O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 24:36-44:

Every year around this time we hear from a certain segment of the news media about a war on Christmas, and how come stores won’t say Merry Christmas. That entire argument misses the point entirely because there is not a war on Christmas. There is a war on Advent, the time of preparation. Christmas does not begin until December 25 and then runs for 12 days, so just when we should begin to say Merry Christmas is the very time in which Christmas is taken down and put away in a box until next year.  If we want to talk about a war on Christmas let’s get serious and talk about returning to the 12 days of Christmas that start on Christmas day, not the 30 or so days before Christmas even arrives. And the last piece is that this year Christmas falls on a Sunday, and we will be holding a worship service, and here is my rule, if you are not in worship on Christmas Day, either here or some other church where you are, then you never get to say “Let’s keep Christ in Christmas” ever again. There is not a war on Christmas there is a war on Advent the time of preparation to get ready for the coming of Christmas. To get ready for welcoming the Christ child into our lives once again. A time to get ready to welcome Jesus into the world, and to recognize, as we have talked about for the past few weeks, that Christ is here and yet Christ is not yet here as well. He has come and he has yet to come.

Now I do have to confess my own hypocrisy here and that is that I start listening to Christmas music before Halloween even arrives, and as soon as Linda will allow me to put up Christmas decorations they are going up, so I have my own personal war with advent. But that has never stopped me from simultaneously emphasizing the importance of Advent, as a time of preparation, a time of slowing down and appreciating and also a time of expectancy and of desire. And so, we are going to spend the next few weeks trying to do that, and approaching this season, both of Advent and Christmas, by looking at some of the most famous songs of the season, what they mean and why they matter for our faith, and we start with the hymn O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.

James: The War Within

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was James 4:1-12:

One of the things that I find remarkable about the stories of the faith that we find in scripture is that they don’t whitewash the stories, or try and hide the skeletons in the closet.  They are right out there for all to see.  And this isn’t just for minor characters, or those who just appear so that bad things can happen so we can learn a lesson, like Ananias and Saphira who are struck dead when they lie about their money to the apostles, you can find the story in chapter 5 of Acts. It’s like when an African-American character suddenly shows up in a horror movie, you know they are about to die.  Those are the ones you sort of expect to find.  It’s easy to say bad things about people no one cares about, but that’s not what happens in scripture.  It’s the biggies that get exposed.  The disciples, and Peter in particular, are constantly being shown that they don’t get it, and they are not alone.  Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Solomon, the biggies, they all have stories told about them in which they do questionable things, and then of course there is David.

That story we heard today of he and Bathsheba is something you might not expect to have recorded and passed on, or if it was perhaps it would be just a sort of an aside that maybe got lost over time and so perhaps there would be some comment about Bathsheba or Uriah, of which we would have no idea what it would mean.  There are certainly some examples of that in the Bible, and the farther we get away the easier it is for it to drift from memory.  To mention a somewhat similar situation, if we were to talk about Monica Lewinski, for an entire generation that would mean nothing.  Of course they could google it and get more than they ever wanted to know.

Challenging God: Zelophehad's Daughters

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Numbers 27:1-11:

Many of you know that I am a number person.  Give me an excel spreadsheet, especially if it’s one I can make longer and more complex, and I am a happy person.  But if you had asked me when I began my ministerial career if there was one book in the Bible that I thought I might never preach from I would have probably said the book of Numbers, because these are not good numbers of excel spreadsheets, these numbers are census reports.  It’s not that there aren’t some good stories to be found in Numbers, but to get to them you have to wade through these lists of names. If you get bored in the genealogies found in other parts of scripture, you are going to fall asleep reading Numbers.  Now, I’m sure that there are some people who find these lists exciting, but I am not one of them, and so I rarely even think about Numbers, but then I came across this remarkable story of Zelophehad’s daughters.

At another church I served, someone asked me to preach about the proper role for women in the household; and while I knew what I thought I wanted to say, I didn’t really know how to approach it, and to be honest I was a little afraid to approach it, but then something remarkable happened.  Within a short period of time, two different people made mention of this story.  The first was someone with whom I went to high school who is now an atheist, although knowing something about the church he grew up in I can certainly understand how he ended up the way he did.  I don’t know how he heard about the story, but he found it exciting and definitely wondered why it had never been covered in his church growing up.  Then shortly thereafter someone else passed on info on a blog being done by someone who was reading the entire Bible and then blogging his thoughts about each story and what made her pass this blog on to others was when he got to this story.

So within less a week, two different people had commented on this rather remarkable story, which I had to have read it because it’s not just found here, but instead is actually mentioned five times in the Bible, although I didn’t even remember having every encountered it. So I thought that having this appear had to be more than just a coincidence and so I began learning more about Zelophehad and his remarkable daughters.

I Believe, Help My Unbelief

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Mark 16:1-8:

When the bracket came out for the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament, better known as March Madness, after a 64 year hiatus, my Harvard Crimson were making the tournament for the fourth time in a row.  But their first game was going to be against the University of North Carolina.  While Carolina is not the team this year that they have been in the past, they were still a superior team to Harvard.  The not only played tougher competition, but they had all around better players.  And so when I went to fill out my bracket, did I pick Harvard?  No, I chose North Carolina.  It was sort of easy pick, and yet it wasn’t.  Because it’s not like Harvard hasn’t won in the tournament before.  In fact, they had won their first round games the last two years including beating a heavily favored and much better New Mexico team in 2013.  But I still picked North Carolina.  I did believe that Harvard stood a chance, but I didn’t actually believe it enough to pick them, or I might say I said I believed, but I wasn’t willing to actually live that belief out in my life.  And so as the game began, I wrote on facebook “I believe that Harvard can win this, help my unbelief.”  And then Harvard came as close as a last second three point shot, which would have won the game, clanked off the back of the rim.  “I believe, help my unbelief.”

That quote comes from a healing story we find in the gospel of Mark.  A young boy has epilepsy, although it’s not called that in the passage, and the boy’s father asks Jesus to help the boy, if Jesus is able.  And Jesus responds, “If you are able! – all things can be done for the one who believes,” and the father immediately cries out, “I believe, help my unbelief.”  That is he believes it in his heart, but not in his head, or perhaps that’s reversed, he believes it with his head but not his heart, and so there is that modicum of doubt there, that piece of unbelief.  He knows that 9 times out of 10, North Carolina is going to beat Harvard on the hardwood, but he’s hoping for that one upset, that one miracle to occur, but while he’s hoping for that miracle, he’s not really ready to bet anything on it.  He wants desperately to believe, to act as if it is true, and yet he hesitates.  We can see the same thing happening with the disciples and with the women who go to the tomb.

Bread and Stones

Here is my sermon from Maundy Thursday.  The text was John 13:31-35:

In her autobiography, Wait Till Next Year, Doris Kearns Goodwin recounts how growing up in Brooklyn in the 1950’s she and her friends acted out the hearings being conducted by Senator Joe McCarthy.  “We had begun by transforming our living rooms into a counterpart of the Senate chamber,” she said.  “We set up a table facing a single chair in the middle of the room.  The person designated as the accused sat in the chair while the rest of us asked questions and made charges from behind the table.  As our accused fidgeted uneasily on the stand, we grew increasingly hostile, interrupting explanations with points of order, claiming we had documents and proof to back up our accusations.  We shouted and argued just as we had seen the counsel do on television,” she said.

“Day after day we played this treacherous game, even though one of us usually ended up running from the room in tears.  We accused one another of being poor sports, of cheating at games.  We exposed statements of the ‘accused’ which denigrated others.  Marilyn… accused Elaine of saying that the new girl on the block, Natalie, was fat; Elaine accused Marilyn of saying that Eileen was a crybaby…  Eddie accused Eileen of complaining that Elaine was too bossy.  Often these charges were true.  We did, indeed, talk behind one another’s backs, but we had never imagined that our slurring words, bad mouthed comments, and hurtful language would be made known to others….

“As the games progressed, they became even more vicious and mean-spirited.  Marilyn said she knew the truth about my family, that my real mother had died when I was born, and that my mother was really my grandmother.  Stung by the attack, I lashed back: ‘How can you say such a thing?  Your name isn’t even Greene.  It’s Greenberg.  You’re the one who’s hiding things, not me.’

Transfiguration: Light in the Darkness

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was 2 Corinthians 4:3-6 and Mark 9:2-9:

One of the conversations that are routinely held amongst clergy, although not really shared amongst those outside, is the difficulty we encounter in talking about the same stories over and over again, especially for those stories that occur every year like Christmas and Easter, and we wonder how we are going to find something new to say about them.  And then there are others, like the story of the transfiguration, a story which we encounter every year on the last Sunday before the season of Lent begins, first with the party we know as Mardi Gras and then Ash Wednesday, that cause us the same anxiety, although as we can tell we don’t get the same turn out for this story as we do at Easter and Christmas, but that doesn’t make it easier to come up with something new to say.  And I know your hearts are breaking for me, complaining about the preparation I have to do when I only work one day a week.

But in addition to today’s story, today is also the one year anniversary of the death of my 9-year-old nephew Wyatt.  In some ways it seems like so much longer than a year and in some ways it seems so much shorter than a year.  Some of you remember that time, and we thank you for your help getting us through it, and for those who weren’t here yet, Wyatt went into the emergency room with a severe headache and, according to his doctors, in a perfect storm of problems, died a week later when a blood clot in his brain caused swelling in his brain that couldn’t be controlled, taking his life.  Yet, there is a link to that tragedy and the story of Jesus’ transfiguration as well as Paul’s statement which today comes from his second letter to the Corinthians.

God's Call: Are You Serious?

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The texts were Mark 1:14-20 and Jonah 3:1-5, 10:

I like Jonah.  I like Jonah a lot, because Jonah is a lot like me, and I suspect that Jonah is a lot like some of you as well.  We really have two different call stories in the passages we heard this morning.  The first is the call story of the first disciples.  Jesus has heard that John the Baptist has just been arrested, which is the event which kicks off his ministry, and so he goes to Galilee and proclaims first a call for repentance, and then the reason, because the kingdom of God has come near.  And immediately, those are Mark’s words, a word he uses a lot in his gospel, Jesus goes to the Sea of Galilee and calls Peter and James and John and Simon to come and follow him, and they get up and go.  They leave their nets and their boats and their family behind, and they follow Jesus, immediately.  And then there is Jonah.

The passage we heard from Jonah is actually already in the middle of the story, that is why it says that the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.  Now many of us are at least somewhat familiar with the story of Jonah, if for nothing else then being Jonah and the whale, although there is actually no whale in the story.  It’s a whale of a story, but there is no whale in the story.  But I want to remind us all of the Jonah story so that we can know what’s going on in the passage we heard and also to then compare and contrast it against the call story found in Mark.

Jonah is a prophet, and his story is found in the Hebrew Scriptures amongst the prophets, but the book is very different than other prophetic writings, because it isn’t a series of prophetic statements.  Instead it is a narrative about Jonah and his dealings with God, much more like what we are used to seeing in the Genesis stories, or in some of the later histories, like the stories found in kings or Samuel.  But Jonah is living in Israel when God calls him and tells him to go “at once” to Nineveh and cry out against their wickedness.  Now the city of Nineveh is said to be a great city, and a very large city, that it would take 3 days to walk across, which means that it’s about 60 miles in diameter.  Nineveh is also not a Jewish city as it’s located in modern day Iraq and is known as the city of Mosul.

Assumptions

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was John 1:43-51:

Today’s message is going to be very different from how I normally preach, because it’s going to be focused on four stories, and it’s also a little more personal than I normally like to be because these are also my stories.  But this message has been sort of bouncing around my mind for a while now, and I thought today was an appropriate time to say it.

The first two stories are about perceptions, or we should probably say assumptions.  When I was attending Harvard, I had to go to the cashier’s office one day and there was a long line waiting to talk with someone, and in front of me there was a very large man.  He was probably 6’4” and at least 250.  His neck was bigger than my thighs.  He was huge.  Now Harvard does not offer any athletic scholarships, nor do any of the other Ivy Leagues, although they still do quite well, including being undefeated in football this year and beating UNM in the NCAA tournament two years ago.  But that’s just bragging, but anyways this guy was huge and I instantly thought, I wonder if Harvard lowers its academic requirements in order to recruit and bring in some athletes to play for the school?  Does anyone want to make a guess as to the race of this particular student?  He was African-American.  The moment I asked myself the question I realized the outright bigotry that went into it, the assumptions that I had made, not only about him but about others like him.

Ghost of Christmas Future

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Luke 1:39-55:

For the past two weeks we have been looking at Christmas through a lens provided for us by Charles Dickens in his classic story A Christmas Carol.  In the story, Ebenezer Scrooge, who approaches Christmas, and really everything in his life by exclaiming famously “bah humbug”, is visited by four ghosts.  The first is the ghost of his former partner Jacob Marley, who is forced to carry the chains of his misdeeds in his life around with him for all of eternity.  Marley comes to warn Scrooge that his fate will be the same unless Scrooge makes changes and that he should heed what the ghosts who come to visit have to show him.

The first ghost is the ghost of Christmas past who helps Scrooge to remember a different time in his life when he didn’t approach everything as simply an economic exercise in which to make, or save, as much money as possible and when he approached life with excitement and verve.  He is also shown the process by which he had become the man he is so that he would understand what changes could be made so that he could become someone different and not face the same fate as Marley.  It was important for him to understand that who he was, was not who he had to be, that he could make other decisions in his life that the past neither determined the present nor the future.

The second, the ghost of Christmas present, showed us the hyper-consumption and consumerism that affects how we celebrate Christmas today.  And we highlighted the fact that most of us want Christmas to mean more for us and we worry that we have gotten caught up in everything else and have forgotten the reason for the season, but because we can’t quite figure out how to make our celebrations more meaningful we focus on trying to make society’s celebrations more Christian in order to compensate.  And so we begin focusing on things which, I believe, distract us and distance us from truly understanding what the birth of Christ means for the world.  Everyday more than 20,000 children around the world will die as a result of malnutrition, war and water-borne illnesses, problems, most of which, could be solved with a fraction of what we spend on Christmas every year?  And so we heard Jesus, quoting from the prophet Isaiah, proclaiming that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him, and it is upon us as well, to proclaim the good news to the world, and I posed two questions for us to ponder, and those where what would we gain if we stopped celebrating Christmas and what would we lose if we stopped celebrating Christmas.  The answer to those questions, I suggested, would help us to realize what was truly important in our own Christmas celebrations which could lead us to potentially celebrating Christmas differently this year and creating new traditions for the future.  And that leads us to the last ghost, the ghost of Christmas future, or as Dickens says, the ghost of Christmas yet to come.

Ghost of Christmas Present

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Luke 4:14-21:

Okay, we’re going to start with a trivia question.  We’re talking about Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, so does anyone know the Christmas carol that is sung in the story? It’s God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.  But we have begun using Dickens’ ghosts of Christmas as a lens through which to view our journey through Advent to Christmas.  Last week we looked at the Ghost of Christmas Past who takes Scrooge, appropriately enough, into the past to see a different vision of Christmas, a time in which he enjoyed the season and all that it brought, and we saw that the past does not determine the future, that the present and the future can also be changed, if we are willing to change.    Much of what we know as the “traditions” of Christmas were invented fairly recently, and that includes the laments about what Christmas has become and the cry to try and practice Christmas differently.

The next ghost that Scrooge encounters is that of Christmas present.  If you’ve ever read A Christmas Carol or seen a movie version, you may remember that the ghost of Christmas present is a large jovial fellow who is surrounded by piles of food and signs of abundance.  Even the ghost’s lamp is in the shape of a horn of plenty or a cornucopia.  If Dickens were to write the story today, this ghost may stay the same because he can be the symbol of the over-consumption which is so prevalent in Christmas present, but there is also a warning in this ghost’s visage.  Because even though he is jolly and laughing and surrounded by abundance, we are told that around his waist “is an antique scabbard, but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.”  Reminiscent of Jesus’ injunction not to put up our treasure where moth and rust will consume and where thieves can break in and steal, but instead to put our treasure in heaven.  And then Jesus says, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  And I think it’s critical to note that Jesus does not say where our heart is that’s where our treasure is, but instead that what we treasure is where our heart will follow, that our treasure doesn’t follow our heart, but instead that our heart follows our treasure.  Definitely something to keep in mind this Christmas season.