Jesus Grown Up, Faith Grown Bigger
by Connie Frierson
Colossians 1: 15-20
Graham advised me to make this sermon simple. After the rush and frenzy of the commercial season this is the Sunday for the true faithful, the troopers of the faith who turn out even on the day after the big day. Graham went on to suggest that I use a film clip or keep the sermon to a few good stories. In that vein I scanned through my brain for popular films with theological importance. And I came up with Talladega Nights, The Legend of Ricky Bobby. As you can see my treasury of film clips isn’t as esoteric as Grahams.
In this silly movie there was one theological idea that is worth sharing. Ricky Bobby is a stock car driver and an idiot who enjoys unreasonable success. This movie owes an apology to all things southern and I can’t actually show the clip because there is just no way to clean it up. But here is the scene. Will Ferrell who plays Ricky Bobby is offering a prayer at the dinner table. Ricky loves the Christmas Jesus best, so he begins his prayer to “Dear tiny Jesus, with Golden Fleece diapers and tiny, fat balled up fists.” Ricky Bobby’s wife interrupts and reminds him, “Jesus did grow up you know. You don’t always have to call him baby.”
“Oh no,” says Ricky Bobby. “I like the Christmas Jesus best.” So he goes on, “Dear 8 lb. 6oz. newborn infant Jesus. Don’t even know a word yet. Just a little infant, so cuddly, but still omnipotent… Thank you for all your power and your grace, dear baby God. Amen.”
I think Will Ferrell might be on to something here. We like the baby Jesus best too. We sing, “Away in a Manger no crib for a bed, the little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head.” We sing, “Silent Night, Holy Night…Holy infant so tender and mild.”
So this morning let’s think together about this love of the baby Jesus and wonder a bit if we aren’t drinking a little too much eggnog, thick and sweet. Is there a problem with our ideas about Jesus? It seems this Sweet Baby Jesus can be both a good and bad thing in our relationship with God.
What is good about a swaddled savior? The good is that God came down, lived in the neighborhood, and dwelt among us, as the First Chapter of John says. A baby Jesus who is allowed to grow up knows what it is to be fully human, is no stranger to family dynamics, bullies next door, greedy tax collectors, oppressive Roman armies, sickness, friendship, love, loss and even death. If we let the baby grow up, we know God to be with us in a brand new way. That fabulous, precious baby Jesus is a way of knowing a God, who knows us.
The nuclear scientist, Robert Oppenheimer said, “The best way to send an idea is to wrap it up in a person.” John Yates of The Falls Church in Virginia tells a story about a little girl who understood the same profound idea that Oppenheimer quote. The little girl said, “Some people couldn’t hear God’s inside whisper, and so he sent Jesus to tell them out loud.” Our God came in person, so that we can know God, in the person, of Jesus Christ.
The only problem with the sweet baby Jesus is when we limit him to babyhood. If we limit Jesus to babyhood, Jesus never grows teeth. A Jesus with out teeth is small, personal and powerless. The danger is when we make our God so personal that we distort who God is. Ricky Bobby’s baby Jesus really had very little power to save anyone in his golden, fleece diapers. Ricky Bobby’s baby Jesus was all about helping Ricky Bobby. That Baby Jesus would never ask you to love your neighbor as yourself, take up your cross and follow him, give to the poor, heal the sick, care for our planet or be a servant to all. The teaching of a grown up Jesus are challenging and following that Jesus changes us and shakes up our world.
So what is the solution to having a baby Jesus and a baby faith? The solution is we need a bigger Jesus. We need to search for the grown up Jesus and even beyond that earthly Jesus. We also need to at least begin to conceive of the Jesus who is God, the Jesus that is the Christ. We can’t box up the Son of God in a cradle. Our passage today Colossians 1:15-20 allows us to glimpse a Christ that is beyond a baby, beyond a man, beyond even a personal savior. Colossians 1 is like the antidote to too many Christmas cookies. The Ancient Hymn of Christ in our scripture this morning is Jesus who is the Christ, a savior on a cosmic scale. This is the Jesus who doesn’t just save us, but saves the world, who remakes a new earth and even a new heaven. This Jesus is the image of an invisible God. This Jesus allows us a glimpse of the power of creation that is beyond our little lives, our parochial concerns and our limited view. When you tinker with your spiritual life you are entering into God’s world on a grand scale, not our own small scale.
Jesus shows us an invisible God. How can we wrap our heads around that? Because we are physical creatures we need to conceive of God in images, in metaphor and things we do know. That is why we love the baby Jesus. We know how to love babies. But how shall we glimpse the invisible God and love a God beyond our understanding?
I think science might help, specifically the science of comets. Scientists believe that comets are like underdone leftovers. Comets are bits of gas and dust that form our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Comets are little frozen storage containers of the original matter. So they are like little frozen time capsules. Astronomers and physicists believe that if we could capture just a little of a comet before it is burned up in our atmosphere, that we could learn some fundamental answers to how planets were born. NASA has been working on this. In 2006, NASA completed a mission to retrieve comet dust. They created an armored spacecraft with a cosmic catcher’s mitt to go out and catch the comet dust. Then the dust is tucked into a reentry pod and landed in January 2006 in the Utah desert. Decades of research will surround this little teaspoon of space dust. From that tiny bit scientists will draw conclusions about how the earth was formed.
It is the same with God. A single solitary person called the Christ can tell us what we need to know about the invisible God. The meaning of life, my life, your life all of life, is held in one life of Christ. Jesus is our face for an invisible God. Flesh and blood and a life lived and died can tell us about an infinite and eternal Spirit. We learn about God’s love in that little baby and in the man, Jesus. But even before that, “For and by him all things were created.” This is Christ the creator, beyond Jesus the man. Christ is the head of the church, not just our little church, but churches outside these door, and across time. Christ is all the fullness of God dwelling inside of him.
How do we begin to get this glimpse of a bigger Jesus, a bigger God? One of the ways we do this is to pray and meditate on the foundations of our faith in the bible. If you want a bigger God to empower your life, even take over you life, look to scripture. One of the ways we want to help you do this in the New Year is to encourage a practice of reading and praying through scripture. In the next week if you are a church member you will receive a letter and a pamphlet “A 2010 Bible Reading Guide.” The letter outlines how you might use this pamphlet. The very first reading on January 1st includes our passage today from Colossians. By reading, meditating and letting these words work on us, we can begin to see a bigger God and grow into a bigger faith. A bigger faith can respond to bigger challenges. A bigger faith can look beyond our own needs to the needs of others.
So if you want to glimpse God, if you want to grow in faith, look at the baby in Bethlehem. Look at the life and teaching of Jesus. See the compassion of a God who comes to us. Experience the forgiveness he offers. Be awed at the creation he made. Catch a comet’s tail and study the complexities of a world born of God breathed dust. This is the far-reaching aspect of glimpsing a Christ bigger than a baby faith.
My wish for you this Christmas season is that you have all the fullness of Christ in you, that you recognize, treasure and nurture an awareness of that thimbleful of God in us that is Jesus Christ.
AMEN.
Witnesses to Christ's Birth:
by Dr. Graham Standish
Matthew 2:1-12
December 20, 2009
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’ When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.” ’
Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, ‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.’ When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
So far during this season of Advent we’ve been reflecting on the different witnesses to Christ’s birth. We’ve looked at the angels, who are beings created by God with a clear mandate to serve God by serving God’s creation. We talked about whether or not they exist, and if they do how we typically experience them. We’ve talked about Mary and Joseph, and about how their desire to do God’s will no matter what. We also talked about the shepherds, and about how the combination of their humility and awe opened them to see the angel and follow God despite their doubts.
Each of those witnesses is interesting, but none of them are as mysterious as our witnesses for today—the magi. We know next to nothing about the magi. The song, “We Three Kings,” calls them “kings.” We don’t know much about them, but we do know that they weren’t kings. We often describe them as three men, but we don’t even know that they were men. They could have been men or women or any combination of the two. What do we know about them? Not much. But we do know that they were astrologers. The magi were actually priests in the Zoarastrian faith of Persia. Their focus was on studying the stars. In effect, they were astrologer priests who tried to divine the future by studying the movement and configuration of the stars. Whenever a Persian king or someone wealthy needed advice, he would call upon these magi. They would divine the starts and give their advice.
Today we know astrologers as those who create our horoscopes for the local papers, which for the most part are total bunk. I know this because I did experiments with astrology when I was younger. For about a month I decided to look each night to see if my horoscope had come true. Over that thirty day period something that could be related to my horoscope came true about six times, and from what I remembered I had to really stretch to say that the predictions came true.
Still, these magi were astrologers, and they saw significance in the stars. Traditionally Christians have believed that the magi saw a special star. In the age of science, many speculated that they saw some great star supernova, or a comet passing by. Unfortunately we know now that neither was the case. Modern-day astronomers and historians have searched for evidence of a supernova or comet, but there is none. There’s no history of either occurring within decades of Christ’s birth. Most scholars today believe that we’ve discounted too much the fact that the magi were astrologers, and could have seen significance in a celestial event that others dismissed.
In all likelihood, the star they saw rising out of the east was a configuration of Jupiter, Saturn, and a star called Regulus. The three of them coming together in the early evening would have been very bright in the eastern sky, and Regulus, the king star, would have traveled westward at night out of that configuration. Scientists who have studied the stars using computers have noted that this configuration existed back in 4 B.C., which is when most scholars believe Jesus was born.
Another mystery about the magi exists that bothers many scholars: why is this story in Matthew’s gospel? You’d expect this story to appear in John’s gospel or Luke’s, but not Matthew’s. Why? To understand you have to understand something about the gospels. The mistake of many people today is in thinking that the gospel writers were just writing history, and that we just have four versions of the same history. The reality is that they weren’t writing history. They were writing about the story of Jesus and his teachings to four very distinct audiences. The differences in the gospels were due to the fact that some stories were included, others taken out, depending on who their intended audience was.
For example, it is believed that Mark’s gospel was most likely written to Jews living in Rome who had become early Christians and wanted to understand the life of Jesus in more depth. So Mark gives them mostly the facts, and it is written in a way that would appeal to a Jewish audience living in the midst of Gentiles. Meanwhile, Luke’s gospel was written by a Gentile to Gentiles, not Jews. The most commonly accepted belief was that Luke was writing his gospel to someone in the Roman emperor’s court, and that the combination of Luke’s gospel and the Book of Acts, which he also wrote, were written as a defense of the apostle Paul, who was on trial in Rome and was facing execution. Other scholars believe he was writing to Gentiles living in Greece. Either way, the gospel is very Gentile-friendly. In his gospel Jesus has many traits that would have been especially appealing to Gentiles, such as sitting down and eating with others, especially non-Jews. Finally, John’s gospel was most likely written to Gentile Christians living in what is now Syria and Lebanon. These Christians had become captivated by a new, heretical teaching called “Gnosticism.” John’s gospel was trying to overcome this heresy by emphasizing that Jesus was real, that he could be touched, that he had been alive in the real world, and that his Spirit is now in us. Who the audience is makes all the difference in how the story is told.
So, why wouldn’t we expect the story of the magi to be in Matthew’s gospel? The answer is that we wouldn’t expect it because out of all the gospels, Matthew’s gospel is the most Jewish gospel. The story of thee Gentiles coming to Jesus would seem to be more appealing to a Gentile audience. Matthew’s gospel was a Jewish gospel, and typically would not have praised any Gentiles. Instead, he praise Jews and Jewish tradition. For instance, he constantly cited how Jesus was fulfilling scripture. Luke and John rarely cited scripture because they were writing to Gentiles who didn’t know Jewish scripture. So, what’s the big deal about Matthew mentioning astrologers? The answer is that not only did the Jews not believe in astrology, but they considered astrology to be evil. To them, the fact that the magi showed up would not be a good thing. But Matthew included this story in his gospel for a reason.
I believe that Matthew was trying to make a very powerful point to the Jews. He was saying to them that the Jews missed the sign of Jesus being born in scripture, but that people of another religion, even an evil one, heard God’s call to revere Jesus. He’s saying that Jesus was so important that God spread the news to both Jews and Gentiles alike. God was not longer just the God of the Jews, but was now the God of everyone, and the Jews need to jump on board.
I also think there was another message here that we can take from this passage, one that it applicable for us today. The message of the magi is that God can speak to us through anything, especially through nature, if we are really listening. If we have a proper openness to God and to God in the world, we can discover God speaking constantly to us. I’m not a big believer in astrology, but I think in this one instance God used it for God’s purposes. God spoke to the magi through the stars, and they heard.
I’ve learned in my life to pay attention to God’s voice coming through the world, and I’m amazed at how often profound messages can come to me when I am looking at the stars, when I am listening to another person, and when I am reading a book. When I am receptive, God speaks over and over and over. Looking back at my life, I know where I Iearned to hear God through the world. As with so much in my life, I learned it on television. Specifically, I learned to hear God speaking through nature from the television show Kung Fu.
I don’t know if you remember the show, but it was about an American-Chinese man, a Shaolin monk, who had to escape to America after he killed the Emperor’s nephew. Each week we followed the man as he wandered the old West looking for a half-brother. In each episode he would face a crisis, which he would always try to resolve peacefully, in keeping with his Shaolin principles. Eventually he would be forced to fight using kung-fu, of which he was a master, and overcome the bad guys.
Often, when faced with a crisis, he would have flashbacks to his training as a child in the monastery. You would see him as a young apprentice monk, speaking to a master. He would ask a question such as, “Master, why is it so hard to know what the right thing to do in each situation?” The master would say, “Place your foot in that stream over there, Grasshopper (he called the young boy by that name). Now place it in again. Did you touch the same water twice?” The young boy would say, “No, because the water keeps moving and changing.” The master would say, “And that is why life is so hard. It keeps moving and changing.”
It may have been just a television show, but God spoke to me through it and taught me that we can find God’s wisdom by observing nature and learning what it can teach us. I believe that the magi understood something similar. They looked at the stars and heard God. Much like the main character from Kung-Fu, they had something that too many of us modern people are missing. They had reverence for nature, and especially the stars.
Last week I spoke of how important awe is—that sense of smallness and wonder in the face of God and God’s creation. Reverence is related to awe, but it’s a bit different. Reverence means looking at what’s around us with a sense that it is all sacred, and that God is reflected through it all. When we have reverence for each other, we sense the sacred in each other. When we have reverence in worship, we sense God’s presence in our midst. If we look at each other with reverence, we can sense God in each other.
Too often we’re missing a sense of reverence. To often we diminish life by making it all about money, or power, or control, or getting things done, or tasks, or a million other ways we diminish life. The question is whether we can begin to live with a sense of reverence, because if we can we can let Christ be born in us. The magi were reverent, and it made all the difference.
Not to belabor the connection between God and labor, but I have a very fun, short video clip I’d love for you to see (I showed it when I preached this sermon). It’s a clip by a Christian musician, Wendy Francisco, and you can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H17edn_RZoY.
I want to leave you with a basic question to reflect upon: Can you hear God speaking all around you? This is supposed to be a season of hearing God. How well are you listening?
Amen.
Matthew 2:1-12
December 20, 2009
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’ When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.” ’
Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, ‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.’ When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
So far during this season of Advent we’ve been reflecting on the different witnesses to Christ’s birth. We’ve looked at the angels, who are beings created by God with a clear mandate to serve God by serving God’s creation. We talked about whether or not they exist, and if they do how we typically experience them. We’ve talked about Mary and Joseph, and about how their desire to do God’s will no matter what. We also talked about the shepherds, and about how the combination of their humility and awe opened them to see the angel and follow God despite their doubts.
Each of those witnesses is interesting, but none of them are as mysterious as our witnesses for today—the magi. We know next to nothing about the magi. The song, “We Three Kings,” calls them “kings.” We don’t know much about them, but we do know that they weren’t kings. We often describe them as three men, but we don’t even know that they were men. They could have been men or women or any combination of the two. What do we know about them? Not much. But we do know that they were astrologers. The magi were actually priests in the Zoarastrian faith of Persia. Their focus was on studying the stars. In effect, they were astrologer priests who tried to divine the future by studying the movement and configuration of the stars. Whenever a Persian king or someone wealthy needed advice, he would call upon these magi. They would divine the starts and give their advice.
Today we know astrologers as those who create our horoscopes for the local papers, which for the most part are total bunk. I know this because I did experiments with astrology when I was younger. For about a month I decided to look each night to see if my horoscope had come true. Over that thirty day period something that could be related to my horoscope came true about six times, and from what I remembered I had to really stretch to say that the predictions came true.
Still, these magi were astrologers, and they saw significance in the stars. Traditionally Christians have believed that the magi saw a special star. In the age of science, many speculated that they saw some great star supernova, or a comet passing by. Unfortunately we know now that neither was the case. Modern-day astronomers and historians have searched for evidence of a supernova or comet, but there is none. There’s no history of either occurring within decades of Christ’s birth. Most scholars today believe that we’ve discounted too much the fact that the magi were astrologers, and could have seen significance in a celestial event that others dismissed.
In all likelihood, the star they saw rising out of the east was a configuration of Jupiter, Saturn, and a star called Regulus. The three of them coming together in the early evening would have been very bright in the eastern sky, and Regulus, the king star, would have traveled westward at night out of that configuration. Scientists who have studied the stars using computers have noted that this configuration existed back in 4 B.C., which is when most scholars believe Jesus was born.
Another mystery about the magi exists that bothers many scholars: why is this story in Matthew’s gospel? You’d expect this story to appear in John’s gospel or Luke’s, but not Matthew’s. Why? To understand you have to understand something about the gospels. The mistake of many people today is in thinking that the gospel writers were just writing history, and that we just have four versions of the same history. The reality is that they weren’t writing history. They were writing about the story of Jesus and his teachings to four very distinct audiences. The differences in the gospels were due to the fact that some stories were included, others taken out, depending on who their intended audience was.
For example, it is believed that Mark’s gospel was most likely written to Jews living in Rome who had become early Christians and wanted to understand the life of Jesus in more depth. So Mark gives them mostly the facts, and it is written in a way that would appeal to a Jewish audience living in the midst of Gentiles. Meanwhile, Luke’s gospel was written by a Gentile to Gentiles, not Jews. The most commonly accepted belief was that Luke was writing his gospel to someone in the Roman emperor’s court, and that the combination of Luke’s gospel and the Book of Acts, which he also wrote, were written as a defense of the apostle Paul, who was on trial in Rome and was facing execution. Other scholars believe he was writing to Gentiles living in Greece. Either way, the gospel is very Gentile-friendly. In his gospel Jesus has many traits that would have been especially appealing to Gentiles, such as sitting down and eating with others, especially non-Jews. Finally, John’s gospel was most likely written to Gentile Christians living in what is now Syria and Lebanon. These Christians had become captivated by a new, heretical teaching called “Gnosticism.” John’s gospel was trying to overcome this heresy by emphasizing that Jesus was real, that he could be touched, that he had been alive in the real world, and that his Spirit is now in us. Who the audience is makes all the difference in how the story is told.
So, why wouldn’t we expect the story of the magi to be in Matthew’s gospel? The answer is that we wouldn’t expect it because out of all the gospels, Matthew’s gospel is the most Jewish gospel. The story of thee Gentiles coming to Jesus would seem to be more appealing to a Gentile audience. Matthew’s gospel was a Jewish gospel, and typically would not have praised any Gentiles. Instead, he praise Jews and Jewish tradition. For instance, he constantly cited how Jesus was fulfilling scripture. Luke and John rarely cited scripture because they were writing to Gentiles who didn’t know Jewish scripture. So, what’s the big deal about Matthew mentioning astrologers? The answer is that not only did the Jews not believe in astrology, but they considered astrology to be evil. To them, the fact that the magi showed up would not be a good thing. But Matthew included this story in his gospel for a reason.
I believe that Matthew was trying to make a very powerful point to the Jews. He was saying to them that the Jews missed the sign of Jesus being born in scripture, but that people of another religion, even an evil one, heard God’s call to revere Jesus. He’s saying that Jesus was so important that God spread the news to both Jews and Gentiles alike. God was not longer just the God of the Jews, but was now the God of everyone, and the Jews need to jump on board.
I also think there was another message here that we can take from this passage, one that it applicable for us today. The message of the magi is that God can speak to us through anything, especially through nature, if we are really listening. If we have a proper openness to God and to God in the world, we can discover God speaking constantly to us. I’m not a big believer in astrology, but I think in this one instance God used it for God’s purposes. God spoke to the magi through the stars, and they heard.
I’ve learned in my life to pay attention to God’s voice coming through the world, and I’m amazed at how often profound messages can come to me when I am looking at the stars, when I am listening to another person, and when I am reading a book. When I am receptive, God speaks over and over and over. Looking back at my life, I know where I Iearned to hear God through the world. As with so much in my life, I learned it on television. Specifically, I learned to hear God speaking through nature from the television show Kung Fu.
I don’t know if you remember the show, but it was about an American-Chinese man, a Shaolin monk, who had to escape to America after he killed the Emperor’s nephew. Each week we followed the man as he wandered the old West looking for a half-brother. In each episode he would face a crisis, which he would always try to resolve peacefully, in keeping with his Shaolin principles. Eventually he would be forced to fight using kung-fu, of which he was a master, and overcome the bad guys.
Often, when faced with a crisis, he would have flashbacks to his training as a child in the monastery. You would see him as a young apprentice monk, speaking to a master. He would ask a question such as, “Master, why is it so hard to know what the right thing to do in each situation?” The master would say, “Place your foot in that stream over there, Grasshopper (he called the young boy by that name). Now place it in again. Did you touch the same water twice?” The young boy would say, “No, because the water keeps moving and changing.” The master would say, “And that is why life is so hard. It keeps moving and changing.”
It may have been just a television show, but God spoke to me through it and taught me that we can find God’s wisdom by observing nature and learning what it can teach us. I believe that the magi understood something similar. They looked at the stars and heard God. Much like the main character from Kung-Fu, they had something that too many of us modern people are missing. They had reverence for nature, and especially the stars.
Last week I spoke of how important awe is—that sense of smallness and wonder in the face of God and God’s creation. Reverence is related to awe, but it’s a bit different. Reverence means looking at what’s around us with a sense that it is all sacred, and that God is reflected through it all. When we have reverence for each other, we sense the sacred in each other. When we have reverence in worship, we sense God’s presence in our midst. If we look at each other with reverence, we can sense God in each other.
Too often we’re missing a sense of reverence. To often we diminish life by making it all about money, or power, or control, or getting things done, or tasks, or a million other ways we diminish life. The question is whether we can begin to live with a sense of reverence, because if we can we can let Christ be born in us. The magi were reverent, and it made all the difference.
Not to belabor the connection between God and labor, but I have a very fun, short video clip I’d love for you to see (I showed it when I preached this sermon). It’s a clip by a Christian musician, Wendy Francisco, and you can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H17edn_RZoY.
I want to leave you with a basic question to reflect upon: Can you hear God speaking all around you? This is supposed to be a season of hearing God. How well are you listening?
Amen.
Witnesses to Christ's Birth: The Magi
by Dr. Graham Standish
Matthew 2:1-12
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’ When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.” ’
Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, ‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.’ When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
So far during this season of Advent we’ve been reflecting on the different witnesses to Christ’s birth. We’ve looked at the angels, who are beings created by God with a clear mandate to serve God by serving God’s creation. We talked about whether or not they exist, and if they do how we typically experience them. We’ve talked about Mary and Joseph, and about how their desire to do God’s will no matter what. We also talked about the shepherds, and about how the combination of their humility and awe opened them to see the angel and follow God despite their doubts.
Each of those witnesses is interesting, but none of them are as mysterious as our witnesses for today—the magi. We know next to nothing about the magi. The song, “We Three Kings,” calls them “kings.” We don’t know much about them, but we do know that they weren’t kings. We often describe them as three men, but we don’t even know that they were men. They could have been men or women or any combination of the two. What do we know about them? Not much. But we do know that they were astrologers. The magi were actually priests in the Zoarastrian faith of Persia. Their focus was on studying the stars. In effect, they were astrologer priests who tried to divine the future by studying the movement and configuration of the stars. Whenever a Persian king or someone wealthy needed advice, he would call upon these magi. They would divine the starts and give their advice.
Today we know astrologers as those who create our horoscopes for the local papers, which for the most part are total bunk. I know this because I did experiments with astrology when I was younger. For about a month I decided to look each night to see if my horoscope had come true. Over that thirty day period something that could be related to my horoscope came true about six times, and from what I remembered I had to really stretch to say that the predictions came true.
Still, these magi were astrologers, and they saw significance in the stars. Traditionally Christians have believed that the magi saw a special star. In the age of science, many speculated that they saw some great star supernova, or a comet passing by. Unfortunately we know now that neither was the case. Modern-day astronomers and historians have searched for evidence of a supernova or comet, but there is none. There’s no history of either occurring within decades of Christ’s birth. Most scholars today believe that we’ve discounted too much the fact that the magi were astrologers, and could have seen significance in a celestial event that others dismissed.
In all likelihood, the star they saw rising out of the east was a configuration of Jupiter, Saturn, and a star called Regulus. The three of them coming together in the early evening would have been very bright in the eastern sky, and Regulus, the king star, would have traveled westward at night out of that configuration. Scientists who have studied the stars using computers have noted that this configuration existed back in 4 B.C., which is when most scholars believe Jesus was born.
Another mystery about the magi exists that bothers many scholars: why is this story in Matthew’s gospel? You’d expect this story to appear in John’s gospel or Luke’s, but not Matthew’s. Why? To understand you have to understand something about the gospels. The mistake of many people today is in thinking that the gospel writers were just writing history, and that we just have four versions of the same history. The reality is that they weren’t writing history. They were writing about the story of Jesus and his teachings to four very distinct audiences. The differences in the gospels were due to the fact that some stories were included, others taken out, depending on who their intended audience was.
For example, it is believed that Mark’s gospel was most likely written to Jews living in Rome who had become early Christians and wanted to understand the life of Jesus in more depth. So Mark gives them mostly the facts, and it is written in a way that would appeal to a Jewish audience living in the midst of Gentiles. Meanwhile, Luke’s gospel was written by a Gentile to Gentiles, not Jews. The most commonly accepted belief was that Luke was writing his gospel to someone in the Roman emperor’s court, and that the combination of Luke’s gospel and the Book of Acts, which he also wrote, were written as a defense of the apostle Paul, who was on trial in Rome and was facing execution. Other scholars believe he was writing to Gentiles living in Greece. Either way, the gospel is very Gentile-friendly. In his gospel Jesus has many traits that would have been especially appealing to Gentiles, such as sitting down and eating with others, especially non-Jews. Finally, John’s gospel was most likely written to Gentile Christians living in what is now Syria and Lebanon. These Christians had become captivated by a new, heretical teaching called “Gnosticism.” John’s gospel was trying to overcome this heresy by emphasizing that Jesus was real, that he could be touched, that he had been alive in the real world, and that his Spirit is now in us. Who the audience is makes all the difference in how the story is told.
So, why wouldn’t we expect the story of the magi to be in Matthew’s gospel? The answer is that we wouldn’t expect it because out of all the gospels, Matthew’s gospel is the most Jewish gospel. The story of thee Gentiles coming to Jesus would seem to be more appealing to a Gentile audience. Matthew’s gospel was a Jewish gospel, and typically would not have praised any Gentiles. Instead, he praise Jews and Jewish tradition. For instance, he constantly cited how Jesus was fulfilling scripture. Luke and John rarely cited scripture because they were writing to Gentiles who didn’t know Jewish scripture. So, what’s the big deal about Matthew mentioning astrologers? The answer is that not only did the Jews not believe in astrology, but they considered astrology to be evil. To them, the fact that the magi showed up would not be a good thing. But Matthew included this story in his gospel for a reason.
I believe that Matthew was trying to make a very powerful point to the Jews. He was saying to them that the Jews missed the sign of Jesus being born in scripture, but that people of another religion, even an evil one, heard God’s call to revere Jesus. He’s saying that Jesus was so important that God spread the news to both Jews and Gentiles alike. God was not longer just the God of the Jews, but was now the God of everyone, and the Jews need to jump on board.
I also think there was another message here that we can take from this passage, one that it applicable for us today. The message of the magi is that God can speak to us through anything, especially through nature, if we are really listening. If we have a proper openness to God and to God in the world, we can discover God speaking constantly to us. I’m not a big believer in astrology, but I think in this one instance God used it for God’s purposes. God spoke to the magi through the stars, and they heard.
I’ve learned in my life to pay attention to God’s voice coming through the world, and I’m amazed at how often profound messages can come to me when I am looking at the stars, when I am listening to another person, and when I am reading a book. When I am receptive, God speaks over and over and over. Looking back at my life, I know where I Iearned to hear God through the world. As with so much in my life, I learned it on television. Specifically, I learned to hear God speaking through nature from the television show Kung Fu.
I don’t know if you remember the show, but it was about an American-Chinese man, a Shaolin monk, who had to escape to America after he killed the Emperor’s nephew. Each week we followed the man as he wandered the old West looking for a half-brother. In each episode he would face a crisis, which he would always try to resolve peacefully, in keeping with his Shaolin principles. Eventually he would be forced to fight using kung-fu, of which he was a master, and overcome the bad guys.
Often, when faced with a crisis, he would have flashbacks to his training as a child in the monastery. You would see him as a young apprentice monk, speaking to a master. He would ask a question such as, “Master, why is it so hard to know what the right thing to do in each situation?” The master would say, “Place your foot in that stream over there, Grasshopper (he called the young boy by that name). Now place it in again. Did you touch the same water twice?” The young boy would say, “No, because the water keeps moving and changing.” The master would say, “And that is why life is so hard. It keeps moving and changing.”
It may have been just a television show, but God spoke to me through it and taught me that we can find God’s wisdom by observing nature and learning what it can teach us. I believe that the magi understood something similar. They looked at the stars and heard God. Much like the main character from Kung-Fu, they had something that too many of us modern people are missing. They had reverence for nature, and especially the stars.
Last week I spoke of how important awe is—that sense of smallness and wonder in the face of God and God’s creation. Reverence is related to awe, but it’s a bit different. Reverence means looking at what’s around us with a sense that it is all sacred, and that God is reflected through it all. When we have reverence for each other, we sense the sacred in each other. When we have reverence in worship, we sense God’s presence in our midst. If we look at each other with reverence, we can sense God in each other.
Too often we’re missing a sense of reverence. To often we diminish life by making it all about money, or power, or control, or getting things done, or tasks, or a million other ways we diminish life. The question is whether we can begin to live with a sense of reverence, because if we can we can let Christ be born in us. The magi were reverent, and it made all the difference.
Not to belabor the connection between God and labor, but I have a very fun, short video clip I’d love for you to see (I showed it when I preached this sermon). It’s a clip by a Christian musician, Wendy Francisco, and you can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H17edn_RZoY.
I want to leave you with a basic question to reflect upon: Can you hear God speaking all around you? This is supposed to be a season of hearing God. How well are you listening?
Amen.
Matthew 2:1-12
In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’ When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: “And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.” ’
Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, ‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.’ When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.
So far during this season of Advent we’ve been reflecting on the different witnesses to Christ’s birth. We’ve looked at the angels, who are beings created by God with a clear mandate to serve God by serving God’s creation. We talked about whether or not they exist, and if they do how we typically experience them. We’ve talked about Mary and Joseph, and about how their desire to do God’s will no matter what. We also talked about the shepherds, and about how the combination of their humility and awe opened them to see the angel and follow God despite their doubts.
Each of those witnesses is interesting, but none of them are as mysterious as our witnesses for today—the magi. We know next to nothing about the magi. The song, “We Three Kings,” calls them “kings.” We don’t know much about them, but we do know that they weren’t kings. We often describe them as three men, but we don’t even know that they were men. They could have been men or women or any combination of the two. What do we know about them? Not much. But we do know that they were astrologers. The magi were actually priests in the Zoarastrian faith of Persia. Their focus was on studying the stars. In effect, they were astrologer priests who tried to divine the future by studying the movement and configuration of the stars. Whenever a Persian king or someone wealthy needed advice, he would call upon these magi. They would divine the starts and give their advice.
Today we know astrologers as those who create our horoscopes for the local papers, which for the most part are total bunk. I know this because I did experiments with astrology when I was younger. For about a month I decided to look each night to see if my horoscope had come true. Over that thirty day period something that could be related to my horoscope came true about six times, and from what I remembered I had to really stretch to say that the predictions came true.
Still, these magi were astrologers, and they saw significance in the stars. Traditionally Christians have believed that the magi saw a special star. In the age of science, many speculated that they saw some great star supernova, or a comet passing by. Unfortunately we know now that neither was the case. Modern-day astronomers and historians have searched for evidence of a supernova or comet, but there is none. There’s no history of either occurring within decades of Christ’s birth. Most scholars today believe that we’ve discounted too much the fact that the magi were astrologers, and could have seen significance in a celestial event that others dismissed.
In all likelihood, the star they saw rising out of the east was a configuration of Jupiter, Saturn, and a star called Regulus. The three of them coming together in the early evening would have been very bright in the eastern sky, and Regulus, the king star, would have traveled westward at night out of that configuration. Scientists who have studied the stars using computers have noted that this configuration existed back in 4 B.C., which is when most scholars believe Jesus was born.
Another mystery about the magi exists that bothers many scholars: why is this story in Matthew’s gospel? You’d expect this story to appear in John’s gospel or Luke’s, but not Matthew’s. Why? To understand you have to understand something about the gospels. The mistake of many people today is in thinking that the gospel writers were just writing history, and that we just have four versions of the same history. The reality is that they weren’t writing history. They were writing about the story of Jesus and his teachings to four very distinct audiences. The differences in the gospels were due to the fact that some stories were included, others taken out, depending on who their intended audience was.
For example, it is believed that Mark’s gospel was most likely written to Jews living in Rome who had become early Christians and wanted to understand the life of Jesus in more depth. So Mark gives them mostly the facts, and it is written in a way that would appeal to a Jewish audience living in the midst of Gentiles. Meanwhile, Luke’s gospel was written by a Gentile to Gentiles, not Jews. The most commonly accepted belief was that Luke was writing his gospel to someone in the Roman emperor’s court, and that the combination of Luke’s gospel and the Book of Acts, which he also wrote, were written as a defense of the apostle Paul, who was on trial in Rome and was facing execution. Other scholars believe he was writing to Gentiles living in Greece. Either way, the gospel is very Gentile-friendly. In his gospel Jesus has many traits that would have been especially appealing to Gentiles, such as sitting down and eating with others, especially non-Jews. Finally, John’s gospel was most likely written to Gentile Christians living in what is now Syria and Lebanon. These Christians had become captivated by a new, heretical teaching called “Gnosticism.” John’s gospel was trying to overcome this heresy by emphasizing that Jesus was real, that he could be touched, that he had been alive in the real world, and that his Spirit is now in us. Who the audience is makes all the difference in how the story is told.
So, why wouldn’t we expect the story of the magi to be in Matthew’s gospel? The answer is that we wouldn’t expect it because out of all the gospels, Matthew’s gospel is the most Jewish gospel. The story of thee Gentiles coming to Jesus would seem to be more appealing to a Gentile audience. Matthew’s gospel was a Jewish gospel, and typically would not have praised any Gentiles. Instead, he praise Jews and Jewish tradition. For instance, he constantly cited how Jesus was fulfilling scripture. Luke and John rarely cited scripture because they were writing to Gentiles who didn’t know Jewish scripture. So, what’s the big deal about Matthew mentioning astrologers? The answer is that not only did the Jews not believe in astrology, but they considered astrology to be evil. To them, the fact that the magi showed up would not be a good thing. But Matthew included this story in his gospel for a reason.
I believe that Matthew was trying to make a very powerful point to the Jews. He was saying to them that the Jews missed the sign of Jesus being born in scripture, but that people of another religion, even an evil one, heard God’s call to revere Jesus. He’s saying that Jesus was so important that God spread the news to both Jews and Gentiles alike. God was not longer just the God of the Jews, but was now the God of everyone, and the Jews need to jump on board.
I also think there was another message here that we can take from this passage, one that it applicable for us today. The message of the magi is that God can speak to us through anything, especially through nature, if we are really listening. If we have a proper openness to God and to God in the world, we can discover God speaking constantly to us. I’m not a big believer in astrology, but I think in this one instance God used it for God’s purposes. God spoke to the magi through the stars, and they heard.
I’ve learned in my life to pay attention to God’s voice coming through the world, and I’m amazed at how often profound messages can come to me when I am looking at the stars, when I am listening to another person, and when I am reading a book. When I am receptive, God speaks over and over and over. Looking back at my life, I know where I Iearned to hear God through the world. As with so much in my life, I learned it on television. Specifically, I learned to hear God speaking through nature from the television show Kung Fu.
I don’t know if you remember the show, but it was about an American-Chinese man, a Shaolin monk, who had to escape to America after he killed the Emperor’s nephew. Each week we followed the man as he wandered the old West looking for a half-brother. In each episode he would face a crisis, which he would always try to resolve peacefully, in keeping with his Shaolin principles. Eventually he would be forced to fight using kung-fu, of which he was a master, and overcome the bad guys.
Often, when faced with a crisis, he would have flashbacks to his training as a child in the monastery. You would see him as a young apprentice monk, speaking to a master. He would ask a question such as, “Master, why is it so hard to know what the right thing to do in each situation?” The master would say, “Place your foot in that stream over there, Grasshopper (he called the young boy by that name). Now place it in again. Did you touch the same water twice?” The young boy would say, “No, because the water keeps moving and changing.” The master would say, “And that is why life is so hard. It keeps moving and changing.”
It may have been just a television show, but God spoke to me through it and taught me that we can find God’s wisdom by observing nature and learning what it can teach us. I believe that the magi understood something similar. They looked at the stars and heard God. Much like the main character from Kung-Fu, they had something that too many of us modern people are missing. They had reverence for nature, and especially the stars.
Last week I spoke of how important awe is—that sense of smallness and wonder in the face of God and God’s creation. Reverence is related to awe, but it’s a bit different. Reverence means looking at what’s around us with a sense that it is all sacred, and that God is reflected through it all. When we have reverence for each other, we sense the sacred in each other. When we have reverence in worship, we sense God’s presence in our midst. If we look at each other with reverence, we can sense God in each other.
Too often we’re missing a sense of reverence. To often we diminish life by making it all about money, or power, or control, or getting things done, or tasks, or a million other ways we diminish life. The question is whether we can begin to live with a sense of reverence, because if we can we can let Christ be born in us. The magi were reverent, and it made all the difference.
Not to belabor the connection between God and labor, but I have a very fun, short video clip I’d love for you to see (I showed it when I preached this sermon). It’s a clip by a Christian musician, Wendy Francisco, and you can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H17edn_RZoY.
I want to leave you with a basic question to reflect upon: Can you hear God speaking all around you? This is supposed to be a season of hearing God. How well are you listening?
Amen.
Witnesses to Christ's Birth: Shepherds
by Dr. Graham Standish
Luke 2:8-20
In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,
‘Glory to God in the highest heaven,
and on earth peace among those whom he favors!’
When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, ‘Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.’ So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.
I want you to stop and reflect for a moment. Take time to think about the places you are most likely to experience God, not including church. Picture places that you’ve experienced God’s presence.
I’d be willing to bet that most of you named somewhere in nature—the mountains, the beach, your back yard, a cemetery, in the woods, along a river, a sunset. There’s definitely something about nature that opens people to the Divine, the Holy, and to God. The places I’ve always been most touched by the spiritual have been in nature. For example, over the course of 35 years our family went to a lake 180 miles north of Toronto. It was there, sitting on a dock at midnight, looking at the stars, that I often sensed God’s presence most tangibly. Something about the stars helped me to feel as though God was there.
Another place that I felt God tangibly was two years ago when Bruce Smith and I led a worship conference at a retreat center in the hill country of Texas. Even though the temperature hovered around 94 degrees, I went for a 4-mile hike through the woods every afternoon. It was beautiful. And twice I came across a small family of armadillos. When I first saw them it scared the giblets out of me. But then I became fascinated with them, especially since they didn’t really care that I was there. They just kept rooting for whatever it is that they eat. Then one little fella put his paws on my toe, then stood up on his hind legs with his front paws against my shin, and sniffed me. He must have thought that I was no good to eat because he (or she) got back down and sniffed the rocks around me. For him (or her) our encounter was nothing, but I was in awe. I never expected to see armadillos. It felt like God had given me such an incredible gift in those woods, and I sensed God smiling.
Why is nature so good at helping us experience the Holy? I believe the answer is fairly simple. Nature inspires awe. It causes us to recognize the greatness of God’s creation while at the same time making us seem small in comparison. We aren’t made to feel small in a bad way. Nature makes us feel small in a way that makes us as though we are part of something great and majestic. I think that this is what those great cathedrals of Europe do. They are awe-inspiring because they make us feel small, but also safe in God’s great sacred space.
Also, nature helps us experience the Holy by reconnecting us with our source—with creation and the Creator. When we are out in nature, we sense God’s presence because we know that God created everything.
Finally, nature helps us experience the Holy by opening us to what is beyond. Nature helps us realize that there is always more than we can possibly take in. For example, when I look at the stars in Canada, I’m reminded that we are on a planet circling one star among 16 billion in our galaxy. And I’m reminded that our galaxy is one galaxy among 16 billion galaxies. Reflecting on that, I realize just how great and beyond anything I can imagine God really is. I am awed by how more there is to the universe, life, and existence there is than I can ever imagine.
We don’t talk much about awe nowadays, but awe is essential to gaining a real sense of God’s presence with us and in us. People who have no awe have no sense of God. The Old Testament talks about awe a lot, although most of our Bibles translate the term as “fear of the Lord,” as in “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” I think “fear of the Lord” is a bad translation. It should be translated as “awe,” as in “Awe in the face of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”
I think the shepherd’s connection with God through nature has something to do with the angel (probably Gabriel) appearing to the shepherds to announce Jesus birth, rather than to the kings, the magistrates, the temple priests, or the rabbis. It’s not just that the shepherds were out in nature. It’s what nature did to them that prepared them to hear the angel and to find Jesus.
How much do you know about ancient shepherds and their situation? To really get an appreciation for our passage it helps to know something about shepherds. First of all, they were considered nothing in the eyes of Jewish society. They were among the lowest ranks of society. Why? Because they had to tend to the sheep all the time. They were considered to be dirty. Their exposure to the sun often caused them to get skin conditions that others thought of as demonstrating sin. And their commitment to the sheep often left them unable to worship at either the Temple or the synagogues. As a result, they were discounted by the culture. But this had a spiritual benefit. Among the sheep the shepherds learned humility. They never had large egos that got in the way of them being open to God. They considered themselves to be nothing, but the result was that they were much more open to God. They had no power, so they were open to God’s power.
Second, their connection with nature caused them to live a life of awe. They were able to experience God in the hills, the sun, the moon, the stars, streams, valleys, and the sheep. They were awed by nature, and their awe created the conditions in which they could be both terrified in seeing the angel, while simultaneously wanting to hear everything the angel said. And their awe led them to be willing to follow.
Finally, they didn’t over-think their experience, but were open to the Holy. Think about us today. Whenever we have a spiritual experience we tend to try to analyze it from all directions. Perhaps part of that analysis is religious and theological, but we’d also try to do a psychological, pragmatic analysis, wondering if we were losing our minds. We’d test the experience against what everyone else says is reality, meaning that people living in reality don’t see angels. We would question the experience, but the shepherds accepted it.
Have you thought much about what gets in the way of our experiencing God? For a lot of us our problem is that we’re the complete opposite of the shepherds. We are all important in our own eyes, both individually and as a culture. We’re a culture of egos, and it’s hard to be open to God when our collective egos are so large. The result is that we don’t spend much time connecting with the divine in nature anymore. Before the 20th century, much of our culture lived amidst nature, whether that means in farming towns or villages and cities where nature was much closer. Today few live amidst real nature, and we’re poorer for it, although I don’t know what the answer is. I know that for me part of the answer is taking walks around Hereford Manor, a local lake in the area. For some of you it is boating or fishing on Lake Arthur, or walking and biking the trails of Moraine State Park.
The problem for most of our culture is that our lack of connection with nature means that don’t look at life with much of a sense of awe. In fact, we Americans are seldom awed. We’re too busy celebrating our greatness to be awed. Or we’re too busy trying to run the world to be awed. Also, we Americans are so well educated that we over-think God and the Holy. I believe that this is the reason so many young adults forget about God in college. They live in cocoons in which their food, shelter, and entertainment are provided for, and so they are free to think of life in a way that’s disconnected from reality. They can entertain thoughts of a world without God or religion because they are disconnected from any sources of awe. Also, college is a place of thinking, analyzing, and rationalizing, which makes the conditions right for over-thinking. Thus, spiritual and theological thinking is diminished.
The result of all of this is that it can be hard for us modern Americans to truly become open to God. So, here’s my question for you: What would it take for you to become more like a shepherd in your life?
I’m not asking what it would take for you to tend sheep. I’m asking what it would take for you to become a truly humble person, a person shaped by awe, and a person open to God in all things? The answers to these questions will offer you a path to the experience of God.
Amen.
Witness to Christ's Birth: Mary & Joseph
Connie Frierson
Matthew 1: 18-25
I have a friend who used to claim to have lived an accidental life. He makes a whole series of jokes about how everything in his life has been accidental. He went to the college that sent him an acceptance letter. But he really didn’t know anything about the college; in fact he was shocked to find that it was a boys only school when he showed up the first day on campus. He met his wife when he accidentally bumped into her at a party and spilled his drink on her. He went to law school to avoid the draft, so he thinks of this as an accidental profession. He claims none of his kids were planned. Yet here is a man with a happy 35-year marriage, healthy grown kids, a prosperous career and years of community service. In hindsight, my friend of the accidental life has had a good life and knows he was blessed, that God was moving in the circumstances and accidents of his life.
As Christians we believe that God works in and through all of life the good and the bad. We believe in more than serendipitous life. We believe in a life of God’s providence.
Graham started a sermon series last week on the witnesses to Jesus Birth. This week we have Mary and Joseph as witnesses to us. Mary and Joseph have had a particular gift from God given to them, a gift that is remarkable even before the miracle of Jesus birth. Mary and Joseph knew that their lives were not accidental or incidental. They knew that God was at work in their lives and how they responded to God made all the difference in the world. Even right down to today and our world.
So who were Mary and Joseph? What was it about them that was faithful, significant and important? Well at first glance not much. My, my, God uses dubious material. At first glance it almost appears random. Mary was one of thousands, no millions of teenage girls in the wide, wide world. If we looked at the 8th grade class at Seneca Valley Middle School would we be any more surprised to see one of those teens as the mother of God? Mary was even more improbable. She was young, poor, powerless and insignificant to anyone except perhaps her parents and Joseph. She had no powerful relatives, no entourage, no four star education. This was no princess.
Nor was Joseph a prince. He was the workingman with a humble but respectable job. He was a good man, Matthew calls him righteous, but of no more importance in the world than millions of other good men. He was from nowhere and had nothing except for a skill set, some homemade furniture and the family background of a long ago King. A small member of King David’s line, a dynasty that had been trounced several empires before the Romans.
So what is God telling us with this Mary and Joseph? If we look with the eyes of the world, we don’t know beans about how God works. God looks at the world and turns what we think we know upside down. God uses common people, poor people, young people, working people to bring in a new world. If you think your life is insignificant, it is not to God. Think you are too young, or too old, or too whatever not to bring Christ into the world, think again. This is a magical aspect of God; God evidently does use sow’s ears to make silk purses.
We are always trying to gild the common story. We make Mary and Joseph saints in retrospect. I respect veneration of Mary and Joseph, but while they lived this story it wasn’t gilded it was messy. The circumstances this couple found themselves in were terribly messy and not just messy but also dangerous and potentially tragic. One of our cultural blind spots is that we don’t understand what a dangerous situation this was for a pregnant teen, how devastating for her fiancé, how lives hung in the balance on the response of Mary, and the response of Joseph.
Betrothal in the first century was a legally binding contract that required a divorce to break it. A betrothed woman whose husband died was considered to be a widow. A man whose betrothed wife became pregnant could be stoned for jumping the gun. The woman could be stoned; any man outside the contract could be stoned. A pregnancy outside of marriage like this was a crime. Hebrew society did not wink and nod at breaking these rules of behavior. Reputations and how you lived or died rested on this. Both Mary and Joseph had lots to lose in the eyes of their communities. Deuteronomy 22 was a clear line in the sand. You don’t fool around with a married woman and a betrothed girl was just as married as some matron with five kids.
This story has a wealth of broken dreams in it. We tend to move on quickly to choirs and angels and gifts. But the gift of God’s son came into the world first with the devastation of best-laid plans. The two people most involved, Joseph and Mary had their young plans, their dreams of how life was to be, broken apart. For Mary, girlish dreams of the wedding and gifts and the whole town turning out to be happy with you, the age-old customs of this high water mark of life, were dashed. Now Mary gets to be suspect. Her reputation is lost. Her very life or at the least quality of life is in danger. Joseph had similar dreams of the respect of being a married man, dreams of a honeymoon, dreams of fathering his own child. Yet now all the eyes of their community would look askance. A reputation has been clouded. What each of these people wanted to happen, planned to happen have been irrevocably changed. Each has to put their lost dreams behind them and share God’s dream for their life.
Isn’t that like our lives too? Each of us has lost dreams, the parts of life that did not go as planned, the parts of life that look accidental or even catastrophic. But angels are urging us on to a new work of God in our life, perhaps a bigger dream. From the ashes of the small dreams of Mary and Joseph came the savior of the world. In the same way God is waiting to let your dreams be taken over by something bigger, stupendous, and eternal.
How well matched these two are. Each in their own way has said yes to God in radical ways. Mary’s response to the angel is so simple: “Here I am the servant of the Lord: let it be with me according to your word.” Mary’s response of the Magnificat is beyond passive acceptance. It is bold and courageous. “My soul magnifies the Lord… all generation will call me blessed.” How simple. How profound. Joseph’s response shows the character of the man even before an angel in a dream changes his plans. Joseph had already chosen a compassionate yet just response to Mary’s scandalous pregnancy. He was going to put her away quietly so that Mary would avoid public disgrace. However, Joseph is completely obedient and completely flexible. Joseph changes his plans on a dime to follow God. These two are evenly matched. These two ordinary insignificant people are really quite extraordinary in their response to God. How open they were. Here God take my body to create a new way to break into the world. Here God take my reputation, my plans, my life and create something new. Mary and Joseph didn’t say yes to God at the edges of their life. They said yes to a divine invasion, a complete take over. Mary and Joseph were radical.
We get this all wrong. We turn the nativity into a sentimental story. We think of Jesus Mary and Joseph, and point to old paintings and say is there anything more traditional than that? Yet Jesus and Mary and Joseph were breaking all the modes, all the models on how God acts and how people respond. Mary and Joseph were iconoclasts. An icon is an image or a symbol of the way things are or the way things are meant to be. An Iconoclast means someone who breaks the image, the mold. Mary and Joseph break all those stock images. God doesn’t speak through powerless working people. Yes God does. God doesn’t speak though an unusual pregnancy, Yes God does. God doesn’t work outside of our cultural rules. Yes God does. Our problem is we pick out the world’s icons. But God is trying to shine through holy icons, to reveal new and timeless truth. This is a love story, yes of Mary and Joseph for each other, but more powerfully of Mary and Joseph for God and more powerfully still of God for us, God with us.
Joseph and Mary are our witnesses today. As a lawyer a lifetime ago, I was used to examining witnesses. One of the fallacies of witnesses is that they are objective observers, like a scientific test of testimony. But every lawyer knows that every witness has a story, a view point a place that they start. When we look at Mary and Joseph we need to know that they aren’t just witnesses to the story. They are part of the story. In the same way you are not just witnesses to the story of Mary and Joseph and God breaking into the world. This Christmas you need to know that you are part of that story, as much as Mary and Joseph. Christ comes into the world when we allow this holy invasion. When you hear this story do you say yes or no to God? Do you view you life as accidental or does God work on and through your life? Do you let God rearrange your dreams, your life? Can you see God creating a new mode of Grace? Christ is waiting to be born in our lives.
AMEN.
Matthew 1: 18-25
I have a friend who used to claim to have lived an accidental life. He makes a whole series of jokes about how everything in his life has been accidental. He went to the college that sent him an acceptance letter. But he really didn’t know anything about the college; in fact he was shocked to find that it was a boys only school when he showed up the first day on campus. He met his wife when he accidentally bumped into her at a party and spilled his drink on her. He went to law school to avoid the draft, so he thinks of this as an accidental profession. He claims none of his kids were planned. Yet here is a man with a happy 35-year marriage, healthy grown kids, a prosperous career and years of community service. In hindsight, my friend of the accidental life has had a good life and knows he was blessed, that God was moving in the circumstances and accidents of his life.
As Christians we believe that God works in and through all of life the good and the bad. We believe in more than serendipitous life. We believe in a life of God’s providence.
Graham started a sermon series last week on the witnesses to Jesus Birth. This week we have Mary and Joseph as witnesses to us. Mary and Joseph have had a particular gift from God given to them, a gift that is remarkable even before the miracle of Jesus birth. Mary and Joseph knew that their lives were not accidental or incidental. They knew that God was at work in their lives and how they responded to God made all the difference in the world. Even right down to today and our world.
So who were Mary and Joseph? What was it about them that was faithful, significant and important? Well at first glance not much. My, my, God uses dubious material. At first glance it almost appears random. Mary was one of thousands, no millions of teenage girls in the wide, wide world. If we looked at the 8th grade class at Seneca Valley Middle School would we be any more surprised to see one of those teens as the mother of God? Mary was even more improbable. She was young, poor, powerless and insignificant to anyone except perhaps her parents and Joseph. She had no powerful relatives, no entourage, no four star education. This was no princess.
Nor was Joseph a prince. He was the workingman with a humble but respectable job. He was a good man, Matthew calls him righteous, but of no more importance in the world than millions of other good men. He was from nowhere and had nothing except for a skill set, some homemade furniture and the family background of a long ago King. A small member of King David’s line, a dynasty that had been trounced several empires before the Romans.
So what is God telling us with this Mary and Joseph? If we look with the eyes of the world, we don’t know beans about how God works. God looks at the world and turns what we think we know upside down. God uses common people, poor people, young people, working people to bring in a new world. If you think your life is insignificant, it is not to God. Think you are too young, or too old, or too whatever not to bring Christ into the world, think again. This is a magical aspect of God; God evidently does use sow’s ears to make silk purses.
We are always trying to gild the common story. We make Mary and Joseph saints in retrospect. I respect veneration of Mary and Joseph, but while they lived this story it wasn’t gilded it was messy. The circumstances this couple found themselves in were terribly messy and not just messy but also dangerous and potentially tragic. One of our cultural blind spots is that we don’t understand what a dangerous situation this was for a pregnant teen, how devastating for her fiancé, how lives hung in the balance on the response of Mary, and the response of Joseph.
Betrothal in the first century was a legally binding contract that required a divorce to break it. A betrothed woman whose husband died was considered to be a widow. A man whose betrothed wife became pregnant could be stoned for jumping the gun. The woman could be stoned; any man outside the contract could be stoned. A pregnancy outside of marriage like this was a crime. Hebrew society did not wink and nod at breaking these rules of behavior. Reputations and how you lived or died rested on this. Both Mary and Joseph had lots to lose in the eyes of their communities. Deuteronomy 22 was a clear line in the sand. You don’t fool around with a married woman and a betrothed girl was just as married as some matron with five kids.
This story has a wealth of broken dreams in it. We tend to move on quickly to choirs and angels and gifts. But the gift of God’s son came into the world first with the devastation of best-laid plans. The two people most involved, Joseph and Mary had their young plans, their dreams of how life was to be, broken apart. For Mary, girlish dreams of the wedding and gifts and the whole town turning out to be happy with you, the age-old customs of this high water mark of life, were dashed. Now Mary gets to be suspect. Her reputation is lost. Her very life or at the least quality of life is in danger. Joseph had similar dreams of the respect of being a married man, dreams of a honeymoon, dreams of fathering his own child. Yet now all the eyes of their community would look askance. A reputation has been clouded. What each of these people wanted to happen, planned to happen have been irrevocably changed. Each has to put their lost dreams behind them and share God’s dream for their life.
Isn’t that like our lives too? Each of us has lost dreams, the parts of life that did not go as planned, the parts of life that look accidental or even catastrophic. But angels are urging us on to a new work of God in our life, perhaps a bigger dream. From the ashes of the small dreams of Mary and Joseph came the savior of the world. In the same way God is waiting to let your dreams be taken over by something bigger, stupendous, and eternal.
How well matched these two are. Each in their own way has said yes to God in radical ways. Mary’s response to the angel is so simple: “Here I am the servant of the Lord: let it be with me according to your word.” Mary’s response of the Magnificat is beyond passive acceptance. It is bold and courageous. “My soul magnifies the Lord… all generation will call me blessed.” How simple. How profound. Joseph’s response shows the character of the man even before an angel in a dream changes his plans. Joseph had already chosen a compassionate yet just response to Mary’s scandalous pregnancy. He was going to put her away quietly so that Mary would avoid public disgrace. However, Joseph is completely obedient and completely flexible. Joseph changes his plans on a dime to follow God. These two are evenly matched. These two ordinary insignificant people are really quite extraordinary in their response to God. How open they were. Here God take my body to create a new way to break into the world. Here God take my reputation, my plans, my life and create something new. Mary and Joseph didn’t say yes to God at the edges of their life. They said yes to a divine invasion, a complete take over. Mary and Joseph were radical.
We get this all wrong. We turn the nativity into a sentimental story. We think of Jesus Mary and Joseph, and point to old paintings and say is there anything more traditional than that? Yet Jesus and Mary and Joseph were breaking all the modes, all the models on how God acts and how people respond. Mary and Joseph were iconoclasts. An icon is an image or a symbol of the way things are or the way things are meant to be. An Iconoclast means someone who breaks the image, the mold. Mary and Joseph break all those stock images. God doesn’t speak through powerless working people. Yes God does. God doesn’t speak though an unusual pregnancy, Yes God does. God doesn’t work outside of our cultural rules. Yes God does. Our problem is we pick out the world’s icons. But God is trying to shine through holy icons, to reveal new and timeless truth. This is a love story, yes of Mary and Joseph for each other, but more powerfully of Mary and Joseph for God and more powerfully still of God for us, God with us.
Joseph and Mary are our witnesses today. As a lawyer a lifetime ago, I was used to examining witnesses. One of the fallacies of witnesses is that they are objective observers, like a scientific test of testimony. But every lawyer knows that every witness has a story, a view point a place that they start. When we look at Mary and Joseph we need to know that they aren’t just witnesses to the story. They are part of the story. In the same way you are not just witnesses to the story of Mary and Joseph and God breaking into the world. This Christmas you need to know that you are part of that story, as much as Mary and Joseph. Christ comes into the world when we allow this holy invasion. When you hear this story do you say yes or no to God? Do you view you life as accidental or does God work on and through your life? Do you let God rearrange your dreams, your life? Can you see God creating a new mode of Grace? Christ is waiting to be born in our lives.
AMEN.
Witnesses to Christ's Birth: Angels
by Dr. Graham Standish
Luke 1:26-38
November 29, 2009
While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, ‘Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’ And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.
Then he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.’
So what do you make of the idea of angels? Are they real? Are they a figment of over-religious imaginations? Have you ever seen an angel, or do you know someone who has?
Frankly, I’ve never seen an angel, but I’ve met a number of people who swear that they’ve experienced something, or someone, that can only be called an angel. I’m fairly sure you have, too. So the question is, what are we supposed to do with these experiences?
We Presbyterians are a fairly rational bunch, which is both to our credit and our detriment. Typically in the Presbyterian tradition, and in our larger Reformed tradition (this is a tradition that comes out of Switzerland, and includes Congregationalist, the Dutch Reformed Church, the Disciples of Christ, Christian and Missionary Alliance, and the Christian Church denominations), we don’t do much with angels. Our tradition is one born of the Enlightenment, which means that we like our religion to be logical and reasonable, focusing on what is knowable and explainable. So you often don’t hear Presbyterians talking about angels, which is too bad. Unfortunately, we Presbyterians by nature don’t tend to gravitate toward unexplained spiritual phenomena, which means that we shy away from supporting the idea that angels exist and are active in the world today. So, traditionally Presbyterians don’t know what to do with angels.
But there is something about us Presbyterians that should get us talking about angels. We may be a rational bunch, but we’re also supposed to be a scriptural bunch. We’re supposed to be people who try to live our lives according to what the Bible teaches. This means that we should at least be open to the possibility of angels, and especially of angels working in our lives. So, I thought it might be kind of fun this morning to talk about angels, about the tradition of angels, and about people’s experiences of angels. Then I’ll let you decide what you should believe about angels.
Let me start with the tradition of angels. Who or what are they? According to tradition (which means that these beliefs aren’t necessarily found in the Bible) angels are “messengers” of God. The word angel literally means “messenger.” They are the first created beings of God, and their role is to serve God. Their role is to oversee God’s creation, and to be messengers of God to us humans in a way that protects us and leads us to God. They car for humans and do what they can to bring humans to God.
In fact, according to tradition, it is the calling to care about humans that caused Satan to become a fallen angel. The belief is that Satan was among the greatest of all the angels, but he considered humans to be vermin who were unworthy of God’s attention. Satan did not want to serve humans, but instead wanted to drive God away from humans. This is the foundation of the Book of Job. In it, Satan approaches God and says that the only reason humans even care about God is that God blesses humans so much. He challenged God, saying that if God took everything away from humans then humans would ignore God. So Satan is given permission to do whatever he wants to Job, one of God’s most faithful people, without killing him.
According to tradition, there are seven archangels, which means that they are among the most important angels. Among these, only two are mentioned by name in the Bible. The first one is Gabriel. He is the lead angel, and always appears as a messenger, proclaiming God’s will. He (or she—there really isn’t a gender to the angels, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I keep referring to Gabriel as “he.”) is first mentioned when he appears to Daniel to explain a dream that Daniel had just had. Gabriel also appears to Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, at John’s conception, as well as to Mary and Joseph. In fact, according to Islamic belief, it is the angel Gabriel who appears to Mohammed and dictated the Koran to him. Gabriel is the main messenger of God.
Gabriel also mentions the angel Michael to Daniel, saying that Michael had been left to bring down the king of Persia and the Persian Empire, thus allowing the Israelites to eventually return to Israel. Michael, as you already know if you saw the film, Michael, is a warrior angel. He is a protector of the faithful, doing battle with evil forces and with Satan.
While there are names to all seven archangels, most come from tradition, not the Bible, although one more is mentioned in scripture,… depending on which scripture you are citing. You may already know this, but Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians have several books of scripture in their Bibles that are not included in Protestant Bibles. We call that scripture the Apocrypha. In one of those books, Tobit, another archangel appears who is named Raphael. Raphael is considered an angel of healing. Other than these, no others are named.
There is also a belief in much of both Jewish and Christian tradition that each person has a guardian angel, an angel assigned to each of us whose mission it is to keep us safe and connected with God and God’s love. These are the angels whom many people swear they’ve experienced. Do they exist? I don’t know, but let me tell you a story about several experiences, and I’ll let you decide.
Arlene Dulski had an experience several years ago that made her wonder about angels. It was Christmas Eve and she was trying to decide whether or not to attend the midnight mass at her church. She was having a very hard time. Her husband was in the hospital with complications from a brain tumor, which left her with her eight-year-old daughter and five-year-old son to look after. Also, she was pregnant. She didn’t want to go to the service, but her kids begged her to go. Finally she agreed.
Driving to the church, the only open parking spot was six blocks from the church. The weather was bitter cold, the road icy. They barely made it on time and found three remaining seats in the back. Ten minutes in, both kids fell asleep. Shaking her head, she began to worry. Her son was a deep sleeper. In her condition she couldnʼt carry him and drag her daughter six blocks up the icy street back to her car.
At the end of the service, the parishioners filed by to leave, but she stayed sitting, about to cry. Then she felt a warm hand on her shoulder. It was a tall man, with the kindest eyes sheʼd ever seen. “Are you in trouble?” he asked. She felt so comfortable that she told him her dilemma. In one sweeping gesture, he lifted her son on his shoulder and helped her daughter up with his other arm. They walked in a quiet group to her car.
“I couldnʼt have done this without you,” she said, turning around after she had secured the kids in their seat belts. But her words disappeared in the night air. The snowy street was deserted. No footprints except her daughterʼs and hers (adapted from “The Man at Midnight Mass,” Guideposts Magazine, http://www.guideposts.com/print/30563).
Was the man an angel? What the man actually there? What had happened?
Back in 1961 and 1962, Edward Beckwell had a series of experiences that left him wondering about angels. It began when he bought a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. As he and his wife were setting up the tree up, he noticed that something made of black plastic was tied to the trunk of the tree. Carefully undoing the twine, and then unwrapping the plastic, he found in it a note from a young boy, Egbert McGraw, from either Legere or Lagare, New Brunswick or Nova Scotia (it was hard to tell from the handwriting which said the town and either N.B. or N.S.). The note asked whomever got it to ask Santa to bring him a pair of skates that would fit an 8 year-old boy.
He gave the note to his wife, but she just dismissed it out of hand, saying, “Right! Like we can get skates for every 8 year-old boy in Canada.” But Ed felt differently. He wanted to help the boy. The first step, after Christmas day, was to find out where the boy lived. Ed didn’t even know where to start. He scanned maps of both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, but couldn’t find a town of Legere or Lagare. After spending the morning trying to do figure it out, he took a break and went to his local diner for a cup of coffee.
The owner, Sid, looked at Ed as he sat at the counter, and said, “Ed, you look irritated.” Ed said, “I am. I’m trying to figure out where a kid I’m hoping to send skates to in Canada lives, but I’m at a loss.” Sid said, “Why don’t you talk to the guy at the end of the counter. He came in this morning saying that his job is to help people, and he can’t find anyone to help.” Ed approached the man, an impeccably dressed man with a unique lapel pin that was a white feather tipped in gold. The man listened to Ed and said with a smile, “That’s a simple problem to fix. Go to the post office. They’ll help you.” So off Ed went, and within thirty minutes the man at the post office had figured out both the province and the town, and even contacted the local post office and got an address for the McGraw family.
The next day, Ed went looking for skates, but it was obvious that all the stores had sold out of kids skates before Christmas. No matter where he went they were out of kid’s skates. Frustrated again, he went to diner for a cup of coffee. To his surprise he saw the same man with the feather lapel pin. He told the man his problem, and the man said, “Go to the Sears in town, they’ll have them.” Ed explained that he had already tried the Sears, but the man was insistent. Ed went back, talked to the same salesman, who said that he was sure they were still out, but he’d go back and check. Within minutes he returned carrying a box of kid’s skates. He said, “I don’t know how I missed this earlier, but I think these are the size you want. They were sitting on a shelf all by themselves.” So, off Ed went to send the skates to Egbert McGraw.
Several weeks after sending the skates, he received a very nice thank you letter, and thus began a correspondence between Egbert and Ed. That summer, Ed and his wife even managed to visit Egbert in New Brunswick, where he found that Egbert didn’t even speak English, and that it was Egbert’s grandmother who had been translating for Egbert. Ed and his wife spent time with them, and even became the hit of the town as he gave the kids of the town a ride around in his convertible, with Egbert always sitting in the front seat, smiling.
The years passed by, and Ed and Egbert lost touch. One day, Ed was sitting in his house reading, and he heard a knock on the door. Answering it, he saw a very tall young man with two little girls. The man said, in a French accent,” Hi, I’m Egbert McGraw. We used to write back-and-forth when I was a child.” Ed was all smiles, and he was so excited to see the children. He asked Egbert how he had found him. Egbert said, “I was in Windsor, Ontario for another matter, and knew that you lived somewhere here in the Detroit area. I brought my children over to see if we could find you. We were sitting in a park, and I was trying to figure out what to do when a man came up to me and said that I looked troubled. I told him that I was looking for you, and he said, “I know Ed. Here’s how you get there.” With that he gave me directions. And he also gave me this envelope to give you when I saw you. Ed opened it up, and in it was a card with a picture of a feather with a gold tip.
So do angels exist? Were the people in these stories angels or just something else? Personally, I don’t know, but one thing I’ve learned over the years is never to dismiss people’s experiences of the supernatural, especially if they are experiences that make their lives better.
I believe that the world we see and know is just a fraction of all that exists in God’s realm, and so I don’t have to experience angels to believe that others have. I also don’t have to see angels to believe that they have been active in my life, because my life is so blessed I know that something out there looks over me. Ultimately, the thing I’ve learned about angels and the spiritual realm is that if we are open, something special works in our lives to guard us, guide us, and lead us ever God-ward. This is what I believe in.
Amen.
Luke 1:26-38
November 29, 2009
While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, ‘Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’ And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate in their presence.
Then he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, and he said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised; so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.’
So what do you make of the idea of angels? Are they real? Are they a figment of over-religious imaginations? Have you ever seen an angel, or do you know someone who has?
Frankly, I’ve never seen an angel, but I’ve met a number of people who swear that they’ve experienced something, or someone, that can only be called an angel. I’m fairly sure you have, too. So the question is, what are we supposed to do with these experiences?
We Presbyterians are a fairly rational bunch, which is both to our credit and our detriment. Typically in the Presbyterian tradition, and in our larger Reformed tradition (this is a tradition that comes out of Switzerland, and includes Congregationalist, the Dutch Reformed Church, the Disciples of Christ, Christian and Missionary Alliance, and the Christian Church denominations), we don’t do much with angels. Our tradition is one born of the Enlightenment, which means that we like our religion to be logical and reasonable, focusing on what is knowable and explainable. So you often don’t hear Presbyterians talking about angels, which is too bad. Unfortunately, we Presbyterians by nature don’t tend to gravitate toward unexplained spiritual phenomena, which means that we shy away from supporting the idea that angels exist and are active in the world today. So, traditionally Presbyterians don’t know what to do with angels.
But there is something about us Presbyterians that should get us talking about angels. We may be a rational bunch, but we’re also supposed to be a scriptural bunch. We’re supposed to be people who try to live our lives according to what the Bible teaches. This means that we should at least be open to the possibility of angels, and especially of angels working in our lives. So, I thought it might be kind of fun this morning to talk about angels, about the tradition of angels, and about people’s experiences of angels. Then I’ll let you decide what you should believe about angels.
Let me start with the tradition of angels. Who or what are they? According to tradition (which means that these beliefs aren’t necessarily found in the Bible) angels are “messengers” of God. The word angel literally means “messenger.” They are the first created beings of God, and their role is to serve God. Their role is to oversee God’s creation, and to be messengers of God to us humans in a way that protects us and leads us to God. They car for humans and do what they can to bring humans to God.
In fact, according to tradition, it is the calling to care about humans that caused Satan to become a fallen angel. The belief is that Satan was among the greatest of all the angels, but he considered humans to be vermin who were unworthy of God’s attention. Satan did not want to serve humans, but instead wanted to drive God away from humans. This is the foundation of the Book of Job. In it, Satan approaches God and says that the only reason humans even care about God is that God blesses humans so much. He challenged God, saying that if God took everything away from humans then humans would ignore God. So Satan is given permission to do whatever he wants to Job, one of God’s most faithful people, without killing him.
According to tradition, there are seven archangels, which means that they are among the most important angels. Among these, only two are mentioned by name in the Bible. The first one is Gabriel. He is the lead angel, and always appears as a messenger, proclaiming God’s will. He (or she—there really isn’t a gender to the angels, but I hope you’ll forgive me if I keep referring to Gabriel as “he.”) is first mentioned when he appears to Daniel to explain a dream that Daniel had just had. Gabriel also appears to Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, at John’s conception, as well as to Mary and Joseph. In fact, according to Islamic belief, it is the angel Gabriel who appears to Mohammed and dictated the Koran to him. Gabriel is the main messenger of God.
Gabriel also mentions the angel Michael to Daniel, saying that Michael had been left to bring down the king of Persia and the Persian Empire, thus allowing the Israelites to eventually return to Israel. Michael, as you already know if you saw the film, Michael, is a warrior angel. He is a protector of the faithful, doing battle with evil forces and with Satan.
While there are names to all seven archangels, most come from tradition, not the Bible, although one more is mentioned in scripture,… depending on which scripture you are citing. You may already know this, but Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians have several books of scripture in their Bibles that are not included in Protestant Bibles. We call that scripture the Apocrypha. In one of those books, Tobit, another archangel appears who is named Raphael. Raphael is considered an angel of healing. Other than these, no others are named.
There is also a belief in much of both Jewish and Christian tradition that each person has a guardian angel, an angel assigned to each of us whose mission it is to keep us safe and connected with God and God’s love. These are the angels whom many people swear they’ve experienced. Do they exist? I don’t know, but let me tell you a story about several experiences, and I’ll let you decide.
Arlene Dulski had an experience several years ago that made her wonder about angels. It was Christmas Eve and she was trying to decide whether or not to attend the midnight mass at her church. She was having a very hard time. Her husband was in the hospital with complications from a brain tumor, which left her with her eight-year-old daughter and five-year-old son to look after. Also, she was pregnant. She didn’t want to go to the service, but her kids begged her to go. Finally she agreed.
Driving to the church, the only open parking spot was six blocks from the church. The weather was bitter cold, the road icy. They barely made it on time and found three remaining seats in the back. Ten minutes in, both kids fell asleep. Shaking her head, she began to worry. Her son was a deep sleeper. In her condition she couldnʼt carry him and drag her daughter six blocks up the icy street back to her car.
At the end of the service, the parishioners filed by to leave, but she stayed sitting, about to cry. Then she felt a warm hand on her shoulder. It was a tall man, with the kindest eyes sheʼd ever seen. “Are you in trouble?” he asked. She felt so comfortable that she told him her dilemma. In one sweeping gesture, he lifted her son on his shoulder and helped her daughter up with his other arm. They walked in a quiet group to her car.
“I couldnʼt have done this without you,” she said, turning around after she had secured the kids in their seat belts. But her words disappeared in the night air. The snowy street was deserted. No footprints except her daughterʼs and hers (adapted from “The Man at Midnight Mass,” Guideposts Magazine, http://www.guideposts.com/print/30563).
Was the man an angel? What the man actually there? What had happened?
Back in 1961 and 1962, Edward Beckwell had a series of experiences that left him wondering about angels. It began when he bought a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. As he and his wife were setting up the tree up, he noticed that something made of black plastic was tied to the trunk of the tree. Carefully undoing the twine, and then unwrapping the plastic, he found in it a note from a young boy, Egbert McGraw, from either Legere or Lagare, New Brunswick or Nova Scotia (it was hard to tell from the handwriting which said the town and either N.B. or N.S.). The note asked whomever got it to ask Santa to bring him a pair of skates that would fit an 8 year-old boy.
He gave the note to his wife, but she just dismissed it out of hand, saying, “Right! Like we can get skates for every 8 year-old boy in Canada.” But Ed felt differently. He wanted to help the boy. The first step, after Christmas day, was to find out where the boy lived. Ed didn’t even know where to start. He scanned maps of both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, but couldn’t find a town of Legere or Lagare. After spending the morning trying to do figure it out, he took a break and went to his local diner for a cup of coffee.
The owner, Sid, looked at Ed as he sat at the counter, and said, “Ed, you look irritated.” Ed said, “I am. I’m trying to figure out where a kid I’m hoping to send skates to in Canada lives, but I’m at a loss.” Sid said, “Why don’t you talk to the guy at the end of the counter. He came in this morning saying that his job is to help people, and he can’t find anyone to help.” Ed approached the man, an impeccably dressed man with a unique lapel pin that was a white feather tipped in gold. The man listened to Ed and said with a smile, “That’s a simple problem to fix. Go to the post office. They’ll help you.” So off Ed went, and within thirty minutes the man at the post office had figured out both the province and the town, and even contacted the local post office and got an address for the McGraw family.
The next day, Ed went looking for skates, but it was obvious that all the stores had sold out of kids skates before Christmas. No matter where he went they were out of kid’s skates. Frustrated again, he went to diner for a cup of coffee. To his surprise he saw the same man with the feather lapel pin. He told the man his problem, and the man said, “Go to the Sears in town, they’ll have them.” Ed explained that he had already tried the Sears, but the man was insistent. Ed went back, talked to the same salesman, who said that he was sure they were still out, but he’d go back and check. Within minutes he returned carrying a box of kid’s skates. He said, “I don’t know how I missed this earlier, but I think these are the size you want. They were sitting on a shelf all by themselves.” So, off Ed went to send the skates to Egbert McGraw.
Several weeks after sending the skates, he received a very nice thank you letter, and thus began a correspondence between Egbert and Ed. That summer, Ed and his wife even managed to visit Egbert in New Brunswick, where he found that Egbert didn’t even speak English, and that it was Egbert’s grandmother who had been translating for Egbert. Ed and his wife spent time with them, and even became the hit of the town as he gave the kids of the town a ride around in his convertible, with Egbert always sitting in the front seat, smiling.
The years passed by, and Ed and Egbert lost touch. One day, Ed was sitting in his house reading, and he heard a knock on the door. Answering it, he saw a very tall young man with two little girls. The man said, in a French accent,” Hi, I’m Egbert McGraw. We used to write back-and-forth when I was a child.” Ed was all smiles, and he was so excited to see the children. He asked Egbert how he had found him. Egbert said, “I was in Windsor, Ontario for another matter, and knew that you lived somewhere here in the Detroit area. I brought my children over to see if we could find you. We were sitting in a park, and I was trying to figure out what to do when a man came up to me and said that I looked troubled. I told him that I was looking for you, and he said, “I know Ed. Here’s how you get there.” With that he gave me directions. And he also gave me this envelope to give you when I saw you. Ed opened it up, and in it was a card with a picture of a feather with a gold tip.
So do angels exist? Were the people in these stories angels or just something else? Personally, I don’t know, but one thing I’ve learned over the years is never to dismiss people’s experiences of the supernatural, especially if they are experiences that make their lives better.
I believe that the world we see and know is just a fraction of all that exists in God’s realm, and so I don’t have to experience angels to believe that others have. I also don’t have to see angels to believe that they have been active in my life, because my life is so blessed I know that something out there looks over me. Ultimately, the thing I’ve learned about angels and the spiritual realm is that if we are open, something special works in our lives to guard us, guide us, and lead us ever God-ward. This is what I believe in.
Amen.
An Oracle of Leadership
Connie Frierson
2 Samuel 23: 1 - 7
Today’s passage is styled the last words of David, the very last words of David. This started me thinking, “My, my what in the world would I say in my last hours, What advise, what reflections, what eulogy, what inanity might I utter? What understanding would I have reached about my life; about the world I was leaving, about God? Famous last words, those are the gist of today’s passage.
I thought I might need some help with this so I went to the Internet. There I found all sorts of famous and not so famous last words. What I found is that people have vastly different orientations to what they say at the end. Some look inward, some look outward, some look back, some look forward, some are flippant, some are unaware and caught off guard, some turn to their regrets, some to the hope of the future. For instance Grover Cleveland, our 22nd and 24th president uttered, “I have tried so hard to do the right.” Grover took stock of where he had been. Oscar Wilde was flippant. He muttered, “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.” And then he died. Edmund Gwenn, the actor who played Kris Kringle in the Miracle on 34th Street, was asked if dying was tough. His last words were, “Yes dying is tough, but not as tough as doing comedy.” Last words reflect our struggles and hope and even our foibles. Some last words are profound, as Jesus last words from Luke, “Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.”
But David’s last words were special. They were Psalm, a song like David wrote throughout his life, yet more. They were as special for what he didn’t say as for what he did. What did David say? The Psalm starts out with the titles of David. He was the son of Jesse, the one who God exalted and appointed. He was God’s favorite. This says who David was at his core. By the time you die you need to figure this out. In fact it would be best if you figured this out right now, this day and lived into it for the rest of your life. Notice what David didn’t say. He didn’t recount his victories, his trouncing of a giant and the Philistines the defeat to the Edomites, the expansion of Israel’s borders. Titles tell us what we think of ourselves. Queen Victoria was styled “By the grace of God, Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and empress of India. But David’s titles are stripped of any boast, and every external, it starts with who he was in the humblest of terms, Jesse’s son, local livestock guy, small time farmer. The glory of David’s life was in his relationship with God. David was God exalted, not David pulling at his bootstraps, God appointed, God loved, God’s favorite.
This is the wisdom we need to get. You are God’s favorite. Now we live in a world of limits and hierarchy, with ladders and pecking orders. So we think there can only be one favorite. God is beyond these limits. How in the world do we think we can set our limits on the limitless God? You get to be God’s favorite. In the book The Shack, Wm Paul Young pictures Papa, the God the mother/father figure of saying again and again, ‘I am especially fond of Mac, of Missy, and that person and that person.’ This is God’s way of saying, “Oh my goodness you get to be God’s favorite, and you and you.” David got to the end of his life knowing who he was, not much in himself, everything in God. This is who David was, this is who I am and this is who you are, God’s favorite.
David’s last words were special. They were special because David’s last words weren’t even David’s own words. They were an oracle, a prophecy, a revelation and a vision. They were God’s own words placed in David’s mouth. “The spirit of the Lord speaks through me, his words are upon my tongue.” This is what God says though David’s last words, “One who rules over people justly rules in the fear of the Lord.” Read this in light of the love relationship of the favorite of God. This fear of the Lord is married with the love of God. This is a paradigm that is new to us and so often misunderstood. Love abides in us from God, yet we are not God. Fear of God faces the gulf between our puny selves and this spectacular God. God is always beyond us, fabulously, ridiculously beyond our limits and understanding. So when we act as leaders, in what ever capacity that is. We are or should be painfully aware of our limits. This is leadership from humility, leadership mindful of God’s highest standards, God’s love and justice for all God’s people of the earth.
You know what we can’t do this. This is impossible for us. We will mess this up. Positional power will go to our heads. Pride will motivate actions and blind our vision. We will dominate and abuse and alienate. The only way to do this ‘fear of the Lord’ leadership is spirit born, God leads and we place ourselves so much in his will that life giving actions result.
Leadership is so slippery because it is gift from God that comes in some surprising and seemingly accidental ways. God leadership comes not from technical manuals and motivational gimmicks, but from an anointing power that comes from the spirit. This is the power that comes from a barefoot lunatic like St. Francis, who led the church into a new understanding of humility and service. This is the power that comes from Mother Teresa, a tiny little nun from Romania in a foreign land with gigantic needs like India. This is God using a stuttering murder, a drop out from the Egyptian court like Moses. And this is the leadership that comes from the littlest brother in the bunch, the shepherd David. Leadership that is anointed doesn’t come from position; it comes from someone doing what God calls, listening and taking up the job at hand, big or little. The right relationship with God, this psalmist calls it ‘fear of the Lord.’ is humility and love. There isn’t a person here that is not called to something. We don’t even need to call this leadership, with all its oppressive baggage. We can call it listening for God and doing. We can call it building God’s world, answering the spirit call to our souls.
What does this oracle of leadership, God’s world building look like? Verse 4 has to resort to poetry because normal language won’t touch what being this kind of Friend of God looks like. Verse 4 says, “It is like the light of morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain the grassy land.” Put your self in that place, the freshness of a new morning, the fragrance that comes only at that time of day, the light that is golden. This is like the in breaking of that first day of creation. There is a newness, a crispness that comes from joining in with God’s world building, no tired old been there, tried that gee it didn’t work mentality. This is gleaming, creative, new. I think the word that encapsulates this kind of being and working in God is Joy. Periodically we need to do a ‘Joy Check.’ Is what we are doing giving us joy? Now joy can coexist with frustration and tiredness and even suffering. But in a Joy check we ask, am I following God? I can only speak from my own experience here. School and work and family have frustrated me, they make me tired and sometime even cranky. But if I quiet myself and ask, “is this what God wants me to do?” I sense God’s joy. It bubbles through the surface weariness and the routine. This is more than satisfaction. It is a wellness in the soul. This is the light of the morning.
Being in God’s will, Kingdom Building, servant leadership has a special character. It creates a climate for health. I have been turning this idea of climate over and over in my mind. It has popped up several times this week. As I read a commentary on 2nd Samuel, the commentator wrote of the climate that come when people lead from God’s spirit, He wrote that the images of verse 4 create a climate of light and warmth and moisture enabling people to grow. A God lead leader enables individuals to develop, to grow to into the God vision of who they are to be. In the introduction to Agnes Sanford’s book, The Healing Light, the writer describes a climate of healing that occur when people pray and be with each other in a God led way. Actually the description is of a negative example, a terrible climate. The writer uses an example of a port in Siberia. The port has all the requirements, equipment, docks, and water depth to be a good port. But it’s frozen. The climate is wrong. We need this light, this warmth that will help us use all the hard wired talents, and functionality and equipment of our lives.
Last week as I came into the church before worship there was a climate of joy. The children’s choir was practicing in fellowship hall. I set up my power point and all the technical expertise of Dwayne and Graham all worked. The kitchen was full of Marsha’s and the Women’s Association soups ready to go out and feed families a quick nourishing hot meal on a busy night. The sanctuary was full of the set for Joseph, the Saturday performance was fantastic. Graham’s sermon and film clip were wonderful. This is a climate that nourishes God appointed leadership. All of these people, hundreds really, were each leading from some call of God to their heart. This is a little slice of the Kingdom of heaven. This was “like the light of the morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.”
The last words of David look ultimately look forward. David looks forward to hope of an everlasting covenant with God. This is the end of David’s life but not the end of life, not the end of hope. “All things will be ordered and secure and prosper.” It is from that hope that David looks forward. In our final hymn I have chosen “Be Ye Glad” by Michael Kelly Blanchard. It is an insert in your bulletin to take home to read and ponder. Verse 3 reads, “So be like lights on the rim of the water.” That is our job description; each of us leads in hope. We are to be the light, pointing out, “Look. God is here. Christ has come. Light has infused this life.” God’s spirit has provided this oracle of leadership, not for the end of life, but to all of life, your transformed life.
Amen.
Are You a Scribe or a Widow?
by Dr. Graham Standish
Mark 12:28-44
As Jesus taught, he said, ‘Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the market-places, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.’
He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury. Many rich people put in large sums. A poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which are worth a penny. Then he called his disciples and said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the treasury. For all of them have contributed out of their abundance; but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on.’
Connie Frierson, our program director, and I were talking the other day. In the midst of our conversation I blurted out something that kind of shocked me as the words came out of my mouth. I said to her, “You know, I think my problem is that I really like ministry, and I really believe in this church. I’m just not sure that I like religion.” The words surprised me because that’s not the kind of thing that we pastors are supposed to say, but it’s true for me.
I get tired of religion in much the same way I get tired of politics. Over the course of my life I’ve become very tired of the process and partisanship of politics. I’ve grown tired of the anger and self-righteousness that not only our politicians exhibit, but also that our country exhibits. I’m not one to always see politicians as crooks. In fact, I see them as a reflection of us. We’re the ones who put them where they are, and too often we put into place people who are self-interested just like us. But what also tires me about politics is the constant bickering, the constant conflict, the constant bloviating about who’s right and who’s wrong.
In some ways my problem is with democracy. Democracy is messy. Democracy runs on conflict, but conflict that is eventually put aside in order to do what is right. I agree wholeheartedly with what Winston Churchill once said, which is that “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.” He also said, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” The truth is that democracy is messy, democracy is tiring, democracy is irritating, but there is no better system conceived of. Thus, it’s the best and only system. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t grow tired of it.
I have a similar irritation with religion. I grow tired of the constant conflict, anger, and bickering that goes on with the grinding together of different religions and denominations. Everyone in every religion is always right and never wrong, and so we have unending conflict. The real problem is that to be human is to be in conflict. Humans have a hard time getting along because all of us are always right and never wrong. Think of the times that you’ve argued a point about anything—political, religious, about music, sports, or anything else? When have you ever said, “Ya know, I’m pretty much wrong in what I’m saying…”? None of us ever does that, which means that we are always right about whatever we believe.
At the same time, whether we like it or not, religion is still essential to our spiritual growth. Democracy may be irritating, but it is a tremendous form of government that really allows us to grow as a nation to be better than we can possibly believe. The same idea is true of religion. It is irritating, but it also allows people to grow spiritually in ways that they would never grow themselves alone. I suppose the best we can say about religion is to paraphrase the character Flounder from the film Animal House: “Religion! Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.”
I’m not alone in my religion fatigue. Jesus got extremely frustrated with the Jewish religion, and I wonder if he gets equally irritated with Christianity. Why would he get frustrated with Christianity? Because his whole focus was to try to get people to become centered in God rather than rules, and in love rather than law. And despite his teachings that lead us to God and love, so many Christians would rather have their faith be about rules and law. We forget the center of the gospel, which is that we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, and soul, and others as ourselves. This center of the gospel is a focus on God first, and letting God’s love flow out of this through us and into the world. But we forget.
No matter how hard people within religions try to focus on God and love, too often they end up focusing on other things. Sometimes that focus is on big, weighty issues that divide us. For example, as I was folding laundry yesterday I was watching a travel show. I love to watch travel shows, probably because we don’t get to travel much since we have young children, and this one way I can travel with the television for at least 30 minutes. At any rate, I was watching a travel show on Northern Ireland. The host was in Belfast, and showed the Catholic section and the Protestant sections of that city. He was talking with a man about the “troubles” in Northern Ireland—the conflicts over a number of decades between those who want to be part of the Republic of Ireland, and those who want to remain loyal to Britain. I found it interesting that both sections of the city were very similar to each other in the signs that were painted on walls. In the Catholic section there were signs with the Irish Republican flag, praising the IRA, and showing arms holding guns in defiance of the Protestant loyalists. In the Protestant sections there were almost identical signs praising England, with the British flag, and arms holding guns.
These “troubles” in Northern Ireland are often depicted as a religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. But I would defy anyone to show where it says in either church’s scripture that we should take up arms against each other and kill. This isn’t a conflict between Protestants and Catholics. It’s a conflict between those who would like Northern Ireland to be part of the Republic of Ireland, and those who would like to be part of the United Kingdom. The people who take up arms, claiming that they represent their faith have forgotten about God and love.
I see the same sort of forgetfulness when it comes to the issue of homosexuality. The issue of homosexuality is dividing many denominations right now, including ours. We are constantly fighting in the Presbyterian Church (USA) over whether or not to ordain homosexuals. What I think we’ve forgotten in this whole fight is the issue of love, and as a result I wonder how well we maintain our focus on God. We’re awfully focused on arguing about our rules and laws.
Where this really struck home to me was an experience I had about fifteen years ago. My wife, Diane, works as a social worker for the Hemophilia Center of Southwestern Pennsylvania. She was originally hired to help the HIV positive hemophiliac patients, all of whom had contracted the AIDS virus through injections of blood products that allow their blood to clot. Hemophilia is a bleeding disorder in which the blood cannot clot, resulting in massive bleedings in even the smallest cuts. As a result of her job, Diane worked on the Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force for a number of years.
As part of her work for this organization, she had been involved for many years with something called the “Healing Weekend,” which is a retreat for people who are HIV positive and their families. They bring in speakers, entertainment, educators, health care workers, and more to help these people live with this terrible disease. Every year, as part of the retreat, they have a healing worship service. One year the Episcopal priest who normally does the healing service couldn’t make it because he was sick. He asked me if I would be willing to step in and help, which I did.
As part of the service I asked those with the HIV virus to come to the front and to stand in a circle. I went from person to person, mostly men, and offered prayers of healing for each one, and afterwards anointed each one with oil.
As I passed from man to man, most had tears in his eyes. Afterwards, one of the men came up to me and said, “Do you know why all of those men were crying?” I said, “I suppose it’s because they were touched by the service.” He said, “Sort of, but the real reason is that you are the first straight pastor to pray for us. We are used to gay priests and ministers praying for us because they are one of us. But to have a straight Christian pastor do that is something that none of us ever experiences. We’re used to being hated and judged by Christians.” We’re used to being hated and judged by Christians. What does this say about us? I think it tells us that too often our focus is on rules and laws, not God and love.
Despite the divisions that come through these bigger issues, more often the issues that divide us in religion are much smaller issues. We get divided by things such as worship styles and hymn choices. And the divisions are growing substantially each year. I’m not necessarily talking about divisions in our particular church, but in many churches. What’s happening all over the place is that churches are fighting over music in church, and these fights are splitting churches, or causing people to leave their churches and to start new ones that cater to generations unhappy with the worship styles of other generations. We have churches that are committed to traditional worship, churches that are committed to contemporary worship, and churches that are committed to Emergent worship (churches like the Hot Metal Community Church that led a worship service here a number of years ago). What we are seeing increasingly in so many communities are churches divided by generations. In traditional churches we see few younger people. In contemporary churches we see fewer of the oldest and the youngest generations. In Emergent churches we see few of the older generations. We’re becoming more and more divided as the focus becomes on rules and laws about worship and music, and less on God and love.
It’s not just we religious people who are like this but even those who reject religion are like this. They complain about us Christians being hypocritical for not being about love, but then they are just like us. For example, do you know who Christopher Hitchens is? He wrote a book a couple of years ago titled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. His thesis is that religion causes many of the problems in the world, including wars. He says that Religion causes more wars than are caused by any other reason. My question back is twofold: First, since when did we give human nature a pass? Since when have humans been so peaceful by nature, and if humans are so peaceful, what is it about religion that causes them to be so violent? Second, where does it say in anyone’s scripture that we should start wars against each other? The truth is that humans manipulate religion to start wars because part of human nature is to be in conflict. There has never been a started by a religion that wasn’t started first by a human. It’s not the religions that cause wars. It’s humans manipulating religion who cause wars. These are the same people who ignore God and love by creating false rules and laws that justify war.
All of this gets back to our passage. What is the difference between the scribe and the widow? The difference is that the scribe loves everything religious. The widow loves God. The scribe is a person responsible for knowing scripture by heart, and for telling people how to apply it to their lives. The widow is simply trying to love and serve God. The scribe wants to be seen as religious. The widow wants to give to others to love them and love God. True religion, as irritating as it can get, leads us to focus on God and love. The religious who love religion are often those who lead us to focus on rules and laws.
I think that Jesus was trying to overcome division by pointing out that it was the widow, not the scribe, who is the great one. She gave sacrificially to God. The scribe just wanted to be seen as serving God.
In this vein, what I’m proudest of in this church is that we have managed, for the most part, to overcome the divisions of our culture in order to focus on God and love. If you look around at our church, we are not a church divided by ideology or theology. We have people who are very conservative, people who are very liberal, and everything in-between. We’ve managed to hold onto a balance that’s missing in so many churches that teach to be a Christian means believing and behaving as they do. We’ve managed to let our religion focus us on God and love, not rules and laws.
Our passage for this morning is a reminder to us that we can get so focused on religion that we forget God. So here’s my question for you: When you reflect on your life, which one are you? Are you like the scribe, or are you like the widow?
Amen.
All Things Are Possible
by Dr. Graham Standish
John 11:1-16, 32-44
Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, ‘Lord, he whom you love is ill.’ But when Jesus heard it, he said, ‘This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.’ Accordingly, though Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was.
Then after this he said to the disciples, ‘Let us go to Judea again.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Rabbi, the Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?’ Jesus answered, ‘Are there not twelve hours of daylight? Those who walk during the day do not stumble, because they see the light of this world. But those who walk at night stumble, because the light is not in them.’ After saying this, he told them, ‘Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him.’ The disciples said to him, ‘Lord, if he has fallen asleep, he will be all right.’ Jesus, however, had been speaking about his death, but they thought that he was referring merely to sleep. Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.’
Thomas, who was called the Twin, said to his fellow-disciples, ‘Let us also go, that we may die with him.’ When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved. He said, ‘Where have you laid him?’ They said to him, ‘Lord, come and see.’ Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, ‘See how he loved him!’ But some of them said, ‘Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?...’
Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, ‘Take away the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, ‘Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead for four days.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’ So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upwards and said, ‘Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.’ When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’ The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’
What do you think? Was it possible for Jesus to raise a dead guy? Many people would say no, but if the answer is no, then what is the line between what is and isn’t possible in life? No one ever defines it, unless they are saying that the only things that are possible are those things that comply to the known laws of physics. But the funny thing about that about the known laws of physics is that they keep changing. So was it possible for Jesus to break the known laws of physics?
What’s possible and not possible? And if we declare events like this one to be impossible, then what are we to make of an experience a friend of mine had years ago? I met Terry when I was working as an associate pastor. She had moved to the Murrysville area from Wisconsin. Like me she had a master in social work and had worked as a therapist. She also was a woman who wanted nothing more than to be a mother. All her life she wanted to raise children, but because of a disease she caught early in her adulthood, she only had one healthy ovary on the right side of her body and one healthy fallopian tube on the other. If you know anything about biology, you know that there is no way that an egg can travel across the body cavity to the other side. Her only option was in vitro fertilization, especially since her husband was against adopting children.
Tracy went through a number of treatments over the years at a cost of thousands of dollars. Every single one of them was a failure. Eventually, the doctors told her that nothing would work and that she had to face the facts that she just wasn’t going to get pregnant and have children. This devastated Tracy. She didn’t know what to do. She struggled through her disappointment. She and I had prayed for her to able to have children, but nothing seemed to work. After the decision to end the treatments, she just didn’t talk much about having children.
Then one day she walked into my office with a big ear-to-ear grin. I asked her what had happened, and she said, “I’m two months pregnant!” I said to her, “But I thought you quit the in vitros.” She said, “I did. This was a natural pregnancy.” I then asked her what had happened. This is the part that continues to inspire me.
She told me that about two-and-a-half months earlier she was going through a funk of depression over the failures of the in vitro treatments, and she was crying. She kept wondering why God wouldn’t let her have children. As she wondered this, she prayed, “Lord, you know how much I want to be a mother. You know how much I’ve wanted this my whole life. It doesn’t look like it is going to happen, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. So, Lord, I give you my life. If it is your will that I become a mother, I will become the best mother I can be. If not, I will serve you the best I can in whatever I do. All I want to do is to be yours, so I will follow you and serve you whatever you do.” Two weeks later she was pregnant.
Terry said that she was convinced that she became pregnant because she had surrendered to God. Her miracle happened because of her surrender. Seven months later she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. Two years later, she gave birth to another healthy baby boy.
So, was her experience possible, because it defied the laws of physics. I suppose the impossible can happen, and perhaps an egg somehow naturally found it’s way across the body cavity to the fallopian tube, but what is the likelihood of this happening, especially when doctors told her that things like this couldn’t happen.
What’s the line between what is and isn’t possible? Would you say that Rita Klaus crossed that line? For many years, Rita, who until recently lived in Cranberry Township, suffered from multiple sclerosis. She first noticed symptoms of the illness when she was a sister in a Roman Catholic order. She started to have strange sensations, such as periodically losing her sight, and numbness in her legs.
After undergoing a series of medical tests, the doctors came back with a frightening diagnosis: multiple sclerosis. Over the years, the symptoms gradually worsened, so much so that it interfered with her ability to remain a nun. She eventually left the convent and moved to Mars, Pennsylvania, becoming a teacher in the local public school system. For a while, her symptoms abated and she managed to live a relatively normal life.
Over the years Rita married and had children. Then her MS came back with a vengeance, eventually confining her to leg braces. As her symptoms increased, so did her bitterness as she sunk deeper into a pit of despair. Her despair crippled her faith to the point that God no longer mattered to her.
In the midst of her darkness, a light shined. A friend of hers, Marianne, who worked at St. Gregory’s School here in Zelienople, called one day and said, “Rita? Listen, there’s going to be a healing service over at St. Ferdinand’s next Wednesday evening—want to come?” Rita scoffed at her. “I’m a scientist. I don’t believe in healing; that stuff happened 2000 years ago… It’s a bunch of fakes!”
Marianne persisted and finally convinced Rita to come to the service. The service was on a Wednesday evening, and by the time they got there it was packed. The only seat available was in the front, which is exactly where Rita did not want to sit. An usher grabbed her and pulled her down the aisle, and placed her in a pew near the front. During the first hymn, everyone stood up to sing. Rita did too, but the metal of her braces slid on the floor, and she slowly started to slide under the pew in front of her. The people around her grabbed her and held her up. A person next to her held the hymnal in front of her face. She was humiliated and now the center of attention.
As the priests processed by, she heard a loud whisper from a priest behind her, saying “Wait, wait!” The procession stopped, turned around, and laid their hands on her and prayed. Then, something incredible happened. Suddenly she felt as though an ocean of peace was inundating her. This peace lasted for the rest of the evening, and it changed her whole outlook on life. She was a changed and transformed person. All the anger, bitterness, and despair had evaporated, and in its place were gratitude, love, and peace from God.
Rita had experienced a spiritual healing, yet her MS remained. Why would God heal her spiritually, but not physically? Rita didn’t ask this question. In fact, this spiritual healing was infinitely more important to her than any physical healing could have been. She told me, back when she spoke here at Calvin Church in 1997, that given the choice between a physical healing and a spiritual one, she would take the spiritual one every time. It allowed her to plunge back into life with faith, hope, love, and purpose.
Still, over the next few years her body declined even more. On the inside she felt a great sense of peace and harmony, but on the outside her body was slowly deteriorating. Eventually, she was forced into a wheelchair. She prayed to God, but surprisingly not for healing. Instead, she prayed for God’s grace to sustain her. Over the next few years, Rita devoted herself to Christ. She immersed herself in a variety of spiritual disciplines and practices, often in the hope that they would lead to physical healing. She took courses in scripture and theology at a local college. Still no physical healing.
One night, she went to bed and, as was her custom, spent quiet time with God. She had been doing this for the three years since her spiritual healing. She was praying the rosary when she heard a voice: “Why don’t you ask?” She looked around the room but could see no one. The television and radio were off, so the voice did not come from there. She knew in her heart that the voice was real. It was a gentle, almost pleading voice. She wondered what it was that she was supposed to ask for, and suddenly it came to her: she was to ask for healing. This was something she had never asked for. She had prayed about many things in the past, but not specifically for her own healing. The following words formed in her heart and came out of her mouth: “Mary, my mother, Queen of Peace,… please ask your Son to heal me in any way I need to be healed. I know your Son has said that if you have faith, and say to the mountains: move, that they will move. I believe. Please help my unbelief.”
She then fell asleep. The next morning she woke up, forgetting her experience from the night before. She had to hurry because she had overslept and was late for a class she was taking at LaRoche College. She drove herself in her specially equipped van. During the class something strange happened. It felt as though heat was surging from her feet through her legs, and across her whole body. She felt itchy all over, especially in her legs. Her toes were moving inside her shoes, which is something that hadn’t happened in years. She scratched her leg and could feel her fingernails. This was something she hadn’t felt so completely in years.
Driving home afterwards she pulled into her driveway and felt another sensation she hadn’t felt in years. She had to go to the bathroom. She stopped the van and hurriedly dragged her braced body, using her crutches, out of the door and onto the driveway. The braces locked in place, and she scissor-stepped across the driveway to the front door. In the bathroom, she unlocked her brace and looked down at her leg. For years her one leg had grown progressively shorter than the other as the kneecap moved to the inside of her knee. Now it was completely normal. She quickly took off her braces. Remembering the prayer from the night before, she thought to herself that if she was healed she should be able to walk up the stairs. With that, she launched up the stairs with a bound. She reached the top, let out a yelp of joy, and ran down them, out the front door, and into the driveway. She had been healed.
Since that day in 1986, Rita has never had a recurrence of her MS—even of minor symptoms. She travels the world over to tell others her story and also about God’s love. If you are interested in reading about Rita’s experiences, she published them in a book, Rita’s Story, by Paraclete Press.
So, was she really healed by God, or was it just some sort of coincidental event? Perhaps it was just some sort of spontaneous remission, although what do you do with all of the other things that she experienced—the feelings of peace, calm, and of spiritual healing? If you’re not sure what to do with this story, what would you make of Don Piper’s story.
Don Piper is a Baptist pastor who had an experience of healing and more in 1989. Piper had been at a large annual conference for Baptist pastors in Texas, hearing inspiring preachers and teachers. At its end he had two choices about which way to drive home. He could go right out of the Trinity Pines Conference Center, or left. Since he had always taken the left route, which was an eastern route driving down Highway 59, he decided to take a right, heading west down I-45. That decision changed the whole course of his life.
He hadn’t driven more than five miles when disaster hit. Driving along a narrow road with no shoulders, he looked in horror as an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer crossed the center line and headed right for him. The truck ran right over his car, then careened off to hit several other cars. Piper and his care were crushed. Within minutes fire engines, ambulances, and police cars were at the scene. They checked on everyone, and most of the victims suffered only minor injuries. Don Piper, on the other hand, was not okay. He was declared dead by the paramedics on the scene. He had no pulse, no signs of life at all. They checked him numerous times, but each time it was apparent that he was dead.
A massive traffic jam piled up behind the accident, and another pastor from the conference, Dick Onerecker, was in that jam. Wondering what was causing the traffic jam, he walked a half a mile to the scene. Seeing the damage, he went to a police officer and asked if he could help, telling him that he was a pastor. The officer told him that everyone except the man in the crushed car seemed okay. Onerecker, in that moment, felt called to pray for Don Piper, so he asked the trooper if he could. The trooper looked at him and said, “The man’s dead. There’s nothing left to pray for.” Onerecker asked again if he could pray for the dead man. Onerecker wasn’t even sure himself why he felt so compelled to pray for the dead man in the mangled car, but he persisted. The officer said, “Well, you know, if that’s what you want to do, go ahead, but I’ve go to tell you it’s an awful sight. He’s dead, and it’s really a mess under the tarp. Blood and glass are everywhere, and the body’s all mangled.” Dick insisted, so the officer consented.
The car was a mess, and Onerecker had to force his way up through the back of the hatchback. Stretching through the mangled steel as much as possible, he reached out to Don Piper’s body, managing to barely touch his left shoulder, and began to pray for Piper. As he prayed, he sang a number of hymns. This went on for five or ten minutes. As he sang “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” he heard someone else singing with him. Looking around for someone next to the car, he slowly realized that the voice he heard was Don Piper’s. Piper was alive. Scrambling out of the car, he quickly got the paramedics, who rushed to the scene, used the Jaws of Life to get Piper out, and rushed him to the hospital.
So, for those thirty minutes that Don Piper was apparently dead, what did he experience? According to him, he was taken to heaven. He says that he was dead and in heaven. He felt an incredible sense of peace and joy, and all around him were loved ones who had died before him, hugging him, laughing, and praising God. He saw so many people he had loved, and all were radiant with light. He said that there was no sense of time at all. It also felt more real than any experiences he had ever had in life. He felt absorbed in love. He also sensed God’s presence, although he didn’t see God. Everything was glowing with, as he says, “a dazzling intensity.” Human words couldn’t describe his experiences. He also heard the most amazingly beautiful music he had ever heard, and it seemed to be everywhere, and all of it seemed to be praising God. As he reflected later, “I was home; I was where I belonged. I wanted to be there more than I had ever wanted to be anywhere on earth. Tim had slipped away, and I was simply present in heaven. All worries, anxieties, and concerns vanished. I had no needs, and I felt perfect.”
There’s more to this story, but I’ll let you read it in his book, Thirty Minutes in Heaven. As he seemed ready to stay in heaven, something happened. There was a pause, and in that pause he heard another voice, one definitely not the heavenly ones. It was singing, “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” He became conscious in the car, hearing Onerecker singing, and aware that his hand was being held tightly.
It took more than a year for him to recover from the massive injuries he had sustained. He had one more interesting experience about a year later. He met Onerecker’s wife, and he told her how much it helped him to feel her husband’s hand clutching his while lying in the crumpled car. The wife said, “Dick wasn’t holding your hand. He couldn’t have. Think about it. Your hand was under the dashboard, and Dick could barely stretch to touch your shoulder.” Piper replied, “Then whose hand was it?” She smiled and said, “I think you know…”
So, did Don Piper really have this experience? What do we do with these experiences? I suppose we can dismiss them, but if do so we miss something important. We miss the fact that there’s so much more to this world than we can ever understand, so much more to God than we can ever comprehend. But here’s the reality, very little is possible for those with little faith, but for those with faith, all things are possible.
Amen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)