John's Gospel: An Entirely Different Christmas Story

Christmas Day        December 25, 2011    

Isaiah 52:7-10   Psalm 98

Hebrews 1:1-4, (5-12)  John 1:1-14

Lectionary Link

  There are two of the Gospels that do not include the Infancy Narratives of the Christmas Story.  The Gospel of Mark begins with the adult ministry of Jesus.  And the Gospel of John does not include the stories of the manger, the stable, the wise men and Mary and Joseph.  The Gospel of John is the last of the Gospels to come to its textual form and so many more years of making Christian theology had occurred.

  St. Paul spoke of the Christian life as living in Christ, by Christ, for Christ, with Christ and to Christ; in short St. Paul believed that we lived in an “In-Christed” world and that it was our wonderful favor to discover this mystery.

  The Christmas story elevates the Virgin Mary as the paradigm of all Christians since the spiritual path of each Christian is to realize the birth of Christ in ones lives.  St. Paul said that the mystery of the ages was to realize that Christ in us is the hope of glory.  And Christ is known to be in us as our lives are known to be over-shadowed by the power of the Holy Spirit.

  The Gospel of John has moved the metaphor of the physical town of Bethlehem to the speculative origins of human consciousness itself.  What is it that has given birth to what makes us distinctively human in the order of all other beings?  It is the Word that is indeed the very order of human existence in how we know ourselves.  We receive Word without asking for it; it is our past and present ability.  Even when we are not good users of Word, it uses us because even before we can speak or read or write, we have come into a completely worded human world. 

  Adam in the beginning was given the task of naming everything in his world.  Humanity has been engaged in the task of naming everything for as long as we have been human.

 And our naming of this world is still the human task.  Even when we say the word tree we are reaffirming how this tree is recreated in a new moment of our lives since each moment in one sense is a new beginning, a new birth and a new creation.

  So the writer of the Gospel of John identifies that the telling aspect of Jesus of Nazareth to be WORD made flesh.

  Each of us in our own way is Word made flesh too since we have received the creative understanding of our lives from the Eternal Word that always, already was.

  The way that Word was made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth has changed our world.  And the Word made flesh is still an invitation to us to change our world in the direction of the values of Jesus of Nazareth:  Love God with all of our hearts and love our neighbors as ourselves.

  The Christmas Story can be an invitation to childlike wonder as found in the narratives of the birth of the baby Jesus, or it can be a fully adult appreciation of a poetic, linguistic, philosophical Christ who is the eternal Word who has given birth to human consciousness itself.  And I like all of the Christmas presentations since each presentation appeals to a different way in which I am human.

  Let us be thankful for Christ as the eternal Word and let our Christmas gift to God be the finding of our Voice to use our words to tell our good news and let the body language of our lives speak the kind deeds that our world surely needs to hear.  The Gospel presentations of Christmas say to us in many ways:  “Merry Christmas!”  Amen. 

Christmas: Being Renewed in Wonder

Christmas Eve         December 24, 2011    

Is. 9:2-4,6-7          Ps.96:1-4,11-12        

Titus 2:11-14        Luke 2:1-14  

 Lectionary Link

   Did you know that one of the most popular toys in the Toy Hall of Fame is the stick.  We spend lots of dollars on PlayStations, Wii’s, Xboxes, and a kid wants to play with a stick.  How high tech is a stick?  Parents can remember Christmas mornings when two and three year old children have been forced to open their expensive educational toys and what do they do?  They play with the boxes and the ribbons.  And we are aghast and humored at the same time; why can’t we just exorcise from them their native childhood and make them to be the instant prodigies that we want them to be?  We want them to achieve quickly extreme adulthood intelligence so that they can be ahead of the curve at their young age.

  Even as we want our babies to grow up, the power of the baby and of infancy and of childhood prevails and exerts its winning influence over us if we are behaving as we should as adults.

  I think that it is the power of the baby that makes the Christmas feast a feast of renewal for us at the end of the year when the natural light of the sun is shortest and when cold prevails.  At the winter solstice the sun has been reborn in our part of the world.  Our secular calendars make the Christmas feast come at the end of the year and so it is a time when we are tying up loose ends in our fiscal year.  It is the right time for a feast of renewal, and how we need a feast of renewal!  How we need a sense of all things coming together at the end of our year.

  The feast of the baby Jesus has grown and accrued so much that it has become a global celebration far away from the religious moorings of our biblical faith.  And that’s okay, since a great event will always ripple and effect life far from its intended purpose.  Great events accrue lots of different meanings and cultural responses.  And in the snowballing of all that has accrued, Christmas has grown for now about 2000 years. It is our duty as the church to dig, as it were, an archaeological shaft through all of what has accrued and imagine that we tonight can arrive at something of the original wonder; the wonder we knew as babies and young children and the wonder that still lives in babies and children today.

  The genius of the Christmas story is that it is able to bear what we project upon it in our spiritual aspirations.  A good story demands retelling over and over again because it is able to bear the projection of the audience.  And the silliest question to ask is, “Is the story true?”  If you have to ask that question, then you just don’t get it.  It’s like asking a little girl if the Disney Princess movies are true.  That is not the question to ask.

  What is true of the Christmas story is that it has the power to awaken wonder.  To be awakened to wonder is perhaps the essence of the Christian faith: To know that we are touched in a favorable way by someone greater than us and whom we cannot control with our limited understanding.

  The Gospels were written much later than the writings of St. Paul.  And since they were written later, they were crafted in such a way that the actual spiritual practices and teachings could be encoded through the metaphors of the narratives of the life of Jesus.

   Dominant metaphors in the presentation of the Gospel were motifs of birth, infancy and childhood.

The renewal of one’s life by the Holy Spirit is called the new birth.  The annunciation, conception and birth story of Jesus is the story of how the world is renewed by realizing God’s intimate presence within human experience.  The story is a personal invitation of renewal for each of us to know how God’s presence is made intimate to us.

  Infancy and childhood are also motifs of the Gospel.  Jesus said that wise adults could not understand God’s kingdom; but it was given to infants to have it revealed to them.  Jesus also said that one had to be childlike to understand and enter the kingdom of God.  Here again we find the dynamic of   wonder.  We can become so adult in the wrong ways that we limit our experience of truth; we limit our experience of wonder.  And that is where we need the power of the baby to renew us again.  We adults have been evicted from the Garden of Eden of childhood innocence for so long and in so many adult ways that we have forgotten wonder and that wonder aspect of our personality needs to be awakened afresh.  We often try to awaken it in the ways that lead to addictive behaviors, but this feast of renewal is an invitation to return to the gift and power of wonder that is as close to us as everything that is retained within us from our first coming into this world. 

  Babies, children, our pets, the beauty of Nature and the Christmas story are drawing from us the power of nascent Wonder.  It is very near and we but need to let it be evoked and arise in us.  And sometimes it has arisen and we need to be reminded of how it has arisen within us.  Ironically, it arises even in Christmas sadness; the type of sadness that we feel because we miss people and pets who have been in our lives but have died.  The experience of wonder even in this kind of sadness is the sudden realization of how much love, joy and response that these people and pets have drawn from us.  They awakened our wonder and if our wonder has been awakened, we know that we can open ourselves to new wonder in new people, pets and events in our lives.

  And so we are invited to this festival of renewal tonight; let us not find that our infant and child aspect of personality to be incompatible with our adult lives.  The wounds of hard knocks in life that often make us react with our “bah humbug” cynicism need to be healed with a fresh encounter with wonder.  And this is the Christmas truth.

  Dear friends, please let the Christ Child call us to a fresh encounter with wonder and the power of this wonder will help us to re-embroider the tapestry of all of the events of our lives to discern a new and fresh purpose of God in our lives.

  Let the warmth of Wonder arise in us tonight, as we whisper, “O Christ, be born in us!”  Amen.

  

What Does the Christmas Story Encode?

4 Advent  B       December 18, 2011

2 Samuel 7:4,8-16     Ps.89       

Romans 16:25-27     Luke 1:26-38  

Lectionary Link

   St.Paul in the Epistle lesson to the Romans, writes about the "revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages but is now disclosed."     And the Gospel of Luke is a story of that disclosure of this wonderful mystery.    And what is the wonderful mystery that drove and motivated the people of the early church?    The mystery that they wanted to share is this:   God is not far from the world.... God is not  aloof from the lives of people.... rather, God is  intimately involved in the lives of people. In fact God is with us.... God is Emmanuel.    What is the best way for humanity to know that God is with us?  If God's life could be found to be in a person, then we would have the nature of God put in human terms so that we could understand what God is like.    And that brings us to the infancy stories of Jesus; in these stories are hidden spiritual direction for those who read them.   The story of the annunciation and the conception of our Lord Jesus Christ encodes within it the mystery that God has for every person.    Let us look at the features of the annunciation story and see if we can find in it relevant events for our own lives.   

  First, the Angel Gabriel sought out Mary to deliver a message. Do we believe that God seeks us out?  Part of the Christian attitude in life involves an esteem based upon an understanding that God cares for us enough to seek us out.   God's angels to us may not be winged figures, but God’s messages are always being issued towards us.  Are we in the practice of being able to discern the message of God to us?

    Next, God's messenger had a special greeting for Mary.  He called her a "favored one."  He said, "The Lord is with you."  You know every person needs to have this experience of being God's favored one.  Imperfect parents could not give us all of the emotional strokes that we needed.  Spouses, families, friends, and colleagues just can't give us the intensity of attention that we need to feel good about ourselves. There are people who need to be universally adored, and the people around them often are at lost to even know how to satisfy that need to be adored.  Christians need to know God's favor and when we put ourselves in the place to know God's favor; we will cease to make impossible demands for adoration on the people around us.

    A third story element is the action of the Holy Spirit upon the life of the Virgin Mary.  In this story form, the Christian has encoded the central belief of Christianity, in short, "Christ in you the only hope of God."  Mary is the paradigm for every Christian soul.  God's life is upon our life, and it is a divine life.  God's Spirit mingles with our spirit.  This is not our own doing but it is a work of God.

    A fourth element of the story is that Gabriel told Mary that her child would be the Son of God. The goal of Christianity is for you and me to realize our selves as sons and daughters of God.   Jesus did not regard "Son of God" a title that was to be kept to himself.  Adam and Eve were God's son and daughter; and like them we lose our family identity with God in estrangement.  The Gospel is a story about how that estrangement has been overcome and how we can realize our restoration into God's family.

   The last element of the Story is Mary's attitude.  "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word."  Let it be. Let it be. Mary's attitude is the Christian attitude.  We will not know the esteem of God's favor, we will not regard ourselves to be sought out by God, we will not discern the life of God in us, we will not reclaim our identity as sons and daughters of God, unless we have a receptive attitude.

  The story of the annunciation to Mary, encodes for us the entire teaching of the Christian faith. God so desired to be with humanity, that the divine presence was found in Jesus of Nazareth.  But God did not regard Jesus of Nazareth to be the exclusive and exhaustive presence of God. It pleased God to let humanity know that Christ is available to be born or realized in the heart of every person.

  As we approach this Christmas, let us make the Christmas story live again in us. Let us develop an attentive, prayerful, and receptive attitude, so that we, like Mary of old, will know the life of God to be born in us.  Christ in us, the only hope of Glory.  This too, is the contemporary Christmas Story.  Amen. 

Isaian Roots of the Gospel

3 Advent b      December 11, 2011

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11 Psalm 126

1 Thessalonians 5:16-24 John 1:6-8,19-28

Lectionary Link

  We should not forget the roots in Judaism of Jesus of Nazareth and the Jesus Movement.  Both Jesus and St. Paul would not have considered themselves to be members of a new religion.  They saw themselves as trying to bring vision and new understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures in a new time.

  Since many of the earliest followers of Jesus were also Jews, it is not surprising that the founders of the Christian movement borrowed whole scale from the Hebrew tradition, including the entire front section of the Christian Bible.

  The front section of the New Testament are the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  So we might associate the word Gospel as being an original Christian word.  The actual word Gospel is from the Old English Word, “Godspell” meaning God news.  You remember the rock musical reprising the name “Godspell” because it also had the modern connotation of “being under the spell of God.”  From the 2^nd Century, the word Gospel was used to designate the writings that pertained to the life and words of Jesus of Nazareth.  So when we use the word Gospel today, we think of the four Gospels in the Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

  But like so much of Christianity, Gospel, too was borrowed from the Hebrew Scriptures. The prophet Isaiah wrote, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the oppressed.”  The Hebrew word for “good news” was translated in the Greek edition of Isaiah as euangellion.  That is the same Greek word that is used for the English word Evangel and it is is translated into English as “Gospel.”

  The Lord’s anointed or Messiah, is the one who brings “Good News.”  The Messiah is the one who brings good news.  Oppressed people do need good news.  The brokenhearted need their inner lives healed.  Captives and prisoners without just cause need release.  People need to know that they are God’s favored ones.  People need to know that justice will be accomplished upon the tyrants.  People who mourn need to be comforted.  They need the condition from which they can exalt and praise rather than mourn.  People need optimism to know that they and their children have a likely future with benefit and blessing.

  When Jesus came and taught, he identified his message with this word of Isaiah.  He told his listener that he came to bring “good news.”  And that is what the early followers of Jesus preached, Good News.

  Good News has it own irresistibility.  One might say that every person is made for good news.  And how do we know it?  When we are experiencing bad news, it seems so unnatural; it seems like something that should be brought to an end as soon as possible.

  One of the saddest things about bad news is that if we get too much of it, we can begin to think that it is what we deserve.  Or even worse, if we get so much bad news, we might become those who deliver bad news to the people in our lives through our words and deeds.

  Today, we might ask ourselves, what would be good news for us today?  And good news might be something different for everyone here or for everyone in this world.  For some in this world, good news might be simply the next meal, or a place to sleep.  To others it might be having the right job.  To others, it might be having the good fellowship of friends, family and a companion.  To others it might be to discover purpose and vocation in life?  To others it might be the need for a profound spiritual experience that affirms God’s loving presence.

  John the Baptist had his own brand of the good news.  He was trying to make straight the way of the Lord.  Well, how did the way of the Lord get so crooked?  God’s way, as it often does, gets all covered up with religion.  That’s why religion in the time of John and Jesus was not good news for many, many people.  Religion was only a way of trying to promote some people as God’s favored ones to the neglect of many who were not offered the message of God’s favor.

  John and Jesus came to those who were made to believe that they had lost God’s favor.  John message of repentance seemed harsh, but it really was one of good news.  His message stated that one did not automatically receive God’s favor because of being born in the right family with the correct rabbinical upbringing; rather one found God’s favor by the choices of one’s life.  One could choose to be in God’s favor, simply by the way that one lived one’s life.  John’s great contribution was to honor the freedom of a person’s choice to be better today than one was yesterday, and look to improve tomorrow.  If one’s standing with God is determined by how one lives, then it diminishes the power of religious authority to be able to judge who is right or wrong with God.  And that is good news.

  We are nearing Christmas time and Christmas time is a time of giving and receiving gifts.  I invite all of us to ask God for the gift of good news.  I ask that God would give each of us lots of good news.  And getting good news may involve us to be more aware of the good news that we have always had, but have taken for granted because it has become so commonplace.  Receiving good news may be as simple as having our eyes open to see how good we actually have it, and not focusing upon the one dominating problem that seems to be current in our lives.

  And why do we have the right to ask for good news?  I think that we are made for good news, but to really appreciate good news, we have to learn how to be people who deliver good news to the people of our lives through the deeds and words of our lives.

  I think that as we deliver good news, we will receive the good news ourselves.  What good news do we have to deliver?  We deliver the good news of God’s love.  We become the hands, the feet, the voice of Christ as we let people know that they truly matter in this life.

  Receiving good news and being those who proclaim good news goes hand in hand.  As we are filled with good news we share from that goodness to those around us.

  My prayer for all of us is that we would have the eyes to see the good news that is towards us today, but also I would hope that each person has the faith and confidence in God to ask for some new and current relevant event of good news that is needed even at this time.

  But also as we ask for the good news that we need for our lives and the lives of those in our world, let us also be willing to become the good news for people who need the good news that only we can bring through the words and deeds of our lives.  In short, let our lives become the living Gospel of Jesus Christ.   Amen.

John the Baptizer, Ultimate Advent Police

2 Advent Cycle b      December 4, 2011

Is. 40:1-11     Psalm 85:1-2,8-13

2 Peter 3:8-15a,18    Mark 1:1-8


Click for Audio>Sermon.12.04.2012

Lectionary Link

  Does anyone know what an Advent police is?  An Advent police is a person who is so liturgically correct, they will bust you if you try to celebrate Christmas too early.  Advent police get very upset when Christians treat the season of Advent as a mere inconvenient speed bump as they are rushing into all things Christmas.  Advent police just despise the commercial world because they start celebrating Christmas right after Halloween.  Advent police remind us that Christmas is for 12 days only, from Christmas Eve until the feast of the Epiphany.  Your Christmas tree should be put up on Christmas Eve and taken down on January 6^th.  You shall not cheat and have poinsettias on the altar until Christmas Eve.  You shall not sing Christmas songs during Advent.  You shall not have a Christmas Festivals of Lessons and Carols; if you want Lessons and Carols before Christmas, it has to be an Advent Lessons and Carols when we sing all of those songs about John the Baptist and they are much less familiar than the Christmas carols.  You kind of get the feeling that an Advent police is a bit of a Scrooge yelling bah humbug when we want to start celebrating Christmas early.

  Well, I’ve been busted by the Advent police of liturgical correctness many times.  But if we think that the Advent police are a little stuffy, we only have to be introduced to John the Baptist.

  John the Baptist makes an Advent police look like a child.  Just as we are getting all ready for Christmas, shopping, planning for great excess, going to parties, suddenly from the Advent lectionary, pops out a Man with the charisma of an angry grizzly bear.  As we are about to “don we now our gay apparel” and sing “fa la la la la”  for Christmas festivities, this grizzly man is dressed in camel’s hair and it is not a Bobby Brooks camel hair brown blazer.

  As we are about to drink our spiked egg nog and eat our sweet meat pies, Christmas cookies, and divinity, we are suddenly reminded about the diet of John the Baptist: grasshoppers and honey.  I don’t know if you could eat enough honey to rid the after-taste of grasshoppers.  No wonder that poor man was such a grizzly bear! It’s his diet!  If you and I forced ourselves to eat grasshoppers, we’d probably be in a world-denying mood too.

  We, Americans, probably would not like John the Baptist, unless he were mere entertainment on some television Sit-Com.  Then we could laugh because comedy is created by contrasting extremes: Our extreme excesses and John’s extreme asceticism.

  But in the genealogy of salvation history, John the Baptist is an important figure.  He figures prominently in the Gospels, the writings of the Early Church. Some of the most prominent early Christian leaders had once been followers of John the Baptist, and they made their transition to follow Jesus; but they never forgot John and his role in setting the stage for Jesus Christ.  They never forgot John the Baptist as their friend and mentor.

  John the Baptist was an unbribed soul.  He could not be bought off.  He would not say pleasant things to please the crowd or do some fundraising.  He confronted the rich and the powerful with strong opinions and that’s what got him killed.  He told Herod what he thought about his divorce, so he got thrown in jail, and his head on a platter became the party favor for the dancing Salome.

  As much as we are not in the John the Baptist mode, let us endeavor in this Advent season to make peace with John the Baptist.  He is an icon, an image of the ascetic principle in life that we all need to learn in order to be true to God and to ourselves.

  The ascetic principle is this:  We have to give up harmful things and even good things, to take on better things for our lives and the life of our world.  That’s the meaning of repentance.

  John the Baptist was trained in the lonely place of the wilderness, where he listened for God’s voice and God’s will alone.  He did not a have a social context that demanded that he compromise his principles to please the crowd.

  So John the Baptist confronts us with this question:  What good things must I give up so that I might take on better excellence in my life and in the life of my family, my community and my world?

  You and I are unlike John the Baptist in that we are fully co-opted by the situations of family, job and social conditions in our lives.   Does it ever feel like you and I are perpetually dancing to please someone else in our lives, even to the point of compromising some important principles of excellence?  There just seems to be too many demands on our time and resources truly to bring a manifold excellence to everything in our busy lives.

  So what are you and I to do?  Jump out of our lives, and “get thee to a nunnery?”

  The monastery is no solution except for a very few who have the calling.  For you and me, we need to find the inner wilderness, the inner place of quietness.  During this Advent we need to take time to find that inner place of peace, tranquility and solitude.  It is a place underneath all of the emotions of the Christmas season.  It is a place underneath, all of the deep feelings that we have about people and friends whom we have lost and whom we miss at Christmastide in a special way.  It is a place, where we know that we please God and that God is pleased with us, so we don’t have to worry about whether everything was perfect or whether everyone was totally pleased with us at Christmas.

  John the Baptist invites us to that “living wilderness” of being alone and silent with God, so that we can have the spiritual fullness to embrace the fullness of our daily lives.

  Don’t make excuses about not having time.  Make time.  What about that daily commute?  Are we using it to pray for spouse, children, family parish, friends, our community, the poor and needy in this world?  Are we using it to pray for peace in our world and for social and economic justice in our world?  It is harder to be disappointed by the people for whom we are praying, because when we pray we cease to ask that they be adequate or omni-competent to our needs. In the solitude of our prayer and meditation wilderness, we find God to be most adequate and competent to our needs, so we need not demand that sort of perfection from anyone.

  Let us find, like John the Baptist, that place where we can give up this world, so that we can take up again our daily worlds with better spiritual preparation.

  Advent is a season of repentance.  It is when we give up what is bad and even what is good, so that we might take up what is even better, even the manifestation of the birth of Christ in our lives by the baptism of God’s Holy Spirit.  Amen.