Christmas Eve Meditation

Scripture: Luke 2:1-20

“But Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart.”  Yeah, I bet Mary did a whole lot of pondering that night that Jesus was born.  Besides the obvious tasks of taking care of the new baby, what else was there to do but ponder?  Mary knew better than anyone the full, miraculous magnitude of what had just happened.  God had just been born into the world, in human flesh. That birth took place to a scared young mother and a scared father who were forced to give birth in a barn because there was no place for them anywhere else.  On the fringe.  In a little, nowhere town called Bethlehem.  In a dirty barn surrounded by animals, and though we hear of angels all Mary saw were shepherds, the lowest of the low.  Shepherds and animals were the only ones who even noticed this birth. 

This is God’s grand entrance into the world.  There are just two scared young parents, some shepherds, some animals, and a baby.  A little, helpless baby.  God, whom Mary felt entering the world.  God, whom Mary holds in her arms.  A baby.  God, whom Mary ponders.

Why did God chose this kind of an entrance?  After all, God could break into the world in any way that God decided.  Jesus could have come down with those angels, singing praises.  Jesus could have appeared in the middle of the royal temple.  Jesus could have been someone powerful, like Emperor Augustus, or governor Quirinius.  But Jesus did none of those things and Jesus was none of those powerful people.  Jesus was a baby.  He was poor.  He was helpless.  And he was God.

He is God.  Jesus, whom Mary holds, is God in the middle of real life, not easy or idealized life.  Jesus is God coming among us, and crying to us.  By coming to us vulnerable and on the fringes, we hear God’s holy Spirit whispering to us that the lives we’ve carefully created, the world we work so hard to control and manage, this real life—it’s wonderful, and beautiful, and worthy of awe.  And it’s also so fragile, and so very vulnerable.

We, too, are fragile and vulnerable.  And if God had chosen to come only to or only as someone powerful, someone rich, someone who always got what they want and someone who won every battle—then God wouldn’t have really come for us.  God came in poverty and in vulnerability and in fear because each of us has places of poverty, vulnerability, and fear.  Jesus lived in and touched all these places because Jesus needed to live them and touch them to touch us, and to save us from the power that they hold over us.

The Jesus whose birth Mary ponders didn’t just come to make those things a little better, either.  He came to turn over tables and overthrow the whole system, to free us completely from whatever enslaves us and open to us a whole new existence where we can live out the lives that God intends for us.  Jesus’ birth is no less life changing for us than it is for those two young parents, scared and pondering in that stable two thousand years ago.

Pondering, because they don’t fully understand.  Throwing these things together in their mind.  Reflecting.  Turning the pictures around and seeing if they fit together like puzzle pieces.  And Luke invites us to do the same.  Because try as we might we will never fully understand this whole God in human form thing, and event, and person. 

The best we can do is ponder.  We can join Mary, and we can seek the answer to what this all means while we throw the pictures, the songs, and the stories together in our minds, and see how they fit.  And we can see how they don’t.  And we can see that we’re missing pieces to this puzzle, and that’s okay because Jesus never said he came so we would understand everything perfectly.  And rather than seeking to know it all, to understand or grasp it all, tonight, we just get to sit and gaze in wonder and awe.  We get to join Mary in pondering and treasuring this miraculous little baby in our hearts. He is born.  He is.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.

The "little" things

Scripture:

Isaiah 7:10-16

Matthew 1:18-25

 

Preached 12/22/2013

The astronomers were captivated.  Much of the world was captivated too.  An asteroid was coming.  It was big—about the size of a football field.  And, as asteroids go, it was coming close to earth.  They called it a “near miss.”  It would pass by the earth about 17,000 miles away, far enough that we didn’t have to worry about it crashing into us, but close enough to see.  They called it asteroid 2012 DA 24, in what has to be one of the least exciting names possible for an event that caused so much excitement.  And, while the world was watching this huge, asteroid in the sky, it missed something else.

It was smaller, only about 10 tons and the size of an SUV.  But it was also much closer.  Too close, in fact.  This asteroid didn’t escape earth’s gravitational field.  It was pulled into the atmosphere at an unbelievably fast speed—more than 33,000 miles per hour. It broke into pieces and exploded over Russia with the force of a nuclear bomb. A sonic boom, shock wave, and waves of shattered glass in more than 3,000 buildings followed. The residents of those buildings were exposed to freezing cold temperatures.  More than 1,000 people were injured.  How could NASA, how could the Russian Space Agency, how could all the professional and amateur astronomers and stargazers who were so trained on the sky already, have missed this?

Well, it turns out that size matters. While that football field sized asteroid is easy to spot, apparently, an SUV sized one is not. NASA’s Near Earth Object Program estimates that there are 100 million of SUV sized asteroids floating around in space, and they just can’t and don’t bother tracking them.  They’re too common and too small to be worth NASA’s attention.

Too common and too small to be worthy of attention.  Kind of like Isiah’s prophecy.  Though many Christians have romanticized this prophecy over the years, it really isn’t that extraordinary.  Isaiah is speaking to King Ahaz, the ruler of Judah, where Isaiah lives.  Judah is under siege right now, and is looking to find protection from the Assyrians, the powerful neighboring nation, and the big empire of the day.  So clearly, Ahaz, as the king, is worried about the fight and is worried about his nation.  And what Isaiah says to him is basically- don’t worry.  This will all be over soon—before a child that is to be born is a few years old.  Even though Ahaz is refusing to ask God for a sign, Isaiah says God is sending one any way.

Now, in Isaiah we have God sending some very clear miracles—but this child isn’t one of them.  To paraphrase Isaiah, what we have here is, “Look, King Ahaz.  This is going to happen like everything always happens.  Somewhere, a woman is going to have a child, just like women have children every day.  And this woman will have faith in God and know that God is with us.  Do you get that Ahaz?  God is still with us.  And this child of this woman who has faith in God will grow, and by the time they’re a few years old, this whole battle will be over and the enemies you’re worried about will be gone.” The child himself doesn’t actually do anything in the prophecy.  They’re just born, and then they grow up a bit.

It has to be one of the least exciting prophecies ever.  It’s like an astronomer pointing out each of the hundred million small asteroids to us.  It’s a small event, and a common one.  Time will pass, God will stay, and normalcy will resume. Woo.  Isaiah isn’t looking hundreds of years forward with this prophecy.  He’s not attempting to predict the coming of Christ, of a Savior, for the whole of Israel.  In fact, at this point, Israel was one of the nations fighting against Judah.  What Isaiah is doing is looking at the situation right in front of him, and seeing God, and seeing hope, in that.  Isaiah isn’t a magician, or some kind of fortune teller.  He’s a man deeply connected to God, and deeply in tune with the will and the love of God, even in a difficult situation.  Much like astronomers scan the sky for asteroids, Isaiah scans his present situation for the presence of God that he notices, and the presence he sees God wills.

And Isaiah’s prophetic scan and assessment is right.  Women have children.  Time passes.  The struggle for protection ends, and the enemies eventually lose power.  And in a few years, the struggle is over.  The prophecy is fulfilled, not hundreds of years later, but in just a few, as Isaiah said.

Before you try to kick me out of the pulpit, let me say that this doesn’t mean that Matthew was wrong to draw on this prophecy to describe Jesus.  Matthew does this kind of thing all the time—drawing on the Hebrew Scriptures he knows and loves to show his understanding of Jesus, the anointed one.  Matthew is deeply concerned with the Jewishness of Jesus, and his ancient readers were too.  They were Jewish, and would have been familiar with this same scripture.  Matthew seeks to show his readers that this new movement of Jesus followers that is popping up isn’t some kind of crazy new cult.  It’s not worshipping a different God.  It’s ancient, like the Jewish scriptures, and prophets.  It’s eternal, it’s the same God known in a different way. This search for continuity is why Matthew draws tons of parallels between the Hebrew Scriptures and the life of Jesus. 

And, in our scripture reading this morning, I think Matthew is completely right that Jesus does indeed fit the description that Isaiah put forth, so many years ago.  Yes, the prophecy had already been fulfilled.  But that didn’t mean it was over.  Matthew is like a wise astronomer, not discounting the small stuff.  He even knows where to look, in that massive collection of little asteroids of God’s presence, and God’s will.

Matthew sees what Isaiah saw.  He sees the most ordinary thing—a woman having a child.  And he tells us the birth story almost in passing—it’s half a verse.  She bore a son, and named him Jesus.  Matthew has no angels singing, no shepherds coming, none of the spectacle of the birth that Luke gives us.  And it’s in this minutia that Matthew sees God. Because he knew, and we know, that it wasn’t just any baby who was born and named Jesus.  It was God, somehow human and God at the same time, in a tiny, vulnerable little package.  God looked just like all the other little babies who were being born.  Be honest here-- we all know that with the exception of our own, newborns tend to look a whole lot alike.

But just because God’s grand entry into humanity in the form of Jesus doesn’t look big, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t big.  And Matthew sees this.  He isn’t distracted by all the other, seemingly big things going on in his time.  Much like Isaiah he too lives in a time of chaos, of destruction, and of change. 

To be honest though, we all live in such times.  The seemingly big stuff grabs our attention.  And then it actually turns out to be not such a big deal.  And when we focus on the wrong stuff, we miss the small stuff.  But the small stuff is actually huge, especially in the case of the baby that Mary bore.  It’s God right in front of our faces.

Two people will got married, like people get married every day.  And the woman will has a child, like women have children every day.  There are be acts of compassion, of faith, of pure love.  Mary does these, in carrying God’s child.  Joseph does this, in marrying Mary, an act sure to bring shame and hardship on him and his family.  They may seem small actions, but they’re really huge.  They’re the kind of huge thing that explodes in the sky for the world to see and sends shockwaves that still move us thousands of years later.  And Matthew sees this.

He sees that these things that look small, and in particular this child that is so small and so weak and helpless, are not small in God’s plan.  He sees that this is God, living and breathing right in our midst.  And he knows that the prophets talked about this, and so he draws on the prophetic language because nothing else is quite good enough to describe the miracle of the birth and the life and the enduring presence of Jesus Christ.

This child is God’s love incarnate.  This child is God loving the world so much that she comes to earth and touches it, and touches us, and heals us and saves us and raises us to new life.  This child is Emmanuel, God-with-us, as Isaiah spoke it.  And this child is also more.  He is more than simply than God with us.  He doesn’t actually get named Emmanuel, does he?  He gets named Jesus.  And Jesus means not God with us, but God saves.  Jesus both fills the description that Isaiah gives, and goes beyond it.  He is more than simple presence of God, if God’s presence can ever be called simple.  He is God’s love, saving us all, even though he’s only a little baby at this point.

Here’s the most beautiful thing about this prophecy, in Isaiah, and in Matthew.  It’s not finished yet.  That’s the problem with seeing prophets as fortune tellers—we’re then tricked into thinking the miraculous is over, rather than seeing it still happening, and still coming.  We are still in Advent, after all.  We’re still waiting for Christ to come.  We’re waiting for his coming on Christmas.  And we’re waiting for him to come again in final victory, as we believe he will.  We can’t be lulled into complacency by thinking that the big things—those prophecies of Isaiah and Matthew-- have already gone past us. 

God is still all around us, and all within us.  And God in Jesus is still coming, too.  Our task is to be careful astronomer-prophets, to continue to look for God in Christ breaking into this world, in the smallest of ways.  Because it is in these small things, like babies, like acts of love, that God continues to speak to us.  And it is these seemingly small things that God’s presence will burst across the sky, shock us, and knock us off our feet and hopefully to our knees in prayers of thanksgiving and tears of joy.  Keep your eyes and ears and hearts open.  Jesus is coming. Let it be so. Amen.

Jesus and Cake Wrecks

Scripture:

Matthew 11:2-11

Preached 12/15/2013

[Note: This sermon started with a PowerPoint using cakes as an illustration of "what they wanted" and "what they got" with "what John wanted" and "what John got" with Jesus. 
For the cake pictures, see: http://www.cakewrecks.com/home/2013/12/6/do-you-copy.html
The Jesus pictures are below, "wanted" first, "got" second]

Much like a customer headed into a bakery, John the Baptist had a picture in his mind of what he wanted Jesus to be.  He wanted a warrior.  He wanted a man of immense powerful who would overthrow the Roman government and bring about a new age of peace and prosperity for John and his fellow Jews.  Just a few chapters earlier, John baptized Jesus.  And it was miraculous.  Depending on the Gospel version you read, there’s a dove and a voice from heaven announcing Jesus as God’s son and telling all to listen to him. 

John is really excited.  He’s been out in the wilderness proclaiming the coming messiah for a while now, and I’m sure he was happy to have this miraculous event seem to fulfill his prophecy.  He proclaims that Jesus is the anointed one, the messiah for whom we were waiting.  This guy just has to be that powerful military king. In other words, John knew just what he wanted his cake to look like.

And now, a few months or years later, John has returned to the bakery, so to speak, and he’s having second thoughts.  The cake he got isn’t the cake he thought was coming.  John is actually in prison, as our reading says, basically waiting for the end of his life.  He’s spent his whole adult life proclaiming the coming of the anointed one who would bring about God’s reign of peace and prosperity.  This Jesus doesn’t look anything like his mental picture.  Things seem pretty much the same for the Jews, and they’ve just gotten worse for John. 

 Jesus isn’t even doing the right stuff.  He’s supposed to have religious influence.  He’s supposed to have political influence.  And to do those things, he’s supposed to be popular, or at least he’s supposed to be hanging out with powerful and popular people.  And what is Jesus actually doing?  He’s hanging out with all the outcast and marginalized people.  The sick—blind, lame, even people with leprosy.  He’s hanging out with women.  With children.  With tax collectors.  With prostitutes.  Seriously, Jesus is even hanging out with dead people! This can’t be right!  This isn’t what a messiah is supposed to look like!  It seems like John and the baker weren’t working from the same picture.

John doesn’t ask for a refund though.  Instead, he sends some of his followers to go ask Jesus if maybe John just got his order wrong.  If perhaps John had been a little rash thinking he knew exactly what the messiah “cake” would look like. 

To be fair to John, though, his image of a messiah as a powerful, victorious, warrior ushering in a new age where everything was awesome wasn’t exactly new.  There have always been apocalyptic schools of thought in Jewish thinking and religion.  And, to honest it’s not just an old Jewish image either.  It’s still one we cling to today.

Think about this.  I’m guessing most of us have heard of the prosperity gospel.  It’s the idea that God will give us material blessings for believing in Jesus.  If you’ve heard of Joel Osteen, Benny Hinn, Joyce Meyer, Creflo Dollar—those are all prosperity gospel preachers.  And the message is a lot what John the Baptist wanted to hear—follow Jesus and good things will happen to you.  Follow Jesus well enough, and nothing but good things will happen to you and you’ll be rich and fulfilled and everything will go your way.  The problem here is that that just isn’t true.  If this is he cake you order, it’s not going to end up looking anything like Jesus.  That order is just impossible.

Following Jesus definitely does not mean that life is going to be easy.  Frankly, sometimes it means that life is going to be extra hard.  Our savior lived a hard life.  He died a brutal death.  Anything that follows his example is going to look a little strange, and a little rough. 

John is a prime example of this.  Even though he was a kind of crazy guy living out in the wilderness, he’d had a following.  He’d been popular.  He’d been somewhat powerful.  And now, after proclaiming Jesus the messiah, he’s sitting helpless in prison. He finds himself in complete solidarity with all those outcast and marginalized people he’s unsure about Jesus spending his time with. 

Following Jesus doesn’t make us rich.  It doesn’t make us popular. It doesn’t guarantee success, and it certainly doesn’t make us powerful.  It may well mean that we get kind of beat up.  We might look more like those “what they got” cakes than the “what they wanted” ones.  And that’s okay—because what “they” want and what Jesus asks and wants aren’t the same thing.  And as Christians, our concern is not with “they,” it’s with Jesus. 

As followers of Jesus, we are asked to do the same things that Jesus did.  Really—just a few chapters earlier Jesus sends out his disciples to do exactly those things he lists off to John—healing the sick, raising the dead, and bringing good news to the poor.  Following Jesus means our load is heavier, not lighter.  And our wallets are emptier, not fuller.  Following Jesus means that we are called to give all that we can to help all those in need around us, because if we call ourselves disciples, or followers, we’ve got a lot of work to do.

Maybe you remember that this Sunday we light the candle of joy.  And maybe you’re also wondering what all this has to do with joy.  In our scripture reading John was, if anything, not joyful, but disappointed.  Maybe you are too at this point, thinking about all the work that there is to do if we really are supposed to follow Jesus’ example to heal and raise and bring good news.  And, contrary to the prosperity position, you know that the work isn’t going to be easy.  And we aren’t necessarily going to succeed in all that we want to do.  But really, I’m sure that there is joy here.  This scripture passage offers us a deep kind of joy, much more than a pretty cake, or a pretty savior who perfectly matches what we think we want.

Instead of that messiah we think we want, we get the one we need.  He reaches into the darkest places and offers light.  He goes to the loneliest places and offers companionship and compassion.  He goes to the most broken places and gives healing and forgiveness.  He goes to the places of despair and offers joy.  And he gets beat up in the process.  And he looks strange doing what he does.  And he’s surrounded by people, like us, who are also beat up and a little strange.

And he asks us to do the same things he does, to go the same places and bring the same light.  And there’s definitely joy in that mission.  First, there’s they joy that in this community, we’re already doing some of the work that Jesus asks us to do.  Our women’s fellowship has been bringing joy to some of our members who can no longer make it to church through notes and cookies.  You all have been bringing Christmas gifts for families in need, who you don’t even know.   You’ve been hard at work through New Beginnings figuring out who the sick are who need healing and the poor are who need good news in this community, and how we can bring that to them.  You’ve been giving your time by serving on session, on committees, or volunteering to decorate or drive or serve at fellowship time or just help out in any way you can. 

But Jesus isn’t telling us to stop yet.  He’s asking us to keep doing, to keep following, just like John, wherever following Jesus will lead us, to the very end.  So, as much as we can find joy in what we’ve already done, let’s not let that joy be all we experience.  Let’s keep going, and keep spreading that healing, that compassion, and that good news.

There’s an old saying that goes something like “happiness isn’t having what you want, but wanting what you have.”  And I think that’s where the other piece of our joy comes in.  For us, joy isn’t in having Jesus be who we want him to but in loving and following who he really is.  It’s realizing that he isn’t a wrecked cake—he’s our perfect savior, and it’s just that our expectations can be a little wonky.  We don’t need to order a new messiah.  We need a new perspective.  This is the part in the scripture reading where Jesus says “and blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”  God has fulfilled humanity’s request for a messiah, and didn't make any mistakes in making him.  Our task is simply to rejoice in him, to accept him, and to accept that challenge he offers his followers to imitate his example, as it really looks, not as we might want it to be different. 

And to imitate his example, and to not end up as wrecked versions of Jesus imitators ourselves, we are called to show compassion to the same kinds of people that Jesus did—the poor, the outcast, and everyone who society pushes out to the margins.  And in showing compassion, in offering healing and liberation and good news, we have to push past those boundaries that society insists we have to keep up.  We will perhaps have to go new places and do new things that and feel a little unsure of ourselves, and a little uncomfortable.  We’ll encounter new people and new ideas that will change us, and unsettle us.  We’ll probably look a bit different than we expected, too.

But blessed are we if we are able to do this, because this is what following Jesus is all about. Who did we expect?  Who do we expect?  As we prepare ourselves for his coming once again, let us remember just who this is who is going to fill that manger.  And let us open our hearts to receive him, not how we might design him, nut as God actually made him.  Not a wreck, but a savior far better and far beyond anyone we could have ever imagined.  Come, Lord Jesus, as you truly are.  Amen.

 

Repent?

Scripture:

Matthew 3:1-12

Preached 12/08/2013

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but we may need to call the police.  The lectionary is trying to kill Christmas.  At the very least, it’s trying to kill our happy pre-Christmas buzz.  Seriously, have you listened to our lectionary texts these past two weeks?  Last week, Jesus was a thief, and this week, we’ve got John the Baptist, crazy guy out in the wilderness, telling us to repent.  And really, there’s nothing quite like the word repentance to get us feeling bad about ourselves, is there?  When I hear the word “repent,” especially in that format that is commanding me to repent, I feel bad.  I feel kind of guilty, like I’m being scolded for not living properly in the first place.  Like I’m being told whatever I’m doing is wrong and bad and I need to stop it.

And then, after that initial gut reaction, the very first picture that pops into my mind is some strange person on a street corner with a sign, yelling at me to repent because the end is near.  And honestly, that isn’t too far an image from the scriptural one of John the Baptist, telling us to repent because the kingdom of heaven is at hand.  He’s a crazy looking person yelling, just no sign this time.  And John’s message to us is blunt.  He definitely doesn’t sugar coat anything.  Repent, he says.  There isn’t any mention of forgiveness, or God’s grace.  His message is simply- repent.  Or, if we add back in the part we cut out, repent you brood of vipers.  It’s just too good of a line to leave it out entirely.  Lovely job lectionary.  Repent, you brood of vipers.  Just what I want to help me get ready for Christmas.

Here’s the thing though.  If you were here last week, there’s a chance you remember the sermon.  If you weren’t, or if you somehow haven’t memorized every word I’ve ever said, here’s a quick refresher.  Jesus as a thief, as the lectionary text painted him, isn’t as bad as it first sounds.  And, very similarly, this week, repentance is actually not as grim as it first sounds either.

The actual Greek word we’re working with here is metanoiete, a form metanoia.  And metanoia doesn’t have anything to do hanging our heads in shame and saying we’re sorry and having to guiltily come crawling to apologize.  Metanoia isn’t about feeling bad at all.  Metanoia repentance is about action.  Specifically, as you can see from the definitions up on the screen, metanoia repentance is about doing something different than we’ve done before. 

So today, I’d like us to take this idea of metanoia, and apply it to our Advent season, our time of preparation for Christ.  John, after all, was telling people to repent as preparation for Christ too.  He was the kingdom of heaven that was at hand. 

I know, even though I’ve just said metanoia isn’t about feeling bad, you might be feeling a little uneasy about repenting in your Christmas preparations. Before you start feeling too sad about possibly having to change what your Advent season has been about, let me add a disclaimer.  Repenting doesn’t mean you have to stop doing what you’ve been doing.  The ways you’ve been preparing this Advent?  I bet there’s a lot of good in them.  Rather than thinking of repentance about not doing certain things, let’s look at it in the positive sense—actually doing things.  Perhaps adding—adding more joy, more love, and more peace to your time of preparation for Christ. 

So, if you would please, take out that little half sheet inside your bulletin.  You should have two columns.  The first says “Advent to-do list.”  In this space, for a few minutes, write, or draw if you’re a drawer, what you still need to do to get ready for Christmas.  And be realistic, and honest.  You don’t have to share with anyone if you don’t want to, and there is no judgment on anything you write down.  This can be things like what’s up on the screen—baking, cleaning, wrapping.  Whatever you really need to get accomplished before Christmas gets here.  Try to be exhaustive too, and get down all the preparations you can think of.  Go ahead now, and take a few minutes to jot down what you still have left to do.

. . .

Okay, now on to the second column.  Christmas Hopes.  This one, unlike the last column, doesn’t have to be realistic at all.  I would encourage you to dream big.  In that column, get down your honest deepest hopes for this Christmas.  The prompts on the screen will give you some different ways to think about this.  So if you can, in your vision of the perfect Christmas, include the day itself, relationships, and the larger community.  This can be feelings, actions, whatever is important to you.  So go ahead, and take a few minutes on this too.

. . .

On to the third part of this little exercise.  I’d like you to work backwards a bit.  Look back at your to-do list column.  Evaluate what you wrote there.  If something on that list helps accomplish something on your hopes list, give it a star or a circle or something like that.  If it doesn’t just leave it unmarked.  I’ll give you a bit to do that.

. . .

Okay, the very last part of this exercise.  The back of your sheet should be blank.  On there, I’d like you to write how you’d like to repent, or make a change, that will help you bring your two lists closer together.  After all, when our actions and our deep desires don’t meet, we can’t really be at peace, and this is peace Sunday, after all.  So write down how you can get a little closer to what you really, truly want this Christmas.  Maybe it’s something like baking extra cookies to share with police or fire fighters.  Or maybe it’s spending more energy on wrapping presents because you love the happiness big beautiful bows bring to your family.  Or even something like not cleaning your house as much before that big celebration so you have more time to spend enjoying the holiday lights, or in prayer. We’ll spend a few minutes on this too.

. . .

Now, the charge for you is to go out and do what you wrote you wanted to do.  Bring a little more peace into your life by focusing your energy on that, the thing that is important to you.  It might mean Christmas will be different, and that’s okay.  This’s what repentance offers us. Freedom from doing the things we’ve always done.  We can be like that shoot coming forth from the stump of the Jesse tree reading.  We can have new life, we can move in a new direction and do a new thing because God is doing wonderful things with us. 

God is offering us more this Advent season.  More life.  More peace.  More of what Christmas is really about.  Let’s go get it.  Amen.

Jesus the Good Thief

Scripture:

 

Matthew 24:42-44

Preached 12/01/2013

What’s your favorite image of Jesus? There are so many in scripture and in tradition that it's probably hard to pick just one.  Maybe yours is among these: Jesus, the lamb of God, or Jesus the good shepherd.  Maybe it’s the crucified and risen Christ.  Or maybe your favorite image of Jesus comes from a Bible story—Jesus inviting the little children to come to him.  Or Jesus and the woman at the well. Maybe Jesus as the fisher of people, calling his disciples.  Or maybe Jesus as God’s living love resonates with you.  Or maybe, as we approach Christmas, you love to picture baby Jesus with his parents, or baby Jesus all wrapped up and adorable in a manger.  And there are countless other images—Jesus as the King of Heaven, Jesus as a boy in the temple, Jesus as a teacher, Jesus calming the storm—there are so many to choose from, all with good reasons to be favorite representations, maybe because they’re sweet or comforting or just so familiar they pull at your heart nostalgically.

But all those images have one shortfall.  They’re not actually images that are included in our scripture reading this morning.  As we begin a new church year, and as we begin the season of advent, our lectionary does a strange thing.  First, it starts with the end.  The verses you just heard Neal read were from a section of Matthew in which Jesus is describing the eschaton, or the end times.  It’s honestly a strange section of Matthew, based on a strange section of Mark usually called Mark’s little apocalypse. Just before our reading in Matthew picks up this morning, Jesus is using all kinds of imagery to describe the end times, and to give a very short synopsis, none of them are particularly pleasant.  And so, the image that we get for Jesus in this short little passage is also, not pleasant.  The image is as Jesus as a thief, coming in the night and breaking into someone’s house.

Not exactly the kind of image we tend to love.  Probably because we don’t tend to like thieves. We take all kinds of precautions to protect ourselves against them—we lock our door and our windows, maybe we have some kind of alarm system too.  We keep valuables out of sight.  We ask neighbors to keep an eye on our place when we’re going to be away.  We don’t want a thief to break into our homes, our cars, or anywhere else we might be.  And why is that?  Well, simply, of course, because thieves take our stuff. 

We like our stuff.  We tend to like our stuff a lot.  In this culture in particular, we like to have a lot of stuff.  We keep buying bigger and bigger houses so we can fit more stuff into them.  And now even our bigger houses aren’t enough and we pay for these little houses that we call storage sheds or even storage facilities, and we put more stuff in them.  Just to be clear, I am including myself in the we here.  Rob and I have started looking for a house, and one of the things we really want is a lot of storage space.  Specifically closets.  For all of our stuff.  We, all of us, like our stuff.  And we don’t want any thief to come and take it away.

And now, of course, we’re in the official season for preparation for Christmas.  And we’ll likely prepare with even more stuff.  With decorations, with trees and ornaments and lights.  By buying presents, and buying food maybe getting some more chairs so everyone can fit around tables at the celebrations we’re planning to have.  We are pressured and encouraged and bombarded by messages that say this season is all about stuff, and we have to get more stuff to prepare and more stuff to celebrate, and more and more and more.  We’re told to stuff our faces with food, stuff boxes with presents, stuff our schedule with parties, and then we stuff ourselves with worries and anxiety about all that stuff going right.  It’s stuff, stuff, and more stuff.

But of course, you know that the preparation we do as Christians to ready ourselves for the birth of Christ is supposed to be different.  We are preparing for more than a family meal, more than a chance to open presents, more than an opportunity to look at glittering lights.  We are preparing for Jesus, the thief who will come in the night and take our stuff.  Our job in preparation?  Stay awake.

Staying awake is really hard, though, when we have too much.  Maybe you experienced something like this after your thanksgiving meal.  You had a nice, full, stomach.  Maybe you’d had some wine, or maybe the tryptophan from the turkey was setting in.  And you started to get a little sleepy.  With an overly full stomach and a cozy place to settle in, it’s very easy to fall asleep, and very hard to stay awake.  But this isn’t just a Thanksgiving meal phenomenon.  It’s an every day life thing too.  That stuff we amass can make us just a little too full, and just a little too comfortable.  The stuff lulls us into that very comfortable, and too comfortable, sense of security, and we get sleepy too.  Maybe we fall all the way asleep.  And if we’re sleeping, we can’t get ready for Jesus the thief.

Because he is coming, and he’s coming to do what thieves do—to take our stuff.  Now, Jesus isn't going to physically take our physical possessions.  But he very well may encourage us to get rid of some of them. I’m not going to beat you over the head with the stewardship thing—but you know where you can give money and time and possessions.   But Jesus is a very strange kind of thief.  Jesus doesn’t come just to take our material stuff.  Jesus is coming to take stuff that no other thief would want.  For example, he’s coming to take away our preconceived notions of what God is like.  And he’ll do this by being a baby born to an unmarried teenage mother in an obscure little town, not some mighty military power.  He’ll do this by not insisting on perfection, but by eating with tax collectors and sinners and prostitutes.  He’ll do this by not spending his time not by judging or bragging about his connection to God, but by serving, by healing the sick and raising the dead and including the outcast.

Jesus will take away more than our preconceived notions though.  He’s coming to take away all of our burdens, all of our worries, and all of our sins.  He’s coming to take away our need to please the rest of the world with our perfect Christmas decorations.  He’s coming to take away the barriers we erect between ourselves and our neighbors, and even our families and friends. Jesus is coming to clean us out, to empty us completely of our burdens and our worries until there is nothing left. 

 And that, on this Sunday where we focus on hope with that first Advent candle, is our greatest hope.  To be robbed blind by Jesus.  Because only once Jesus has emptied us completely can we be filled.  And Jesus robs us blind to fill us with the Holy Spirit.  So that, filled with the Spirit, we can go from this place and be Jesus alive in the world, even as we await his coming again.  So how do we even begin to prepare to for Jesus the thief?  Not at all like we protect ourselves against thieves, actually.  Pretty much the opposite of that.  Rather than setting up barriers and alarms and protections, we prepare by breaking these down.  Instead of closing up, we prepare for this coming robbery by opening ourselves up, as much as we can and as intentionally we can, in hope that Jesus will empty us out as completely as he can. 

So this morning, I’m going to ask you to do some preparation for me.  We’re going to take some time, together, to do one of my favorite spiritual practices, which is meditation.  We’ll use the mantra of “Ma-ra-na-tha,” which means Come, Lord.  We'll use this meditation as a way to ask Jesus to empty us out, and a way to sit in emptiness, and silence together. . .

(time of relaxing the body, and meditation using Maranatha on inhales and exhales)

Come, Lord Jesus, and rob us blind.  Amen