Habrá varias oportunidades de contemplar los eventos de Semana Santa en la semana entrante. Buena cosa, porque hay mucho de contemplar.

Hoy me llaman la atención dos elementos. Primero, los gritos del pueblo:

¡Que muera este hombre! Déjanos libre a Barrabás.

¡Crucifícalo, crucifícalo!

Como nos enseña la liturgia, es nuestro grito. Basta con la mentira “¡Es el grito de los judíos!” Es el grito del pueblo de Dios. Y esto es importante en nuestro contexto tan polarizado, donde es tan fácil suponer que la maldad habita entre ellos. Nosotros los justos, ellos…

Y—entre paréntesis—Jesús anticipa este error:

Señor, yo estoy dispuesto a ir contigo a la cárcel y a la muerte.

Te digo, Pedro, que hoy antes de que cante el gallo habrás negado tres veces que me conoces.

Por la gracia del Señor nuestras historias no terminan aquí. Sin embargo, creo que es bien importante recordar este “Crucifícalo,” reconocer nuestra solidaridad hasta con nuestros enemigos.

Segundo, este “Padre, perdónalos, porque no saben lo que hacen.” La consecuencia, la integridad de Jesús es francamente temible. Antes, en una situación más calma: “Perdónanos nuestros pecados, porque también nosotros perdonamos a todos los que nos han hecho mal.” Y aquí está. Pero, ¡ojo! No dice “Les perdono yo a Ustedes¨ sino “Padre, perdónalos. ¨ Quizá en este momento no es capaz de perdonar, pero hace lo que puede: ¨Padre, perdónalos. ¨

Tenemos enemigos. A veces nos no es posible perdonar. ¿Quizá podemos orar por ellos? Me ayuda mucho el rezo en nuestro LOC:

Oh Dios y Padre de todos, cuyo Hijo nos mandó amar a nuestros enemigos: Guíanos a nosotros y a ellos del prejuicio a la verdad; líbranos del odio, la crueldad y la venganza; y, a tu debido tiempo, capacítanos para llegar reconciliados a tu presencia; por Jesucristo nuestro Señor. Amén.

Cómo dije, hay tanto que contemplar esta semana. En el centro, Jesucristo, quien, en las palabras de la Gran Plegaria “Extendió sus brazos sobre la cruz y se ofreció en obediencia a tu voluntad, un sacrificio perfecto por todo el mundo.” Y precisamente este Jesús estando en el centro me impulsa ver parte de mi carácter (“Crucifícalo”), y parte de mi vocación como su seguidor (“Perdónanos nuestros pecados, porque también nosotros perdonamos a todos los que nos han hecho mal.”). Y cuando no puedo perdonar, por lo menos puedo—debo—orar.

Readings

What a table today’s readings set! Let’s notice, briefly, a couple of the entrees before moving to Jesus’ parable.

Toward the end of Revelation John hears this from the throne: “See, I am making all things new” (21:5). All things new: not a bad heading for our readings from Joshua and 2^nd Corinthians. Joshua: the transition from the wilderness to the promised land, with the celebration of Passover making a fitting bookend with the first Passover on the night of Israel’s exodus from Egypt. 2^nd Corinthians: “everything has become new!”

‘New’ has mostly positive connotations in our culture. Ironically, the opposite is true for ‘change’. “How many Episcopalians does it take to change a lightbulb?” “CHANGE???” We like ‘new’, we dislike ‘change’, and that makes most areas of our life more complicated than necessary. Minimally, it might help to recognize that the change to which God invites us in Lent is in service of achieving the new.

Repentance. Our psalm highlights its importance. When we set the psalm next to Jesus’ parable two things become, I think, evident. First, first while repentance is necessary, the decisive element is God’s/the Father’s character. All the repentance we could muster wouldn’t do any good unless our Father were disposed to run to it. That repentance is necessary, consider what would have happened had the younger son gone to the distant country, made a killing, and swaggered back: “Dad, this place is really a dump; let me help you out.” That would have required a different response from the father.

Second, our prejudices can make it really hard for us to recognize who needs to repent. That, ironically, is baked into the traditional title for the parable, “The Prodigal Son,” for even a cursory reading reveals that it’s the older son who needs to repent. But no: put them in a line-up and we predictably point to the younger son as the one needing repentance. And this despite Luke’s stage-setting: “all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling.” Anyhow, if we’re looking for an opportunity midst the solemnity of Lent to take ourselves less seriously, here’s an opportunity.

Jesus’ parable. This morning I’m hearing the parable in the company of Ken Bailey and George Caird. Ken Bailey’s Jesus through Middle Eastern eyes helps me hear the parable more clearly. “Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.” In that culture, hard to think of more insulting words, for property is divided after the owner’s death, so that the son’s request says, essentially, you’re of more value to me dead than alive. And later in the parable: “his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran…” Middle Eastern fathers don’t run. In a pinch one might walk sedately, but, more appropriately, remain unmoved as the lower-status party approaches. How this father humbles himself, and doesn’t seem to mind a bit!

The father in the parable is one of Jesus’ clearest pictures of our heavenly Father. And it’s worth noticing that Jesus here is simply echoing his Scripture’s (our Old Testament’s) pictures. Some of us have been reading Isaiah in these weeks; here are two quick excerpts from the divine speeches:

You have not bought me sweet cane with money,
or satisfied me with the fat of your sacrifices.
But you have burdened me with your sins;
you have wearied me with your iniquities. (Isa. 43:24)

Listen to me, O house of Jacob,
all the remnant of the house of Israel,
who have been borne by me from your birth,
carried from the womb;
even to your old age I am he,
even when you turn gray I will carry you.
I have made, and I will bear;
I will carry and will save. (Isa. 46:3-4)

As today’s psalm ends:

Be glad, you righteous, and rejoice in the Lord;
shout for joy, all who are true of heart.

And what is it to be “righteous” or “true of heart” if not to be increasingly recognizing and reflecting God’s character? I’ve snuck a couple ideas into that question: here they are; see what you think of them. First, “increasingly recognizing and reflecting:” “righteous” and “true of heart” don’t do well standing still. They involve growth, newness, even the c-word (‘change’). Second, “righteous” and “true of heart” are relational, depending on our relationship with the Lord. Without that relationship, strange things can happen. Which brings us to the older brother.

We naturally feel some sympathy for the older brother. After the division of the property in a sense it’s his fattened calf that’s being served. And yet, oddly enough, the figure the older brother most closely resembles is the accuser, the satan. That demands, I think, a bit of a digression.

We first meet the Adversary (‘satan’ is simply a transcription of that Hebrew word) at the beginning of Job. It’s a good guess that he’s patterned after the agent provocateur in the Persian court whose role was to sniff out disloyalty before it became dangerous. He plays a similar role in one of Zechariah’s visions: “Then he showed me the high priest Joshua [dressed, we learn, in filthy cloths] standing before the angel of the LORD, and Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him” (3:1). He’s all about justice. Here’s George Caird in his New Testament Theology:

Yet even at this early stage of his history we can see where his one-sided emphasis on justice is to lead him. In both stories he is found arguing against God, whose holiness he is so anxious to defend. It cannot be said of him that he does not will the death of sinners, or that he is hoping that they would turn from their wickedness and live. He is a rigorous legalist, a prosecuting attorney, who must have a conviction, and who is satisfied only with a capital sentence. If the evidence does not give him a good case, he is prepared to manufacture new evidence by provoking Job into mortal sin.

And like the Adversary the older brother wants justice, and this single-minded focus turns him against the father.

What if Caird’s description governed our use of words like ‘diabolical’ or ‘satanic’—the single-minded pursuit of justice without compassion?

We imagine the Adversary encouraging people to do bad things, and that’s true enough. The Bible’s portrayals might encourage us to imagine him spending as much time saying things like “If you did that you can’t be worth much!” or “That person/that group doesn’t deserve compassion,” that is, channeling the older brother.

I wonder if the Bible doesn’t talk about the Adversary also to help us bring God’s character into focus. Justice is important to God, but not at the expense of compassion. The psalmist is counting on that! Gustavo Gutiérrez gets it right: “The world of retribution—and not of temporal retribution only—is not where God dwells; at most God visits it.” And one important reason that the Bible repeatedly says “Fear not” and “Be glad, you righteous, and rejoice in the Lord” is that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is not this Adversary.

We Christians use the word ‘God’ a lot. But what images accompany that word? Today’s parable invites us to let Jesus’ image of God sink deep into our imaginations.

Readings

Today’s lessons invite us to contemplate and enact repentance from a variety of perspectives. Before diving in, a reminder: repenting, turning, changing course, involves more than feelings. If I’ve got my foot on someone’s back, repentance isn’t simply about feeling badly. (“Oh, what a terrible person I am to have my foot on their back!”) It’s about moving my feet. So in the spirit of those old public service announcements “It’s 10:00 pm; do you know where your children are?” during Lent the Church asks us: “It’s Lent; do you know where your feet are?”

The Gospel: Jesus’ fig tree parable is a riff on Isaiah’s vineyard parable: the Lord looking for fruit and coming away empty handed.
“For the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel,
and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting;
he expected justice, but saw bloodshed;
righteousness, but heard a cry!”
God engages with us for our own sake and for the sake of our neighbors. Isaiah’s “justice and righteousness:” we might understand this as describing a community that is life-giving for all its participants, in contrast to the communities our world tends to create, where “life-giving” varies depending on where we are on the totem pole. The last thing God needs is another totem pole, this one with a cross on the top. Lent reminds us that fruit is important, that folk experiencing our parishes as life-giving is important, that our neighbors encountering here an alternative to our society’s disfunctions is important.

The Epistle: it would be easy for Paul’s words to conjure up memories of touchy disciplinarians: behave or God’s gonna wop you. But what’s at stake here is the Corinthians’ and our capacity to remember what story we’re in: we really are bound for the promised land. And if that’s where we’re bound, the detours Paul lists (idolatry, immorality, etc.) lose their attraction. Lent invites us to recall that what story we’re in is an important question, and that every day we’re barraged by competing answers. “God helps those who help themselves.” “The one who dies with the most toys wins.” This is why the Book of Common Prayer begins with the Daily Office, readings and prayers for use throughout the day: remembering which story we’re in takes mindfulness. “The earth is the LORD’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it” (Ps. 24:1). Not Russia’s or America’s or Coca Cola’s or Google’s. Perhaps I need to hear that in the morning before turning to CNN, Fox, or MSNBC. Lent’s a time to experiment with ways of nurturing that mindfulness.

Exodus: To hear this story in Lent means, I think, to pay attention to the backstory. Why is Moses tending sheep in Midian? Moses, a Hebrew, had been raised in the Egyptian court. At some point he figured out that he’s a Hebrew, and since the Egyptians had the Hebrews enslaved, knowing that he was a Hebrew must have been a constant source of strong and conflicting emotions: shame, anger… One day he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew—and kills the Egyptian. The deed becomes known, Moses has to flee, and that’s how this prince of Egypt ends up herding sheep in Midian far from Egypt. If Moses’ career in Egypt were rated the way hotels are rated, he might end up with half a star.

And here’s God telling Moses to go back. That is, of course, for Israel’s sake. But it’s also for Moses’ sake. In Midian Moses has an important part of himself walled off, the key thrown away. There’s unfinished business. This may have been the sort of thing Henry David Thoreau was thinking about when he said “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”—and maybe also in our parishes. And God comes to Moses: let’s revisit that; let’s see what we can do together. Lent is about noticing the occasional burning bush that might signal God inviting us to return to those sites of failure and loss, those sites we have under strict quarantine. That returning can be some of the more difficult work of Lent.

Finally, our psalm.
“O God, you are my God; eagerly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you,
as in a barren and dry land where there is no water.”
Our culture encourages us to imagine God as the one who’s always saying “no.” That’s not a god we’re going to seek, thirst for, faint for. But, as Paul reminds us elsewhere, in Jesus “every one of God’s promises is a ‘Yes’” (2 Cor. 1:20). This God desires for us more than we can ask or imagine. Lent is about reencountering this God.

The psalmist’s “Under the shadow of your wings I will rejoice:” the psalmist may have had a static image in mind. But between God’s call to Moses to go back to Egypt and Paul’s evocation of Israel traveling through the wilderness, we might recognize that “the shadow of your wings” is often a moving shadow. To stay under that shadow we may need to get up and move.

Readings

I wonder how Zechariah, Elizabeth, Mary, Joseph, Simeon, Anna, John and Jesus (the folk in Luke’s first chapters) heard our reading from Deuteronomy. It’s a celebration of a good harvest and of God’s deliverance in the exodus and gift of the good land. But that was hardly their experience: Israel had spent centuries in the belly of foreign empires. In Ezra’s words: “Here we are, slaves to this day– slaves in the land that you gave to our ancestors to enjoy its fruit and its good gifts. Its rich yield goes to the kings whom you have set over us because of our sins; they have power also over our bodies and over our livestock at their pleasure, and we are in great distress” (Neh. 9:36-37).

Hearing that Deuteronomic text probably involved some combination of pain over what had been lost and hope that God’s mighty hand and outstretched arm could again intervene. That’s the hope for a new exodus, a new Davidic heir, a new deliverance expressed in Mary’s Magnificat and Simeon’s prayer.

I wonder how they heard Psalm 91. “…my God in whom I put my trust.” Trust is tricky. Encouraged by Isaiah, King Hezekiah trusted, and God delivered Jerusalem from the Assyrian army. Just over a century later Jerusalem, ignoring Jeremiah’s calls to stop exploiting the poor, trusted that God would again deliver Jerusalem (“The Temple of the Lord! The Temple of the Lord!”), and watched the Babylonian army destroy Jerusalem and dethrone the Davidic dynasty. The Maccabean heroes started out proclaiming their trust in God, and ended up as fat and happy clients of the Roman Empire. Trust is tricky.

Over to Jesus. Luke tells us that while Jesus was praying after his baptism “the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’” (3:21-22), which rather sounds as though it’s heralding that new exodus, that new Davidic heir, that new deliverance. So, no pressure.

What does trust mean for Jesus? That, after forty days of fasting, begins to be sorted out in an interview with the diabolos, the ‘accuser’ or ‘slanderer’, that cynic who assumes the worst about humanity.

There are many ways of unpacking what’s going on in that interview, what’s at stake, and over the years you’ve probably heard many of them. So, with no interest in reinventing the wheel, let me simply recall a couple of them.

“Son of God.” If we focus on its Davidic/Messianic dimension, the interview is about how this son of David will operate. The editors of the David stories in Samuel noticed the moments in which David had the choice of receiving or grasping. The former, receiving, e.g., kingship, turned out well. David let the kingship come to him on God’s terms, and repeatedly refused to kill Saul.  The latter, grasping, e.g., Bathsheba, not so well. The interview easily reads as offering Jesus the same choice: are the kingdoms of the world something Jesus is going to grasp, or receive from the Father—in the Father’s time and way?

Grasp or receive. A question for Jesus, but also for Jesus’ followers. So there’s some logic to reading this text the first Sunday of Lent. Where might we notice that we’re grasping? “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD” (Isa. 55:8). What are the situations in which we judge that to be a defect in God?

Let’s pull back the camera a little. “The devil is in the details,” we say. And in this interview the devil wants to get the details right, because with a little fine tuning even the presence of Jesus, the Son of God, need not disturb the status quo. And as long as Jesus’ church doesn’t disturb the status quo, doesn’t embody an alternative to the lies and jockeying for power that deform our institutions, the devil’s content.

We might put it this way. I imagine Jesus hearing Mary’s song repeatedly as he was growing up:

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;

Jesus recognizes—with the help of Deuteronomy, the source of all his replies—that the devil’s suggestions would put him on a sidetrack, set him up to be no more than an improved model of King Herod. From this perspective, the text—with the Magnificat as the audio bed—invites us to remember our calling. God’s mighty hand and outstretched arm—Jesus—intervenes not simply so that we survive, but so that we help heal our world.

Not simply so that we survive, but so that we help heal our world.

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.