is hungry for that, and Jesus’ dream is that it be found here. For that we come together. For that we extend our hands to receive into ourselves Jesus’ Body, Jesus’ Blood.

Amen, and Merry Christmas!

(Readings)

Good morning, and merry Christmas!

Our readings present us with an intriguing collage; let’s take a few minutes to ponder it.

The first reading, written when Jerusalem was under the heel of the Persian (Iranian) Empire, calls on the Lord to do something. The psalm, probably written when the Lord’s kingship was mirrored by the Davidic king in Jerusalem, but continuing in use when the Davidides were a distant memory, sounds the same notes: “Zion hears and is glad, and the cities of Judah rejoice, / because of your judgments, O Lord.” And the psalm imagines all this playing out in terms of the familiar contrast between the righteous and wicked: “The Lord loves those who hate evil; / he preserves the lives of his saints / and delivers them from the hand of the wicked.”

The Gospel. I love the scene of the angel and heavenly military appearing to the shepherds: it’s the Good Lord handing out cigars scene. And the angel’s announcement promises the fulfillment of all the hopes voiced in Isaiah and the psalm: “to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” However: Jerusalem is now under the even heavier Roman heel, so that we might wonder whether what Jerusalem needs is this baby or Arnold Schwarzenegger making a Terminator-style entrance into our space-time coordinates. Some years later Jerusalem wondered this too, and opted for Barabbas for the now-grown Jesus who kept spouting nonsense like “love your enemies.” And with the events of Holy Week any self-serving understanding of the psalm’s “righteous/wicked” contrast went out the window, as the religious authorities handed Jesus over to the Romans and the disciples fled. And Jerusalem, who had for so long pleaded for the Lord’s intervention said, when the Lord showed up, no thank you. Now what?

All that’s the backstory for Paul’s words in Titus: “When the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of any works of righteousness that we had done, but according to his mercy.” Not because we got it right back then, or because we can be counted on to get it right now.

The Persian heel, the Roman heel, the many institutional and systemic heels today that grind down too many: the Lord responds not with Arnold, but with this baby. What does that tell us about how God understands power, about how God goes about getting things done?

Here’s the thing. Our culture treats the Christmas story as a sort of Rorschach, onto which we project all our assumptions and hopes. But the Christmas story is too specific for that: it affirms some of our hopes and overwrites most of our assumptions. To whom should the angel and heavenly military appear? To Caesar? To Herod? To the High Priest? God opts for the shepherds. Or, from Matthew’s account, Matthew describes Joseph as being a “righteous man,” and Joseph qua righteous man responds to Mary’s pregnancy with a plan to dismiss her quietly. So the first order of business is for an angel to have a quiet conversation with Joseph about what being righteous means. God would use the Christmas story, I think, to breathe life into our hopes and shake up our assumptions.

Luke tells us that “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” We might do the same.

Merry Christmas!