Daniel’s Blog

I heard fine reports about David Fisher’s visit last Sunday. Our former Senior Minister, whom I’ve known since our Park Street Church days together in Boston back in the early 90s, enjoyed being back here where he spent so many meaningful years.  Likewise we enjoyed our visit to Brooklyn for my end of our preaching swap. Brooklyn has traded its reputation as a hip-hop borough for a hipster vibe—revealing itself to be the new nexus for the young “eco-conscious, agrarian-seeming, hair-celebrating locavore.” According to one report, a shopper in a Brooklyn boutique fell in love with a pair of leather boots. She asked the salesperson: “Are these locally made?” The salesperson’s reply: “No. They're made in Manhattan.”

David’s church is not quite all that, but it is remains a fitting place for a Colonial minister to preach. It’s called the Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, and while nobody wore buckles on their hats like we do here, Plymouth does have its own piece of the rock: Plymouth Rock, just like ours that sits out on the hearth. Everywhere you turn at Plymouth there’s also tribute to its famous founding pastor, Henry Ward Beecher, hailed in a recent biography as “the most famous man in America” (antebellum America, that is). Beecher was the first real celebrity preacher, his fiery and flowery sermons filled the broadsheets of his era. Plymouth Church was reportedly the Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad; fugitive slaves regularly hid out there on their way to Canada. Beecher regularly held mock slave auctions in church, raising enough money to purchase freedom for enslaved Africans. 

Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman all came to hear him, with Mark Twain describing Beecher’s style: as “sawing arms in the air, howling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point.” The vast, ornate sanctuary (by Congregational standards) sits close to 2000 and the pulpit was the same one Beecher used. Statues and portraits adorn the hallways and gardens, and in the sanctuary windows stained glass venerations of Beecher’s deeds were installed after his death, competing with Jesus himself, all contributing to the sense that the church is still haunted by Beecher’s ghost, appropriate, perhaps, to this Holy Ghost Sunday we call Pentecost.

To haunt means to “be persistently and disturbing present,” which aptly depicts the first Pentecost. Technically I should say the first Christian Pentecost since Pentecost itself is an ancient Jewish feast celebrating the spring harvest. Also called the Feast of Weeks, Pentecost (meaning fiftieth) occurs fifty days after Passover (that’s seven weeks plus one day, seven days being the signal for creation and an eighth day being the classic Biblical depiction of heaven). Pentecost, along with Passover and Tabernacles, was one of three Jewish feasts that required traveling to Jerusalem, so crowds from all over the Jewish world were gathered to celebrate. 

In the book of Acts, Jesus’ disciples were there too, when suddenly the Holy Ghost became “persistently and disturbingly present” first by a mighty wind (wind being a Hebrew synonym for spirit), followed by fire (a symbol of power) shaped like tongues (a symbol of speech). Haunted by the Holy Ghost, the disciples blew out onto the streets, creating a holy disturbance for the gathered Jewish pilgrims. The crowds couldn’t believe what they heard—rube Galilean fishermen speaking in their own native languages. But the crowds did believe what they said—and some 3000 turned to Jesus that day to be harvested. The church was born as the gospel spread to the whole world.

The apostle Paul encountered the Holy Ghost on his way to Damascus. He was on a mission to destroy all these new Christians when Jesus burned him into one too. Paul launch a whole New Testament full of churches, including the one at Philippi, to which he wrote the letter we read from this morning. Philippians contains many memorable verses that define our faith, and I’ve spent these Sundays since Easter focused on those “most likely to be cross-stitched” since so many have. This morning’s notable verses follow after another cross-stitched set we looked at two Sundays ago. I once saw them cross-stitched and appropriately hung over a toilet. Writing of his own vaunted accomplishments and success as a Pharisee, Paul nevertheless concluded that “whatever I gained, I now regard as a load of (literal) crap for the sake of gaining Christ.” On that Damascus Road, Jesus had condemned Paul not for his wickedness as a Pharisee, but for his goodness. Paul’s pretentious reliance on his credentials had paved his road to perdition. “I now count it all garbage,” Paul wrote, “compared to the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord for whose sake I have suffered the loss of all things so that one way or another, I may attain the resurrection from the dead.”

“Not that I have already attained this,” he quickly adds in our verses this morning. “I haven’t yet reached my goal,” or as other translations put it, “I’m not perfect,” which may come as a relief to us all. Except that unlike most people, Paul doesn’t use imperfection as an excuse. It’s his motivation. “I press on to be perfect,” he writes, working out his salvation “with fear and trembling” as he phrased it back in chapter 2. Is Paul saying that grace still takes effort? Yes, but not to attain. Grace has never been a reward for good deeds. But grace is the fuel of a righteous life. The grace that saves is the grace that motivates us to live lives worthy of it. As fuel, the grace that motivates also empowers. “Work out your salvation” Paul wrote, “understanding that God is doing all the work.” It’s the Holy Ghost inside us making righteousness happen. “I press on to obtain what Jesus has already obtained for me,” Paul explains, “though I do not consider myself to have attained it yet.”

OK, so language is still a little confusing. And analogies are hard to come by. Paul tries a racing analogy. “Forgetting what is behind (both his successes and failures, his pride and his guilt) and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal of the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.” Jesus is Paul’s finish line, but he’s the starting gate too. This only adds to the confusion. And I’ll admit I’m not much for racing analogies since the last race I ran had me coming in dead last. How about adding a wedding analogy since Paul uses these elsewhere too. It’s easy for couples in the throes of wedding planning to treat racing down the aisle as finally crossing a finish line. But if you’re already married, you know that by getting married you’re just getting started. That’s OK, because you soon find that loving somebody enough to marry them only makes you want to know them more. And the more you know the more you love. I think that’s what Paul means here. Knowing Christ made Paul want to know Christ more. It kept him running his race—even though he’d already won!

Another illustration that I like to use to explain this passage comes from snow skiing (which is OK since it snowed two weeks ago and Dawn and I still needed long underwear at Target Field on Friday night). I like to use skiing to explain this passage, but not because I’m a better skier than I am a runner (or a husband for that matter). Being a bad skier is actually what makes this analogy work. My favorite part of any ski trip is hanging out in the lodge at the end of a long day on the slopes, sitting by the fire and drinking hot chocolate. The last time I did skied (which was the last time I skied--in New Hampshire some years ago), I’d spent most of the day zipping down intermediate blue trails, succeeding just enough to delude myself into thinking I was ready for black diamond. I reserved the expert trail for the end, fully anticipating a triumphant descent and my fitting reward of hot chocolate by that roaring fire in the ski lodge once I gracefully reached bottom. However, once on that black diamond precipice, my complete lack of skill was totally exposed. I tried to translate my nifty blue trail maneuvers to this much steeper hill, but after a couple of lame efforts, I fell flat on my back, which most times would have meant would have meant simply getting back up, but this time, with the cliff coated in hard New England ice, and I in my slick nylon coated parka and pants, I couldn’t get up because I couldn’t stop. Screaming and swirling and flailing, I spun and slid all the way down the mountain not stopping until I reached the base of the hill, a few yards from the steps of the lodge, after which I got up, went inside and drank my hot chocolate.

This is my point: whether on my feet or my butt, for better or worse, one way or another, I still made it to the lodge. Holy Ghost gravity hauled me home. Pentecost guarantees that even Christians who are bad at being Christians still make it down the mountain.

You may remember my sharing with you a story last fall about being considered for an excellent job opportunity in one of my favorite cities (I mean, besides Minneapolis). I was flown in for interviews which I thought went tremendously well, and I left excited and confident about what I was sure would be a fabulous fit. Like Paul, I had proudly relied on my impeccable credentials and accomplishments, which I presumptuously figured made me a shoo-in for this new position. Instead, I soon received my rejection letter with the requisite “so many qualified candidates” blather leaving me both dejected and resentful. Then came a phone call. It was my rejecters calling me again. Had they recognized their error? Had they reconsidered their ill-fated decision? Had my creamy resume risen back to the top? Hardly. No, they just called to ask me to be a reference for their preferred candidate—a good friend of mine whose name (unbeknownst to him and with whom I have chuckled about this during the ensuing years) I had submitted as a personal reference for me. 

Of all the nerve! They wanted to know from me if there was any reason they shouldn’t hire my friend for my job. Now was my chance to bring some even distribution to the unfairness of life. While I couldn’t come up with any real reasons not to hire my friend, I probably could make up a few. Since I couldn’t have this job, why should anybody?

What I didn’t tell you last fall was that the job was Senior Minister of Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims in Brooklyn. When we arrived there last weekend, their Associate Minister who greeted us introduced himself by telling me he had been on the Search Committee that rejected me. “I remember you so vividly,” he announced, which obviously was not a good thing given the outcome. Then to my horror, he went on to say how he had been the one who called me about the reference for David Fisher. And then he told me he’d never forgotten what I said. Well, this was just great. So much for “forgetting what lies behind and pressing on.” How do you forget what’s behind when it gets thrown back in your face ten years later? I braced myself to be scolded for my past pettiness and petulance. Humiliated afresh for my former bitterness. Clearly this guy had known how awkward I felt then. Why did he even let David use me as a reference? And why bring it up now? Must we relive that embarrassing nightmare?! I’m supposed to be your guest preacher this weekend!

 “I’ll never forget what you said,” this Associate Minister remarked. I closed my eyes for the shameful impact. “You immediately replied what a great choice we’d made and how you couldn’t imagine anyone more perfect for the position. I thought that was so gracious and honorable of you, given the circumstances. We hired David right afterwards.” Really? I said that? You thought that? About me? Pathetic and petty me? Seriously? Wow, talk about sliding down the hill on my butt: I skidded right into that lodge. I came in last place and still won the race! Holy Ghost gravity pulled me all the way home.

If you recall the Pentecost story, you’ll remember Jesus’ disciples as a pretty pathetic bunch too: betrayers and deniers, cowardly deserters of their Lord at the one moment he could have used their help. Left to die, unjustly executed on a cross, Jesus rose from the dead and came looking for them, only to find them still hiding out in fear of the authorities. Though maybe they were now scared of him. Jesus showed himself risen, and forgave them their sins, but that only eased their fear enough for them to go back to their old fishing jobs. So Jesus showed up yet again, and prodded them on to Jerusalem to start spreading the gospel, but they only made it so far as a hotel room still too scared to say a word to anybody. But with the Holy Ghost gravity, even these disciples who were bad at being Christians still got down the mountain. They got down onto the streets, finally opened their mouths and changed the world.

The Holy Ghost got me through my sermon last Sunday too, despite the ghosts of the past and Henry Ward Beecher haunting me from every corner. One of the many things I like about the Pentecost story is how in the crowds each heard the gospel in their own native language. We tend to attribute this to a miracle of speech, but it was also a miracle of hearing; a miracle that still happens and not only in Pentecostal churches. Often on Sundays after I preach somebody will thank me for saying what they needed to hear. When I ask what it was, they will relay words I never actually spoke. That’s the Holy Ghost gravity, translating one set of words into a language of healing and help. Just like when my words of disappointment and bitterness somehow were heard as enthusiastic endorsement.

I preached my Prodigal Son sermon last Sunday and afterwards a young hipster greeted me at the back of the church. He was wearing lipstick—which may be a Brooklyn thing—but it also made me wonder whether he might be somebody’s own prodigal son. Perhaps he heard me say how the father’s irresponsible love of his son in the parable is the same as God’s love for us, but I don’t know. He didn’t say what he heard. He just stood there in silence with tears in his eyes, and I knew one way or another, for better or worse, Holy Ghost gravity would pull him home too.

Watching it snow in May has been enough to turn this Southerner into a raving existentialist. Here’s a scenario went through my mind: While up late trying to figure out what to say in this sermon, suddenly it’s 2 in the morning and I imagine myself going for a walk to clear my head. It’s cold out, snowing and slippery. Springtime in Minnesota. Once outside, I get an uncharacteristic hankering to walk along the creek, intrigued as I suddenly am by the unusual quiet of the night. I stroll down to the water’s edge, where the current rapidly courses up to the bank due to recent heavy rainfall and snowmelt. I curiously step too close to the edge, slip, bump my head on a rock and tumble into the torrent, unbeknownst to anyone. No one sees me fall. No one hears me splash. Unconscious, I am carried over the Minnehaha Falls down to the river and eventually washed out to sea.

Dawn awakes and wonders where I went. By 8AM she’s panicked and calls the police who initiate a search, but nobody thinks to check the river because Dawn knows I’d never go down there late at night in the snow. The search continues for a while, but finally dissolves into futility. There are tears (a few). Some nice remembrances (perhaps). But in time life goes on. Danielle gets promoted to my job. Revival ignites. Years later when asked whatever happened to her husband, Dawn sadly shrugs and shakes her head, saying how we have to live life as it is rather than as we wish it was. More years pass and no one asks anymore. Silence descends over this work I now so energetically sustain and value. It’s a potent irony. In the end, all of my conscientious effort at life evaporates into nothing.

OK, so it probably won’t happen like that. But it will happen one way or another. It is the perfect statistic. One terminal existence per person, each of us ultimately destined to a noiseless absence, our obsessions and energies over meaning and worth rendered absurd. Novelist DH Lawrence despaired that: “The search for happiness … always ends in the ghastly sense of the bottomless nothingness into which you will inevitably fall if you strain any further.” Famed French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre concurred, “All human actions are equivalent ... and ... all are on principle doomed to failure.” Søren Kierkegaard, the 19^th century Danish philosopher (and whose 200^th birthday we celebrate today), is considered the father of modern existentialism. For example, “I see it all perfectly;” he wrote, “there are two possible situations — one can either do this or that. My honest opinion and my friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it — you will regret both.” 

Existentialists characteristically stress the utter pointlessness of human existence. If you’re doomed to die no matter what, why bother? Que sera, sera. You may find this depressing. A result of seasonal affective disorder, perhaps. Existentialists say they're just being realistic. It’s always darkest before it goes pitch black.

You can try to deny it. Or fight it. The premise at one local anti-aging clinic here in Edina, is that aging is an error you can fix. Your body naturally reduces its hormone levels over time which cause a rise in many of the diseases associated with aging, such as heart disease and dementia. By medically replacing these hormones, the clinic asserts you can stave off these diseases and effectively recapture your youth. The problem is that according to a recent study by government and independent health researchers, artificially increasing your hormones later in life also increases a risk stroke, blood clots, gallbladder disease, urinary incontinence and cancer. Hormones or not, you still die in the end. 

Then there are the Trans-Humanists, committed to the elimination of existential risk through the acceleration of human evolution beyond its current limits. Technology is the savior here, imagining a future of cyber-humans whose brains no longer degenerate, our lives and thoughts preserved though social media, our bodies cryonically frozen until nanoelectromechanical systems and synthetic organs advance to the point of replacing our messy and error-prone biology. The enlightened Trans-Human Manifesto confidently envisions “broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.” Unbuckle your seat belts.

Ethicist Gilbert Meilander, author of the provocatively titled Should We Live Forever? The Ethical Ambiguities of Aging, observes how “The classical understanding of virtue referred to what philosophers in recent decades have come to call human flourishing—the excellence that realizes and expresses the full potential of our human nature. Because that nature is an embodied one, we might suppose that, whatever human flourishing involves, it must include the aging and decline that characterize bodily organisms. Since, however, we are rational animals, our full potential may be realized only through our freedom to remake ourselves, transcending indefinitely the limits of the body. We try—rightly I think—to cure and even eradicate disease, but whether we should approach aging in the same way is deeply puzzling. Still more, when we notice that some of the more ambitious proposals for age-retardation seems rather like a desire to escape bodily existence itself, we may begin to wonder whether the aim is to transcend or to transgress the body’s limits.” 

Kierkegaard posited that while humans are indeed rational animals, we are also ecstatic animals. We possess an innate sense of transcendence which fuels our hunger for immortality. Prolongation of this life, sadly, no matter how long we prolong it, constantly fails to slake our hunger. It’s like a dinner party that won’t ever end. Or worse, a party that ends badly. “A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater.” Kierkegaard wrote, “I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.”

 Existentialists describe life as existing in three dimensions: you, your world and that ominous maw of death they call the void which suffocates everything with its grim inevitability. To this three-dimensional existence, Kierkegaard advanced a fourth. Somehow, despite humanity’s most horrendous inhumanities—war, terrorism, torture and all sorts of individual evil—people persist in remolding new meaning and purpose. That survival and hope persevere in the darkest of voids testifies to this fourth dimension, which Kierkegaard recognized as the Kingdom of God. Human flourishing cannot happen apart from resurrection. By rising from the dead, Jesus changes everything—and not just the horrible deeds that kill, but the honorable deeds in which we falsely place our confidence too.

This was the apostle Paul’s existential realization as he languished in the darkness of his Roman prison cell contemplating execution. His words have proven worthy of cross-stitching, and I have devoted these Sundays since Easter to them. “God who began a good work among you will bring it to completion.” “Living is Christ and dying is gain.” “At the name of Jesus every knee will bow and tongue confess him Lord.” “God is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” I’ve seen this morning’s verses cross-stitched and hung in numerous places, most memorably over the toilet in a guest bathroom.

Chapter 3 commenced with Paul taking aim at those who insisted Christian faith be augmented with conformity to Jewish ceremonial ritual, specifically circumcision. Salvation by faith through grace by itself was not enough. We waltzed through this confusing territory last Sunday, confusing since Paul also argued that our salvation by grace be “worked out with fear and trembling” (coincidentally, the title of a Kierkegaard classic). Paul’s point, however, was not that our work can earn our salvation—grace is no reward for good behavior. And yet grace must still show itself to be true. Good works of love are the visible fruits of salvation.

Customarily, we Americans presume ourselves to be basically good people, exceptional sometimes. 71% of Americans still believe in hell, but less than ½ of 1% ever imagine themselves going there. After all most of us do not murder, do not cheat or steal to any criminal degree, do generally behave with baseline levels of kindness, and do as little harm as possible. There are mistakes to be made, a few sins here and there, nobody’s perfect, we’re only hummus, which is all fine and good until you find yourself at the edge of that existentialist void and discover that being good doesn’t do any good. You’re going to die anyway.

This is what happened to Paul. If anyone had any reason to think himself exceptional it was him. As the Pharisee Saul, his credentials were impeccable: circumcised on the eighth day, a descendent of Abraham of the tribe of Benjamin, as Hebrew as you could get; zealous and blameless as to the law, a very holy man. Yet happily riding down that road to Damascus, Saul was violently cast into darkness by the light of Christ that exposed Paul’s whole life as a sham. “Whatever gains and assets I had, these I have come to regard as loss and liability, and flush down the toilet because of Christ.” It’s not as if Paul now minimized his credentials, humbling considering them to be no big deal. Uh-uh, Paul looks at his impressive successes and accomplishments and he is horrified.

I’ve told you about how easy it is for pastors to visit people who’ve just received bad news—whether it’s the bad news of sickness, a lost job or a troubled child just flunked out of school. Any pastor can pay that visit. People who’ve received bad news are actually glad to see us. As bad as bad news can be, it can also be the threshold for spiritual conversion. Good news, on the other hand, is spiritually perilous. It takes a better minister than me to visit a person who’s just scored a large bonus or bought a huge house or been promoted at work or whose child just got into Harvard. When things are going good, the last person we want to see is a minister. We don’t want God meddling with our success. We stay off Damascus roads. Jesus did not condemn Paul’s wickedness as a Pharisee. Jesus condemned Paul’s goodness. His treasured reputation and achievements were all garbage, filth fit only for law-abiding dogs. “I regard it as all rubbish,” Paul wrote, “compared to the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord for whose sake I have suffered the loss of all things.”

All that mattered now was being found by Christ as having no righteousness or goodness of his own. “[Grace] works like a trap,” Kierkegaard said. You cannot capture it. It has to capture you. There was an exceptional time in my life when I’d committed some spectacular sins, which I shamefully tried to hide though they ate me up inside. When I finally confessed, I did so to Christian people I didn’t know so well, not wanting to risk disappointing those I cared for most. These Christian acquaintances quickly brushed my iniquities aside, kindly providing rationalizations and excuses to guard my self-worth. Nobody’s perfect, you’re only human, everybody makes mistakes, you’re still a good person. Yet ironically, all their unconditional support only made things harder. It wasn’t my self-worth they needed to guard as much as their perceptions of me. How could we still be friends if I was a real sinner? Feeling this burden, it is was unbearably stressful to finally confess my sins to one of my oldest friends. Given our longtime relationship, I knew I would deeply disappoint him. But grace works like a sweet trap. My friend assured me I needn’t worry about disappointing him. He’d never thought that highly of me.

The efforts we make to impress and to generate admiration and attention, the résumés on which we count to earn merit and favor, these all inevitably evaporate into nothing. In the presence of Christ—whatever was gain is counted as garbage. And this is good news. Paul flushes all his meritorious efforts and credentials down the toilet gladly. Paul gladly gives up what is exposed as nothing so that he might attain everything. His loss is gain. His defeat is his victory. His death is his life. Grace captured him. “I have been found” he writes, “with no righteousness of my own that comes from obeying the law, but only that which comes through faith in Christ”—and not even necessarily his own faith. The phrase is just as easily translated as the “faith of Christ” such that in the end what saves us is not even our own faith—which can be so wobbly and uncertain—but instead Jesus’ faith in us based on what he has done for us and in us and to us. Grace is a sweet trap.

Grace is our hope—a hope that ethicist Gilbert Meilander describes as the virtue that sustains us on our way toward the true beauty we long for, the genuine  goodness that finally catches our heart and holds us still, protecting us against any presumption that an indefinitely extended earthly life could ever quench our longing, whether that life be organic or virtual, by way or hormonal replacement or technological trans-human cryonics. Our longing is for more than this life’s dinner party, sumptuous as it may be, something other than just indefinitely more of the same. Our life, however long, always seems less than complete.

This is why the communion table has always featured only a bite of bread and a sip of wine. It was never meant to be life’s banquet, but an hors d’oeuvre for the real thing. It whets our appetite and arouses our hope. As we gather around it, let us gladly flush our gains as losses, that we too, like Paul, may find ourselves sweetly trapped by Christ.

If this passage sounds recently familiar its because you’re remembering Jeff Lindsay’s sermon from New Year’s Eve Sunday from these same verses. Following in last fall’s series on light, Jeff focused on Paul’s encouragement a few verses later that we “shine like stars in the world.” As far as this this morning’s passage, he did point out the awkwardness we Protestants feel at being told “to work out our own salvation” since as Protestants we’re all about being saved by grace alone. Tack on the “fear and trembling” part and the verse feels like a throwback to a pre-Reformation recipe for medieval Catholic guilt. “Fear and trembling” is an idiom long associated with divine judgment, setting up Philippians 2:12 as a legalist’s dream verse, and most likely the basis for another idiom that many people think is somewhere in the Bible; namely, “God helps those who help themselves.” Legalistic types worry that salvation by grace alone is nothing but dangerous permission to slack off when it comes to obedience. Work out your salvation yourself or you’re doomed.

Normally I’d wait a little longer before returning to a passage to preach, but you can’t do a sermon series from Philippians and skip this one. I was tempted to just replay Jeff’s fine sermon, but that would make me a slacker. So instead I’m working it out with fear and trembling myself. This the fourth in a series I’ve entitled “verses from Philippians most likely to be cross-stitched.” Philippians ranks as a favorite book in the Bible due to its prolificacy of memorable exhortations. We began in chapter 1 with: “God who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.” Then we looked at: “Living is Christ and dying is gain.” Last Sunday brought us to chapter 2 and the collection of verses where Jesus is praised as the humble then exalted Son of God at whose name every knee will bow and every tongue confess his Lordship. This morning’s passage, well-known though it is, is less likely to be subject to needle and thread. It’s not nearly so much endearing as it is confusing.

Verse 12 begins with Paul commending the Philippians’ reputation for obedience. They are Christians who hear the word of God and do what it says. Obedience derives from the Greek word “acoustic,” which while placing an emphasis on hearing, also means that to hear something clearly is to heed it too. Good behavior is evidence of good listening. Likewise bad behavior results from selective hearing. Paul sits chained in a Roman jail and worries that the Philippians’ obedience may falter, especially given that it hinges on their humble and selfless love for each other. Nobody wants to hear about humility. While admired in others, it’s rarely a virtue you seek for yourself. Modern advocates of the importance of high self-esteem would go so far as to deem humility to be hazardous to your psychological health. In cultures devoted to self-confidence and personal ambition are paramount, Paul’s admonition that we “in humility, regard others as better than yourself” is bad advice. 

Yet as we read last Sunday, Paul lauds Jesus’ humility as the hallmark of virtue. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus ,” he sang, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” Humility and human are tightly entwined, both deriving from the word humus meaning ground or dirt. Some say humility is therefore all about “remembering where you came from;” but Christianity tends to shovel a little deeper. We all come from the dirt, Scripture says, made of the dust of the ground. But Scripture also insists that you are dirt, ruined by the sin in your life. No one can stake a claim to righteousness based on his or her own obedience, for as Paul wrote elsewhere, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

This severe, self-effacing character of Christian humility led the great theologian Karl Barth to equate it to a “startled [self-]consciousness of having nothing to assert in one’s favor.” To be so startled by our own deficiency may be what Paul meant by fear and trembling. You work out your salvation without any confidence that you can actually pull it off. On the one hand this feels like a set-up for more religious guilt, but on the other hand it does keep away any temptation toward selfishness and conceit. In 1 Corinthians 2, Paul uses fear and trembling to describe his inadequacy in preaching the gospel so that he has to rely on God’s grace. In 2 Corinthians 7, fear and trembling describes the Corinthians’ own obedience at hearing the gospel taught by Titus, realizing how they too needed God’s help to do it. In Ephesians 6, fear and trembling describes servants’ regard for their masters, analogous to the way we are to regard Christ as Lord. Fear and trembling is not so much quaking and shaking in the presence of God (though some of us could probably use a little more of that), but to that startled self-consciousness at our own scarcities and weakness. We’re just not as fabulous as we sometimes like to think ourselves to be. 

At a graduation ceremony in Wellesley, Massachusetts last year, the English teacher giving the speech began by shocking the cap-and-gowned seniors. He said, “Normally, I avoid clichés like the plague, wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, but here we are on a literal level playing field. That matters. That says something. And your ceremonial costume… shapeless, uniform, one-size-fits-all. Whether male or female, tall or short, scholar or slacker, spray-tanned prom queen or intergalactic X-Box assassin, each of you is dressed, you’ll notice, exactly the same.  And your diploma… but for your name, exactly the same. All of this is as it should be, because none of you is special. You are not special. You are not exceptional.” Really? I’m not special? I’m not amazing? 

Imagine anybody ever saying that about a high school class in Minnesota! Every child is above average, right? Especially here in Edina as I understand it. The English teacher’s speech was so shocking that a video of it went internet viral. He had to go on television to defend it. He said, “In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another — which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point — and we’re happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that’s the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole.”

Just because somebody says you’re amazing doesn’t mean that you are. You have to do something to prove it. Applied to Christianity, God may love you just as you are, but that doesn’t make you amazing. It makes God amazing, which is why we sing about amazing grace. But to sing about grace without it having any effect is only hypocrisy. You can do nothing to earn your salvation, but you still must do something to prove you received it. Paul doesn’t say to work for our salvation, but he does say work out your salvation. Exercise it. Over and over, here in Philippians and elsewhere, Paul pleads with believers to live lives “worthy of the gospel,” worthy of grace, humble lives that look like Christ’s life. Not for humility’s sake, but for the sake of love. It was love that caused Jesus to humbly set aside his equality with God for us and it is love that spurs us to humbly set aside ourselves for others.

The Toronto Star ran an obituary last month for Shelagh Gordon, a 55-year-old woman who died suddenly of a brain aneurysm.  Given how so many obituaries read like résumés, Shelagh’s denoted nothing by way of extraordinary accomplishments. All it said was that she had been a loving aunt and a special friend. Surprised by so meager a mention, a newspaper reporter decided to explore a little more deeply and see what such an ordinary life looked like. She crashed the funeral and interviewed Shelagh’s friends. It turns out that Shelagh Gordon didn’t have a great job, she wasn’t married and never had children, so she wasn’t successful in any traditional sense. All she did was love people. And the people she loved couldn’t stop telling stories about her kindness. If Shelagh noticed your boots had holes, she’d press her new ones into your arms. When you casually admired her coffeemaker, you’d wake up to one of your own. A bag of chocolates hanging from your doorknob would greet you each Valentine’s Day, along with some clippings from the newspaper she thought you’d find interesting. It was said that Shelagh made people around her feel not just loved but coveted. Hers was not list of achievements, but a legacy of relationships.

Funerals serve as tearful goodbyes to a departed person’s life, but as the reporter found, funerals are also lenses through which we assess our own lives. Some fear and trembling can show up here too. We hear of such humble and loving people and wonder how we could ever measure up. What makes a life worthy? We easily ascribe value to the amazing: To the Bachs and the Bonheoffers, the Mandelas and the Mother Theresas, people who’s lives changed the world in extraordinary ways and influenced millions. But Shelagh was an ordinary woman who only a few people ever knew, each of whom had their worlds changed in ways a Mandela or Mother Theresa never touched. She changed them by loving them deeply and personally, in simple and ordinary ways, inspiring them to do the same to others though she probably never realized it. The reporter concluded, “Her life revealed that it doesn’t take much to make a difference every day — just deep, full love —and that can be sewn with many different kinds of stitches.”

So many of you gushed this week about last Sunday’s memorable Innové Award presentation. It was great. Amazing even. A number of you said it was the best thing you’d ever seen happen in church. Extraordinary. But when you stop and think about it, the things we’re trying to do with Innové are actually pretty ordinary: feeding hungry schoolchildren, making a college experience possible for a handful of students with disabilities, teaching men to be good boys, providing some clean water and interest-free loans, some fresh produce on a bus. In the vast scheme of things these are fairly unremarkable, except that these humble and ordinary acts, done with love, are the epitome of the gospel God calls us to obey.

 To call last Sunday amazing reminds me of a Sunday last year when  one of you gushed about a sermon I preached. You called it perfect. Talk about fear and trembling. I wasn't sure what to do with that, I should have quit while I was ahead. I hope I just said thank you and praise the Lord. Though at the risk of sounding cheeky, I told you how I wish I'd said something along the lines of "it's too soon to tell." That's because the true measure of sermonic perfection can only be the effect it has on our life as a congregation afterwards. The same with last Sunday. Describing last Sunday as amazing doesn’t mean that it is because while all these ideas we celebrated and funded are good things to do, we haven't done anything yet. We haven't fed any kids or made an interest free payday loan or loaded a bus with with fresh produce. We don't even have a bus to load. We still have something to prove, and this should humble us and even make us a little scared. We still have to work out our salvation with fear and trembling. This is our obedience, and from obedience, no doctrine of grace can save us. In Jesus’ famous parable of the talents, where two stewards entrusted with their master’s money had increased its worth, a third steward gets sternly castigated by his master for burying his allotment in the ground. The steward put forth fear of the master as his excuse, not wanting to mess up what his master had given him. However the master quickly retorted how if the steward truly thought the master to be as imagined, the steward’s fear would have motivated him to get off his butt and do something. As it turned out, the steward wasn’t afraid. He simply didn’t care. Thus the master branded him “wicked and lazy” and cast him into the darkness to weep and gnash his teeth.” The moral seems to be this: refuse to work out your salvation and your salvation may not work out.

This should humble us, and even make us a little scared. Not scared of God, I am sure, but scared of ourselves and of the says we can so easily sabotage our salvation. Which is why Paul tacked on the cross-stitch worthy news of verse 13. We can work out our salvation because in the end it is God who does the work in us, hand in glove as Jeff put it, enabling both the desire and the effort to do what pleases the Lord.” What God demands, God provides. His spirit inspires both the will and the deed, the desire and the effort. As Karl Barth put it, “Salvation, the promised final deliverance that the Christian as such awaits, claims the movement, the activity, the work, the life of the whole person. In the reality of the kingdom of Christ, everyone who [will be] there [then] puts their future salvation into practice [now].”

God is the one who works in our work to provide both the will and they way. This humbles us too. Because God is at work, we praise the Lord instead of ourselves, which keeps us humble. “As for me,” Paul wrote to the Galatians, “God forbid that I should boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live,” he said, I’m dead as dirt, “but Christ lives in me.” The same with us. Do you see any humility or willingness to place the interests of others ahead of my own? That’s not me. I’m dead as dirt. That must be Jesus in me. Do you see any loving my neighbor as myself? Do you see me forgiving people when they wrong me? That’s not me. Do you see me regarding others as better than myself? Serving them with ordinary and beautiful acts of love everyday? That’s not me. That must be Jesus in me. Jesus at work in us, enabling both the will and the work for his good pleasure.

This has been a bad week: from the winter that won’t quit to Senate gun debates and a shaky stock market, from the horrible fertilizer factory explosion in Texas to the horrific Boston Marathon mayhem that played out like something from a Scorsese movie. As one website put it, “Maybe next time we have a week, they can try not to pack it so completely to the freaking brim with explosions, mutilations, death, manhunts, lies, weeping, bloody gunfights and lockdowns. You know, maybe try to spread some of that total misery across the other 51 weeks in the year. Just a thought.” None of it ever makes any sense. Dawn and I knew people who knew each of three victims killed at the Marathon on Monday. For such a large city, Boston can be a pretty small town. We know people who knew Sean Collier, the MIT police officer. We have friends who were at the hospital when Richard Donahue, the wounded transit cop was brought in and the first bombing suspect too. We know folks who lived down the street from the house with the boat.

My former church in Boston held a prayer gathering downtown on Tuesday. It was a full house. Then President Obama spoke to a packed South End Cathedral on Thursday. I find it fascinating and strangely comforting that the initial impulse of so many people following tragedy—believers and nonbelievers—alike, is to pray. Rather than fretting over “where was God” or how he could allow bad things to happen, the initial impulse for many is to rush to where they believe God can be found. That we do so instinctively turn to God in our troubles, and for some only then, may suggest why Scripture has God allowing the troubles he allows. We realize afresh every Easter season how the spring bloom of resurrection and eternal life emerges solely from the fertile soil of suffering and death. Paul joyfully expressed this disturbing gospel truth to the Philippians as he sat chained in a Roman prison. Jesus himself, King of kings and Lord of lords, is crowned only once he submits to death on a cross. This is God’s glory, Paul writes, a strange and redemptive reality that shines at the center of the Christian faith.

This morning marks our third in a sermon series: “verses from Philippians most likely to be cross-stitched.” From his Roman imprisonment to what was likely the first church in Europe, Paul penned words that have become framed favorites among believers for centuries. We began with chapter 1 and verse 6: “the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ.” Last Sunday we looked at verse 21: “For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.” This morning brings us to chapter 2:5-11 and one of the grandest Christological expressions of all Scripture. These inspired and inspiring verses soar in their praise of Jesus Christ as the lowly turned lofty Son of God whose name, in fulfillment of all prophecy, spurs every knee to bow and every tongue to confess his Lordship.

While Paul hoped for release from prison and a return trip to Philippi, he knew chances were good he could end up executed for refusing to worship Caesar as Lord. Paul wasn’t worried about dying—to him that was gain—but he was worried for the Philippians. Like any church comprised of sinful people (which is every church), it risked division and rancor from within. Paul appealed to the unity that was already theirs in Christ, even if they had yet to fully experience it. He writes, “If there is any encouragement in Christ (which there is), any consolation from love (which there is), any sharing in the Spirit (which there is), any compassion and sympathy (which there is), then make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind—the same mind in you that was in Christ Jesus.”

By “one and the same mind” Paul meant that mindset of abject humility that drove Jesus to the cross. While admired, such humility is rarely sought and often begrudged as hazardous to your psychological health. In a culture where self-confidence and ambition are paramount, Paul’s admonition to “regard others as better than yourself” is just plain bad advice. Still, Paul lyrically points to Jesus’ humility as the hallmark of virtue, who despite being God in the flesh never considered equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself for our sake and became a slave, regarding us as better than himself, as impossible as that sounds. Maybe it came easy for Jesus. If you’re equal to God you can act as humbly as you choose and still be God.

Harder for us ordinary schmoes. For us to regard others as better than ourselves is a sure recipe for life in loser-land. Be a doormat and you’ll get treated like one. “Blessed are the meek,” Jesus said “only those who humble themselves will be exalted.” But this simply isn’t practical. Christian scholars have tried to lessen the impact by insisting that by “humble yourself” Jesus only meant that you acknowledge your intrinsic “creatureliness.” Since the English word humility is related to the word human, both deriving from the Latin word humus, meaning ground or earth, to be humble is to remember where you came from, that you are “dust and to dust you shall return,” that the meek shall inherit the dirt. On the one hand this punctures any inflated sense of self-worth or conceit, but on the other hand, it also can become a rationale for self-conceit or used as an excuse for self-centered behavior. When we choose badly we'll often plead, “I can’t help it, I’m only human.” And then of course, there’s the observation about how it really doesn’t do much good to exalt the humble anyway. People don't remain humble long once they’re exalted. The genuine article is hard to find.

Then again, we watched on Monday as scores of Bostonians, with little concern for themselves, ran toward the explosions, assisting the bloodied and injured in humble ways that were nothing short of heroic. The same with the way an entire whole city willingly abandoned the streets to make space for the bravery exhibited by scores of law enforcement personnel, police who then humbly discounted their bravery as just doing their job. It was another glimpse of the beauty that can emerge from intense sorrow and tragedy—a beauty which the Bible labels as the power of resurrection.

I talked to a number of Boston friends this week, and read the Tweets and Facebook posts of others. One of whom, named Steve, is a big Marathon fan, having run the race himself five years in a row. Steve is an assistant church facilities manager and a good athlete, but far from what you’d describe as an elite runner. The joy of competition or setting a good time was not what got him to run 26 miles. What got him running was the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a local hospital devoted to eradicating cancer in children. Thousands of weekend runners raise money running the Marathon every year. This is another reason the Boston Marathon is so sacred. The ones who run for charity are never the elite runners, they cross the finish line  a couple of hours after. It was mostly them and their supporters who were harmed by Monday’s bombing, and who remain fearlessly determined to run again next year.

For Steve, his passion for children’s cancer comes from the cancer his daughter Caitlynne contracted when she was seven. The good news was that her tumor was localized in her right leg. The bad news was that her leg had to be amputated. Steve and his wife Doreen were totally devastated, as were all of their friends. And yet we all rallied, including the Boston Red Sox and their Jimmy Fund, coming alongside their whole family with prayer and support, because that’s what people instinctively do when tragedy strikes, believers and nonbelievers alike. Steve and I were remembering this week the hours spent on the say of Caitlynne's surgery. She not only survived, but thrived, thanks to all this support and to a remarkable piece of surgery performed at Children’s Hospital.

Out of sheer gratitude for all of this, Steve started running the Marathon to raise money for other kids. And each year, during the last mile, Caitlynne ran with him. She’s 18 years old now and has received a full ride to Boston University. It is another glimpse of the beauty that can emerge from sorrow and tragedy—the power of resurrection.

The resurrection of Jesus turned tragedy on its head. Suddenly loss now meant gain, leastness meant greatness, being a loser meant being a winner, death meant life, ankles become knees, and humility became the epitome of strength. It sounds crazy, and by itself, humility is crazy. But humility is never meant for humility’s sake. Christian humility serves the cause of love. It was love for sinners that caused Jesus to humbly set aside his right to exalted grandeur, and it is this same love, this same mind, that spurs us to humbly regard others as better than ourselves. Humility orients you away from delusions of self-importance and frees you to love courageously as Jesus modeled. “We love,” the apostle John famously wrote, “because God first loved us.”

Despite all the horrors that engulf our world, love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things. Love never fails. Jesus’ love even conquered death, so we cannot lose heart. God who began his good work among us will bring it to completion himself. Our hope is built on nothing less than Jesus’ blood and righteousness. Christian hope translates life’s tragedies into a beautiful tapestry of redemption, pointing toward that day, when by grace, all things will be made new and love remains. Confidence in that day gives us courage to live humbly in the present—as justice gets done against perpetrators of evil, as comfort is blanketed on those who mourn, as prayers are instinctively offered for peace, as doctors reconstruct bodies as previews of resurrection itself, as thousands run marathons to raise awareness and money for these causes, even as our own Innové project refashions profit-making business into the making of beauty and peace and justice and grace in the world—everything humbly done to serve the cause of love which is the cause of the name that is above every name and before which every knee and ankle that serves as a knee will bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

by Daniel Harrell

The Palm Sunday outside Jerusalem is steeper than I thought it would be. Coming down off the Mount of Olives is a downhill run into the Holy City. And this being Holy Week, Jesus was definitely headed downhill. For the last leg of his journey into Jerusalem, he had two disciples round up a donkey colt. He did it like you’d expect a Son of God to do it, all wrapped in mystery and prophetic foresight: “Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here.” The reason is found in Zechariah 9.  “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Jerusalem, for your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious, humble and riding on the colt of a donkey.” Jesus staged his grand entry to make a Messiah statement.

Indeed there was great rejoicing when Jesus made his grand entrance here in Luke. And you’ll note that the people understood his statement. “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord,” they sing. However you’ll also note that there wasn't a single palm. Instead, people took off their coats and laid them in Jesus path.  This was how people paid homage to kings back then, a gesture akin to taking off your hat for the national anthem. So technically, we should call today Coats Off Sunday. But since this is Minnesota in March, we’ll stick with the palms. They remind us of Florida.

Now I should say that, technically, we didn’t walk down the actual Palm Sunday road in Israel. We definitely didn’t stop by the village where Jesus got his donkey colt either. Nobody is sure of the location of Bethany or Bethpage. They’ve long since been covered by succeeding civilizations. One of the things about walking in the footsteps of Jesus in Jerusalem is that you have to dig down deep to do it. But as with the colt, Jesus predicted this would happen too. Of Jerusalem he says, “not one stone within you will be left upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.” This prophesy was violently fulfilled by a savage Roman assault. Had Israel received Jesus as king, things might have been different. This is why Jesus weeps.

There’s a church for just about everything Jesus did in the Holy Land. As you walk down the Palm Sunday road, just off to your right, is Dominus Flevit,  The Church of Jesus Weeping. As you would expect, it dramatically overlooks Jerusalem. And as you might not expect, it’s shaped to resemble a teardrop (though it takes a little imagination to see it).

This is one of two times Jesus cries in the Bible, the other time over the death of his friend Lazarus. You might wonder why Jesus only cries twice, but then the Bible never has Jesus laughing even once. If it had I assure you there would have been a church built to commemorate it, probably shaped like a smile.

As for the tears Jesus shed over Lazarus, he wipes them away by raising Lazarus from the dead. But Jerusalem gets razed to the ground. Jesus’ lament echoes the one Danielle preached about a few chapters back. That lament had Jesus bemoaning Jerusalem’s history of killing its messengers, prophets sent to call God’s prodigal sons home. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,” Jesus said, a desire commemorated on the altar of the Teardrop Church. “But you were unwilling,” a rejected Jesus despairs, leaving Jerusalem to its own devices, and then sternly declaring “you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’” This line comes from Psalm 118, and is commonly sung to welcome pilgrims to Jerusalem.

But again, you note that Jesus’ welcome committee changes “blessed is he who comes” to “blessed is the king who comes,” which you’d think would count as Jerusalem recognizing “the time of your visitation from God.” Their mention of peace on heaven is weird, its almost as if they sense peace on earth is impossible. Luke is clear that it wasn’t any city delegation that welcomed Jesus, but instead “the whole multitude of disciples.” The official response, represented here by the Pharisees, is rebuke. Jesus is told to tell his disciples to knock off the messiah worship. Such praise is reserved for Israel’s legitimate king. Jesus replies that shutting them up won’t do any good for then the stones would take up their praise. Jesus wasn’t just King of the Jews. He was King of Creation.

Sadly, Jesus’ royal welcome rapidly deteriorated into a bloody coronation. His crown would be thorns and his throne a cross. It’s a tragedy we recount every Good Friday. If Jesus’ intent is to establish his kingdom and gather his people, why do it as a chicken? Why allow yourself to be plucked and slaughtered? Why not a stone-cold display of brute force? Bring down the armies of heaven! Zechariah foretold a king humbly riding on a donkey colt, but read the rest of that prophesy, and you’ll find a humble King of Creation convincingly triumphant by way of fire and hurricanes, thunder and lightening. It’s easy to be humble once you’ve pounded your enemies into the dirt. But here, Jesus’ enemies pound him onto a tree. That’s not humility. That’s humiliation and humiliation doesn’t gain you much. Loss is no pathway to victory. Weakness and failure only get you run over.

For modern Israelis, military might is vital to their security. A belligerent Lebanon and a violent Syria border their north. An increasingly Islamic Egypt churns to their South. A bellicose Iran threatens just over Jordan to the east, and resentful Palestinians smolder in both the West Bank and Gaza. What unites their enemies is the desire to wipe Israel off the map, a desire expressed by the fact Israel doesn’t even appear on Palestinian maps. Stoking Israel’s security concerns is the dark memories of Holocaust, a ghastly reminder of how the world hates Jews. Israeli law mandates that teenagers visit the Holocaust Museum three times so as to drive this reminder deep into their identities. The Museum somberly narrates the Nazi atrocity start to finish, from the vicious propaganda to the segregation and oppression, to the collectivizing and the ghettos, and ultimately to the extermination of six million people. Oddly, the Jewish teenagers there during our visit mostly seemed unaffected. They were too busy flirting and texting to worry about hatred.

Afterwards we made our way into Bethlehem, despite official US State Department warnings against traveling there that day. Bethlehem sits in the West Bank, where Palestinian protests flared. But as Christians wanting to see the manger, we ignored the warnings and went to Bethlehem anyway, which these days means crossing a heavily armed checkpoint into a city surrounded by a massive security wall, seen here from a distance. You must swap your Israeli guide for a Palestinian since each is not allowed in the others’ territory. Poverty and unemployment are rampant behind the walls, with strict limits on every movement blatant oppression, leading more than one of our traveling companions to take note of the irony: “Israel is doing to the Palestinians what Nazis did to the Jews.”

We visited a Palestinian Lutheran church whose pastor held out little hope for genuine peace. President Obama has come and gone, as have plenty of Presidents before him, and nothing really changes. The pastor was obliged to suggest everybody give Jesus a chance, but Christian quibbling over who runs the Church of the Nativity makes Jesus seem like a losing proposition too. And , it’s hard to see in Jesus anything but another losing proposition. And loss is no pathway to victory. Weakness and failure only get you crucified dead and buried.

I’m participating in a Bethel University theology and work initiative with a group of business and seminary professors. Given our own Innové project, I’m interested in the ways our faith as Christians can influence entrepreneurship and the marketplace proper. This is not as easy as it might sound. Too often influence runs the other way. So much of what matters to business runs contrary to the gospel, be it the primacy of shareholders over service, gluttonous profits, avaricious career ambition or the over-accumulation of capital. As I mentioned last Sunday with Jesus’ parable about an uncharitable rich man, to prosper financially is not a Biblical vice. But wealth does tempt us toward greed and injustice and extravagance, none of which bode well for our souls if the rich man’s eventual torment in hell is any indication.

Having just preached that parable as I sat in the theology and work conversation, I wondered out loud what Christian faith can noticeably contribute to the way we do business. The Bethel scholars offered up the Christian virtues of honesty and integrity and hard work, along with Christian concerns for service and fairness. And I agree. To believe in Jesus is to value all these things. But you can value these things without believing in Jesus. Is there anything else that is distinctive to Christianity? What about humiliation and loss? Although he was Almighty God, Jesus wore weakness as his human identity, riding in as king on a borrowed burro. Over and over again he stressed how the last shall be first and the humble exalted. He speaks of the importance of lost sheep and lost coins and lost sons and losing your possessions and even your life for the sake of the gospel. That is distinctive.

As far as I know there’s not a business plan on earth that puts loss in its mission statement. Loss is not a pathway to profit. Unless, of course, you buy the gospel. Our Innové judging commences this Saturday. What if we chose as our winners those social entrepreneurial projects deemed certain to lose? Granted, one of the mantras of the startup world is fail faster. Mistakes are an inevitable step on the path to true innovation—but you want to get through them quickly. Nobody makes mistakes their goal.  That would be ridiculous. As ridiculous as changing the world through death on a cross.

Jesus weeps for Jerusalem, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now it’s too late.” Too late and too bad. Embedded in Jerusalem’s name is the Hebrew shalom, a kind of peace that goes beyond the mere absence of enmity to include justice and righteousness and tranquility. This city was supposed to be heaven on earth. God’s own house was located there, the Temple where the Lord himself resided, making Jerusalem the nexus of holiness and humanity. But now the Temple would be ruined by the Romans, as the Babylonians had ruined it centuries before. The prophet Jeremiah cried over Jerusalem then, and Jesus wept now, the only difference being that unlike after Jeremiah, God’s house would not be rebuilt this time.

In Jerusalem we walked where the Temple once stood, on the stones Jesus actually walked on himself. There are some religious groups who believe that if the Temple gets rebuilt then the Messiah will come and walk there again. Their fervor has led them to remake the Temple’s furnishings according to Biblical specs in preparation for that day. Standing in they way, however, is the fact that the Temple mount is under Islamic ownership. To try and build a Jewish Temple there and you ignite World War III. Not even Israel will allow that. The Roman Emperor Julian tried to rebuild it in 363 AD, but an earthquake halted construction. Apparently God wouldn’t allow it either. That’s because in Christ, the stone house of God gave way to a human body, The Lord in the flesh, which is another reason Jesus wept. “You did not recognize the time of your visitation from God” meant Jerusalem did not recognize Jesus as God himself coming to visit in person.

But again, this is understandable. What kind of God comes to visit dressed like a vagrant and riding a donkey? Even his disciples dump him once they see how deadly serious Jesus was about humiliation and loss. Loss is no pathway to victory. Weakness and failure only get you crucified dead and buried.

If you’re going to win, brute force and muscle are the ways to do it. It's how the forceful Romans eventually burned Jerusalem to the ground. It's how the mighty Persians rolled in later and destroyed the Romans, followed by the stronger Byzantines who pounded the Persians. A few decades later Islam powerfully emerged and Arab armies took over the city, who in turn were beaten down by the more powerful Turks, who massacred all of Jerusalem’s inhabitants during their reign. Christians, under Pope Urban II, took offense and the Crusades commenced, leading to the slaughter of 30,000 Muslims and Jews in one battle. More Crusaders followed making Jerusalem a Roman Catholic stronghold until the tougher Ottoman Turks invaded and reduced the city to ruins once more. The Ottomans ruled for 400 years, and then the Egyptians moved in, and then the Russians and the French and finally the brutish British who made Jerusalem part of a colony called Palestine, named for the Philistines, Israel’s ancient enemy and a subtle reminder that Israel will always have its enemies. Jerusalem became the capital of a fortified Jewish state after World War II and the Holocaust, but there is no shalom.

Of course there's no Roman Empire anymore either, or Persian or Byzantine Empires for that matter. Muslims violently divide as Shiite and Sunni. The Crusades proved a colossal failure, and the Ottomans have been reduced to living room furniture. The British still have their Queen, but she’s only a force as far as the tabloids are concerned. And even Israel, while strong, won't last forever. No human civilization ever does. Someday Jerusalem will be reduced to ruin again and another civilization will be added to the pile. All earthly displays of power and might fade away, but 2000 years later, we still do Easter. Next Sunday we’ll  rejoice and shout and sing yet again about the victory of weakness and the power of  humiliation and acknowledge once again that loss truly is the way to new life, giving thanks that resurrection defeats death every time. It’s no coincidence that at the end of time, Scripture envisions heaven as a brand new Jerusalem, finally situated at the top of the pile. There’s no Temple there or any need for light, for the glory of God and the Lamb of God is all the light that you need. On that day every knee will bow and every coat will come off there will be no more crying. All will finally recognize that God didn't just come to visit. He came to stay.

Hearing this parable about a super rich man and a desperately poor man unavoidably prompts a correlation to America’s current wealth inequality. One recent video making the rounds from a Harvard economist gloomily intones how the richest 1% of American’s own 42% of the entire country’s wealth, more than the bottom 97% combined. Notably, there is general agreement among those surveyed as to what an equitable distribution curve would look like—even though with the system unfairly skewed. But the perceived gap between this equitable ideal and reality pales as pocket change wen compared with the true state of things—an ugly inequality curve in which the poorest and middle class are a barely-indistinguishable line while the top 1 percent is, quite literally, off the charts. I thought about showing the whole video this morning but it’s rather depressing. And frankly, this parable is depressing enough. Even for Lent. 

Stony Brook University economist Noah Smith counters that much of America’s wealth inequality has more to do with age than class. Young people, he says, tend to have a lot of debt and not much by way of savings, accounting for their negative wealth and the reason they move back in with their parents. Moreover, the video’s  statistics don't include things like entitlements, or the value of one’s skills or education. Americans aren't as staggeringly unequal as the video makes out. But they are still very, very unequal.

Not that this is a new development. As Jesus illustrates, wealth inequity has been around for a long time. In fact, his parable also shows up in other reversal of fortune folktales circulating during his day. Wealth inequality isn’t solely an American issue either, of course. While in Israel we encountered poverty among Bedouin shepherds who plaintively positioned themselves at tourist stops, peddling locally-crafted cashmerey scarves made in China. Their sad roadside shanties clashed harshly with the opulent accommodations we tourists enjoyed each night. The fine linens and sumptuous feasting Jesus described translated for us into thousand thread-count linens and lavish dinner buffets. 

Now I should say that you work up quite an appetite walking in the footsteps of Jesus, but I’m sure that not even Jesus ate like we did. Jesus chose to be poor for the sake of solidarity with the homeless and hungry, with the least and the last. The irony wasn’t lost on us and I felt bad about it after my second slice of cheesecake. But even in the Bible, blessings of abundance are not solely reserved for the heaven. Though Scripture sternly warns against the temptations and tyrannies of wealth, to prosper is not a Biblical vice. Christian virtuousness promotes diligence at work, good stewardship of resources, getting an education, commitment in marriage and caring communities, all of which can contribute to economic and social advancement. The issue in Scripture is never that God’s people prosper, but that in prospering they ignore the plight of the poor. Blessings start getting treated as earned privileges. Hoarding for financial security’s sake displaces generosity toward those in need. Jesus takes selfishness personally. “I tell you the truth,” he cautions, “whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” 

As with last Sunday’s parable of the Envious Brother (otherwise known as the Prodigal Son), Jesus aims this Sunday’s parable at the Pharisees. Like the Prodigal Son, the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus only shows up in Luke’s gospel. And among all Jesus’ parables, it’s the only one where the characters have names, Abraham being the patriarch of Judaism and Lazarus a fairly common name meaning “God has helped.” The Prodigal Son demonstrated obedience gone sour. Like the envious older brother, the obedient Pharisees couldn’t stand that Jesus hung out with sinners and got away with it. Here the comparably well-off Pharisees despised Jesus for giving preferential treatment to the poor. If prosperity is a blessing from God, what does that say about those who have nothing? Clearly they were sinners too.

Working all the years that I served at a downtown church, I got constantly barraged by requests for spare change from street people who had nothing. Wanting to be a good reverend, I started by putting money in everybody’s cup, but my generosity got jaded over time. Seeing the same people panhandling year after year, I began to ask myself whether dispensing change into a cup truly helped then get off the streets, or enabled them to remain there instead. Were they genuinely needy or just lazy and willing to lie? Then again, was I so righteous that I can even make such judgments? Shouldn’t my faith in God make my generosity tireless? How can I say I follow Jesus and then walk by unaffected? Yet if I give only in order to assuage my guilt, can it truly be called giving? And really, what good is a dollar? Shouldn’t I be willing to offer more given how much God has offered me? I did eventually spend four years hanging out with homeless guys on the streets. I got to know their names and hear their stories. But in many cases this only made matters worse. At least the sinners and tax-collectors Jesus hung out with always reformed their lives. The homeless guys I knew weren’t really that interested in that. Granted, I’m no Jesus, but still. As you can tell, this is why I moved to the Minneapolis suburbs.

It is possible that the Pharisees were hard-working clergy who got jaded by the demands of their work. Maybe they were underpaid and resented the fact that they’d sacrificed so much to serve the Lord. But I doubt it. Luke describes them as “lovers of money,” which was not meant as a compliment. That Jesus ties them to the rich man in the parable must have meant they were doing all right. Not that the rich man was a greedy materialist. He likely counted his riches as a blessing from God. Again, the issue was not his prosperity, but his cold and self-righteous heart. He probably had his reasons. Probably thought that Lazarus should go get a job. Probably figured there will always be poor people. What can you do? “You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others;” Jesus told them, “but God knows your hearts.” The bottom line turns out to be the difference between being having money and loving it, which comes as a huge relief for most of us well-to-do Christians. Thankfully, none of us love money. 

Jesus says these things as religious and political opposition against him deepens. Telling parables like this didn’t help matters much. We’re all fans of fairness and poetic justice, but do we really need to be told how we get eternally recompensed for all the slights we commit on earth? And what’s with all the hellfire and torment? Turn or burn? Isn’t just feeling guilty bad enough? Jesus says that Lazarus would have been happy with a few crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. According to another statistic, we Americans throw away 40 percent of the food we produce—more than 20 pounds per person per month. That’s a lot of crumbs. 

In the end, Lazarus dies without so much as a proper burial, but that’s when things start looking up. He gets ushered up to Abraham’s heavenly dinner table while the dead rich man gets sent down to the furnace room. Turns out that is easier to thread a needle with a camel. Flames lick his body like the dogs licked Lazarus, and now he’d be as happy with a drop of water as Lazarus would have been with that crumb, anything to cool his blistering misery. Being a religious as well as rich, he appeals to Abraham for relief, but Abraham says sorry, you had your chance. Justice is justice. You reap what you sow. God knows your heart. What about grace? It’s too late for that. “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed,” Abraham explains, “so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.” We couldn’t help you even if we wanted to.

Why would Jesus ever tell such a horrible parable? It’s not like the rich guy was asking to get set free. He just wants a lousy drop of water. And what’s with the vast chasm? Who put that there? For a Savior who’s all about love, Jesus sure comes off sounding awfully judgmental. Then again, God doesn’t even show up in this parable. He’s not passing judgment. He doesn’t really need to. Because whenever we hear this parable we judge ourselves. Like when we hear about the envious older son who snubbed his found brother’s welcome home party happening just inside the house. Or when we hear about the religious Levite and priest in the who scurry past the wounded neighbor right there in the roadside ditch, only to have a despised no-good Samaritan pick up the slack and make us look bad. Or here with Lazarus being right outside the rich man’s gate. Chances are they saw each other every day. The religious rich, the righteous brother, the Levite and the priest, each came within inches of doing the right thing. But by failing to do it, each might just as well have been million miles away. This is the judgment: We all come within inches of loving and helping and even forgiving others every day, yet by refusing to close these little gaps, for whatever reason, we create for ourselves an infinity of separation amounting to the distance between heaven and hell.

 Perhaps you’re heard the one about the difference between heaven and hell as the difference between two kinds of people gathered around identical soup pots and all in possession of identical long wooden spoons. The difference is that those in hell starve because they cannot get the spoons to their own mouths while those in heaven feed each other and are full.

Up to this point, Jesus’ morality tale was like those his audience had heard before. To the formerly rich man’s credit, he suffers his horrible fate; a fate he now wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. Now Jesus adds his own twist. He has the formerly rich man begging. He pleads for Lazarus be sent to his father’s house, “for I have five brothers who need to be warned, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.” Abraham says they should just read their Bibles. “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.” According to yet another statistic, the average American owns four Bibles, and we keep buying more. The Bible still ranks as the country’s number one selling book, and we give it to children, probably because nobody reads it.

Why would we? Have you ever opened one? Sell your possessions and give the money to the poor and you’ll have all you need? Consider the birds and lilies and don’t worry about your life? The Lord knows what you need before you even ask? Simply seek the kingdom of God and its righteousness and everything will be yours? Trust in the Lord and he’ll give you the desires of your heart? It’s all very Biblical. It’s just not very realistic. Not even for people who don’t love money.

There’s a small group curriculum put out by World Vision and Sojourners entitled Lazarus at the Gate and is advertised as an “economic discipleship guide.” The curriculum invites participants into a community experience where the goal is for each participant to make four individual commitments:

• Spend joyfully: Regularly give thanks for the blessing of wealth.

• Spend justly: Make one lifestyle change to consume more responsibly.

• Spend less: Make one lifestyle change in order to reduce personal consumption.

• Give more: Make a substantial gift to fight global poverty

At the end of the time together participants pool their saved money and give collectively to the poor. In this they work like a giving circle. If you’ve yet to do anything for Lent, this can be a good plan on a lot of levels. I’ve known a lot of people who’ve done it. I once asked a participant whether being in her Lazarus group and supporting each other’s economic choices also meant sharing information like salaries or current spending habits or personal budgets. If economic discipleship brings you closer to God, it should also bring you closer to your fellow believers. “Heavens no,” she replied. “That’s way too personal. And we only know each other from church.” It reminded me of an old letter once written to the recently deceased Dear Abby: “Dear Abby. I am a twenty-three-old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It’s getting pretty expensive and I think my lover should share half the cost, but I don’t know him well enough to discuss money with him.”

It’s said that to know someone’s financial statement is to know their values. Actually Jesus said that. “Where your treasureis, there your heartwill be also.” This being the case, divulging our pay stubs and budgets with fellow Christians might not only foster deeper obedience, but genuine intimacy too. But then I try to imagine it actually happening. I try to imagine it happening at say, a pastors’ conference, you know, among people who “aren’t in it for the money” and who supposedly read our Bibles all the time. I doubt that comparing salaries and personal budgets would make us closer. Envious and resentful and condescending, perhaps, but probably not closer.

“Father Abraham,” the burning man pleads, “I don’t think that reading the Bible will do it. Send them somebody risen from the dead. If someone shows up from the dead, then they will repent.” But Abraham replies, “Meh. Why bother? If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” People ain’t gonna change.

Of course Jesus tells this parable on the last leg of his journey into Jerusalem as he approaches the last days of this earthly life. Palm Sunday. Good Friday. Denial. Betrayal. Execution. He knows what’s coming even as he speaks. And knowing what’s coming is what gives this parable its power. Why bother if nobody listens and nobody changes? Because it bothers God. Despite our stubborn resistance to Scripture and obedience and his word, God stubbornly loves us and remains willing to do whatever it takes to bring us around. He may not have created the chasm, but he's determined to bridge it even if it kills him to do it. It is while we are yet money-loving sinners that Christ dies for us. It is for our sake that he rises to redeem us. It may be easier to squeeze a camel through a needle than to squeeze a rich man into heaven. But as Jesus said and shows, with God, everything is possible.

Most people recognize this parable of the Prodigal Son—prodigal from the Latin meaning irresponsibly extravagant. It is one of the most beloved stories in Scripture, if not in all of literature. Despite its familiarity, or more because of it, I’ve never preached a sermon about it. Its message of overwhelming, undeserved grace moves us to reconsider those moments when our own sin and shame would otherwise keep us from coming home, as well as those times when obsessive concerns for rightness and fairness threaten to overshadow the primacy of love. Seriously, what’s left to say? 

Well, I got a few things. The parable actually begins rather ominously enough. For any good Jew, to hear “A father had two sons” would have immediately churned up bad memories about Ishmael and Isaac. Esau and Jacob. Joseph and his colorful coat. David and his bag of rocks. All stories of conflict between older and younger siblings over preferential treatment which younger brothers in the Bible typically enjoyed. Here we go again.

An ungrateful jerk of a kid shockingly seeks his share of inheritance from his father—in effect wishing his daddy dead since inheritance only happens once pappy buys the farm. And this father consents to it? This would have meant him selling off assets, likely an actual farm with land and livestock, liquidating his investment portfolio, and then giving it all over to this scalawag of a son whom the father had to know was going to go off and blow it all on what Jesus calls “dissolute living”: drugs, booze, sex, the whole party manimal thing. And then after the money’s gone and the kid comes repentantly hang-doggin’ it back, the father welcomes him home no questions asked. He hardly even lets the kid apologize. So who’s the real prodigal here? Show me one parenting magazine that would ever commend such irresponsible child-rearing. Vanderbilt New Testament professor Amy Jill-Levine, a Jewish mother from Massachusetts, argues that the parable should be re-titled “The Absent Mother” because as any good Jew knows, none of this would have happened had the mother been present.

At the turning point in the parable, the good-for-nothing son—having deeply dishonored his father—ends up on his knees at a non-kosher pig trough where he comes to his senses: “How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger!” Is this remorse? Christians tend to interpret this coming-to-his-senses moment as the roots of repentance—which is why the parable gets assigned to Lent. And Jesus does tell it in the context of two other parables about a found sheep and a found coin, the punch line of both being the finders’ inexpressible joy. “I tell you,” Jesus says, “there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents.” Joy is evident on the part of the father too. But repentance from the son? Not so evident. Of course lost sheep and lost coins can’t repent. But once we finally get to the story about a human being who can repent, it’s not obvious that the prodigal son does. 

Knowing daddy as he did, the son’s turnaround could be interpreted as just another dishonorable scheme. In this case: “run back to daddy and act religious.” He rehearses his lines: “I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.’ Yeah, that should do it.” Now maybe I’m stretching it here, but I wouldn’t be the first. For any good Jewish audience, familiar with Old Testament patterns and human hypocrisy, suspicions of motive are always in play.

And then there’s the older son, a sanctimonious goody-two-shoes who still has a valid gripe. His resentment isn’t as much against his brother’s inexcusable behavior as it is against his father’s indulgence—a father who had never cooked him so much as a goat-burger for being the good boy he was. The father tries to comfort his firstborn by reminding him how “all that is mine is yours.” Really?  What comfort is that? Of course all you own belongs to me because my share of the inheritance is all you have left. Little brother has already squandered his. And still he gets a whole cow? Why does the baby in the family always get off so easily?

Fine, so maybe this story cuts simply too close to home. As you know, I am the oldest son. I am the good boy. I am the pleaser. I made good grades, did what I was told. Played by the rules. Went to church. Went on and became a minister for Christ’s sake. My little brother? He was always getting into trouble growing up. Problems in school. Questionable relationships. Jail time. Skipped church. My dad felt bad for him. Helped him start his own construction business. Made him a millionaire. Not that I’m bitter.

C’mon, says the dad. “This little brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found. We have to rejoice!” The late Catholic mystic Henri Nouwen, contemplating this story through the aid of Rembrandt’s famous depiction, observed how “resentment and gratitude cannot coexist, because resentment blocks the perception and experience of life as a gift. My resentment tells me that I don't receive what I deserve. It always manifests itself in envy.”

The table for such envy is plainly set in the first two verses of Luke 15: “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to Jesus. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” There’s the resentment. Tax collectors were universally despised in Luke’s world for their dishonesty and exploitation. Sinners were all those whose behavior excluded them from the category of proper society—from the merely detestable to the outright criminal. These were prodigal people, not the kind you want sitting beside you in church. By contrast were the Pharisees. Good people. Well-mannered, devoted and righteous with strong reputations. They’re offended that Jesus so blatantly betrays social and religious protocol. He acts as if immorality has no consequences. Doesn’t he know that to coddle sinners only encourages them to sin more? How will they ever learn to do right?

 That Jesus flouts religious convention is irksome to be sure, but what really ticks off the Pharisees is how Jesus has become so popular for doing it. Here’s where the envy sets in. It’d have been one thing if Jesus had been a bad boy sinner himself, iniquity loves company. But instead he’s hailed as a wise rabbi and wonderworker, a paragon of virtue and a real peach of a guy, basically the sort the Pharisees had worked so hard to be like themselves. He’s stealing their lines and their thunder; hogging a righteous limelight they’d labored all their lives to secure, all by just dispensing love and hugs all around. No wonder they can’t stand this guy. Dang right they’re resentful and envious. They want him dead!

There’s another Jewish parable that never made it into the Bible that tells of a greedy man and an envious man who appeared before a king. The king said to the two men, “one of you may ask something of me and I will give it to him, provided I get to give twice as much of that same thing to the other.” Now, the envious man did not want to ask first, for he was envious of his companion who would receive twice as much. The greedy man did not want to ask first because he wanted everything that could be had for himself. The greedy man eventually prevailed upon the envious man to go first; but only because the envier had conjured up a malicious idea. He requested that the king pluck out one of his eyes—knowing that this meant his greedy companion would have both of his eyes plucked out.

Envy is as old as humanity itself. In the first utterance of the word sin in Scripture, a man had two sons; two brothers who come to grief over, of all things, an offering given to God. “Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground. Abel brought the firstborn of his flock and their fat portions. The LORD looked with favor on Abel, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry.” He killed his brother. Was Abel’s offering better or more generous? Or did the Lord just have a thing for shepherds? It’s hard not to suspect some favoritism at work here—the same kind of favoritism that unfairly parcels out beauty, intelligence, ability and opportunity to some but not all. Why doesn’t everybody receive the same? God’s response? “Thou shalt not covet.” Thanks a lot, Lord.

We all know what envy feels like. You look around this Meetinghouse and can’t bear to behold what you imagine to be the full lives other people enjoy. Just look at their happy marriages, their successful careers, perfect children, good looks. They make you sick—and these are your brothers and sisters in Christ. Frankly, if you have to hear one more word about how their great their life is you’ll scream. Oh sure, you could rejoice in their happiness; but why do that when you can begrudge their existence and fuel your own misery? If only they could taste just a bit of your bitterness. Not that you’d ever pray for that to happen. OK, you might. And then when their misfortune finally hits, ha-ha, you can mask your perverse delight behind a façade of fake compassion. Though you never had anything genuinely positive to say during their good times, now that they suffer you are so there for them; not because you care, but because witnessing their pain close up brings such satisfaction. Sure, I’ll give up an eye if it means you lose two.

So it’s possible I’m being a little melodramatic here. I like being melodramatic. You judge yourself. After all, Lent is the season for self-examination. In Luke’s gospel, the tax collectors and sinners respond to the gospel. In the story of the Prodigal Son, the sinful brother comes from far away back to his father, whatever his motives. But not the older brother just out in the back yard. He refuses to step one foot in the door. No way he’s participating in that happiness.

“For most of my life,” Henri Nouwen wrote, “I have struggled to find God, to know God, to love God. I have tried hard to follow the guidelines of the spiritual life—pray always, work for others, read the Scriptures—and to avoid the many temptations to dissipate myself. I have failed many times but always tried again, even when I was close to despair. Now I wonder whether I have sufficiently realized that during all this time God has been trying to find me, to know me, and to love me. Maybe the question is not ‘How am I to find God?’ but ‘How am I to let myself be found by God?’ The question is not ‘How am I to know God?’ but “How am I to let myself be known by God?” And, finally, the question is not “How am I to love God?” but “How am I to let myself be loved by God?” God is looking into the distance for me, trying to find me, and longing to bring me home.”

At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, one of at least two possible sites for Jesus’ empty tomb, competing branches of Christianity vie for control of a grave that is still empty. The Greek Orthodox control the empty tomb proper, filling it up with all manner of iconography and liturgical folderol, smells and bells. The Armenian Apostolic church has their ornate chapel off to one side, with the Roman Catholics off to another, candles and music and prayer chiming in each. The Ethiopian Orthodox have been relegated to one of the entry ways, with their own dimly lit protocols, and the Syriac Orthodox theirs. And then tacked on to the main shrine with a separate entrance, like some sort of add-on Ikea closet, sits this odd little Coptic Christian chapel staking out its territory. Inside when we walked by was a lone monk reading his newspaper by candlelight, his sole responsibility being to swat intrusive tourists trying to take pictures. 

On a hot summer day in 2002, a Coptic monk moved his chair from its agreed spot into a cooler part of the church. This was interpreted as a hostile move by the Ethiopians, and eleven were hospitalized after the resulting brawl. In 2004, the Greek Orthodox monk left a Roman Catholic door open which was taken as a sign of disrespect leading to another melee. Then on Palm Sunday in 2008, a fight broke out over some other perceived liturgical slights requiring the Jewish police to come in and break it up. It’s been this way for centuries. Pious Christian brothers preaching the love of Jesus can’t stand each other. Their silliness is symbolized in an immovable ladder that leans against an upper window of the church for no reason. Somebody leaned it there a couple of hundred years ago, and there is remains since to move it would represent an infringement against one of the religious orders though nobody knows which one. Still, that ladder might be mine. When it rots every hundred years or so, the groups all chip in to replace it, just in case. Tension floats in the air like so much religious incense. Incensed being an appropriate word to describe the smoldering emotions. All I can say is that’s it’s a good thing the Protestants never became involved or things might really have got ugly. Ironically, or perhaps providentially, a Muslim family owns the keys to the church’s front door.

With the parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus leaves a lot of tension in the air. This father’s love—God’s love—defies any anything commonly practiced by people. No father who truly loved his son would ever behave so foolishly, would he? And not just the father, but the shepherd who abandons a hundred good sheep to find a single stray? Isn’t losing a few just the cost of doing business? Or that crazy woman who upon finding her lost coin spent more money to celebrate finding the coin than the lost coin itself was worth. If this is love, it’s not a love that makes any sense. OK, so maybe if you’ve hit rock bottom and are forced to eat pig slop you can understand it, but that’s hardly the preferred strategy for getting people to Jesus. “Go screw up your life and then you’ll find out how much God loves you!” Seriously? Where’s the incentive to obey?

One New Testament professor I heard suggested how that fatted calf killed for party boy was probably one nurtured and raised by the obedient son. Can you imagine? The good boy carefully and diligently raises a calf as a 4-H project, tends to it and nurtures it as his own pride and joy. And then my dad takes it and gladly kills it to celebrate home that worthless, little no good piece of … 

How does God do that?

You know the story. Following his baptism by John, Jesus was marched off into the desert where for 40 days he fasted in preparation for the best that the devil could dish out. (The season of Lent is modeled after these 40 days). The 17^th century King’s English poet John Milton, in his sequel to Paradise Lost called (appropriately) Paradise Regained, makes the temptation of Christ in the desert, rather than the crucifixion, to be the fulcrum on which salvation balanced. Blow this, and we would all be lost. You can’t die for the sins of the world if you have sins of your own.

As I turn out the lights on my sermon series on light this Sunday and next, among the things I’m sad about going dark are these occasions to use quantum physics as sermon illustrations. I’m sure you’ll miss that too. Not that I really know anything about quantum physics, but among its novelties is this notion called “photon entanglement.” If two distinct particles of light, photons, enter a state of entanglement—and there’s a few ways to do that—each photon then loses its individual identity and acts with the other as a single unified system. Any change to one is mimicked immediately by the other, whether the particles are next to each other, or get this, even if they are light-years apart. It’s like particle voodoo. There is nothing analogous to this in the physical reality we personally experience. It’d be like you getting a mosquito bite down in Florida with me feeling the itch here in Minneapolis. I scratch and you feel better. With quantum entanglement, a photon of light cannot move without the other moving too. It’s so radically at odds with our everyday way of viewing the world that Einstein himself pronounced it “spooky.”

The apostle John asserts that “God is light.” Applying quantum entanglement as analogy, this might help explain the interplay of the Trinity. By virtue of their entanglement, Father, Son and Holy Ghost (in keeping with Einstein’s designation of “spooky’), cannot exist in isolation. When one moves, so do the others. The Son does not act outside the will of the Father. The Holy Ghost does only as Jesus does. Jesus acts as Creator, the Father suffers the cross and the Holy Ghost walks in human flesh. Spooky indeed. The Bible affirms all of this. And not only this, but Jesus goes on to say that believers are entangled with the Trinity too. John uses the word koinonia in this morning’s passage, which while normally translated as fellowship meaning coffee and bagels after church, can also be translated participation meaning “a part of.” As followers of Jesus filled with the Ghost, we are participants in the life of the Trinity. We are a part of the divine existence. We are one with God and with each other too.

Spooky again. In John’s gospel, Jesus prayed for as much when he asked “that they (meaning us) may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that … they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one…” in us. That’s as entangled as it gets. This is why the Bible says of the church, “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it” even if we’re light years apart.

Now to say God is light is not to say God is a photon—even though photon is the word John uses here. The ancients understood light as analogous to God’s glory and presence, his righteousness and goodness and grace. Whether a wave or a particle, light is pure and clear, simple and uncorrupt, immediately accessible to us and yet at the same time eluding our grasp. It illumines the objects upon which it falls without suffering loss or change in itself. It spreads throughout space yet remains undivided, existing everywhere all at once while keeping the universe together. It is dynamic and life-giving, bestowing warmth, hope and beauty. To have koinonia with God is to walk in this hope, following the way of the Lord, a straight path in the right direction, fully able to see where you’re going.

To walk in darkness, by contrast, is to stumble and fall into sin and defiance. You can’t stumble and fall if you can see where you’re going. God is light, it’s impossible to have fellowship with him and still walk in the dark. You can’t be a follower of Jesus if you’re not following Jesus.

This being Super Bowl Sunday means that its time for a football illustration. Sports Illustrated ran a story on its cover this week asking whether God cares who wins the Super Bowl. I say clearly not since the Patriots are not in it. Then again, Jesus had a preference for losers. As even Sports Illustrated noted, “the Bible is filled with passages that extol the weak over the strong and the poor at the expense of the rich.” Not that that the Patriots can be described as poor. Neither weakness nor poverty are NFL values. Still, despite all the contradictions with holy Scripture, there are a lot of believers in the NFL, both players and coaches, both Ravens and 49ers. All those tattoos on 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s biceps? Bible verses. This despite Leviticus 19:28 which reads: “You shall not tattoo any marks upon you: I am the LORD.” (There’s actually a tattoo parlor on E. Lake St. called Leviticus Tattoo and Piercing)

Sports Illustrated recounted how “just 50 years ago [any] coziness between public Christianity and football would have seemed absurd.” Athletes were nobody's idea of good ambassadors for religion; they were more likely to be seen as dissolute drinkers and womanizers instead of devout. The aggressive, violent play preached by coaches of an earlier generation was accepted as natural precisely because sport was pagan, not Christian. Christianity was light: peaceful, charitable and pious. Sport was dark: savage, ruthless, impious. Now players regularly meet for Bible study on Wednesdays before pounding each other into a concussive stupor on Sunday. Praise the Lord. Churches will cancel services tonight so that believers can gather in alternative houses of worship around big screen altars over a communion of beer and buffalo wings. Lifeway sells a media kit you can play during halftime to lead your neighbors to Christ. $149.95. The Patriots chaplain attended my church in Boston. Once had a tight end preach the sermon during revival week. It was terrible, but who cared? He played for the Patriots. Touchdown Jesus. We make it work.

Among the most vocal of believers is Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis. Tonight’s Super Bowl will be his last game in a Hall of Fame career. Lewis has definitely made it work for him. He is a passionate follower of the Prince of peace despite his violent play on the field, and his questionable behavior off. This past week it was deer antler spray—whatever that is—sold to him by a brother in the Lord. Thirteen years ago it was accessory to double murder outside an Atlanta nightclub to which Lewis pleaded guilty in exchange for his testimony. “My mom taught me to put my complete faith in God,” Lewis recently said. “You talk about the walk of Jesus… that’s what my life is based on.” 

Asked which biblical figure he most closely identified with, without hesitation Ray Lewis cited King David. A flawed yet righteous stone cold giant-slayer with a heart for God, King David abused his power to commit both murder and rape. Exposed by a prophet, David confessed his sin and rose from disgrace to grace, blessed by God and made things right. Ray Lewis’s identification with David demonstrates that he understands the moral ramifications of being involved in an event in which two young men lost their lives. Lewis does not make a habit of publicly talking about that fateful night, but his life afterwards, whether or not he acknowledges it, has been a testament to redemption and atonement, making the most of a second opportunity. Observers attest that Lewis has become a force for good in the community and a strong mentor to younger players in a billion-dollar football culture rife with temptation toward sin and corruption.

John writes that “If we say that we have fellowship with God while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth.” And yet we all know it is possible to walk in the light and still stumble and fall. Believers in Jesus do unbelievably dumb things. Dark things. Hurtful things. Harmful things. We are living contradictions. “Light has come into the world,” Jesus declared in John’s gospel, “and people loved darkness rather than light because they did not want their evil deedsexposed." "If we say we have no sin we rationalize, we minimize, we deny, we deceive ourselves.” God’s light that illumines the straight path also shines a glare on the detours we choose. The difference is in how we respond to the exposure. 

To do right in God’s sight is to walk the righteous path of obedience and love and grace. But here’s the thing: when we stumble and fall off the path, we can still do right by making it right in God’s sight. Again, John writes, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, we make God a liar and the truth is not in us. But if in the light we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” To repent is to participate in resurrection. To say “I have sinned” is also the right thing to do. God’s light exposes our wrongness so we can walk straight. That’s how it worked for King David. And how it worked for Moses and Peter and Paul and linebacker Ray Lewis too. Confession is good for the soul.

So why is it so hard to do? Ironically, part of the problem is that being wrong rarely feels like being wrong. More often than not, being wrong feels like being right.And it’s because we love the feeling of being right so much that we fail so often at relationships and at ever knowing the truth. I remember once doing some marriage counseling with a couple where the husband eagerly listed the reasons he and his wife were at odds: she didn’t understand me, she misinterpreted the situation, her expectations are too high, she’s being unreasonable. Might there yet be any other reason for their conflict? I asked. Sure, he added, “she didn’t hear me right, she disregards my feelings (most men would never say that), she’s stubborn, she refuses to compromise.” I suggested that there may be one other possible reason he was leaving out him. He genuinely had no idea what I meant. I suggested that, maybe, he was wrong. He looked as if he had deer antlers. Caught by the light. Completely nonplused. His being wrong had never crossed his mind.

Which is why confession of sin gets scheduled into communion services. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it. It’s such a small price to pay given the enormity of the benefits. Confession is not only good for the soul but is essential for relationship with God and each other. The communion table is a koinonia table, an emblem of our oneness with God and each other: one cup, one loaf, one faith, one Body. It is a participation in Trinitarian life as God’s people. John writes how “the blood of Jesus cleanses us from all sin,” but to eat and drink Christ is even more than taking away sin. We take on Jesus’ life as our life. We have fellowship with God. We are filled with the Ghost. We get entangled with Christ.

Being cleansed by blood marked Jesus’ death as a sacrifice, something his Jewish disciples gathered around that Last Supper table would have understood. They’d taken part in the ritual of sacrificing animals and shedding blood to atone for their sins. They were taught that the wages of sin are death and that life is in blood and blood pays for death and life atones for life. Jesus’ disciples understood blood as sacrifice. What they would have never understood was blood as dinner beverage. Jews aren’t even allowed to touch blood, and here’s Jesus saying drink it? Talk about spooky. But this is the point. More than atonement as taking away sin, Jesus adds the idea of atonement as taking on life. The Holy Ghost gets inside us. Jesus explained that once resurrected, his disciples would finally realize that “I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” Jesus’ blood shed for us is Jesus’ life in us. John speaks of it as “the truth in us” and “the word in us” by which he means Jesus in us—in all of us together as members of one entangled body. We have fellowship with God. We are entangled with Christ. We walk in the light.

“If we walk in the light as Jesus himself is in the light, we have fellowship with God and one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.” The word for cleanse is catharsis. There’s real power in that. To say “I was wrong,” to say “I have sinned” and mean it opens us up to that power. John knew it. Moses, Peter and Paul and King David knew it. You know it, I know it. Ray Lewis knows it too.

This gives another dimension to “unapproachable” or “incomprehensible” light. Neither physicists nor philosophers can comprehend what happened in the beginning. They have ideas, however. Stephen Hawking talks about time folding over on itself into something of rewinding tape. Time just keeps going round and round starting over and over again. There’s a theory of random quantum fluctuation, a vacuum from which popped out a little packet of energy that quickly bloomed into a universe. Brian Greene has popularized the notion of a multiverse. Tied to what’s called “string theory,” the idea is that there are an exponentially large number of universes out there, something like 10⁵⁰⁰, of which ours is but one pulled out of the deck.

If ever I’ve called you from my cell phone and you have Caller ID, you’ve likely seen my 617-Boston area code flash on your screen before letting it go to voice mail. Who’d be calling you from Boston? These days, with long distance being no distance, many still hold onto their hometown area codes for nostalgia’s sake. A woman who took my call on Thursday told me she’ll be a 612 girl for the rest of her life. And why not? Last month, in the midst of our one winter snowstorm, I was picking up a pizza when my smartphone accidentally slipped from my coat pocket and dropped into the snow accumulating in the street. Since it hit the snow, I didn’t hear it fall and therefore didn’t realize it missing until a few minutes later when I wanted to check the football scores while driving. The snow was deeper by then, so I decided to call myself from the pizza shop phone, and listen for my nifty Hawaii 5-0 ringtone in the snow. However when I explained my plan to the pizza people, and asked to use their landline, they said, sorry, but we can’t let customers make long distance calls. “But my phone is right out in front of your store!” I pleaded. I would have called Dawn and had her call my phone, but her area code is Boston too. And we don’t have a landline. So now I was stranded, helpless as I stood on the cold snowy street. How was I to make it without my smartphone? What if someone was trying to text me?

Life is tough when you have it easier than everybody else. Obviously I needed some perspective. The news this week reported that despite numerous public and private programs and millions of dollars spent, overall homelessness in Hennepin County increased. As I was out on the street ice fishing for my dumb smartphone, 1400 families were looking for a place to sleep. It’s the highest number in more than a decade. Advocates say homeless people still face fallout from the down economy, high foreclosure rates and a tight housing market that leaves no other options.

Martin Luther King, Jr. devoted the last years of his life to combating poverty, most evidently in his Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. Motivated by the conviction that all people should have what they need to live, King shifted his focus from civil rights after observing gains had not improved the material conditions of life for many blacks in America. The Poor People’s Campaign aimed to end poverty in America regardless of race. In 1967, King wrote, “In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out. There are twice as many white poor as [black] poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and [black] alike.” It’s a challenge we still take on as a society, and as a church, through our partnerships with Calvary Baptist, CES, Families Moving Forward and other organizations. A number of our Innové applicants have submitted ideas that address poverty too.

One government program that has enjoyed recent success is called “Rapid Re-Housing.” It’s managed to put a measurable dent in the numbers of chronic homelessness, those people who’ve been without housing for more than a year. Rapid Re-housing takes funds normally funneled into shelters and food services and rents apartments instead that are freely given to homeless people. A case worker simply walks up to her homeless client and hands him keys to a new home. Darrell Bandy, a 49-year-old man who’d been on the streets for several years, now has his own apartment. “Now I can wake up and make my own breakfast.,” he said “I can wash my own clothes. ... It’s a blessing to know you don't have to wake up in that jungle [outside].” Rapid Re-housing has worked in other cities and proven economical too, but it still has its drawbacks, the most obvious being that it is morally offensive. Hundreds of thousands of poor people work hard every day, barely make ends meet and are on the cusp of being homeless themselves, but nobody ever offers them a free apartment. Yet the ungrateful bum on the street swigging cheap vodka gets one for nothing?

That is morally offensive and extremely unfair—which makes Rapid Re-housing sound a lot like the gospel. After all, from God’s vantage point, who are sinners but an ungrateful lot of chronic indigents who’ve opted for all kinds of cheap vodka ourselves? At the end of our rope with no hope of redeeming ourselves, up walks Jesus who says, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions. I am your key to a free apartment.”

It is a little hard to swallow. Imagine walking up to some downtown panhandler, dropping a set of keys into his cup and saying, “Hey friend, here’s a house in Edina with your name on it. Enjoy.” You think he’d believe you? He’d probably tell you what you could do with your keys. No wonder the apostle Paul’s detractors in 2 Corinthians, along with so many others, found the gospel so hard to believe. And so offensive. Especially since when the apostle Paul tried to drop dropped keys in the Corinthians’ cups, theirs were still full of Starbuck’s dark roast. Paul treated law-abiding latte-drinkers as if they were drunken street people. How dare he presume that they needed salvation. Salvation from what? They were good people. They were already righteous enough.

Paul took their resistance as evidence they were possessed by the devil, blinded to the truth and unwilling to see the light. Not the most winsome evangelism strategy. But how else to make sense of anyone refusing abundant and eternal life? Who of their own free will would ever turn down keys to a free house? Could they not see that the gospel came from God himself? Did they not realize, that the same Lord who brought light to creation now shines new creation on anybody will to take it? Jesus was everything the Corinthians had been hoping for. “God has made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ,” Paul writes, piling on words that resonate throughout Scripture: “Let there be light,” said the Lord, and there was light. “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light,” sang Isaiah, “on those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, light has shined.” “Though I sit in darkness,” said the prophet Micah, “the Lord will be my light.” “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. In Jesus was life, and his life was the light of all people.”

The bright light of Christ had literally lit up Paul on that famous street to Damascus. More righteous in his own mind than any, drunk on the cheap vodka of his own accomplishments, Paul, as Saul, was a first rate Pharisee in need of nobody’s grace. On his way to Damascus to dispense with a few heretics, “a great light from heaven,” stopped him in his tracks. At first maybe Paul thought God was spotlighting him for being such a good person. But the spotlight was instead the hot light of Jesus, interrogating Paul for being so evil. “Why do persecute me?” came the voice from heaven. Blinded by the light, Paul was led to a Jewish Christian named Ananias, who made Paul see and understand that righteousness before the Lord was never anything he could attain on his own. All the housing in heaven is fully subsidized by grace. It is an offensive salvation; a glorious treasure.

A glorious treasure carried in “clay jars,” Paul writes in our passage, the ancient equivalent of brown paper bags; its purpose “…to make clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.” This is not about us anymore. “We do not proclaim ourselves;” he writes, “we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for his sake.” Paul paid for the offensive salvation he preached. “We are afflicted in every way—perplexed, persecuted and struck down—always carrying the death of Jesus in our bodies.” To proclaim Christ as Lord is to proclaim Christ as crucified Lord—afflicted, perplexed, persecuted and struck down himself—a morally offensive proclamation once you understand that Christ’s death is our fault, that he was struck down for our sin. “Death is at work,” Paul asserts, crucifying all of our blatant wrongdoing and bleating rationalizations, all of our fake piety and condescending righteousness. “Those who try to save their lifewill loseit,” Jesus warned, “only those who lose their life for my sake will findit.” “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, but those who humble themselves will be exalted.” The gospel gives you keys to a free house, but it often has to kick you out onto the streets to get you to take it.

I didn’t watch any of Lance Armstrong’s confession last week, though apparently 3.2 million viewers did. After being outted by former teammates and banished by the professional cycling community, Lance did what celebrities do when they’re up against a wall of scandalous shame—he turned to Oprah. While a lot of people watched, few had any sympathy. Lance strong-armed a lot of people into complying with his doping and lying, covering himself with a cancer charity while becoming like cancer to any who crossed him in order to keep his secrets safe. 

Cyclist Tyler Hamilton, stripped of his own Tour de France title because of doping, wrote how “…secrets are poison. They suck the life out of you, they steal your ability to live in the present, they build walls between you and the people you love. Now that I’d told the truth, I was tuning into life again. I could talk to someone without have to worry or backtrack or figure out their motives, and it felt fantastic… One afternoon, I was doing some business research on the Internet, looking at training websites. As happened sometimes, an ad with a photo of Lance popped up. Usually, seeing his face made me wince, and I’d click the window closed. But this time, for some reason, I found myself staring at his face, noticing that Lance had a big smile, a nice smile. It made me remember how he used to be, how good he was at making people laugh… I found myself feeling sorry for Lance… I was sorry in the largest sense, sorry for him as a person, because he was trapped, imprisoned by all the secrets and lies. I thought: Lance would sooner die than admit it, but being forced to tell the truth might be the best thing that ever happened to him.”

It was the best thing that ever happened to Paul. The truth set him free. "He renounced the shameful things that one hides." In his defense before his detractors in Acts, Paul rolled out his what many would have thought to be a rich resume: proudly educated at all the best schools, commissioned by the high priest and zealous for God, a righteously hunter of heretics. For Paul his prestige was his poison, walling him off from the God he pretended to serve. Jesus kicked him onto the street to Damascus, exposing his spiritual poverty as a spiritual necessity. You have to lose your life to find it. For Paul, writing to the Philippians, this meant, “suffering the loss of all things and counting them as rubbish for the sake of gaining Christ.” Death has to work for resurrection to work. “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed;” he said. “Perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed. We carry around in our body the death of Jesus always, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our body.”

The light that blasted Paul did so at high noon—a detail designed to emphasize how Christ’s glory outshines the sun. It caused a complete turnaround in Paul’s life, the persecution he executed against Christ became the persecution he endured for Christ. “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not even worth comparingwith the gloryto be revealed to us,” he wrote to the Romans.

Paul’s dramatic Damascus road conversion provides the template for a “come-to-Jesus experience,” the abrupt reversal from going the way you were going to going the way of the Lord. I’ve told you about my own reversal from a business and marketing path onto a pastoral ministry path. It happened at a fraternity party which may explain a lot. My fraternity brothers were horrified. Why toss away business savvy and bankable ability for a career of cultural irrelevance and pot luck suppers? I’ll admit there are days when I wonder if my fraternity brothers were right. Like any work, pastoral ministry has its share of frustration and trouble. I remember once bemoaning a particular spate of trouble to a seminary class, only to have an exasperated student demand to know whether I’d really been called to ministry, given my bad attitude. I responded, “You think I’d put up with the trouble if I hadn’t been called?”

Granted, you don’t have to go to seminary or work in a church to do the work of the Lord. If anything, the Kingdom of God could probably do more, missionally speaking, with fewer pastors and more Christians viewing themselves as “ministers” in their own vocations. This is part of the purpose of Innové, trying to “do church” in ways that don’t look like church has always looked. When our jobs are done for the Lord, they have their own integrity apart from anything else they might accomplish, for the work itself brings glory to God and therefore joy to us.

Maybe this is what that seminary student considered so exasperating. It’s one thing to suffer for Jesus. It’s another thing to whine about it. Not so for Paul. On the contrary, we rejoice in our sufferings, he wrote to the Romans, “knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, hope does not disappointus, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” A glorious treasure in brown paper bags. Death at work so that resurrection can work: the life of Jesus made visible in our bodies. Free keys to a home in glory land that outshines the sun.

I should add that Dawn found my phone. She took hers over to the snow bank and called mine, retrieving it from its frozen grave, run over, crunched and broken but still functional. There's an analogy there somewhere.

by Daniel Harrell

Continuing in our seasons long theme of light in the Bible, we spent last Sunday on Epiphany and the star power that drew the Magi to Jesus. This past week another kind of star power shone with the debut of this year’s Oscar nominations. I’ve seen three of the best picture nominees: Lincoln, which I loved. Beasts of the Southern Wild, which reminded me a little of some of my relatives. And of course, Les Miserables. A lot of church folk have flocked to this film, including a lot of you. For some, its message of grace and redemption provides an apt substitute for a whole month’s worth of sermons—especially if your preacher happens to be long-winded. Like heaven, this movie went on forever. The religious imagery abounded to be sure, with Wolverine hauling a wooden mast in the beginning that looked a lot like Jim Caviezel carrying a wooden cross as Jesus in The Passion of the Christ. There was plenty of faith and hope and love in Les Miz, along with plenty of mediocre singing too. I know this will come as a grave disappointment, and even sound sacrilegious (if that’s possible in Hollywood), but I found Les Miserables to be tres Miserables. I didn’t really like it. Unfortunately I made the mistake of posting my opinionon Facebook, soliciting mounds of scorn from my Facebook friends. They demanded to know what kind of Christian pastor I think I am.

My response to that question is always: “a bad one.” I make no claims to ministerial greatness. If you’ll remember back to the very first sermon I preached from this pulpit, I made John the Baptist’s protestation my own: “I am not the Christ.” Obviously. Shoot, I’m not even Hugh Jackman. Nevertheless, people catching John the Baptist’s dramatic performance down by the riverside thought him to be Oscar material. Luke tells us that they “were filled with expectation, and all were questioning in their hearts whether John might be the Messiah.” It’s not only what he said and what he did, but how and where John the Baptist did it. He did it dressed in camel hair and leather just like the prophet Elijah, and he did it out in the desert where Moses had done all his best work. The Old Testament predicted Israel’s Savior would resemble Moses and Elijah. Add to that the fact that John baptized with water: a prophetic sign reminiscent of Noah’s flood and the Red Sea, two instances where God’s salvation was on mighty display (despite the fact that in each of those instances the ones being saved never got wet). 

 Nevertheless, in this passage traditionally slotted for the Sunday after Epiphany, John squelches any Messianic expectation by telling the crowds how they ain’t seen nothing yet. “One who is more powerful than I am is coming whose sandals I’m not worthy to stoop down and untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” John then scares everybody to death by adding how this fire will be unquenchable fire that burns up the bad chaff separated from the good wheat. Judgment Day was coming. John sounded just like a Baptist, in stark contrast to Jesus, the respectable Congregationalist. No hellfire from him. Just nicer sermons about the blessedness of the poor and the meek and how you should love your neighbor. Sure, there was some silly stuff about loving your enemies too, and how you should even pray for your persecutors, but nothing about burning them up, thank God. No unquenchable fire. Not even any quenchable fire.

This worried John the Baptist. Imprisoned for rebuking the local ruler, King Herod Antipas, for swiping his brother’s wife, Herodias, John had figured he wouldn’t be in prison for long. He’d seen the heavens open and the sky tear apart over Jesus. He saw the Spirit descend and heard God’s thundering approval. He knew Jesus would be wielding his winnowing fork and fire any minute. But then came the reports. Jesus wasn’t sticking a fork into anybody. And there was no fire to be found. In Matthew’s gospel, a worried John sends a couple of his own followers over to Jesus to find out what’s wrong. They ask: “Are you really the Messiah, or should we wait for somebody else?”

Did John the Baptist have Jesus all wrong? Not exactly. This being Luke’s gospel, if you want to see Holy Spirit and fire, you have to go to the second volume. Luke also wrote The Acts of the Apostles, meaning that John the Baptist’s mention of “baptism with the Holy Spirit and fire” was a prediction of Pentecost. In Acts 2, after Jesus was crucified, dead and buried, raised and ascended to the right hand of the Father, his disciples gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish harvest of Pentecost. “Suddenly,” we read, “tongues of fire separated and came down to rest on each of them” and “they were filled with the Holy Spirit,” leading to a harvest of a different sort. 

How was Pentecost a baptism? There wasn’t a drop of water in sight. Were the disciples ever even baptized with water? The Bible never mentions it. True, Jesus did recruit some of his disciples from John the Baptist’s ranks, so its safe to assume that they’d been doused. But we never hear anything about the rest. If this Holy Spirit and fire was their baptism, and the way Jesus would do things after Pentecost, then why did the early church go back to using water? Was the fire too hot? Was the Spirit too strong? Did it get too dangerous? Are there supposed to be two baptisms or just one? Sprinkle, dunk or detonate? Infants too or just adults? Needless to say, for such a core Christian practice, baptism can get pretty confusing.

We try to to sort it out for parents who want to get their children baptized at Colonial, but mostly they end up as bleary eyed as I did watching Les Miz.  Frankly, most parents are less concerned about getting the theology straight. They just pray that their kid won’t cry during the service. And they’ll go to great lengths to guard against it: sedating their baby with milk and rocking her into a sacramental stupor, plugging his mouth with a pacifier. Most of the times it works, though I did baptize this one baby boy who launched his pacifier out of his mouth into a beautiful arc that splashed down right into the font. Other kids get startled by the surprising splash on their head, especially when the ministers forget to warm the water. These startled babies let loose a shriek of terror shrill enough to set an entire congregation on edge. It’s definitely enough to embarrass some parents into never returning to church again. 

But as I’ve said before, let those babies scream! Screaming babies are onto something about baptism that most of us forget. In the Bible, water is a sign of judgment. It flooded evil on earth with Noah and deluged Pharaoh’s army with Moses. Those saved through the flood and the Red Sea exodus never got wet. Baptism is a drowning before it’s a cleansing; a killing off of sin more than a mere washing off. Jesus called his cross a baptism, killing him and our sins dead with him. The apostle Paul, writing to the Romans, asserted that to be baptized in Christ is to be crucified and buried with Christ, which is why Jesus said we have to take up crosses too.

Paul wrote that only by dying with Jesus in baptism do we get to be raised. It’s the only way we get to walk in newness of life. Baptized in water by John, Jesus underwent our judgment. He suffered our fate. He endured our condemnation. But he also became our Noah’s Ark, our dry pathway through the personal Red Seas of our sin. Only Jesus emerges from the baptismal waters to heaven’s applause. The skies part and the Holy Spirit descends “in bodily form like a dove” (another nod to Jesus as our Ark). And a voice thunders its approval, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” By being baptized into Christ’s death, by receiving his life into ours, we are washed clean by grace and so become beloved children of God too.

What about the fire? Fire burns to be sure, but as with water that drowns, heaven’s fire burns for the sake of salvation. The prophet Malachi described its blaze as a “refiner’s fire… that purifies God’s people like gold that they may present [lives] of righteousness to the Lord.” This is what happened at Pentecost as fire refined a band of timid disciples into impassioned apostles, eager to step up and step out in truth and love, their own tongues now ablaze. However, since Jesus is the only one who can baptize with fire, the church resorts to water for baptism to signify all of this: judgment and cleansing, purifying and power, light and new life. God the Father shines as light at creation, through the desert exodus and atop holy mountains. Jesus shines at his own transfiguration as the light of the world. The Holy Spirit shines as Pentecostal fire, infusing all that he licks with the light of new creation, the power of faith and the capacity to love and do right. 

How does this apply to babies? Depending on your view of original sin, Christians haven’t always held that babies get a free pass. Sin has a sinister sway all its own. On the other hand, infant baptism serves as the New Testament successor to Old Testament circumcision—expanded to include female and Gentile children too. Baptism, like circumcision, is the signature of a community’s covenant to raise a child to be faithful to Christ. And because baptism is done with water that can drown you (just as circumcision was done with a knife that can kill you), it’s a covenant we make with utmost seriousness. Jesus himself said that whoever causes a child to fall into sin would be better off having a millstone tied around his neck and thrown into the sea. So yeah, there should be crying at baptisms.

But as with baptismal water and fire, tears of terror always give way to tears of joy. The water that kills also cleanses, the fire that burns refines. We experience this not only in baptism, but over and over as the Spirit keeps refining our souls. Our failures and sin that drag us down become the material for our own redemption. Grace burns away our guilt and shame and fires us up to live righteous lives.

In a small but somewhat related way, our Innové project is about lighting fires. We received 138 creative ideas for doing good and right in the world: non-profit and for-profit plans to feed and teach and serve and innovate for the sake of the gospel, all of which could easily bog down for any number of reasons, from poor planning to bad market analysis. As often than not, as many of us can attest, good ideas founder due to the overconfident missteps of the idea-makers themselves. The bright light of creativity can cast a prideful shadow. Entrepreneurial enthusiasm isn’t readily open to critique. It doesn’t like to take advice. But good ideas need fire (and failure) to become productive realities: fire burns away pride and the parts of a plan that can’t work. It hones creativity sharp and ignites with a passion for service. Innové is not just about the money. Money is good kindling, but you burn through that quick. What keeps up the heat are people like yourselves willing to pray and coach and befriend and speak truth in order to refine idea-makers into doers who serve the world for Christ’s sake. This is good news for those who’ll take it. But you do have to be willing to take it.

One part of Les Miz I stayed awake through was the part where a duplicitous Russell Crowe gets caught infiltrating a blockade erected by the young French revolutionary entrepreneurs. Doomed to die for this treachery. Jean Valjean boldly intervenes with everyone anticipating that he’ll deliver the justice. Having seen Javert viciously hound and mistreat Jean Valjean for so many years, we impulsively cheer for Valjean to exact his righteous revenge. Yet consumed by holy fire, Valjean does what nobody anticipates, the least of all Javert himself. He mercifully sets Javert free. He gives him grace. But Javert cannot take it. He gruffly sings of Valjean: 

“Who is this man?

What sort of devil is he?

To have me caught in a trap

And choose to let me go free?

…How can I now allow this man

To hold dominion over me?

… I am reaching, but I fall.

And the stars are black and cold.

As I stare into the void,

Of a world that cannot hold.

Spoiler alert: Javert throws himself into the rushing river below, baptismal waters that prove to be his own condemnation. Grace is free but never forced. The water that kills is the water that cleans: but you have to be willing to take it. 

For liturgical calendar watchers and church history enthusiasts, today ranks as the third most important Sunday of the church year, right after Easter and Pentecost. That’s right, Epiphany trumps even Christmas. It was one thing for Israel’s King to be born among Jewish shepherds and angels. Quite another to have him revealed as the King of the Gentiles too. Epiphany means revelation, and with the revelation of Jesus to the Magi, God’s plan to save his chosen people turns out to be a plan to save the whole world.

By the time we get to Matthew 2, Jesus is a toddler and sleeping in a bed. His family thankfully upgraded to a house, which may have had something to do with all those glorious angels. Anybody witnessing that spectacle surely scrambled to make more room available, if only to get on the Lord’s good side. The family still resides in Bethlehem, however, having yet to make the move back to Nazareth (which they’ll end up doing by way of Egypt to further secure Gentile credentials). Here they’re famously visited by a collection of exotic magicians from the east, described by tradition as three kings or wise men, easily the strangest dudes to show up in the gospels so far. Scholars conclude they were likely astrologers, who having checked their the skies, determine an important king has been born who was worth checking out. With the kind fervor currently reserved for Prince William and Kate’s scone in the oven, these astrologers trace a star toward Jerusalem, Israel’s capital city. They drive straight to the royal palace since that’s where you’d expect a king of the Jews to be born.

For the ancients, astrology was the best that science had to offer as far as the cosmos was concerned. It was a world where the earth sat at the center of the universe and stars and planets were thought to be alive. What did the Magi see up in the sky that night? An astral anomaly? A blazing comet? A bright supernova? An alignment of planets? A bird or a plane? Speculation runs rampant. But whatever they saw, I like how the Magi used the science of their day to pursue truth and how it brought them to Jesus. Searching for truth does that.

Scholars conclude that “from the east” probably meant the Magi hailed from Persia, Babylon or Arabia, known to us as Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, nations whose significance to peace on earth is as important then as now. What are these Arabs doing looking for a Jewish Messiah? Plenty of scholars remain suspicious about whether this epiphany even happened. Who can believe a bunch of Arabian astrologers chase a moving star to go looking for a Jewish kid they think to be divine? Then again, it’s not the sort of story you concoct as a gospel writer trying to get a new religion off the ground. For serious Old Testament readers this was not a surprise encounter. Isaiah the prophet saw it coming in chapter 60: “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. Nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your dawn.” This is where we get the idea that the Magi were kings. Isaiah goes on to foresee how “the wealth of nations shall come to you; a multitude of camels shall cover you…” (This is how camels get into Nativity scenes.) And finally, “they shall bring gold and frankincense and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord,” which is how Isaiah 60 gets linked to the Magi.

Isaiah uses the imagery of light and darkness we’ve been exploring since last September. I’m obviously milking this light theme for all that its worth. Israel had walked in darkness for a long time, both literally in exile and spiritually in disobedience which led to their exile. God’s merciful glory now returns to Israel, shining like the sun overhead, not only giving light but causing Mt. Zion and Jerusalem itself, to glow with glory. In time, God’s glory reflecting off a place gave way to glory reflecting off people. As Jeff preached last Sunday, this reflection is what the New Testament meant by calling God’s people shining stars and the light of the world. We shine so to attract others to the light of the Lord. And thus: “Nations come to your light and kings to the brightness of your dawn.”

Perhaps the Magi knew something of Isaiah, which would have given them corroborating reason to follow the light to Jerusalem. They get to the palace but don’t find a new king. There’s just the crazy old king: A maniacal monarch, King Herod was paranoid about his power to the point of murdering his own wife and sons out of fear that they threatened his throne. The Roman Emperor Augustus remarked how it was safer to be Herod’s pig than his kid. As Herod later approached his own death, he cruelly ordered a large group of prominent citizens be simultaneously executed as he breathed his last so that ample tears and grief would accompany his own demise. We all know the atrocity he commits against innocent children. News of a newborn King terrified Herod. He checked with his Jewish religious advisors and finds that the Magi’s calculations were six miles off. The prophet Micah had later foreseen Israel’s savior to be born in Bethlehem instead of Jerusalem. Putting on some fake piety, Herod sends the Magi to Bethlehem on a diabolical hunt: “Go and search diligently for the child. And when you find him, bring me word so that I can go and worship him, too.”

The irony is unavoidable: pagan astrologers travel the long distance to adore Israel’s Savior, but Israel’s ruler just wants him dead. And not only that, but Israel’s religious leaders, who know the prophecies inside and out and actually believe, fail to join the journey even though for them it was only a six mile trip. Why bother? What could a kooky bunch of Gentile astrologers know? Despite the popularity of daily horoscopes, Judaism debunked astrology as dangerous if not demonic.

It also didn’t work. The Magi missed it by six miles. However maybe that was due to human error. The Magi may have been wise men, but we all have our biases, even when it comes to divine revelation. If you’re looking for royalty, you look for it among glitter and splendor like you find in capital cities, not in Podunk backwater towns like Bethlehem. Who could have imagined a King being born to working class commoners engulfed by the kind of scandal that swamped Mary and Joseph? Jesus wasn’t Joseph’s baby and everybody knew it. That’s why they couldn’t find a place for Mary to give birth in Joseph’s hometown. People still seek Jesus in places you’d normally expect to find a king: amidst respectability and success, security and contentment. We presume the Lord to be present mostly when there’s money in the bank, the career’s intact, our relationships are enjoyable, the kids succeed, our bodies are fit and the weather is nice. And not that we shouldn’t. I even like seeing football players thank the Lord for scoring touchdowns, though I doubt God really cares about who wins (a comfort to Vikings fans this morning).

Now that I mention it, I’m not sure God cares so much about your bank balance either, even on this Stewardship Sunday. I’m not sure God cares so much about how far you’ve made it up the career ladder—or about your relational enjoyment, your kid’s success, good fitness or the five-day forecast—at least not if God’s track record is any indication. The fact is that for most Christians, even the faithful ones, money goes away, careers collapse, relationships break, children disappoint, our bodies get sick and the weather can kill you. Remember, the Magi gave Jesus myrrh for Christmas, a spice used for burying bodies. It was like putting embalming fluid under the tree with Jesus’ name on it, or wrapping up a sword for his mother to be buried with (for those who were here Christmas Eve). You get the sense these wise men knew how things would turn out. Jesus himself warns that following him requires a cross. Whether you take that literally or metaphorically, the point seems to be that coming to Jesus can be hazardous to your health.

This was certainly true for the Magi. Knowing the horror Herod wrought upon baby boys in Bethlehem, it’s not hard to shudder at what he had planned for the Magi had they met up with him again. God warned them in a dream to take the back roads home, and fortunately they were the sort who paid serious attention to dreams. Their lives had been changed. They returned to their own country, but they went back as different people. Though we never hear from them again, artists and poets over the centuries since have speculated plenty. TS Eliot mused over the wise men’s emotions in his poignant work, The Journey of the Magi. Listen to the last stanza,

… were we led all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation…

Coming to Jesus can be hazardous to your health—whether you take that literally or metaphorically. New birth feels like death, hard and bitter, because being born again means death to the sinful life you’ve been living, and that can hurt. Yet as painful as new birth can be, the new life it brings gets described, and experienced, as both abundant and eternal, full of grace and joy. We read that the Magi were “overwhelmed by joy” upon coming to Jesus—and he was still just a toddler. They bow before him and pay homage though he’d yet to speak a word or do a miracle. “They shall bring gold and frankincense, and proclaim the praise of the LORD,” just like the prophet said.

Pagan astrologers travel the long distance to adore Israel’s Savior while Israel’s ruler just wants him dead. Though Israel’s religious leaders know the prophecies, they don’t even bother. The irony is unavoidable and intentional. As a baby Jesus already shatters human categories of religion and race and class and privilege. Outsiders are welcome inside. Before the story is over, the homeless and destitute, prostitutes, lepers, Roman centurions, condemned criminals and the IRS will all be welcomed inside too. But the welcome wasn’t merely an opening of doors and putting out a welcome mat hoping outsiders might drop by. The disturbing beauty of the gospel is how Jesus became an outsider himself: marginalized and outcast, scandalized and condemned.

I’ve mentioned how my old church a group of us served dinner to homeless folks on the Boston Common one night a week. We’d invite them to church too, but it was tough getting them to come inside. We quickly realized that if we wanted these friends in church, we’d have to take church outside. So we did. And it made a difference. When I was back in Boston last summer guest preaching, it was fun to see the back pew filled up with my homeless buddies. We speak of the Magi as outsiders coming in to Jesus. But it may be more accurate to say that Jesus got into them.

He said, “I have come as light into the world to save it, so that everyone who believes in me should not remain in the darkness.” Among the many things we’ve learned about light in the Bible so far, the most important, I think, is light’s role as the Lord’s signature. It is the sign of his presence. For Jesus to call himself light in the world to call himself God in the world. If you can see that light, then with the Magi, you will be overwhelmed with joy. And joy inspires worship. With the Magi you bow before your king with gifts fit for a king. On this Stewardship Sunday, there are any number of other reasons I could offer for giving gifts to God: your cheerful participation in Christian community, your covenant obligation, simple obedience, supporting the work of the church in a needy world, showing gratitude, practicing generosity. But when it comes right down to it, you give to Jesus because Jesus is your Lord and your King and you’re happy to do it.

Sixteen hundred years ago, on another Epiphany Sunday, the church father Chromatius preached of the Magi who “fell to their knees immediately and adored the one born as Lord. They worshiped him with gifts though Jesus was merely a child. A boy he is, but it is God who is adored. How inexpressible is the mystery of his divine honor. The invisible and eternal nature did not hesitate to take on the weaknesses of flesh for our sake. … It is he who though a child was truly God and King eternal.”

And so we pay homage, with our treasures and with our lives. To partake of the bread and the cup is to stake our lives on God’s mercy. Jesus gets inside and causes a hard and bitter new birth that results in an abundant and joyful new life. Let us come and adore our King, by laying down our sins, by taking up his cross and by making his life our life—our money, our bodies, our work, our relationships and our families and our future.

Luke 2:25-35

It’s one thing to get all you ever wanted for Christmas. It’s quite another thing to get what you never wanted. To guard against any danger of the latter, my wife’s family practices the helpful tradition of detailing their wish lists with the exact specification and locations of each present each person wants for Christmas. It makes for a very stress-free holiday on both the giving and receiving ends. There are no surprises and therefore no disappointments. To my side of the family, however, such safe practicality takes away the intrigue of gift-giving. You see, my family tradition places high value on insight and thoughtfulness. It’s one thing to get somebody the perfect gift because they told you exactly what to get. It’squite another to know someone so well that you can figure it all by yourself. It is more risky, I know. It requires that you actually pay attention to the people in your family. That you understand their needs. That you know what makes them happy. That you truly care about them enough to pick up on the little things. That’s is why I give cash.

However some years I do try to pay attention. One year in particular, some months before Christmas, Dawn and I attended a family funeral and took turns viewing the open casket. It was chock full of mementoes that would accompany our dearly departed into glory: a favorite tie, a baseball cap, a military medal. Afterwards, reflecting upon her own mortality, my wife Dawn—who is Scottish on both sides of her family and an avid fan of Tolkien and Norse mythology—mentioned, off-handedly, how when it came her time to go, she’d like to be buried holding a sword. Immediately I thought: Jingle bells! What a perfect opportunity to demonstrate to my beloved how well I understand her! How attuned I am to her needs! How well I know what she really wants! How I pick up on the little things. I raced online and Googled broadswords and lo and behold, eBay was stocked to the hilt. I found the perfect Christmas present.

Granted, it was a little hard to wrap and disguise under the tree, but I managed to pull it off. Christmas morning came and Dawn tried to guess what it was. She thought maybe an extension for the vacuum cleaner? Or an ironing board? Something sexy like that. She was in for such a surprise! She eagerly unwrapped it—unsheathed it I should say—and oh that look in her eyes! I could tell she was thrilled. She hardly knew what to say. “A sword. You bought me a sword. Why did you buy me a sword?” And I said, “remember how you mentioned that when you died you wanted to be buried holding a sword? Now you have one!” “Well, thank you, dear,” she said. “I guess it is good to get those funeral arrangements out of the way early. What a shame Santa couldn’t get a casket down the chimney too.” “Oh, don’t be silly,” I said. We don’t―have―a―chimney. Wait a minute. Was she being sarcastic? Nah. She loved it. I could tell. She couldn’t sleep for nights afterwards. She’d just lie there in bed with her eyes wide open clutching that sword in her hand, staring at me with just a little worry on her face. I could tell she was excited. She was so excited that she could hardly eat. She refused to put a single morsel of anything I cooked in her mouth for the next several weeks. She wouldn’t ride with me in the car either. Though come to think of it, that was a little weird.

I wonder how Mary felt when the magi rolled out that third gift of myrrh on the first Christmas. Gold and frankincense made sense. Both were gifts fit for a king—gold was a symbol of royalty and incense the aroma of power. Myrrh, on the other hand, was mostly used to anoint dead bodies. In a day before funeral homes, preservatives and caskets, myrrh kept corpses from stinking. Why kind of present was this to bring to a baby? What would you do if as a mother someone showed up bearing embalming fluid? Why not just give Mary a sword too?

Actually, that gift would arrive a few days later, in the gospel passage we read tonight. Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the Temple to be presented to the Lord as the Torah commanded of all first born sons. The gospel describes how “the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses.” According to Jewish law, a woman became ceremonially unclean on the birth of a child. On the eighth day, sons were circumcised, after which a mother had to wait another 33 days before she could enter the Temple and return to worship (66 days if the child was a girl). While modern sensibilities tend to be affronted by such gender restrictions, it might be helpful to know that being unclean meant you weren’t allowed to cook or do any housework either. When the time for purification was over, the mother came back to the Temple and offered a sacrifice, either a lamb or, if she was poor as in Mary’s case, two doves or two young pigeons. The point here is to show that Jesus was raised in conformity to the law and that his parents obeyed the Lord. As told by an angel, they named him Jesus, which means “God saves.” 

Overhearing all of this was a righteous and devout man named Simeon, whom the Holy Spirit guided to the Temple, and who upon seeing Jesus, recognized the baby to be the Savior he’d been waiting for his whole life. He grabbed the baby into his arms and let loose a joyous Christmas carol of praise to the Lord. “Now I can die in peace,” he happily sighed. “I have seen my salvation, which you have prepared for all people. Light to reveal God to all nations! The glory of your people Israel!” Talk about proud parents. I imagine Mary and Joseph beamed with delight as they heard Simeon sing. How many times do strangers look at your infant baby and call him the light of the world? 

If you’ve been a regular here at Colonial Church of late, you know that light has been our theme since September. And it’s a big theme at Christmas. Candles and lights glow everywhere during the darkest days of the year, intended to instill hope and promise of brighter light to come. In the Bible, prophets promised how people walking in darkness would see a great light. In the Isaiah passage we read, and which Simeon echoed, light is the calling card of God’s promised Savior: “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” Simeon knew this about Jesus. Jesus knew this about himself. “I am the light of the world” he would boldly declare, though it was an audacious assertion for anybody to make, especially in first century Israel. For first century Jews, light was the realm reserved for God alone. “Let there be light,” announced at creation, which was practically the same as God saying “let there be me.” To call yourself light was to call yourself God. No wonder Jesus offended so many.

Simeon knew this would happen. He told Mary and Joseph how Jesus would bring joy to many, but he would also cause many to fall. Though a sign sent from God, he would be opposed. Jesus knew this too. “Light came to the world,” he said, speaking of himself, “but people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” Light cuts like a double edged sword. It shines as a sure sign of God’s salvation, but it’s sharp brightness also exposes our weaknesses and our need for salvation. It can be pretty painful.

That light can cut like a sword comes as no surprise to Star Wars fans in the room tonight. I remember wishing for a light saber one Christmas when I was in college. What I got instead was an actual saber. Unlike the one I gave Dawn, mine was for the fencing team. Phys Ed was required at my University, and not being especially athletic, I decided to take a stab at fencing. I did fairly good. I quickly picked up the footwork, learned to parry and riposte and lunge. Since the class turned out to be mostly filled with fantasy-fiction lovers, sci-fi geeks, Shakespeare aficionados and math majors, I ended up winning our class tournament. I cut down all my opponents just like a Skywalker. The teacher, who was also the fencing team coach, suggested I try out for the university squad, which I did.

And I got picked. I made the team and worked out with the scholarship fencers, one of whom I defeated in a training bout. Clearly I had this thing all figured out. At the rate I was going, I could feel a future Olympic gold medal tickling my neck. Noting my progress, and no doubt my progressing cockiness, the coach called me aside one day and told me to take off my padded fencing jacket. Unlike the foil and the epee, a saber is a cutting weapon. You score by slicing your opponent with your blade anywhere above the waist. The padded jacket protected you from being injured, so I wasn’t sure why the coach wanted me to take mine off. It was a drill, he said, an exercise in discipline designed to improve my defense. A few seconds and several nasty whelps later, it proved to be an exercise in humiliation, exposing my weakness and drilling into my head how a few lucky strikes did not a gold medal forge. It was very painful. Both to my body and to my pride. The truth does hurt.

In the Isaiah passage we read, truth is likened to a sword. In describing the Savior to come, Isaiah says, “The LORD called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me. He made my mouth”—meaning his words—“like a sharp sword.” Simeon knew this about Jesus. “The child is ... a sign from God that will be opposed, his words will cut to their hearts “and reveal their secret thoughts.” Jesus understood this about himself. “Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth,” he warned, despite the Christmas angels’ greeting. “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Jesus would be the light saber of the world, speaking truth, exposing human pride, causing conflict and creating division. “Light came to the world,” he said, “but people loved darkness more than light because their deeds were evil.” The truth does hurt.

It hurt Mary and it hurt Jesus too. Simeon turned to Mary and told her, “a sword will pierce your own soul.” Mary and Jesus would both suffer profound anguish: Mary at the loss of her son. Jesus at the sacrifice of his life. Simeon foreshadows the cross, a violent sword which in ancient Roman culture served to keep a petulant public in line. The Empire designed it as a brutal reprisal against any rebellion. Crosses were very common, a clear warning against those who might threaten the government’s power. Nothing good that could be affirmed about crosses; they were designed to extinguish life in a most horrifying fashion. The cross represents the culmination of human history gone wrong—an instrument of torture standing for all the other dead ends of history, from spears to bombs, from gas chambers to semi-automatic assault rifles. If “the hopes and fears of all the years” were met in Jesus birth, they would shatter at Jesus’ unjust death. Hung on a cross, an innocent victim, Jesus suffered the full weight of human rebellion―not against Rome―but against God. Jesus fell on our sword for our sins.

Afterwards, as if there weren’t enough indignity, no suitable place could be found to bury him, just as there had been no suitable place for Jesus to be born. As with the spare manger, a sympathetic Pharisee from Arimathea offered up a spare burial tomb. Another sympathetic Pharisee rounded up some myrrh. The Magi had seen it coming. Simeon saw it too. A sword of execution and shame pierced Jesus. A sword of deep sorrow pierced Mary’s heart. What mother should ever endure the death of her child? It’s a question we’ve asked too often in recent days. In the wake of the senseless slaughter of innocents, we sadly affirm Jesus’ judgment: “people loved darkness more than light because their deeds were evil.” 

A pastor in Newtown, Connecticut, his church decked out for the holidays, stood before a full and grieving congregation, and solemnly asked “how can we rejoice in the face of such suffering?” It was a rhetorical question. Everyone already knew the answer. It was why they brought their sorrows to church instead of taking them somewhere else: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light.” “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it.” “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

This is the startling paradox we defiantly celebrate at Christmas: The sorrow and suffering endemic to our world and to the Christian story finds miraculous redemption. Light shines in darkness. Born into scandal, unjustly crucified dead and buried in disgrace, Jesus rises from the dead. He rises and redeems an ancient apparatus of heartless torture into the ultimate symbol of hope. The dark visage of the cross becomes the light of salvation. The sword that pierced Mary’s heart becomes the blade of triumph and glory, girded on the thigh of our risen king who achieves his victory by way of defeat. No longer wielded as a weapon of destruction, his sword serves “the cause of truth and righteousness,” just as the Psalmist sang. 

“I came to earth with a sword,” Jesus said. A painful sword that pierced us too. It’s sharpness exposes our sin and our need for salvation. Christ’s death is our death. The truth hurts. But as Jesus also said, the truth sets us free. His resurrection is our new birth. The full weight of our rebellion meets the full weight of God’s grace. As we sing tonight: “born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them―to give us―second birth.” A new birth, a new beginning, a new chance, a new life, a new start―starting now: It’s all anybody could ever want for Christmas. And with Jesus, all you could ever want is what you always get.

If ever you’ve read the prophet Micah, assigned to the Advent season, you’ve probably read the part in chapter 5 about Bethlehem being the least of the clans of Judah, “yet from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.” Matthew’s gospel cites this prophecy in its version of the Nativity. You also may have read the verse from chapter 6 where Micah sums up the requirements of the godly life as “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” It’s a noble calling. Micah’s original audience mostly perverted justice, scorned mercy and walked pretentiously pertaining to God. That’s why Micah showed up. You never see prophets around when people are behaving themselves. Micah arrived with all the terror of the holy ghosts of Christmas to ancient Israel’s Ebenezer Scrooge, doing all he could to scare God’s chosen people into being worthy of calling.

Though saved by grace, Israel presumed grace to be permission to do as they pleased. The Lord had picked them and loved them just the way they are. But divine love has never been about preserving the status quo. The Lord may indeed love you just as you are, but he has no intention of letting you stay that way. “Therefore hear this,” Micah howled, “you who despise justice and make crooked all that is straight, who build God’s kingdom with bloodshed, and Jerusalem, her city of peace, with violence; whose judges judge for a bribe, massaging their verdicts to serve political interests and agendas; whose politicians deprive the poor and fawn instead over the rich and the powerful; whose preachers preach for a price, shaping their sermons to fit the religious consumer; all the while posturing and playing righteous while having the audacity to say, ‘Everything will turn out fine. Is not the LORD among us? Is God not on the side of his faithful and upright people?’” That would be a nice Christmas sermon. But instead Micah cries out, “The faithful have disappeared from the land. There is no one left who is upright; everyone lies in wait for blood, and each hunts down the other.”

Micah can be pretty grim. But it’s been a grim week. Sandy Hook has cast a dark pall over our holiday hustle. We’ve watched footage of parents and families and neighbors flocking to one funeral after the other, after packing out church services and vigils. For many, to witness such tragedy and sorrow evinces the absence of God. To keep faith in the Lord in the face of such horror seems ridiculous. But for those who actually suffered the tragedy and sorrow, the Lord could not have been more present, their faith in him more critical. This is why the Newtown churches were so full. Where else do you turn when confronted with such unspeakable loss? Sorrow and suffering are woven into the Christian story—our Savior saves by being born into scandal, rejected by his own family and people, and then being hung to die on a cross. God’s presence is always most palpable amidst tragedy and loss.

To suffer loss is to have your soul pierced. But once pierced, you’re opened up to a transformation that would have been otherwise unlikely. Resurrection only comes after crosses. In Micah, the suffering occurred as a brutal attack from a marauding Assyrian army. The terrified populace fled to the safety of Jerusalem’s walls and barricaded themselves inside as their enemy laid siege and choked off supplies. Starvation set in and all hope was lost, yet the people’s hope surprisingly surged: “Though we have fallen we will rise,” they collectively asserted, “though we sit in darkness, the LORD will be our light. He will bring us out into the light; we will see his righteousness.”

Their hope was based that promise from God back in chapter 5: a mighty and majestic shepherd would emerge from Bethlehem to save his flock. Our passage this morning is Micah’s prayer for God to keep his word. It’s a prayer laced boldly with imperatives: “Shepherd your people with your staff! Let them safely graze as in days of old. As in the days when you came out of Egypt, show us some marvelous things!”

Bibles disagree as to whether Micah or the Lord is the one doing the talking here. Some have the Lord saying “As in the days when you came out of Egypt, I will do marvelous things!” Either way, Micah is confident. “The nations, our enemies, will be shamed and deprived of their power,” he struts, “they will shut their mouths and lick dust like a snake”—a blatant reference to Satan’s own defeat. Not only does God crush earthly adversaries, He crushes the devil himself and grinds evil underfoot. “They all come trembling out of their dark lairs like worms,” Micah says with a swagger, “they all come out in dread of God.” Every shaky knee bows and every disdainful tongue confesses who’s Lord of all.

God saves his people from the sinister forces that tormented them from the outside. They suffered cruelty at the hands of others’ doing. But they also suffered consequences of their own doing. That the Assyrians ran freely over Israel was due in part to their own sinful rebellion. Micah’s prophecies had announced judgment upon Israel for social evils, corrupt leadership, and idolatry. Yet in the end, God still saves them. He can’t stop loving them. Micah is amazed and exclaims, “Who is a God like you?” (This is what Micah’s name means.) “Who is a God like you, who pardons sin and forgives transgressions? You don’t stay mad forever? You delight in mercy? You will again have compassion on us? As with Satan, you tread our sins underfoot! As with Pharaoh’s army in Egypt, you all our iniquities into deep water. You will be true to Jacob, you will show unswerving loyalty to Abraham, just like you promised to our ancestors long ago.”

God’s people are completely surrounded and on the verge of certain defeat, and Micah’s declaring victory. This is usually how Biblical hope operates. Author GK Chesterton wrote, ““As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude. It is only when everything is hopeless that hope begins to be a strength at all. Like all Christian virtues, hope is as unreasonable as it is indispensable.”

700 years after Micah, a virgin girl likewise hoped amidst hopelessness and gave birth to Jesus in Bethlehem. He would be the promised Shepherd to rule over God’s flock, who would crush the power of Satan and sin underfoot. As the hope and fears of all the years kicked and squirmed in Mary’s womb, her “soul magnified the Lord,” in language redounding with Micah’s own prophetic confidence. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” Mary famously sang, “and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. 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. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

Notice how Mary gets her verb tenses confused. Instead of singing about a God who will lift up the lowly, who will fill the hungry, who will bring down the powerful and who will send the rich away empty, Mary sings as if all these things had happened already. Jesus isn’t even born yet and already she’s declaring victory.

Except that the victory Mary declared would look a lot more like failure. Mary’s triumphant singing gave way to scandalous hand-wringing as her husband Joseph considered breaking off their engagement. Everybody knew her baby wasn’t his (and nobody was going to believe God did it). Mary ends up giving birth in a feed trough not because there was no room at the Holiday Inn.. Ancient Middle Eastern hospitality would have never permitted turning away a pregnant relative (Bethlehem was Joseph’s hometown). But neither would Joseph’s kin be disgraced by this scandal. They had a reputation to protect. You can squeeze into our house, they allowed, but go sleep with the other animals. You’d think the worse was over once Jesus was born, but then they take him to be circumcised only to have their rabbi warn that their son will end up causing the failure of many in Israel. How’s that for a christening? Your child will invite opposition and rejection by many. Oh, and Mary, a sword will pierce your soul too. And yet Mary still blessed the Lord.

GK Chesterton was right. Christian hope is unreasonable. Two days after the Sandy Hook tragedy, CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewed the parents of Grace McDonnell, one of the victims. Unbelievably composed, they insisted that hate would not be poison their thoughts going forward. They would hope for new life out of their immense loss. They would live by Grace, they said, remembering their daughter’s kindness and peace and beauty and allow that to pave their way forward. They would forgive.

Their determination reminded me of  the last time a tragedy like last Friday’s  struck an elementary school in America. Five little girls in a Pennsylvania Amish schoolhouse. As violent and horrific an act as that was, the truly unbelievable part, you may recall, was the act of compassionate forgiveness and reconciliation that followed. A pastor of the gunman’s family described being in the family’s home when there came this knock on the door. It was an Amish neighbor visiting on behalf of their community. He put his arms around the gunman’s father, and said “We will forgive you.” A goodly number of Amish showed up at the gunman’s funeral. The grandfather of one of the girls was quoted as insisting, “We must not think evil of this man.” A father of one victim said to the press: “We don’t know or understand why this happened but we do believe God allowed it. The rest of us, our lives will go on. We will try to work together to support and help the families directly involved… including the man responsible for this tragedy.’’ At the behest of Amish leaders, a fund was set up for the killer’s widow and three children. The West Nickel Mines School were the tragedy occurred was torn down and replaced by a new one-room schoolhouse called the New Hope School.

Such hope is unreasonable. Unimaginable. It is impossible! How can any parent suffer such loss and then show such mercy? From what little I know of the Amish, I understand that their strength comes from being a community devoted to Christ and to the practical implications of the gospel in everyday life: doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with their God. “How can you call me Lord,” Jesus asked, “and not do the things that I say?” Granted, Jesus never mentioned horses and buggies; but he was crystal clear about forgiving your enemies and praying for your persecutors, even though it kills you to do it. Jesus said that following him meant dying to yourself and taking up a cross everyday. From what little I know, the Amish admonish one another toward the daily practice of self-denial and obedience in the little things. They habitually hone their souls so that when the tragedies strike, as they inevitably do, their faith and obedience will not waver. I have to think that by practicing lesser mercies everyday—whether its helping a neighbor raise a barn or forgiving somebody their rude remark or slight—by practicing lesser mercies everyday you can’t help but become a merciful person: The kind of person for whom the only thing unimaginable is withholding mercy. This is why Jesus talks about taking up a cross daily. If you wait until some momentous crisis to take it up, your cross will be too heavy to lift.

Christian hope is unreasonable. It requires believing in spite of the evidence—and then waiting and watching the evidence change. Hope lets us glimpse reality as God sees it. You know what you’re getting for Christmas because you’ve already been given a peek. Christian hope is not generic wishful thinking, but a specific vision of the future presented throughout Scripture as certainty rather than possibility. It’s a future Micah confidently paints where the mountain of the Lord, the heavenly Zion, dominates the landscape. All nations stream to it, learn from it, live by it. Politics are no longer the love of power but the love of service. Economics are motivated by generosity and equity rather than by profit and prejudice. Justice governs with integrity and honesty; there is no corruption or duplicity. Worship is no longer performing on Sundays only to live as you like the rest of the week. Faith infuses every aspect of life. Mercy abounds. Obedience is joy. The Lord himself settles all disputes. Swords are hammered into shovels and semi automatic assault rifles pounded into garden tools because nobody shoots anybody anymore. There is no more war, no more violence, no more starvation, thirst, disease or fear; only genuine peace on earth and goodwill among all people, just like the angels sang.

This confident picture is grounded in the God who created the heavens and the earth and called forth light with his lips. The same God who birthed a nation out of a nursing home candidate named Abraham whose body was good as dead. That God miraculously delivered that same nation out of their Egyptian slavery by leading them through parted waters, and them rescued them over and over again, though they were surrounded by trouble on every side. Our confidence is grounded in a that God who showed up in person at Christmas in scandal, who stuck around to suffer and who fell to an unjust death, only to then rise from that injustice and be crowned King and Lord and Light of all. In Christ our Lord we confidently hope, despite the worst the world can dish out on us and despite the worst we dish onto ourselves. In Jesus Christ our Lord we confidently hope and therefore can speak of a beautiful future using the past tense. So go ahead and open your present. Because of Jesus, you already know what it is.

The seasonal darkness of Advent makes light an annually welcome topic, so it’s good we’ve been shining forth these past months looking light in the Bible. It inspired a member to send this photo he took from last Sunday, which he entitled “Colonial Church in Soft Light.” It’s a beautiful take. Of course for us non-photographers who drove to church last Sunday, we remember “Colonial Church in Dense Fog,” for some, even more difficult to maneuver through than the snow this morning. Most of us embrace this morning’s snow since it means a dreamy white Christmas, yet there remain others for whom the bluish fog better matches their mood. In what has become an annual tradition, churches around the country, including several here in the Twin Cities, sponsor “Blue Christmas” services (with no connection to Elvis) for people whose holidays feel neither merry nor bright. Candles are still lit and ornaments hung in these services, but rather than decking the halls, the candles are lit for remembrance and the ornaments hung are inscribed with names of those who suffer this season through hardships of personal loss, grief and despondency. Christmas merriment piles on the sadness for so many during December that having a place to hang your sorrows helps.

Blogging blue about Christmas myself this week, I wrote how ironic that yuletide expectations of peace and joy dominate given that the Christmas story itself is such a downer--what with all of its scandal, exile, homelessness, rejection, oppression, not to mention raging infanticide. Sure, the angels pronounce “peace of earth,” but that’s been such a long time coming that it really only works on greeting cards, for anybody who still uses the mail. To read the Christmas story straight up is to paint any Christmas service unavoidably blue. Attending a Blue Christmas Service several years back, I got so depressed that I had to run right to the mall afterwards so to reconnect with the real reason for the season.

The Christmas story’s depressing downside feeds off ancient Israel’s sad history. Chosen as God’s own and then dramatically rescued from an oppressive enslavement to Pharaoh’s Egypt--led out of captivity by a pillar of fire, on dry land as waters parted around them, their enemies drowned, their mouths fed with bread from heaven, all their prayers answered and a bright future secured--these people somehow preferred to abide in a fog of unfaithfulness, rejecting God’s grace and thus obstructing their travel plans for the next forty years.

The Old Testament reads like a broken record—for those of you who still remember records. Love and its rejection leading to sin and its repercussions, followed by grace and comfort, and then comfort and a complacency, skipping back into sin once more. We see this no more vividly than with the prophet Isaiah. Comfortably ensconced in their Promised Land, it was just too hard to stay faithful. Warned by the prophet to trust in the Lord, Israel demurred, deciding instead to cozy up to mighty Babylon with all of its enticing power and wealth. They being chosen with being entitled; they deserved whatever they could get. Israel got greedy and tried to assert its own wish list, and the Lord let them have it, giving them over to their Babylonian Santas, who proved in the end to be nothing but Grinches with intolerably hot coal for their stockings. 

Babylon crushed Jerusalem, trashed Israel’s Temple and enslaved the people anew. That Babylon succeeded in smashing the House of the Lord, it was assumed that they had defeated God himself. But the Lord had already left that building; allowing Babylon to serve Israel its just desserts with a cruel ferocity. The Lord had allowed it--sin has its repercussions--but the ferocity with which Babylon acted was a blatant abuse of their power. Therefore the Lord, whose justice ultimately aims at restoration rather than destruction, sends Isaiah with tidings of comfort and joy.  The Servant of the Lord was coming to town, to rebuild their city and their Temple and bring forth his justice against tyranny. Unleashing the Persian King Cyrus, his army thundered in from the east and routed the Babylonians as if on cue. King Cyrus ordered the rebuilding of the Temple and the city and brought Israel back from their exile. It was a mighty move of grace, and arrived with the expectation that God’s people, their candles relit, would finally shine as a light for redemption, visible evidence of God’s love for all people. They had never been chosen solely for their own sake. Like the church, the idea was for Israel to be the light of the world, serving and caring and wooing all nations into the Lord’s everlasting radiance.

That was the idea, but comfort and joy led to complacency again, skipping back into sin and its repercussions once more. The Romans rolled in as did Israel’s fog, inducing the Lord to abandon the Temple project for good and show up in person instead. But rather than ride in as a King or fly in like Superman to save the planet, God showed up as a humbly and scandalously born baby in a manger, a working class Messiah with just a few tricks up his sleeve, unjustly treated then summarily executed, effectively turning the tables on every expectation of what salvation would look like. Jesus proved exactly the sort of Servant of the Lord Isaiah foretold.

King Cyrus had been but a shadow. To read this morning’s passage is to read one of four famous servant songs from Isaiah, the most familiar being the one hear sung every Christmas in Handel’s Messiah: “he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, he was wounded for our iniquities and the chastisement that brought us peace was upon him.” Though a depressing way for a Redeemer to redeem, the gospel writers never had any trouble applying it to Jesus who died for human sin on the cross. 

“I have put my spirit upon him,” says the Lord in Isaiah, never more evident than in Jesus who forgave his accusers and killers even as he hung to die. “He will bring out justice,” says the Lord in Isaiah, which Jesus did by being raised from the dead, vindicating the righteousness of his cause. As a risen King, Jesus powerfully rules but without power’s abuses. He incites no rioting in the streets, insinuates no threat of chemical weapons, compels no political grandstanding nor portends any fiscal cliffs.

Indeed, he “will not cry aloud or lift up his voice to make it heard in the streets,” says the Lord in Isaiah. He’ll not run ads on television or spam any inbox. Instead, he will speak by his life, and show his power through mercy and compassion to the least and the lost. “A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench.” “He will open the eyes of the blind and rescue from prison those confined to the darkness.” And he’ll do all of this without growing faint or discouraged. “Thus says the LORD, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it and life to those who walk in it: ‘I am the LORD; I have called my servant in righteousness; I will take him by the hand and keep him; I will give him as a covenant for the people, a light for the nations.” Jesus shouldered the covenant obligations Israel forsook, and bravely took up his calling. “I am the light of the world,” he declared, and went on to burn brightly for the glory of God. 

Matthew, in his gospel, has no problem linking Isaiah 42 to Jesus. He cites our verses verbatim after Jesus healed a poor man with a deformed hand on the Sabbath. Religious rules prohibited any healing on the Sabbath because healing was a lot of work and only God was allowed to work on the Sabbath. Which was precisely the point: if God is the one who heals and God is the only one who works on the Sabbath, and Jesus does both, then you do the math. He’s Isaiah’s guy. The self-righteous, rule-keeping Pharisees, still playing that broken record, could never accept a Savior who didn’t look like them. So they started looking for a way to destroy him. Jesus got the hint and got out of town, and took the crowds with him, hurting people eager for anybody to help them, even if he didn’t look like much of a Savior. Jesus goes on to heal them, with the caveat that they keep it quiet, in fulfillment “what had been spoken through Isaiah the prophet” according to Matthew. The servant of the Lord would show his power through mercy and compassion to the least and the lost without any fanfare, publicity, expectation of appreciation or press conferences. His left hand wouldn’t know what his right hand was doing.

God’s grace brought comfort but then comfort brought complacency again, and before long it wasn’t enough for people to have their hurts healed. If Jesus really was the Servant Messiah, then bringing out justice meant bringing down the Romans, just like King Cyrus had brought down Babylon. When King Jesus made clear that military might was not his method, the crowds turned disappointed and then turned on him. People want their Saviors to be superheroes. It’s what we want and think we need despite reading Isaiah every Advent.

Catholic writer Max Lindeman calls it the “Advent Trap.” He fell into it one Christmas after getting mugged. Left alone on the street bereft of his stuff—his wallet, his cellphone and credit cards—he knew he had to get in touch with his bank right away, or the crooks were going to hit the nearest convenience store ATM and max out his overdraft. Max got mugged the week after losing his job as an airline baggage-handler. A disgruntled white-collar guy, he’d taken this job “in a quest for blue-collar authenticity,” but ended up driving his belt-loader into the fuselage of an 319 Airbus. Twice. His car had quit on him too, of course. His computer’s hard drive had crashed. And he’d broken up with a girlfriend. It was a dismal holiday season.

Unfortunately his local parish didn’t sponsor a Blue Christmas Service (I think this is mostly a Lutheran and Calvinist thing), but his parish was still doing Advent. Max’s ex-girlfriend was seriously devout and now, stripped of all his worldly possessions, he figured he might as well check out her church (hoping, perhaps, to bump into her again too). It was, he learned when he got there, the second Sunday of Advent and the gospel reading included those verses where Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to a slow-flowering mustard seed. Jesus was born as a baby and had to grow up. He promised to bring the Kingdom of God, but then he died. He rose from the dead to get things started, but then he left again, assuring everybody he’s be back later to fix everything for good. In the meantime, the Holy Spirit would serve as a placeholder so that everybody could see that Jesus was still at work in the world even if he was long way from being finished. Even for the Lord, these things take time. For Max, patience and waiting were the sermon takeaways, perfectly appropriate for Advent. He wrote, “I’ve always preferred the term ‘late bloomer’ to ‘complete failure,’ so it was a source of great comfort to note I shared this status with the Son of God.”

Advent’s promise of new light and eventual bloom got Max through the New Year, during which time a number of strange and wonderful miracles occurred. He convinced the hiring manager of a security firm that his feet constituted “reliable transportation.” He’d barely broken into that job when he got offered him a much comfier bank job. He won $50 from a Lottery ticket, all of which he took as a sign of God’s favor, evidence of his chosenness and of being on the right track to his own personal promised land.

But then the new job turned demanding and stressful. A new car brought new car troubles. He made some bad investments. He lost another cell phone. His enthusiasm at finding God gave way to disappointment once his prayers weren’t answered like he thought they should be. He’d fallen into the Advent Trap—that false sense of having turned a corner, of having taken an irrevocable step upward. “Seen without the proper perspective,” Max wrote, “Advent can look like a big, fat bait-and-switch. Think about it: it’s the beginning of winter. It’s cold. Night falls earlier every day. Then a few candles and a splash of violet appear around the altar, signaling that it’ll all be over soon. Except it isn’t. After four weeks of anticipation, Christmas comes and goes, leaving you to face the January chills and the February blahs. And then, if things weren’t grim enough, Lent starts.”

Jews of the first century, those who, if they’d looked, would have seen the star above the manger. They would have been able to relate. To date, they’d waited six centuries for their Savior. And when He finally arrived, he was in a state unfit to do much of anything but drive the local tyrant into his infanticidal panic. And then, 30 years later, when His hour finally came, did the Messiah take down the corrupt government walls or lead anyone to a new Promised Land? No. He just died his painful, degraded death and — resurrection notwithstanding — left His followers to the swords of their persecutors. Such disappointment. We all want their Saviors to be superheroes, or at least Santa Clauses. Jesus was neither. Sigh. Welcome to Colonial’s Blue Christmas service. I'm sure the malls will be open after church.

And yet better than that, this is the word of the Lord: “who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people on it and life to those who walk in it. He will open the eyes of the blind and release prisoners from their dungeons of darkness. New things I will bring and light I will shine.” But this too is the word of the Lord, light shines out of darkness and resurrection requires dying. Promised Lands lie on the other side of deserts and grace forgives sin. winter and summer, springtime and harvest, good jobs and bad, sickness and health, brokenness and redemption, life and death and new life, blue Christmas and white: the Advent Candle burns as our pillar of fire, shining the presence of God even as we wait for the Lord. To some this may just look like fog, but to those who hope in the Lord, it is a soft light that pulls us ever forward, ever leading us on.

Among the things I’ve yet to grow accustomed to since moving north so many seasons ago are the death-dark days of late autumn. Whatever leisurely evenings of lingering dusk I enjoyed as recently as October steeply plunge into the savage descents of night by early December. There’s a vague anxiety that comes with being forced inside at 4:30 during what used to be the afternoon. It feels strange, like time is running out and I’m losing my grip on something. You’d think I would have built up some immunity to this over the years, but I haven’t. That we dangle over a fiscal cliff with only 23 shopping days until Christmas doesn’t help. It’s enough to make everybody feel uneasy.

Granted, such uneasiness isn’t entirely inappropriate for this season of the new church year. Advent, meaning coming or arrival, falls in late autumn as a shadowy foretoken of  Christmas. During Advent, churches that operate on liturgical cycles dust off unapologetically rude scriptures mostly ignored for the rest of the year. The genial account of Bethlehem’s manger is reserved for later. Advent commences with passages labeled as apocalyptic—mystical revelations regarding the end of time. They rudely thrust us toward a future advent, a Second Coming of Christ due to arrive without any humble pretense--the Lord gallops in on clouds of glory instead, trumpets blaring and an army of angels in his wake, with truth as his sword and vengeance on his mind. Apocalyptic doom reminds us that all is not yet right with the world, and sounds ever more ominous when its already dark outside.

If Apocalypse was purely the purview of prophets and the wacky book of Revelation, it might be easier to ignore. But this morning’s words come from Jesus himself in what is known as his “Olivet Discourse.” They show up in Mark and Matthew too. We actually looked at Mark’s version back during Lent. There as here, the sun and moon go dark, wars rage with earthquakes, famine and plagues, there’s persecution and destruction, and then finally the Son of Man soaring through the air, those angels in tow. Mark and Matthew have him gathering the elect from the four winds. While in Thessalonians, Paul has all of us meeting Jesus in the air. It’s strange stuff. And  frankly a little embarrassing to talk about in public. The oddness of such orthodox tenets  probably explains why so many church folk prefer to stress Christianity’s more reasonable aspects: living an ethical life, making beautiful music and art, doing justice and serving the poor, building healthy marriages and raising good kids. The trouble is that you don’t really need Jesus to do any of those things. As theologian Philip Clayton put it: "once our beliefs become merely metaphorical or poetic—or worse, when one finds oneself using language one no longer believes but vaguely feels that one ought to believe–-one begins to wonder about the reason for the church’s existence."

It’s Jesus’ fault. He taught and did so many wise and wonderful things; why go and get crazy with talk about flying back to earth like some Superman with truth and justice for all who have faith? As in Mark, Luke starts with Jesus condemning a religious system that succeeded in hoodwinking a destitute widow into giving her last two pennies to the Temple treasury. He let loose a scathing indictment against the leaders of this system, fuming about their “prancing around in long robes to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, vying for the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers.” Jesus censured the entire Temple travesty, labeling it bankrupt and doomed to destruction. Folks naturally objected to his strident reproof, pointing out the breathtaking magnificence of the Temple which the people’s offerings had gone to construct and maintain. But Jesus shot back, “the day will come when not one stone will be left upon another; it will all will be thrown down!”

Apocalyptic talk of wars, earthquakes and famine was small change compared to the loss of Jerusalem’s Temple. For Jews of Jesus’ day, to lose their Temple truly marked the end of the world. The Temple was the religious, political and cultural nexus of Judaism; the very locus of the good Lord’s presence on earth. As such, it was thought to be impervious. The Temple was were God lived. Except that the Lord had long left the building on account of his people’s infidelity. Within forty years, Rome would ransack Jerusalem and reduce the Temple to rubble. According to the ancient historian Josephus, a Roman siege prior to the rampage caused frantic citywide starvation—people ate their babies to survive. Factional fighting among God’s own people resulted in more casualties than the Romans inflicted once they invaded. The scene was utterly chaotic. No wonder Jesus told his followers to run for their lives: “When you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Those inside the city must leave it, and those out in the country must not enter it; for these are days of vengeance, as a fulfillment of all that is written.” After centuries of abusing the Temple and taking God’s grace for granted, their judgment day had finally come.

Jesus employed stock apocalyptic language for emphasis: “the sun, the moon, and the stars” all go dark. Throughout Scripture, the loss of light marks the end of the world--a astronomical reality due to happen either way a few billion years out. Jesus isn’t making a cosmological pronouncement here--though he does say that “heaven and earth will pass away.” Note too that our pew Bible puts “the Son of Man coming in clouds” in quotes. Jesus cites Daniel 7, a pinnacle vision of Old Testament prophecy. Every Jew knew what Jesus meant. Daniel saw “one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of heaven. ... He was given authority, glory and sovereign power.” Throughout the gospels, Jesus refers to himself as “son of man,” which some was Jesus’ way of saying he was just a normal “human being.” But as we know from Christmas, he was the son of no man. And as know in Daniel, he was no normal human being either. Jesus had been given the divine right to judge the world.

He also earns this right. The stick and stone Temple gave way to a flesh and blood embodiment of God’s presence: Jesus himself. Like the Temple, Jesus was destroyed because of the people’s sin. But unlike the Temple, Jesus was raised from the dead and vindicated as Son of God and Savior, triumphant over sin and rebellion, over injustice and evil; and now victoriously sits enthroned at the Father’s side. The Daniel 7 imagery of his riding in on clouds has all the trappings of a victory parade: Daniel sees “every nation and peoples of every language worshipping the Son of Man.” “Every knee bows and tongue confesses that Christ is Lord.” “His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.” Jesus uses Daniel to frame his own resurrection and ascension, which is how he’s able to say “this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place.” In Luke Volume 2 (known as the Book of Acts) the disciples indeed witnessed Jesus airborne—just as some of them would see the Temple decimated too.

If this was all there is to it, we could consign the Olivet Discourse to ancient history as already fulfilled. The problem is that as the disciples stood and gawked at Jesus ascending to heaven in the book of Acts, two angels appeared and promised that “this same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go.” And thus the Apostles’ Creed asserts Christ “will come again to judge the living and the dead.” And the Communion Table “proclaims the Lord’s death until he comes” again. It won’t necessarily be a happy day for everybody. Jesus declares, “people will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world." The Son of Man returns with light to be sure, but as Danielle preached last Sunday, light shining in darkness has a way of exposing our bad behavior for the sin that it is.

“Look at the fig tree,” Jesus said. “Look at any plant for that matter.” Had Jesus lived in Minnesota he might have said “look at the corn crop.” “As soon as it sprouts leaves, you know that summer is near.” Except that in Minnesota, it wasn’t long after the corn crop sprouted leaves that tiny worms started eating away at its roots. Ironically, this corn had been genetically modified to resist worms. I read last week that by using genetically modified seeds, farmers had been able to minimize pesticide use while greatly increasing their yields and their profits to the tune of some $10 billion dollars last year alone.

The problem was that the financial success led to a third of the state being planted with just two genetically modified species of corn and soybeans --setting the table for an evolutionary disaster. You see, the worms adapted. They evolved into sinisterly resistant mega worms. Now stronger, more toxic chemicals than before must be sprayed which scientists fear pose an even greater risk to the environment and human health. Biotech companies promise to unleash a whole new arsenal of genetically modified seeds to combat the mega worms, which will eventually accelerate the costly chemical warfare even further. Talk about apocalyptic. Fortunately, a biochemical company spokesperson assured a concerned public by saying, “we believe we can manage this.” In other words, run for your life.

It turns out there is another solution--but you can’t be greedy for profit to do it. This past summer, as one farmer hired a helicopter to douse insecticide on his worm-infested corn, his neighbor’s field, just across the driveway, stood tall in the wind. The difference: The previous year, his neighbor planted less lucrative alfalfa. It’s a lesson as old as farming itself. You have to rotate your crops.

“Look at the corn fields,” Jesus could have said. “When you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.” Throughout the gospels, whenever the Kingdom draws near, it brings with it an invitation to change your bad behavior. But we push back, even if it means feeling guilty for doing what we do. As exhausting as guilt can be, it’s still a price you’re willing to pay for not having to change. And since you’re already feeling bad, you might as well just keep on doing the crap you’re doing. At least that way you can say you’re consistent. “Your day is coming,” Jesus warns, “it will come upon all who live on the face of the earth.” We believe we can manage this; we modify with seeds of self-justification and douse ourselves with pesticides of denial. But sin is a wily worm. It always adapts. “Be on your guard,” Jesus warns, “lest your hearts be consumed with the excesses and cares of this life and that day close down upon you suddenly like a trap.”

There is another solution as old as farming itself: rotate your crops. Turn from your sinful ways. Repent and trust the Lord. “Look at the cornfields,” Jesus could have said, “when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.” Over and over in Scripture, redemption blooms in distressed soil, resurrection comes after crosses, and light outshines darkness. “So be alert at all times,” Jesus says, “stay faithful.” “Pray constantly,” he says, and we will find the strength to endure. Lead us not into trial. Deliver us from the evil one. Give us legs with which to stand and be counted before the Son of Man. “As often as we eat the bread and drink the cup of Christ," a foretaste of Christ's return, "we proclaim his death until he comes.” Jesus may plow a costly, demanding and obligatory field; but it produces a bountiful yield of life and hope and love stretching into eternity. Let us rotate our hearts and enjoy it.

We’re walking in the light all this fall and winter; easy to do when reading the Bible since throughout light shines as the Lord’s true identity. “God is light,” we read, meaning that the physical properties of light resemble the character of the Lord—illuminating, brilliant, radiant, unchanging, omnipresent, undivided, unifying, simple, uncorrupt, accessible yet mysterious, dynamic, life-giving and good. Sometimes when God appears in the Bible he does literally shine. There’s the light of creation in Genesis, the light of a fiery pillar in Exodus, the thunderous flashes of light atop Mt. Sinai for Moses, the blazing light of a chariot of fire for Elijah, a shining star for the Magi, a dazzling blast at Jesus’ baptism, and a knock-down flare that converted St. Paul. In this morning’s gleam, regarded by Christian orthodox traditions as the pinnacle light passage in Scripture, the light of God radiates from Jesus himself. Last week in John’s gospel, Jesus declared himself to be the “light of the world.” In Matthew, Mark and Luke, he literally shines.

Mark’s version kicked off with Jesus promising how “some standing here will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.” Six days later (which would make this the seventh day: hint, hint), Jesus took Peter, James and John up a high mountain (Moses and Elijah met God on high mountains too: hint, hint). Once there, Jesus’ “clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.” Matthew adds that Jesus’ also face shone like the sun. This transfiguration was no doubt an amazing spectacle. Mark tells us that it scared the disciples to death.

Last week in John’s gospel, on the other hand, Jesus’ claim to be the light of the world made the Pharisees furious. For first century Jews, light was the realm reserved for God alone, thus causing Jesus to sound utterly sacrilegious. So why Jesus didn’t glow a little bit for them? It probably would have just taken a flicker for the Pharisees to come around. But the danger was that had the Pharisees believed, they may not have had Jesus crucified. God’s whole plan for changing the world would have been ruined. As St. Paul would later realize, “in Christ all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

You may also remember from last Sunday how the Pharisees refused to take Jesus’ word for all this. They said because he testified on his own behalf his testimony was invalid. Jewish law required two witnesses to verify anything as true. Wanting to make sure that his disciples did believe (and just in case his lighting up wasn’t sufficient) Jesus offered up witnesses. A two reliable good ones. Setting aside how it was that the disciples recognized Moses and Elijah, why these two saints instead of, say, Jeremiah and Isaiah? Or David and Deborah?

The reasons had to do with popular Messianic expectations of that day. God had promised that he would raise up another savior like Moses, only greater. For ancient Israel, this meant another hero to make fools of their enemies and establish Israel as the greatest nation on earth. When Elijah arrived on the scene, he was a whole lot like Moses—meeting God on mountains, walking across parted waters, calling fire down from heaven. But then Elijah just left, carried back to heaven in that fiery chariot, leaving Israel to languish in eventual captivity to the Assyrians, the Babylonians and the Romans, nevertheless determined to hold out for eventual glory. Still, because Elijah did not technically die, everybody expected he would return someday to finish the job. The prophet Malachi said as much. And Elijah would come back alright. He would call back Israel to God. But it would take another Moses to get them there.

So you can imagine the disciples’ awe not only at seeing Jesus shine, but at Moses and Elijah standing alongside. This was huge. Peter (being Peter) suggested turning the mountaintop into a three-ring circus to prolong the experience. (Mark, perhaps embarrassed for Peter, adds that Peter didn’t know what he was saying because he was so freaked out). God himself puts a stop to the silliness by lowering a tent of his own. A cloud enveloped them and they heard a voice say regarding Jesus, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him!” Moses and Elijah provide their own validation, pointing to Jesus and not to themselves as the One. Jesus was not to be confused with a reconstituted Moses (a political hero to deliver them from their oppression) nor a returning Elijah (a flame-throwing prophet to coerce the religious leaders into faith). Jesus’ victory would come through defeat, coercion by way of love. He would save their lives by losing his own. Jesus shines with the dark light of a crucified Savior.

No sooner had it all happened, it was over, leaving Jesus alone with his disciples again, clad as the poor and scandalized carpenter from Nazareth. The disciples likely now thought Jesus to be merely disguised as a homeless human—Almighty God in cheap clothes. But Jesus debunked this fallacy by telling them again to keep quiet until after he rose from the dead; thereby reminding them that being human meant dying, something that superhero Messiahs weren’t supposed to do. It was all very confusing, but Peter knew better than to open his mouth again. Instead, “they kept the matter to themselves, discussing what ‘rising from the dead’ might mean.” Nobody they knew had done that before.

The disciples wouldn’t fully get it even after the resurrection. It would take a big lick of hot light and power from heaven at Pentecost for the disciples to fully come around. But even when you get it, it’s still hard to get it right. Hike up the traditional site of the Transfiguration and you’ll see they built that circus anyway. OK, it’s a church, but that only makes it worse. The power of Pentecost was power to to go out into the world to do good and make beauty and speak truth and share the gospel. Not shut yourself up inside to talk about it. The church was never supposed to be a monument so much as a mission, the ongoing work of Christ in the world. For Jesus to turn and call us the light of the world makes this very clear.

And yet, as we all know, churches still struggle to get this right. Rather than worry that we’re not serving the world, we worry that people don’t come to our services so much anymore. Al lot has been made of late of “the rise of the nones”—n-o-n-e-s—as opposed to the Catholic women in black habits. “None” as in “no religious affiliation.” Twenty percent of the American public—a third of adults under 30— are religiously unaffiliated—the highest percentages ever according to reliable studies. This number has doubled in the past ten years and continues to accelerate. According to Duke sociologist of religion Mark Chaves, “The evidence for a decades-long decline in religiosity is now incontrovertible—like the evidence for global warming, it comes from multiple sources, shows up in several dimensions, and paints a consistent factual picture.” Religion among young people in on a steep decline.

Diana Butler-Bass, in her book Christianity After Religion, insists that more people would go to church if they could find a community—or a Christianity—that embodied God’s love and mercy in practical and meaningful ways. “People are fed up,” she writes. “They are unwilling to put up with religious business-as-usual.” As I concluded last Sunday, church has to be more than well-done music and a well-honed sermon in a well-crafted building. Church must be situated in the concrete things Christians do to, with and for other people. We must embody the words we preach. Our lives must match our speech—even when we fail—because in our failures we demonstrate what repentance and resurrection look like. “You are the light of the world” Jesus said, not because we are flawless, but because his light shines through us, even on those days when it’s the dark light of crucifixion.

As with death and resurrection, bad news often plows the ground for good news. Diana Butler-Bass goes on to write that the rejection of religion-as-usual may lead to the very resurrection of Christianity itself. Young adults may be ditching institutional religion, but they aren’t abandoning the gospel.

Take Morgan Perry and Jasen Chung, two young Christians who lead a campaign to fight child sex trafficking in the United States. Morgan got involved after seeing a young prostitute left for dead on the streets of Thailand. While researching to write a book about it, she was shocked to discover the same thing happening in America. Jason spent four years in corporate finance, but then left the trading floor to serve the poor in Haiti, fueling his passion for the oppressed. Together they’ve produced a documentary and other resources currently being used for training purposes by the FBI, The Salvation Army and The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, as well as other organizations. Their goal is to do church by effectively combat trafficking in America by increasing education, supporting restoration homes for survivors, improving state legislation, and addressing the primary elements of demand that perpetuate the abuse.

Or take Hannah Song, a former ad exec, and Justin Wheeler, who worked with war-affected children in East Africa, two more young Christians, who together founded an agency that provides emergency rescues to North Korean refugees hiding in China and direct assistance upon their resettlement in safe countries. Called “Liberty in North Korea,” they do church by changing public perceptions of North Korea through focusing on the people instead of the politics.

Or take Tyler Merrick, a young Christian and founder of Project 7, a company that does church everyday by manufacturing and selling products that give back to seven areas for good around the globe: health care, homelessness, hunger, creation care, water, education and peace. You can find their products in places like Caribou Coffee, Target, Wal-Mart and elsewhere.

Each of these enterprises, along with many others, have been funded by Christian initiatives such as one called Praxis, a mentorship-driven program for young social entrepreneurs & innovators compelled by their faith to advance the common good and embody the Gospel. One of the founders of Praxis, Steve Graves, was here at Colonial yesterday to train some of our member to be navigators for our own Innové project. We hope to give away $250K along with mentoring and coaching to young Christian social entrepreneurs in the Twin Cities: people like Tyler and Hannah and Justin and Morgan and Jason.

With this morning’s Scripture as our inspiration, think of Innové as a transfiguration of church: a coming down off the mountain in order to shine light in the world. It’s not that mountains don’t matter—they do. We desperately need encounters with God in worship and the love and care we receive in gathered community. Worship reorients our priorities and community keeps us strong and compels us to serve. You can’t be a Christian alone. It’s only together with the Spirit’s power that we can be the real body of Christ. What makes our service to the world different from similar work done by say Partners in Health or Doctors Without Borders or the United Way? The difference is that Christian service brings an everlasting lifetime guarantee. In Christ, health means more than well-functioning bodies, and our borders extend into the expanse of eternity. Eternal life still matters. But rather than viewing it simply something good that happens after we die—remember the transfiguration. Christ’s light shines on earth. Good happens now. The kingdom is here with power. Eternity has already started. Like starlight from billions of years out, the bright future of God pulls us forward toward a life that is already happening, a glory that is already ours, not only to have, but also to share.

I’ve told some of you about a lovely visit I paid this past week to one of the oldest church members who unfortunately is unable to attend worship services anymore. Due to her being homebound, we’d never had the chance to meet. She enjoys regular visits from our Deacons, so she was glad to welcome me too and proceeded to regale me with a catalog of hilarious stories from her many years at Colonial Church. She eagerly de-closeted a few skeletons, broadcast a number of well-articulated if trenchant critiques on church politics, and topped it off with a few tasty tidbits about some of our former ministers. 

“However,” she eventually added, “I do hear that Harrell is doing OK.” 

“Oh?” I replied. “What else have you heard about Harrell?” 

Before she could respond, the phone rang. Calling was a neighbor whom I was also to visit. The neighbor asked, “Is Dr. Harrell there?” “No, just one of the deacons.” “Actually,” I interrupted, “I’m Dr. Harrell.” Pause. Cue the surprise.

“OH GOOD LORD!”

When I called later to ask whether I could share this story, she told me that she wasn’t sure she believed me until her neighbor, whom I had met, vouched for my identity. She admitted I didn’t much look like a Senior Minister, which I decided to take as a compliment. For the Pharisees confronting Jesus here in John’s gospel, he didn’t look like much of a Messiah. And it wasn’t enough that he would vouch for himself. “You are testifying on your own behalf;” they said, “your testimony is not valid.” This was especially true given that Jesus outrageously declared himself to be the light of the world.

In a day when we unflinchingly sing about Jesus as light, it may be hard to imagine how utterly sacrilegious he sounded. For first century Jews, light was a realm reserved for God alone. “Let there be light,” he announced at creation, which was practically the same as his saying “let there be me.” As we have observed throughout our series on light in the Bible, light is an apt description for God. Among all the constituents of the physical world, light is the least material. It illumines the objects upon which it falls without suffering loss or change in itself. It spreads throughout space yet remains undivided, conveying the impression of being everywhere at once. It holds the universe together. It is pure and clear, simple and uncorrupt, immediately accessible to us and yet at the same time eluding our grasp. More important, light is dynamic and life-giving, bestowing on us a sense of warmth, hope and beauty. To be the light was nothing short of being God. Whenever God had shown himself to his people of old, he had always brightly shone. Light was his calling card; his brilliance a sure sign of his presence. Yet here stood dull and dingy Jesus without hardly a glimmer. Is it any wonder the clergy of his day were skeptical?

Their skepticism was enhanced by the occasion on which Jesus revealed his identity. These chapters in John occur during the Jewish Thanksgiving-like Feast of Tabernacles. Tabernacles gets its name from the tents or “tabernacles” built to commemorate the ancient Israelites’ desert sojourn on their way to the Promised Land. Jews then as now camped out in these temporary shelters to remind themselves of the transience of earthly life, and to spur their hope for a future Promised Land. Tabernacles coincided with the grape and olive harvests and therefore included rituals geared toward promoting harvest success. Prayers for necessary rainwater and sunlight, both literal and metaphorical, were offered in grand liturgical fashion. 

The water ritual invoked God’s provision of seasonal rain but also celebrated God’s faithful provision of miraculous water in the past, specifically the instance of his providing water from a rock during the desert Exodus. An accompanying light ritual likewise called to mind God’s past provision of miraculous luminosity during the Exodus in the form of a fiery pillar of cloud. This pillar of light guided Israel through darkness and guarded them from harm. As for the future, the prophet Isaiah foresaw a time when, “The sun will no more be your light by day, nor will the brightness of the moon shine on you, for the LORD will be your everlasting light and your God will be your glory. Your sun will never set again, and your moon will wane no more; the LORD will be your everlasting light, and your days of sorrow will end.”

The Tabernacles light ritual occurred in an area of the Temple known as The Court of Women, so named for its allowance of women to join the men in worship. In the center of this court were four huge candlesticks, on top of which sat these massive bowls of lamp oil with wicks, made from of all things, the discarded trousers of priests (don’t ask me why). At the commencement of Tabernacles, these four great lamps were lit and reportedly they radiated such intense light that every courtyard in Jerusalem reflected the glare. As the lamps blazed, the reputably wisest and holiest men of Israel danced before God until dawn, praising the Lord with songs of joy with harps and cymbals.

Picture the energy and excitement such worship generated; especially for a people currently oppressed under Roman occupation. If but for a moment, their minds were free to dream of that day when their sorrows would end, their storehouses would be filled, their joy complete, and their prayers answered. Picture yourself amidst all of this celebratory expectation, not unlike jubilant crowds whose candidates won on election night, enraptured with hope, passionate for salvation—a salvation that first century Jews believed would be inaugurated by the return of their King, a superhero Messiah who single-handedly would rescue them from the tyranny of their gloomy oppression and usher them into shining everlasting glory. Whip all of this eagerness up to a fervent pitch only to have some homeless, working-class, ex-carpenter step up and shout: “It’s me! I’m the answer to your prayers! I’m the light of the world! Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

It’s like somebody who’d prayed her whole life for prince charming, who’d packed a hope chest full of baby clothes, wistfully waiting for Mr. Right to appear, only to finally have some homely, unemployed Mama’s boy waltz up and announce, “Hi honey, it’s me. I’m the answer to your prayers.” Or for that same homely vagabond to step up onto the platform during the doxology, grab the mike and after we sang Praise God from whom all blessings flow, hold up his hand and say “You’re welcome.” Who’d ever believe such a person?

It was around Veteran’s Day in 1998 when the World War II epic Saving Private Ryan debuted to much acclaim, especially that opening scene depicting in courageous yet gruesome Technicolor the Normandy D-Day invasion. Marveling at the bloodiness depicted on screen, a bunch of us at work were joined in our conversation by a longtime member of the custodial team, a kindly retired gentleman who never said whole lot. I asked whether he’d seen the movie (he had), and what he thought about it. He said the surf was actually bloodier than Spielberg depicted. I chuckled, what, are you some sort of history buff or something? Not really, he said, but I was on Normandy beach that day. What!?!? What do you mean you were on the beach? He said, I fought in the battle. He went on to describe being 19 years old and riding in the transports trying not to puke, and then storming the beach, being terrified as he clung to an anti-tank barrier in the freezing cold as bullets whizzed by, and then advancing deep into France. He went on to earn Six Battle Stars including one from the Battle of the Bulge. Or so he said. I believed him, but I told him I needed to see those stars.

“Just because you say it doesn’t make it true,” the Pharisees replied to Jesus. “You’re testifying on your own behalf. Your testimony is not verifiable.” It’s easy to empathize with the Pharisees here. People are naturally suspicious of anything that smacks of self-adulation. Unfortunately, Jesus’ response hardly tempered their suspicions. “Even if I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is valid,” he said, “for I know where I came from and where I am going.” This issue of “coming and going” revolved around whether or not Jesus came from Bethlehem, a requirement for any Messiah since Bethlehem was King David’s hometown. Folks mistakenly thought Jesus to be from Galilee. But there’s a double meaning here too. Jesus may have had his earthly origins in Bethlehem, but his actual origins (as well as his destiny) were far above any earthly map. But the Pharisees were too committed to their own earthbound standards for judging Messianic authenticity. Their certainty blinded them to seeing reality.

“You judge by human standards,” Jesus said, a word that literally means flesh, a classic New Testament contrast to spirit, along the lines of the contrast between darkness and light. For Jesus to say “I judge no one” meant that he judged nobody based on appearances like the Pharisees did. Instead, Jesus judged with the wisdom and insight of his heavenly Father. He said to them, “In your own Law (that is, your own interpretation of the Law), it takes two witnesses to verify a fact. Very well, I am one who testifies for myself; my other witness is the Father, who sent me.”

This only further exasperated the Pharisees who snidely demanded to know, then “Where is your father?” For them, to have Jesus put forward his “Father” as a witness was lame unless he could produce his Father in the flesh. But ironically, producing His Father in the flesh was the very thing Jesus had been doing all along. “If you knew me,” he replied, “you would know my Father too,” meaning, of course, that they would know the God they claimed to serve. Granted, his own disciples had the same trouble making this connection. Philip said, “Lord, just show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” To which Jesus answered, “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”

It’s easy to empathize with Philip here too. It would be nice to have an observable manifestation of God now and then, some visible proof that God’s really here. This would be especially during times of doubt or when you are trying to explain what you believe to someone who doesn’t believe it. The good news is that the Bible says there is visible proof. You can roll out a observable manifestation of God on demand. Jesus will allude to himself as “the light of the world” again in John 11; but otherwise the designation only shows up one more time in all of Scripture. Jesus uses it in Matthew 5, but not in reference to himself. There, addressing his followers, Jesus said, “you are the light of the world.” Like the light of Tabernacles radiating from the Temple that reflected off every courtyard in Jerusalem, so the light of the world radiating from Christ reflects off of those who call Christ Lord. As Jesus was visible proof of the Father, so are Christians the visible proof of Jesus. The apostle Paul calls us the body of Christ.

“Great,” you’re thinking. "That should go over real well. For folks to believe that Jesus is real, they need to look at Christians? No wonder the church is doomed.”

And yet for most of us, coming to real faith in Jesus when it happened finally came through real relationships with real-live Christians who were connected to real-live Christian communities of Christians where real-live Christianity was practiced. The gospel is more than some abstract compilation of evidence with a simple prayer tacked onto the back. The gospel is more than a well-crafted event or a well-honed speech. The gospel is situated in the concrete things Christians do to, with and for other people. Most of us weren’t talked into faith. We were loved into faith.

I once had the pleasure of speaking at a university where a group of Christian students took Halloween as an opportunity to invite their entire campus to a discussion about Christianity. They wanted to be the light for their whole campus. Theirs was an expansive effort to reach every student, which they did by purchasing 12,000 pieces of candy which they packed into 4000 trick or treat bags along with an invitation to the discussion. They then delivered these bags to every single dorm room at the university. I was impressed, but also curious. So I asked, “how many people were in their rooms when you stopped by?” “I don’t know,” she said, “we never got to talk to anyone, we just dropped off the bags.”

The turnout that night turned out to be nearly all Christians. And we ended up having a good discussion. Yet afterwards, one student came over to express her disappointment. She said she and her friends put so much effort into these outreach events but the people they invited rarely came. “I’m tired of going through all of this work just to have nobody show up,” she said. “Why should we have to keep trying so hard?” I replied with something pastoral about the long haul of obedience and trusting God with the outcomes, about how the search for truth must begin with an interest in finding it, and about how they should probably have had somebody else be their speaker that night. But as I thought about her comments later, I was again reminded how among the reasons we busy ourselves doing all the stuff we do is because the real work of the gospel can be so scary.

The gospel is more than a well-crafted event or a well-honed speech. The gospel is situated in the concrete things people do to, with and for other people. Acting justly, loving mercifully and walking humbly all imply actual interactions with difficult and needy people, not imaginary conceptualizations of how you wish or might wish people should be. Jesus died on the cross to redeem sinners. Redeemed sinners die to ourselves for the sake of others. To share the gospel is to bear witness to Christ who is the paragon and paradigm of new life lived. To witness to Jesus means that others have to witness you. We embody the words we say. Our practice shapes our proclamation. Our lives match our speech. And this is true even when we fail—because when we fail, that’s when we demonstrate what repentance and resurrection look like. We are the light of the world not because we are flawless, but because we strive to be honest and humble and courageous and faithful and hopeful and kind.

“Let your light shine before all people so they can see it,” Jesus said, even on those days when it's just a flicker. In the final analysis, light proves itself simply by shining.

I trust none of you are surprised that David Fisher isn’t preaching here this morning as promised. Our former Senior Minister, scheduled to swap pulpits with me today, has rightly remained in New York City with his congregation as they recover from the ravages of Super-storm Sandy. The storm left at least 41 dead in the city alone with a financial toll approaching $50 billion. David told me that many from his congregation had been flooded out, with a few needing to stay with him and Gloria in their parsonage. Sitting up on a hill, their church building has been a refuge for many evacuated from their low-lying homes. Transportation problems have made going back to work difficult, especially with so many from his church working in blacked out lower Manhattan. We’ve rescheduled our swap for Mother’s Day, though many parts of New York and New Jersey will still be rebuilding even then. The whole area is left to deal with a new normal.

Sandy was a magnificent storm. Had she stayed out at sea, we would have marveled at her immensity and power for a moment, but then switched over to watch Monday Night Football. But once Sandy came ashore, marvel turned to horror and there was no changing the channel. We watched, transfixed, as the enormous waves pounded beachfronts and boardwalks and profuse water fiercely roared into subways and tunnels and over houses in what many now agree is the worst storm ever to hit New York City. Afterwards, religious blogs pondered the meaning of it all. Throughout the Old Testament especially, natural disaster is a commonly employed as an agent of justice, alongside pestilence and war. But these days, those who remain willing to attribute nature’s power to God generally refrain from ascribing any intentionality. As Jesus says in the New Testament, rain falls on the righteous and unrighteous alike.

Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, asserts that “God is moral,” but “nature as not. Nature is value-free. It can’t tell the role between the deserving the undeserving. God’s role is not to decide where the hurricane goes and how severe it is. God’s role is to motivate people to help neighbors and improve methods to predict hurricanes. God is found not in the problem, but in the resilience.”

I don’t disagree with this. It makes me feel better about a God who presumably is more powerful than nature. But as the Creator of heaven and earth, hurricanes and storm surges still fall under his watch. So where was God? The best theologians have been able to offer by way of apology is what’s called the “free-will defense.” It goes something like this: The Trinitarian God who exists in eternal relationship as Father, Son and Holy Spirit desires a relationship of love with his creatures, but cannot coerce it and still call it love. Love by definition must be freely given and freely received, which means that it can also be freely rejected. Could not God simply force his creatures to use their freedom appropriately? No, because a person is not truly free if they are not free to choose wrongly. Ergo the rub. God allows for his people’s rejection and subsequent sin in order to have genuine relationship with them.

 But that still leaves open the question of where the initial desire to choose wrongly came from. It’s the same question we ask in regard to our own behavior. How is it that we who possess the very Spirit of God, can nevertheless choose to behave in ways so contrary to that Spirit? We answer that God is not done with us yet. Sin still has a foothold. We’ve yet to become who we will be in Christ. If this is the case for the creature, could it also be the case for creation? What if creation is not so much something good that went bad, but something started as good but just not yet done, incomplete and yet still due to be finished? This is not to say that nature is moral and makes willful choices, but the processes by which it operates can freely go this way or that, resulting in everything from random mutations to colliding galaxies. Just as the free will of people can result in rejecting God’s will, so the free process of creation results in mosquitoes and the diseases they carry—as well as hurricanes, volcanic eruptions and drought. Still, we would like to think that God would do more to protect people from harm. Are deaths and disasters an unavoidable outcome of freedom? Does the Lord value creaturely freedom so much as to be constrained by it?

God only knows. Creation ultimately exists for His glory, not for human approval. Granted, there are places where God does defy human freedom in response to our own abuses of it. Again, Scripture describes severe weather at times as an agent of justice. The Lord is awesome and righteous and hates evil. Does this mean he would ever still cause calamity? Personally, I’m more comfortable blaming climate change. However I do know there remains a response to calamity that the Lord eagerly welcomes. In the 13^th chapter of Luke’s gospel a report goes viral about a hideous crime some attribute to the rule of Pontius Pilate. While ceremonial sacrifices were being offered in the Temple, Roman security forces stormed in and brutally massacred five worshippers. Adding blasphemy to murder, Pilate’s soldiers then proceeded to pour the victim’s blood upon the Temple altar. Where was God? Over in the next county, in the flesh.

Apparently reports had yet to reach Jesus. Several rushed to break the news. Surely as a Galilean himself, he would share their shock and fury. Surely as a compassionate shepherd he would share their sorrow. Surely as a revered and renowned teacher and prophet, he would offer shrewd guidance as to the ferocious vengeance they could exact in exchange. Surely as a popular preacher, he would launch into a tirade against the tyranny of Pilate and demand his ouster. Surely as a celebrated miracle worker would call down from heaven the thunderous wrath of God! But Jesus does none of these things. Instead, he makes it all about them: “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all others?”

What about barbarous sacrilege has been committed against God’s people in His very house? What about Pilate? What about the Romans? What about the victims? Employing that annoying ability to peer inside the human heart; Jesus knew their ultimate concern was not for the ill-fated Galileans, but for their own fate. Customary among the convictions of ancient people was the belief that one’s miseries and tragedies correlated, tit for tat, to one’s misdeeds and transgressions. By behaving yourself and being good, you could ward off most misfortune. Bad things only happened to bad people. These slaughtered Galileans had obviously done something to bring this tragedy upon themselves. 

But Jesus said no. “Unless you repent you will perish just as they did.” And then adding calamity to atrocity, Jesus went on to cite eighteen who were killed when a tower collapsed on top of them—not unlike the sad losses of many whose trees and houses collapsed in the storm. “Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others? No,” Jesus said, “but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”  Try to imagine my preaching this sermon to David’s New York congregation this morning. They would have hauled me out to the harbor and tossed me in. I hope they don’t listen to this on the podcast or that Mother’s Day pulpit swap won’t happen either. This is an insensitive sermon. Some may even say offensive. But it’s what Jesus preached. His congregation needed support and compassion, some assurances that everything would work out OK, that God loved them just as they are. But Jesus goes hellfire and brimstone instead.

And then he tells them a parable. A man planted a fig tree in his vineyard. He plants it and expects figs from it. Year one goes by. No figs. Year two. No figs. Year three. Still no figs. He’s frustrated. He’s infuriated! He screams for his gardener. “Look at this tree. Look at it! Three years it’s taken up space in my vineyard. THREE YEARS!! And for what? FOR Nothing. NOTHING. Not one stinking fig. Get it out of here. Cut it down! It’s just wasting dirt!”

His gardener replies, “Why don’t we give it one more year?”

“OK.” 

The standard interpretation runs something like this: God is the vineyard owner, you’re the fig tree. God demands results. Your life is marked by a lack of results. You’re not producing any fruit. God has been patient, but you have not responded. The ax of judgment tickles your trunk. “Wait,” interrupts a gardener, “let’s give it one more chance.” “OK,” replies the stern vineyard owner, “But that’s it. One more chance.” Standard application: Your time is limited, you had better get your act together and start producing fruit or you’re going to find yourself producing sparks. Unless you repent you will perish. There’s a limit to God’s patience. 

Such an interpretation only supports the misguided equation the Galilean congregation presumed. I behave and God rewards. Be fruitful and thrive! Be fruitless and burn. I’ll buy the vineyard owner being God. A severe representation to be sure, but nevertheless firmly in line with his holy and judicial righteousness. The wrath of God against sin is real. I’ll also accept the mantle of our being fruitless fig trees. God looks for fruit in our lives and doesn’t always find much. There’s plenty of other stuff to be sure, but when it comes down to the things God cares about most: love, kindness, honesty and faithfulness, the pickings are too often slim. “I planted you in the middle of my vineyard but you just waste my dirt. I come around looking for fruit but I find none. Firewood is your only good.”

Enter the gardener. I think he's the pivotal character in this tale. He’s willing to do whatever he can. As he appeared to Mary on Easter morning, I think the gardener is Jesus. He intercedes for the tree. “Wait a minute, sir,” he says to the owner, “Let it alone one more year. Let me dig around it and throw some manure on it. Let’s see if it bears fruit next year. If not, cut it down then.” End of parable. The parable ends and the gardener descends into the dirt and the dung for the sake of the tree. “Sir, let it alone,” is the exact same Greek phrase translated later in Luke as “Father forgive them,” words Jesus uttered as he hung on the cross. The gardener descends into the dirt and the dung of human sin for our sake. He brings resurrection to our roots and fruit to our branches.

 “Repent or you’ll perish too” does seem so harsh and untimely. But judging from the responses of many in Sandy’s aftermath—from the affable cooperation between Governor Christie and President Obama just in time for the election, all the way to isolated New York apartment dwellers suddenly behaving like lifelong neighbors—it’s as if repentance goes without saying. If you remember a few sermons back, you may recall me noting that the focal component of repentance is typically sorrow or contrition. The English word derives from Latin meaning to double down on your penitence. But in Greek, the word is more akin to changing the way that you think. To repent is to have your eyes opened, your heart transformed, you spirit moved, your priorities shifted. And as we all know, disaster has a way of doing that. 

Facebook, Twitter, personal blogs and mainstream media all offered a seemingly endless stream of photos and stories of devastation. One New York blogger wrote, “It’s impossible to process it all. We are dazed and feeling the effects of a real and sustained threat to basics we all took for granted a week ago. Physical safety, food, shelter, clean water, a hot shower, electricity, a pleasant walk in the park or on the beach, and the stability and predictability of our daily routines feel more cherished as they become more distant. What we are seeing now is that there is strength in the number of Sandy survivors. There's also a collective consciousness that much of the petty, generic stuff we worried about before we had heard a hurricane was heading our way is a lot less relevant now. The past few days have resulted in a shift of priorities and resources.” 

Of course, talk to anyone who works in emergency services and who has responded to disasters, and you’ll hear that in the days and weeks that follow tragedy, people often lose their patience and their hope. It's easy to get frustrated with the fact that recovery takes time. Again, one New Yorker wrote, “For all the computer-generated models we saw over the weekend about Sandy's expected path, the next stage is almost worse; it’s unchartered territory.” New ground.

A perfect place to plant a fruit tree. Hope for New York, a partnership connecting local churches, is mobilizing volunteers to help clean up flooded buildings and go door to door in apartments with power outages to connect with those in need. And in Haiti, where flooding and unsanitary conditions have led to a cholera outbreak, the disaster response team of the Evangelical Lutheran Church is sending medical doctors and supplies. Next Saturday we gather to pack food for Haiti through Impact Lives—an endeavor that now carries increased urgency. Sign up to help if you haven’t already. Our youth ministry packed close to 12,000 meals on Halloween. World Vision, Samaritan’s Purse and other relief organizations are on the ground too. As a church and as individuals we support their efforts. 

Disaster spurs repentance. Hardship bears fruit. Lost is found, least is great, weakness is strength, darkness is light, death is life, defeat is victory—such are the ways of the Lord. A cross marks the path of redemption. Christ’s own body and blood become our thanksgiving feast. But you have to open your eyes to see it, have your heart transformed, you spirit moved, your priorities shifted. In a word, you have to repent.

So far in our survey of light this fall we’ve looked at creation’s first burst, Noah’s rainbow, the Lord’s pillar of fiery cloud that led Israel out of Egypt, the tree-of-life lamp stand that lit up the Tabernacle, as well as last Sunday’s walk in the dark as we considered the righteous suffering of Job.

Due to the severity of Job’s suffering, especially unsettling since it was all God’s doing, I noted how not single child born in the annals of Judaism or Christianity has ever been named after him. It’s just not worth the risk. However, Mustafa Omar who hails from Afghanistan, and who along with his wife Jen joined our church this morning, informed me afterwards how among Arabic speakers, Job is in fact a very common name. Taking for granted that most Arabic speakers weren’t Bible-believers (at least not in the Jewish or Christian sense), I decided to see how the Quran depicted Job, since many of the Bible’s characters appear in Islam too. You might be glad to hear that the Quran provides a much shorter version of Job: a mere six verses compared to the Old Testament’s 42 chapters. And moreover, when Job complained about his suffering to Allah (having blamed it all on Satan), Job immediately received a miraculous fresh wellspring of water from which to wash and drink, and was then verily praised for coming to Allah the ever-merciful with all his troubles. So sure, Job should be a popular name among Arabic-speakers.

Arriving several centuries after the close of the Christian Bible, Muslims view the Quran as a welcome improvement. Christians don’t regard the Quran as  the word of God, though many of us would probably welcome a few improvements. Take the Christmas Story. (Only 72 shopping days left). Greeting cards and carols polish it up as round yon virgin and imperturbable child peacefully sleeping while snow falls, cattle low and bells jingle. But if you actually read the story, what you get is a very sordid tale of an engaged young woman apparently cheating on her fiancée. She says that God did it, adding blasphemy to the infidelity. The ancient laws allowed for the betrayed Joseph to stone Mary, but preferring to keep the scandal out of the papers, he decided to break it off quietly so to save everybody any further embarrassment. 

The whole thing was a miserable mess. And as Joseph would eventually discover, as with Job, it was all God’s doing. We’re taught that the virgin birth was necessary for the Son of God to possess no original sin. So why make everything look so sinful? Why all the secrecy? Why not a blaze of public, visible Holy Spirit glory and then a pregnant Mary? That way her neighbors could have thrown her a baby shower with swaddling clothes from Baby Gap. Somebody could have made sure there was room at the Bethlehem Hilton so that Jesus wouldn’t have had to be born in a barn. Better yet, why not just skip the whole birth process entirely? Spare Joseph the painful humiliation. Spare Mary the painful labor. Spare Jesus the hazardous temptations of adolescence. It’s not like he did anything for his first thirty years anyway. Just show up on Good Friday and be done by Sunday.

However the church has always insisted that the death and resurrection of Jesus was contingent on his obedient life. Jesus takes away our sins to be sure. But he also gives us his well-earned righteousness, a righteousness won despite the best that Satan could throw at him. Like Job, Jesus took all the devil dished out, yielded to the sacrificial will of his Father, but then topped it all off by shouldering the miserable mess of human sin—something only Jesus could do because he had no sin of his own, having lived a perfectly obedient life.

Christian’s insist on Jesus’ obedient life, though we’ve had to rely on some troubling equations to pull it off. We believe that Jesus was totally human, but also totally God. It’s hard to say with a straight face. As the Nicene Creed famously affirms: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven:by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man for our sake…”

The Nicene Creed wasn’t crafted at some church committee meeting over coffee and donuts. It emerged after centuries of infighting, some of it bloody, over how to do the math of the incarnation. How can any real person really be God? You’re either human or divine, the creature or the Creator, but not both. This is definitely a place where the Bible could have used some improving, if only to minimize the dissonance. On the one hand, Jesus walked on water, rose from the dead and read people’s minds. But on the other hand, Jesus had no idea when he’d come back on earth, couldn’t tell who touched him after some healing power went out of his body, was surprised by the faith of a Roman Centurion and got talked into changing his mind by a Gentile woman, of all people, who needed a demon cast out of her daughter. What kind of a God acts so unpredictably?

The Nicene Creed does provide an unintentional hint, apropos to our theme for this fall. “Light from light.” Unbeknown to our forefathers of faith, light behaves as unpredictably as God himself, and with the same sort of dual nature as Jesus. Take an example from your bathroom mirror. Did you know that every morning when you get up and look in the mirror, you only see 95% of your reflection. Praise the Lord. Where is the other 5% of the light? It goes through the mirror. How is this possible? Because light behaves both as a true wave—bouncing back from solid surfaces that reflect it—and as a true particle—bouncing off but also breaching those same reflective surfaces. How do we know which will bounce and which will breach? We don’t. Fire a photon at a mirror and there’s literally no way to predict whether it will bounce back or pass through. Photons are by their very nature predictably unpredictable.

The discovery of light’s quirky behavior—or maybe I should say quarky behavior—made a miserable mess of classical physics. Remember the picture of Sir Isaac Newton under a tree getting bonked on the head by an apple? Newtonian mechanics and its predictable dependence on gravity ruled the scientific realm for the next 300 years. A devout believer, Newton viewed the predictability of nature as a testimony to the reliability of God. But then along came Albert Einstein, and with him the quantum mechanics—Messrs. Bohr, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and others—whose discoveries of life at the subatomic level of particles and quarks meant that in some cases that same apple would not bonk but hover in an unstable state only to fall at some unpredictable moment calculated only in terms of probability. There may be a high probability that the apple will fall within a very short time, but there is also a small probability that the apple will suspend above the ground for hours, just as a photon of light flies through a mirror.

Not only that, but according to quantum mechanics, any one photon or quark can exist in multiple places simultaneously. It’d be like having your umbrella in your car, in your house and at work all at the same time, available whenever you need it. This unnerving reality drove Einstein, no real believer himself, to contend that God could never behave is such dicey fashion.

But inasmuch as “God is light,” this is precisely how he operates. He’s everywhere at once and wherever you need him. Mystery is woven into the system. In fact, the more precise the scientific instruments and the more accurate the scientific measurements, the more we're certain of light’s indeterminate and double nature. In accordance with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (the closest thing to a law in quantum theory), any attempt to pinpoint a quark’s behavior is doomed. 

The Nobel Prize for Physics this week went to two scientists who confirmed light’s murky behavior. Normally, to detect light is to destroy it, since photons are absorbed into our retinas or into the chips in our cameras. But these physicists figured out how to isolate light without destroying it so as to more precisely observe its erratic behavior. Paradoxically, tapping into the unpredictable nature of quarks can actually lead to perfectly predictable applications—from the orbit of planets to the tick-tock of clocks. Among the practical applications of this year’s Nobel research is a practically perfect clock, one that would be off by only five seconds over the whole course of cosmic time—that’s five seconds for every 13.7 billion years. In Galatians we read how “God sent his Son, born of a woman, … to redeem … at just the right time.” Jesus Christ, as the author of nature, the light of the world and God in the flesh, unconventionally operates, but he does so right on schedule.

OK, so I’m getting a little carried away here. According to Matthew’s gospel, Jesus was born of a woman only that the “Scripture might be fulfilled.” The same with our passage this morning. Jesus “made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled.” Matthew is very deliberate about fulfilling Scripture. Our passage marks the fifth of ten times he mentions it. Chances are that Jesus was deliberate too. We read that he moved to Galilee of the Gentiles after hearing of John the Baptist’s arrest so that the prophecy might be fulfilled. John had made straight the way for Jesus’ coming and made clear that suffering would be part of the gospel. “Galilee of the Gentiles” indicated the gospel’s eventual scope. 

Jesus moving to Galilee and the Christmas Story both rely on the same section of Isaiah, chapters 7-9. In Isaiah 7, the prophet says, “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” However, given Isaiah’s context, it’s highly unlikely that the prophet was talking about the virgin Mary giving birth since the birth Isaiah predicted occurred in his own lifetime. Israel’s King Ahaz was in dire straits and needed divine help to fight his Assyrian enemies. Eager to help, God pressed Ahaz to ask for a sign. But Ahaz, feigning modesty, demurs. He wanted to do things his own way. So God gave him a sign of his own. “A young woman (a more accurate translation than the King James virgin) will have a baby and name it Emmanuel (which means God with us).” Big deal. Women have babies everyday. Which may have been the point: God being with Ahaz meant God letting nature takes its course. Assyria was strong enough to take down Israel any day of the week. So God lets them do it.

However Isaiah 7 in only the beginning of a whole string of events about a child and the name Emmanuel. In chapter 8, Emmanuel applies to the entire people of God coming under Assyrian attack. God not only lets Assyria run them over, but by being with his people, he gets run over too. But then in Isaiah 9, Emmanuel resurfaces, this time as a child born of redemption: “a son is given on whose name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of his dominion and peace there will be no end.” With the arrival of Jesus, “the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light; on those in the land of the shadow of death, light has dawned.” The ordinary child born in Isaiah 7 as a sign of failure unexpectedly gives way to the extraordinary child prophesied in chapter 9 as a sign of salvation. Matthew had Isaiah’s whole unpredictable pattern in mind when he spoke of Christ fulfilling it. Defeat turns out to be the pathway to victory. Failure the welcome mat for grace. Suffering, surprisingly, leads to gratitude and new life. And somehow, Jesus said while on earth, the Kingdom of Heaven is here.

 How is this possible? How can heaven be in two places, already here but not yet come? How can Jesus be both fully man and fully God? How can light behave as both particle and wave? How can a particle of matter exist everywhere at the same time, but then in only one place once you look at it? According to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, “to observe is to disturb.” This is disturbing. Physically speaking, you need light to see but to shine light disturbs what you look at because the photons of light bump into the particles of matter and moves them. You can never see where something actually is. You can only see where you’ve moved it. What you see isn’t ever what you were looking for. Mystery is woven into the system. Applied to psychology, to observe is to disturb your perspective. Like it or not, whenever we look at something we can only see it from a relative viewpoint. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applied to psychology means we must adjust our perspective to truly understand. You have to look at things differently to find what you’re looking for. Applied to theology then, to observe is to be disturbed by God. It is to have your eyes opened, your heart transformed, you spirit moved, your mind changed. It is, in a word, to repent.

 Normally, the focal component of repentance is sorrow or contrition due to sin. But the emphasis in Scripture is more on the change of mind and behavior due to a new reality. If the kingdom is here, you have to think about the world and your place in it differently. You have to adjust your perspective to reflect the reality of Jesus for whom lost is found and least is great. Repent and you understand Jesus as fully human and fully God, and are grateful that he is with you in suffering and for you in resurrection. Repent and see defeat as the pathway to victory. Repent and see failure as the welcome mat for grace. Repent and see suffering lead you to gratitude and new life. Repent, and by the light of Christ, you’ll see the kingdom of heaven everywhere.

Our theme is Biblical light, but we’ve spent a good deal of time in the dark in recent weeks. We’ve stumbled through darkness as mystery (the cloudy abode of the Lord), darkness as evil and sin    place Jesus says that we love more than the light), and this week into darkness as suffering, expressed no more representatively and bitterly than in the gut-wrenching cries of the blameless man Job. Back at creation God said “let there be light” and called it good. Here Job says “let there be dark” and calls it necessary. “Why is light given to one in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, who long for death, but it does not come…? Let the stars of its dawn be dark; let it hope for light, but have none; may it not see the eyelids of the morning—because it did not shut the doors of my mother’s womb, and hide trouble from my eyes.” Add the gloom of pending winter outside, and this might have been the morning to skip church.

Job has had a bad day. An upright man without guile, he tragically lost his house, his kids, his business, his money and his skin. But this is the real shocker: it was all God’s fault. The Lord gets embroiled in a presidential debate with Satan, though I’ll let your own political proclivities sort out which was the Democrat and which the Republican. At issue was the record of the incumbent, in this case the Lord, who in his defense invites the devil to consider his Job record. “Consider my servant Job. There is no one like him on earth. He is blameless and honest and reverent and moral.” Satan concedes that Job’s a fine man, but counters that nobody’s that good for no reason. Satan hisses, “You pamper him like a pet! You make sure nothing bad ever happens to him or his family or his possessions! You bless everything he does! But what do you think would happen if you reached down and took away all that is his? He’d curse you right to your face.”

This is no small line in the cosmic sand. As with Noah and Moses and Abraham in their day, Job is exhibit A when it comes to righteousness on earth. Should Job turn out to be a poser, God’s entire relationship project with people would be exposed as fraudulent. Do we worship God because he is Lord? Or merely for the benefits he promises? Where do true loyalties lie? We confess to love the Lord with all of our heart, soul and strength, but there’s only one way to know. As with the ludicrous command that Noah build a boat on dry ground, or the insanity of Moses rescuing a whole nation from slavery with a stick, and that atrocious request that Abraham sacrifice his only son Isaac, the Lord allows for Job to be run through the ringer. To be sifted like wheat. To be put to the test. God kills off Job’s cattle and camels, his house and his servants, his sons and his daughters. Job’s loss is total and cataclysmic. And he passes the test. Despite the enormity of his suffering, he worships the very God who has brought him to ruin. “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.”

Satan is not impressed. He cynically rebuts that the real test of faith is endangerment to one’s life. A man will always give up everything to save his own skin. Our genes are wired for self-survival. To see Job’s true character, wreck his body. Make him sick. “Skin for skin,” Satan says. You know it’s bad enough that the Lord and the devil are still on speaking terms, badder still that God lets Satan have at it. The devil does his dirty work, inflicting Job with malignant sores on from the sole of his feet to the crown of his head. “And Job took a broken piece of pottery with which to scrape himself as he sat among ashes.” Job’s wife had enough. She watches her pious husband and loathes him for accepting his doom. “Why do you try to hold on to your integrity?” she screams. “Curse God and die!” But Job replies as he scrapes at the pus, “shall we accept only good from the Lord and not anything bad?”

We have reached a high point in human ridiculousness here. An absurdity of faith. Jewish tradition regards Job as an incomparable saint, but not one single Jewish child has ever been named after him. Jacob and Noah and Daniel remain popular baby boy names from the Bible, Jacob being the top boy name overall this year. But Job? According to the Social Security Administration, no child in America has ever had that name. Why risk it? Job seems to agree: “Let the day be erased in which I was born,” he cries, “that night that said ‘a boy-child is conceived.’ Let that day be darkness, that night—let thick darkness seize it! Let it be blotted off the calendar, never again to be counted among the days of the year.”

Job, with Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, is assigned to those books of the Bible labeled “wisdom,” leading many to conclude that Job’s story of Job is more morality tale than real life event. If only that were the case. In our own congregation we’ve prayed for the Thomas family, Jennifer and Bob, who on their way to the funeral following the tragic death of Jennifer’s cousin, got word of the declining health of Bob’s mother. He went to be by her side as she died, only to then have Jennifer’s beloved grandmother die too. At the same time, Bob’s job was in upheaval as his department got eliminated, and then their daughter fractured her elbow playing in the yard. All this occurred as Jennifer planned an annual benefit to raise money for MS Research, a disease that she suffers herself. The dark woes of Job may be consigned to wisdom literature, but they are hardly fictional.

We all suffer our own misery and affliction. Its persistence remains the foremost argument against the existence of God. If the Lord is light, how can life get so dark? We need an explanation. Job initially takes his licks lying down, but even he starts to wonder, especially once his familiar friends from the philosophy club come over to commiserate. We’re mostly remember the obtuse advice they offer later on, but their initial impulse was powerfully compassionate. They see Job but hardly recognize him, his disease and distress were so severe. But rather than draw back as we often do in the presence of extreme misery, these friends draw near and join Job in his ashes. They weep with him seven days, without a word, “for they saw that his suffering was very great.” While in college a classmate of mine died too soon, and his father recalled how at the hospital so many well-meaning church folk came by to comfort by telling him try to find something good in his son’s death. This father later wrote how he wished these friends would have simply sat and cried with him.

Job finally breaks the silence himself, with the bitter words we ponder this morning. His grief outweighed his hope. “My sighing comes like my bread, and my groanings are poured out like water. Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes.” Job’s lament opens the verbal door to his friends, whose loquaciousness runs on for the next thirty-five chapters. “Why do bad things happen to good people?” is a hard question. One friend insists that it’s an impossible premise; Job must have committed some crime. Another argues that Job’s misery cannot last if he is truly blameless, while a third suggests Job repent anyway, just in case. A fourth friend comes late to the debate and tells Job to treat his troubles as a guard against future sin—all of which amounts to well-meaning church folks trying to make sense of Job’s suffering. But to Job, his tragedy is all God’s fault. Only the Lord can give him the answer he needs, even if it’s not the answer he wants. 

Note that Job loses hope. But he never loses faith. To blame God is to believe in God. “I know that my redeemer lives,” he insists, with words sung every Christmas season in Handel’s Messiah and recited in every funeral liturgy. “I know that my redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and though my skin has been destroyed, in my flesh I shall see God standing on my side,” and I will get my answer.

Both happen. Job sees God and he gets his answer. The Lord appears as we have grown accustomed—in a thick cloud of darkness. God appears and treats Job’s demanding entreaty, not with condescension, but with an invitation to step up. “Who darkens my counsel by words without knowledge?” thunders the Lord. “Stand strong like a man, I have some questions for you.” It’s all very dramatic. God proceeds to riddle Job with an inquisitorial barrage, four chapters long, intended to answer one simple question: “Who are you, Job? Were you there when I laid the foundation of the earth? Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place? Have you entered into the springs of the sea, or walked in the recesses of the deep? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness?”

God answers “who are you” by asking “who am I?” The way we see God always shapes the way we see ourselves. Here God describes himself by resorting to creation. “Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth? Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you? Can you send forth lightning? Who has put wisdom in the inward parts, or given understanding to the mind?” 

Job is duly overwhelmed, though these days the argument is not so sufficient. Astronomers look at the heavens and see a chaotic cosmos, a universe expanding with increasing speed, its planets and stars facing certain annihilation as immense black holes suck away energy and dying nebulae with their roiling cauldrons of gas tear space apart, decimating the night sky. As for life on this planet, its course has been a ravenous evolutionary epic, demanding billions of years of apparent waste and futility, species extermination and organism road kill. The massive dying off has not only been rampant, but mandatory. The emergence of life depends on the death of prior life, millions of generations of mutational and reproductive failure, making for a world where the struggle for survival means cruelty and suffering are standard fare. There has been so much dysfunction, so much excess and error, so much ruin and ravage that to attribute it to any superior, intelligent and benevolent Being is practically an insult. 

Of course God knows all about insults. He endured them in person as he cruelly suffered and died on a cross. And yet this darkest moment of divine life is revealed as the supreme expression of divine love. An ancient instrument of ruin and waste ends up as the emblem of extravagant sacrifice, the ultimate reminder of a creator who so loved his creatures that he would suffer everything he made for us: billions of years and billions of galaxies and billions of organisms and his only begotten son that whoever would believe would find real life. Real life that gets lived not in the vacuum of bliss and apparent prosperity, but in the clarity of knowing what truly matters and with empathy and sacrificial love. On the one hand this sounds horribly sadistic—what kind of God operates this way? Only a God willing to suffer himself with us and for us, so that on the other hand, our own unearned suffering might prove redemptive and give us wisdom.

 “My ears had heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you,” Job acknowledges at the end. “Therefore I despise myself for what I have said and repent in dust and ashes.” And God blesses Job doubly more than he had been before. “I know that you can do all things,” Job confessed. “No purpose of yours can be thwarted.”

Many of us had the honor of joining Jennifer Thomas and family a her MS Benefit where she recited a lyrical and totally logical rant against the ravages of MS and all the ways it has ruined her life, ways that would make it hard to be anything but bitter. But then looking out on a banquet hall packed full of loving family and friends, she surprised us all by thanking God for her MS; thankful for all that it has given her and for all it teaches her. For light that always pierces through darkness. This is the high point of human ridiculousness here. The absurdity of faith. “I know that my redeemer lives,” Job says, “and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and though my skin has been destroyed, in my flesh I shall see God standing on my side.”

What kind of God operates this way? Only a God who suffers for the sake of our redemption, who sets a table with the emblems of his redemption that we might know he stands on our side. Rather than give us an answer, God gives himself in a silent act of love. Rather than explain with words, he weeps with us, dies for us, and then raises us up to the height of human ridiculousness--a resurrected life in him.

We’re looking at light in the Bible this fall, though we ended last Sunday on an ironically dark note. While light shines throughout Scripture as a prominent ID for the Lord—bright, immaterial, illuminating, unchangeable, incorruptible, pure, life-giving and everywhere—Scripture also describes God as purposely shrouded in darkness. The Lord led the Israelites up out of Egypt as both pillar of fire and of cloud, with both radiance and obscurity. To Moses, the Lord burned brightly in a bush, but then thundered darkly on a mountain. In the New Testament, Jesus comes as light to the world, but the supreme expression of his love comes with darkness and death on a cross.

Here in Exodus 25, the setting is the Tabernacle, that mobile tent home for the Lord modeled after creation itself. It housed the famed Ark of the Covenant, that 2x2x4 foot box covered with gold, carried by poles with the Ten Commandments stored inside. Atop the box sat the mercy seat, the emblematic throne of the Lord fashioned after his heavenly throne. The Ark signaled God’s assured, palpable presence among his people. However the signal of God’s presence was not a glowing Tabernacle, but an overcast one. We read that the “cloud covered the Tabernacle and the glory of the Lord filled it.”

Because the Tabernacle was modeled after creation, its architecture depicting the heavens and the earth, I loosely compared the Tabernacle last Sunday to a mobile planetarium, specifically the University of Minnesota’s mobile planetarium called the Exploradome that will be parked in our gym as part of our Guelich Lecture Weekend, October 19-21. We will host Dr. Jennifer Wiseman, Senior Project Scientist for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, who will share and show some of her findings along with their implications for our faith. It will a wonderful opportunity to introduce friends to our church.

To be a good planetarium requires darkness. You can only see the glory of starlight at night. In the mobile Tabernacle, God’s glory centered on the mercy seat within the Holy of Holies, a smoky inner sanctum where the Lord sat enthroned. Darkness served to evoke divine mystery. However the Bible also uses darkness as metaphor for human sin and human trouble. “Light has come into the world,” Jesus said, “but people loved darkness more because their deeds were evil.” Yet whether as mystery or malice, the glory of God shines through the dark. As King David sang in Psalm 139, “even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.” And then amidst his personal troubles in 2 Samuel 22, beset by enemies on every side, King David still hopefully sang, “O Lord, you deliver people who are humble and oppressed, but your eyes are upon the haughty to bring them down. Indeed you are my lamp, O Lord; O God, you lighten my darkness.”

In the Tabernacle, the golden lampstand represented God’s light shining in darkness. Nevertheless, I trust that Exodus 25 has never ranked high on your devotional reading list. Its tedious descriptions offer little by way of personal enlightenment or life application. “The base and the shaft of the lampstand shall be made of hammered work; its cups, its calyxes, and its petals shall be of one piece with it; and there shall be six branches going out of its sides, three branches of the lampstand out of one side of it and three branches of the lampstand out of the other side of it.” How can people say the Bible is boring? Why all the pedantic attention to detail? The New Testament book of Hebrews explains it this way: the Tabernacle was “a copy and shadow of the heavenly tent. Moses was warned as he built it, ‘See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.’” That warning comes from our passage this morning. If you’re going to build a copy of heaven on earth, you have to get it right. A planetarium’s no good if its stars are out of alignment.

Instead than starlight, however, the Tabernacle lampstand, pounded out of 75 pounds of pure gold, was built to look like a tree, specifically an almond tree. It was decked with seven olive oil lamps, seven being reminiscent of creation, which made it a flaming tree, reminding Moses, perhaps, of that burning bush. But why an almond tree? In the Near East, the almond tree is the first tree to bloom, a sign of new life. More importantly, an almond tree branch served as Moses’ staff with which he split the Red Sea. Moses’ brother Aaron, the first Levitical priest, also carried an almond staff. It was stored inside the Ark of the Covenant alongside the Ten Commandments.

The tree-shaped lampstand emitted light in the Tabernacle so that the Levitical priests could see the way to the Lord in the dark. It was like a door into heaven, into another world. “Indeed you are my lamp, O Lord; O God, you lighten my darkness.” At night, the tree light would have made the Tabernacle the brightest house in the Israelite encampment. No individual family would have chosen to use the large amount of oil necessary to keep seven lamps constantly lit. Exodus and Leviticus both required for the lampstand to leave its lights on all the time. Leaving the lights on meant then much the same thing that it means now: somebody’s home. In the case of the Tabernacle, that somebody was God.

The connection between trees and light is more than merely symbolic. It’s embedded in nature itself. You learned this is basic biology. Light hits trees and causes photosynthesis, a process whereby light captured from the sun converts into life—life for plants and life for people. We breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide. Trees take in carbon dioxide and put out oxygen. It’s a beautifully efficient circle of life. If all the stuff we use could be paired in such perfect harmony we would live in a zero-waste world. I learned this watching PBS the other night.

I learned that more energy from the Sun hits the Earth in one hour than all the energy consumed on our planet in an entire year. This fact inspires dreams of solar power as a clean energy source for the world. Solar panels convert sunlight into energy, but these panels are fragile and quite expensive because the silicon they're made of has to be very pure. PBS reported about one company trying to make solar cells more cheaply and durably. They’re modeled after nature itself. The silicon for these new solar cells is shaped like the veins of a tree leaf, embedded in a conductive plastic film. The leaf shape allows electrons to flow through the veins, even if the silicon has impurities. These silicon leaves are cheap to grow and flexible enough to be rolled out like a blanket. What’s especially significant is the how these silicon leaves deal with another big concern in solar power: what to do when the sun don’t shine. Trees have this figured out. The best way to store energy is in chemical bonds, as with photosynthesis, which is what this new silicon does, converting sunlight into storable energy. Hydrogen can be isolated and then easily packaged into batteries. If this idea scales up, the hydrogen produced would provide zero-waste fuel to power our homes and factories and cars.

The connection between trees and light is the connection between trees and life, or more to the point in the Tabernacle, the tree of life. In Genesis, God made people and gave them the sun and trees for energy to live daily life, and then on day six, the Lord gave them a tree as their source of eternal life, but we sinners all know firsthand how badly that worked out. It worked out badly for Adam and Eve. It worked out badly for Israel and the rest of humanity. But God’s glory still shines in the dark, and thus on the on the sixth day in the Gospels (the day before the Sabbath), God, having become human himself in Christ. He hung on a tree to redeem human sin, and then by the bright light of resurrection converted the cross into a new tree of life. Turn to the end of the Bible, where Revelation previews eternity itself, and you find that “tree of life producing its fruit every month; and leaves for the healing of all people.” It’s a zero-waste world where the light’s always on. There is “no need of lamp or sun,” we read, “for the Lord God will be our light… forever.”

The Tabernacle’s golden lampstand depicts the tree of life. No word on whether the Genesis tree of life was an almond tree, any more than the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis was a red delicious, but the tree of life was the tree of eternal life, and thus the golden lampstand’s seven lamps stayed constantly lit. God’s light always shines. Out of reverence for eternal light, Jewish tradition mandates that people not mess with light on the Sabbath (Sabbath being the seventh day and a foretaste of heaven.) God let there be light on the first day One, but rested from making light on the seventh, meaning you’re not to make light on the Sabbath. As the Lord declares in Leviticus, “You shall keep my Sabbaths and reverence my sanctuary: I am the LORD.”

You’ll recall that I spent a month living with some friends back in Boston according to the book of Leviticus (which you can still read about in my book on sale for cheap at the reception desk—just a few copies left). One of these friends, named Sokol, had a Jewish colleague at work who, hearing of Sokol’s Levitical adventure, invited Sokol to take part in his family’s orthodox Sabbath one weekend. Sokol described the Sabbath meal they shared once a week as akin to the Thanksgiving feast he ate once a year. All the cooking, however, had happened on Thursday, because his hosts still had to go to work on Friday, leaving no time to prepare the feast before the sun set on Friday (Jewish Sabbath runs from Friday sundown to Saturday sundown).

Since Sabbath rules prohibited messing with light on the Sabbath, they had to turn on all the lights that needed to be on for the twenty-four hours beforehand (living room, bathroom, ceremonial lamps) and turn off the lights that needed to be off (bedroom). Sokol proudly added, “I was glad to see that my reading of orthodox Jewish books came in handy when I reminded them how the refrigerator light needed to be turned off too.” Otherwise, whenever they opened and closed the refrigerator (which was allowed), the light would come on and go off (which was prohibited). The Jewish family, bending into the refrigerator to unscrew the bulb, irksomely looked at each other as if to say, “who invited this guy?” Reverence can be irksome and inconvenient.

A past Guelich Lecturer here at Colonial, Barbara Brown Taylor, describes reverence as “that virtue that keeps us from trying to act like God.” “By definition,” she writes, “reverence is the recognition of something greater than the self—something that is beyond human creation or control, something that transcends full human understanding.” God certainly meets that criteria. So does light. So do trees. Taylor tells of a Native American elder she knows who begins teaching people reverence by taking them to a tree. He asks them, “Do you know that you didn’t make this tree?” If they say yes, then he knows they are on their way to reverence.

And yet the way to reverence is not a straight line. Last Sunday we saw how God took Israel the long way around on their way out of Egypt. “Reverence requires a certain pace,” Taylor writes, “a willingness to take detours, even side trips, which are not part of the original plan.” She goes on to mention Moses, whose life changed forever that day a bush burned bright. The bush wasn’t right in front of Moses, however. It must have been over to the side somewhere, because when Moses saw it, he said, “I must turn aside and look at this great light and see why this burning bush is not burned up.” The bright burning bush turned out to be a talking bush too, and it called out to Moses and told him to take off his shoes out of reverence. He was standing on holy ground.

Barbara Brown Taylor admitted she’s never seen a burning bush, but she did see a garden turn golden once. “I must have been sixteen, earning summer money by keeping a neighbor’s cats while she was away. The first time I let myself into the house, the fleas leapt onto my legs like airborne piranha. Brushing them off as I opened the cat food and cleaned litter pans, I finally fled through the back door with the bag of trash my employer had left for me to carry out to the garbage cans by the garage. I could hear the fleas inside flinging themselves against the plastic, so that it sounded as if light rain were falling inside the bag. I could not wait to be shed of it, which was why I was in a hurry.

On my way to the garbage cans, I passed a small garden off to the left that was not visible from the house. Glancing at it, I got a whole dose of loveliness at once—the high arch of the trees above, the mossy flagstones beneath, the cement birdbath, the cushiony bushes, the white wrought-iron chair—all lit by stacked planes of sunlight that turned the whole scene golden. It was like a door into heaven, into another world. I had to go through it. I knew that if I did, then I would be golden too.

But first I had to ditch the trash bag. The fleas popped against the plastic as I hurried to the big aluminum garbage cans. Stuffing the bag into one of them, I turned back toward the garden, fervent to explore what I had only glimpsed in passing. But when I got there, the light had changed. All that was left was a little overgrown sitting spot that no one had sat in for years. The smell of cat litter drifted from the direction of the garbage cans. The garden was no longer on fire. I had noticed the light, but I did not turn aside. I had a bag of trash to attend to instead.”

“The light has come into the world,” Jesus said, “But people loved their darkness more than the light, because their deeds were evil. All who do evil avoid the light and do not come near for fear that their deeds may be exposed. But those who want what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their life is now lived in God.” By the light of Christ, as with the lamp stand that foreshadowed it, heaven comes to earth. Eternity enters the present. As the apostle Paul declared, new creation is now. The light of Christ blazes the way to a beautiful new reality of goodness and brightness and justice and rightness—a veritable zero-waste world. The door to heaven is open. Let us set down our trash and go through it.