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. 

This Too, Is My Body!

 Lectionary Link

Click for Audio >Sermon.11.20.2011

Last Sundy of  Pentecost: Christ the King Cycle A  proper 29 November 20, 2011

Ezek. 34:11-16, 20-24     Ps.100       

Eph. 1:15-23      Matt. 25:31-46

  Imagine a King who becomes aware of the lack of welfare and civility in his kingdom.  The nobility use their positions of proximity to the royal family to mistreat, ignore and neglect the poor peasants who work the land and provide the revenues for the wealthy.

  Imagine an enlightened king who is troubled by the conditions in his kingdom and so he decides to sneak out of the palace and disguise himself as a poor peasant, just to see how a peasant gets treated.

  And what he finds is that some people treat him well and some treat him with cruelty in his disguised role as a peasant.

  He returns to the palace and calls to the palace each person with whom he interacted as a peasant in disguise.  And he confronts some about their bad behavior.  And he says to one why did you shove that poor peasant to the ground when all he was doing was asking for directions?  I want you to know that I was that poor peasant whom you shoved to the ground.

  To another he said, why did you share your meager meal with that poor peasant who knocked on your door?  And you did it without even knowing that in fact you were feeding your king.

  This scenario is akin to the parable of Jesus that we have read today and in this parable we have a metaphor of a truly sacramental event.

  The church proclaims sacraments as ways to experience the presence of Christ.  But often in practice they have become religious rules so that the church can organize and administrate its membership for the benefit of the church.

  This parable of Jesus gives us a different metaphor for the experience of the real presence of God and the Real presence of Christ.

  Jesus presents God as one who confounds us with counter-logic.  God sees incredible suffering and inequity in this world so what does God do?  God says, “I am going to take a complete identity with those who are powerless and marginalized and those in need and then I am going to see how those with wealth and power and ability respond to my disguised presence within the needy.”  And we might have to admit our easy religious behaviors:  “But God, it’s much easier for me to experience Christ in the little wafer at the altar on Sunday.  After all Jesus did say, this is my body!”

  Well, apparently Jesus is also saying about the needy people in this world, “These are my bodies, my suffering bodies, please come and experience my presence with the suffering people of this world.”  And by the way, when we suffer, we too become the enhanced presence of Christ that begs to be experienced by someone who can provide us comfort and relief, and so know the presence of Christ in response to our suffering.  Christ is on both sides of suffering and relief.  Christ is present in the suffering one; Christ is present in the loving action of the one who responds to the one in need.

  This is the true dynamic of the sacramental life as proposed by Jesus of Nazareth.  And the reason we play church on Sunday with our sacraments, is so that we can get into the dynamics of the real sacramental life: Christ in one who suffers meeting Christ in the responder.

  This is how Jesus presented God’s agenda for our world.  And it is an agenda that is meant to inspire us to be the favorite way for God to intervene in this world, namely through the likes of you and me.  Now what kind of God would entrust us with such a responsibility?  The same God who inspired our baptismal covenant: Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbor as yourself?  The Answer:  I will with God’s help.  Let me hear you say that with conviction: I will with God’s help!  Amen.  

Great Law and Legalism

Click for Audio>Sermon: 10.23.2011

Lectionary Link

19 Pentecost, Cycle A Proper 25, October 23, 2011

Leviticus 19:1-2,15-18 Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17

1 Thessalonians 2:1-8 Matthew 22:34-46

   If I were to ask you for the comparative value of any certain laws in terms of their importance; what would you say?  All are created equal with certain unalienable rights, including Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?  Or that jaywalking is forbidden in a downtown areas?

  Which is more important?  The Bill of Rights or rules that govern dog owners and cleaning up after their dogs in the park?

  So there are some great principles of law and there are some very detailed contextual rules.  Those contextual rules are important but they cannot be given the same emphasis as the weightier principles of justice and human worth.

  Jesus and his disciples were known to flaunt in practice some of the detailed religious rules:  They ate with tax-collectors and sinners.  Jesus broke the rule of the Sabbath by healing on the Sabbath.  Jesus touched forbidden people, like lepers. Jesus did not follow the rules about segregation of men and women.   The disciples were not diligent about their hand-washing and other rules of ritual purification.

  The members of the various rival groups in Judaism had the practice of argumentation.  While the Gospels often present the interlocutors of Jesus as being antagonistic, in the original context, it was a very rabbinical thing to do to argue about matters of the law.

  When some noticed that Jesus and his disciples were perhaps a bit lax in following the minutiae of the religious law, they wanted to know from him, “Well, Jesus if you are dismissive about some of our religious practices which laws do you regard?  What is the greatest law for you?  After all, in the Torah there are 613 commandment rules; are all commandments of equal importance?”

  If there are 613 commandments, a person definitely needs a religious specialist to keep one informed about all of the details of keeping these 613 commandments.

  Jesus was more of a populist rabbi in that he saw many people who did not and could not take advantage of the religious specialists who were so keen on regulating the lives of the people in their community.  As a populist, he was more interested in presenting the great principles and then leaving to people the task of applying these principles in the detailed events of their lives.

  What was the greatest law?  Love God with all of one’s heart and soul and mind.  And the second greatest law: Love your neighbor as yourself.

  As a populist rabbi, Jesus was encouraging people to be practical about doing their own moral thinking?  How do I determine the validity of my behavior?  Am I loving God with all of my heart?  Am I loving my neighbor as myself?

  We, religious authorities, need to have jobs and so it is important that we make ourselves important to lay people by our theological specialization and by asserting a role of mediation between lay people and God.  Then a person like Jesus comes along and abbreviates the vast complex laws to but two principles, and so encourages people to do their own moral thinking in applying great principles to the actions of their lives.  Imagine people not needing my highly refined Jesuit casuistry regarding moral actions.

  For religious leaders, the order and administration of a community of people can become a foremost priority.  A subtle switch occurs; legalism becomes the expression of administrative control and what can be lost is what is good for each person, namely, loving God and loving one’s neighbor as oneself.

  By stating the great principles of the law, Jesus was also giving people the freedom to interpret and apply them in their lives without fear of being condemned because they could not always perform all the 613 commandments in the prescribed ways.  That sort of freedom is very threatening to religious leaders who are “hung up on the administration” of their truths.  Sadly, the truth of administration of religious behavior has often become the chief feature of organized religion.  In the ascendency of legalism, the great principles can get lost.  That is why I think it is important to go back to the summary of the law as viewed by Jesus.

  Jesus came to make God, the law and the messiah accessible to people.  When religious administration creates a barrier to God, the law and the messiah, then the good news of God for people is lost.  The Gospel for us today is that God has become accessible to us through Jesus Christ.  And Jesus as the Messiah invites us to the great principles of life.  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.'  `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'   Let the work of our lives be the constant effort to bring these two greatest of laws into the details of our lives.  Amen.

A Children's Sermon: God's Image Is On Us

Lectionary Link

23 Pentecost, Cycle a, Proper 24, October 16, 2011

Exodus 33:12-23  Psalm 99
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10  Matthew 22:15-22

  If I had all of the children sit on this side of the room and all of the parents sit on the other side of the room.  And then I have a stranger who did not know anyone here come into the room and look at you.  Do you think that this stranger could tell which children belonged to which parent?  And how could a stranger match you and your parents?  Because you look like your parents…you have their noses, their eyes, their hair color.  So you look like your parents.  You in some way are an image of your parents.  And so you belong together as a family.

  We’ve read a story today about some people who tried to trick Jesus about taxes.  Do you know what taxes are?  Taxes are the money that we pay to the government to pay for the army, the roads, the courts and all of the things that the government does for us.  It is a law that if we make money, we have to pay taxes.

  So some people came to Jesus and asked him if he paid taxes to the King, called the Caesar.  Jesus knew that they were trying to trick him into saying that people should not pay taxes and that would get him into trouble.

  What did Jesus do?  He taught them a lesson.  He asked them to show them a coin.  I’m going to show some of the coins that are just like the one Jesus asked for.  These coins are more than two thousand years old.  If you look carefully at these coins you can see that the head of the King called Caesar is stamped on these coins.  And these coins were used to pay taxes to the King.

  Jesus asked his questioners?  "Whose image is on this coin?"  And they said, “It’s the King’s image.”

  And Jesus said, “Then give the coins that belong to the King to him, but give to God the things that belong to God.”

  Now this was a very smart saying.  Do you know why?

  Jesus had read the book of Genesis about the creation of the world.  And in the book of Genesis it is written that men and women are created or made in the image of God.  So if men and women are made in the image of God, who do they belong to?  To God.

  Was Caesar the King a Man?  Who did he belong to?  To God, because he was made in God image.

  The most important lesson in life is to learn that we belong to God because God made us.  And how do we show that we appreciate God?  We worship God.  We praise God.  We thank God.  And obey God’s rules about how we should live.  And we are to love God and love our neighbors.  That is how we show that we belong to God and how we give the very best of our lives.

  Do we have to pay a tax to God, since we are like God’s coins?  Yes, we do pay a tax to God by loving God and loving our neighbors as our self.

  Jesus came to remind us that we are all children of God and so we need to learn to live as children of God.  Can you remember that?  Amen.

The Backside of God, the Emperor's Head and the Human Person as Icon

Lectionary Link

Click for audio>  Sermon 10.16.2011

23 Pentecost, Cycle A, Proper 24, October 16, 2011

Exodus 33:12-23  Psalm 99
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10  Matthew 22:15-22

  I am a person who probably lives in more constant personal irony than is good for anyone, but things just occur to me, as in our two lessons for today.  We have some rather strange anatomical juxtaposition:   The backside of God and the head of the Emperor.  How’s that for a sermon title:  The backside of God and the head of the Emperor?  And now you do wonder about my inclination to irony.

  The biblical representation of God is that God is a holy God.  God is such an entire other order of Being; how could we even know the existence of this other order of Being without some translation of this Holy Being into the categories of human experience?  No one has seen God at anytime; his Son has declared him.  No one can see God and live and so humanity is the proverbial moth headed towards the flame since we do not have the capacity for either the Heat or the Light of God.  Our God is an all-consuming Fire, Scriptures records.

  So how do we deal with such a holy and great God who is another order of Being incomprehensible to those who do not have the divine capacity?  How do we know that such a Being exists since if we declared God’s existence, why would anyone trust our limited knowledge of such a Being?  We are rescued from the problem of an unknowable God by the concession that there are energies and emanations from God that are perceptible to human experience and they are such enhanced perceptions that they are able to be for us an adequate proof of God’s existence.

  Moses was a great man because of his encounters with God.  He had several theophanies or encounters with God; God in the burning bush, God in the inscription of the laws on the stone tablets, and yet when it came for Moses to see God, he could not.  He was allowed to see only the energies of God; he was allowed to see the backside of God as he passed by.  Moses was like a moth that did not fly into the flame and get consumed.

  Certainly this theophany or encounter with the divine, bespeaks of what is called God’s glory.  And how is it that we human beings can be aware of God’s glory or the sublime evidence of the Divine?  We confess that there is enough of a likeness with divinity in human capacities to be able to know God who is way beyond human capacity.  If the heavens can bear or carry the glory of God, so too it is the belief in the biblical tradition that men and women can bear the glory of God.  Why do men and women bear the glory of God?  What is one of the most often used words since we have been using computers?  Icon.  In the book of Genesis, it is written that Adam or the first human being was made in the “image” of God.  The Greek word for “image” in the famous Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures is the Greek word from which we get the word “icon.”  Humanity was made to be like the “icon” of God.

  If human beings were coins, then God’s icon or image would be stamp upon us, because we belong to the one whose likeness we bear.  When a child looks like a parent, we can say that “child” belongs to the one whose image is seen in the child’s face.

   Now let us fast forward to the time of the Gospel of Matthew.  What did the writer or editors of the Gospel know?  They knew the Caesar during the ministry of Jesus?  Caesar Tiberius.  And he was the step-son of Caesar Augustus who had been elevated to the position of a god by the Roman senate.  And so what was one of the titles of Caesar Tiberius?  Tiberius was a divi filius, a son of a god.  What was the right of every Roman Emperor?  An Emperor would stamp his image or icon on the coinage as a sign of his economic power in his realm.  His image or icon on the coins was also his right to collect taxes in his empire.  What did the Gospel writers believe about Jesus Christ?  They believed that he was more than divi filius  or son of a god; they believe he was Son of God, Dei filius,  Son of the Lord God, the God of Moses. And being the Son of the God of Hebrew monotheism, he was special indeed.

  I am trying to coax you into the irony of the numismatic encounter between Jesus and the Pharisees and Herodians who were trying to stir up trouble about paying taxes to the Emperor.

  Jesus who is the exact image or icon of God as God’s Son makes a comment about the image or the icon of the Emperor Tiberius on the Roman coinage in Palestine.  And this same Caesar is one who was call divi filius or son of a god.

  Jesus said that Caesar could have all of those coins on which his image was stamped.  But let God have everyone  on whom the image of God is stamped.  And who is that?   That is all men and women, including the emperor.

  Let the emperor keep his coins but let him honor the profound image of God that is stamped upon even the emperor by virtue of his being made in the image of God.

  Do you now see all of the symbolic irony of this Gospel text?

  But there is a further faith assumption in this text?  If the Emperor really is made in God’s image and belongs to God, then the coins and all of the Emperor’s possessions also belong to God.

  There is a message of faith and stewardship for each of us in this Gospel.  We can live our lives as strutting Caesars on the stages of our little empires.  We mark the image or icons of our lives on things in our lives with possessive words like my and mine.  These clothes are mine.  This talent is mine.  This house is mine.  This church is mine.  This money is mine.  This fame and notoriety is mine.  This car is mine.  This is my time. This is my right.  This is my privacy.  This is mine…mine…mine…mine.

    We stamp our image on what we think that we possess and we create the “mine field” of our lives.  Mine…mine…mine…mine….don’t step on my mine. 

  And Jesus reminds us about our image and about derivative iconography.  “Okay, render unto you the things that are yours….but render unto God the things that are God's.”

  And there’s the catch.  Whose icon do you and I carry in our lives?  If you and I bear God’s image, we belong to God and so in a derivative sense, we are fooling ourselves every time we say “mine.” 

  Faith in Christ who is the Divine Image of God for humanity means that we learn to transform the attitude of “mine” into the attitude of “yours.”  It’s all yours, God.  And when we transform the attitude of it’s all mine, into it’s all yours, God; we will hear God say to us, “My children, it all belongs to us, because I have shared it all with you and with everyone.  Now go forth and enjoy and share what belongs to us."  

  The Gospel today invites us to get our derivative “iconography” in order so that we can be converted to know that all things belong to God and then we can know God’s conversion to us to hear God say, “It all belongs to us, now go enjoy and share.”  Amen.