Reconciliation

Here is my message from Sunday. The passage was on reconciliation from 2 Corinthians.

I have a clergy colleague who was sexually abused by her father when she was a child. As often happens, to help cover the pain, she turned to drugs and alcohol as a teen and in her young adult years. She also cut off all relationship with her father and had no intention of ever seeing or talking to him again. Although she and I have not discussed this part, I also imagine that she wanted really bad things to happen to him, and who could blame her? After she got clean, and as part of the 12 step program she was in started making amends to others that she had hurt, seeking their forgiveness, she also came to the realization that she had hurt her parents too, maybe not as much as she had been hurt, but that she needed to reach out to them, and she did. What she also did was to set parameters around that and tell her father that what he did was wrong, and how it had hurt her, and the levels of mistrust and pain it had inflicted in her life. He in turn made a confession of guilt and was ready to do whatever was necessary to help them have a relationship again, and also knew that that might not be possible and that he was responsible for that. But she was willing to forgive and they have reconciled their relationship. That is sort of the best case scenario of the forgiveness process, and it is not one that is possible for everyone. She does not have any children and I often wonder if she did if that would have changed that outcome.

In talking about forgiveness, Rev Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, said “we can never say, ‘I will forgive you, but I won’t have anything further to do with you.’ Forgiveness means reconciliation, a coming together again. Without this, no man can love his enemies. The degree to which we are able to forgive determines the degree to which we are able to love our enemies.” Now I don’t want to be one to disagree with Rev. King, but here I’m going to disagree with Dr. King. As I said in the first message on forgiveness one of the myths or untruths of forgiveness is that it has to lead to reconciliation, but I don’t think that’s the case because sometimes it’s just not safe to be reconciled, and sometimes it’s not safe for either party to be reconciled. And so how do we make that distinction? Some of that comes from what we hope to accomplish in a reconciliation process and that is something that can begin with us as part of our process of giving forgiveness, and it can also begin with a person seeking forgiveness, and that former is the way it has often been done.

Forgiveness in Families

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was from Genesis as Joseph forgives his brothers.

So far as we have walked this journey of forgiveness, we have looked at what forgiveness is not, some of the reasons why we need to forgive and then last week we looked at the steps of forgiveness, if ever so briefly, and we are going to return to that today as we move onto the idea of forgiveness in families. Now the steps to forgiveness in families are not different from those to forgiving others, but the hurts we have in our families are often bigger or deeper because we have greater expectations from those we love, or whom are supposed to love us, than we do for others in our lives. And so, when there are breaches of trust or loss, and most often that’s what happens with our family hurts, they dig deeper into our lives and the stones that we carry as a result and bigger and heavier, and so I thought it necessary to try and deal with these issues specifically. But, before we get into those hurts and how we forgive them, I wanted to switch things up a bit, because while we’ve talked about how to give forgiveness we haven’t talked about how to seek forgiveness, and while that too could probably be its own message, we’re not going to spend that much time discussing it, but it is important to at least talk about because as I said just as we carry rocks around representing the hurts that others have given us, so too others carry around the rocks of hurt that have our names on them.

Rev. Adam Hamilton says that there are six words everyone needs to know to be able to keep a relationship together. The first three are hard, and that is, as we’ve been working on, “I forgive you.” But the other three may be even harder, and so we’re going to practice saying them, and that is “Please forgive me.” Can we say that together? Now while I think that’s a good start, I do disagree with him and think that there’s six other words that have to go along with this. The first of those three is “I was wrong.” Can we say that together? And the final three are “I am sorry.” Now how about we say all three of them? I wanted to practice here because it’s easier to practice it when there’s nothing on the line then saying it without practice when it really matters.  And it doesn’t matter which order you say them in, but they are the start. Just as one of the steps of giving forgiveness is to name exactly what it is that happened and why it hurt, and the same is true in seeking forgiveness. If we are truly seeking forgiveness, then we have to be able to say what we did and why it was wrong. If we cannot admit that, then we’re not actually seeking forgives, we’re just seeking to be absolved of our guilt, and those are not the same thing. This is also the not the time in which you seek to explain yourself, or make excuses. The one exception to that is if it’s to use that to say what you learned from it so you can try and not have it happen again.

Steps of Forgiveness

Here is my message from Sunday.

At another church, there was a member of the congregation who thought it was his job to cause conflict in the church. That’s not just my opinion, it’s what he said. He thought that causing disorder was good for the church and would cause it to grow. Now growth often does cause some disorder to happen, because of the changes that come with growth, but I’ve never seen disorder leading to growth. After several tries to get him to behave in healthy ways, the situation began to escalate, and he ended up making what many people considered a death threat against me. After spending a morning arranging for an armed security guard to be present at the church, and talking with our attorney about the possibility of a restraining order, and working with the police, you could say that I wasn’t having a very good day. But in the midst of it, as I was praying for the turmoil I was feeling, I knew that the other person was also in turmoil and so I stopped praying for myself and I started praying for the other person. I prayed that God would give him peace and calm, the same thing that I was praying for. I didn’t ask for God to show him the errors of his way, simply that God would be with him. and you know what happened? A peace came over me and my anxiety dissipated, and I can say that I’m still working on the whole forgiveness thing the stone is much smaller than it was before.

And so, we continue looking at forgiveness we now get down into the nitty gritty. we began by looking at what forgiveness isn’t, so we could get passed some of the myths of what forgiveness, and then last week we talked about why we need to forgive and also started with the choice to begin the process of forgiveness by dropping one of the stones that we carry. And before we move into the steps of forgiveness, let me give you one more reason why we need to forgive. We need to forgive someone is because we have been hurt. But what do hurt people do? Hurt people, hurt people. Often the reason someone else has hurt us is because they too are hurt. Hurt people hurt people. Brokenness leads to more brokenness. When we talked about the fruit of the Spirit, one of them was peace, the Hebrew word for which was shalom, which you may remember has a connotation of healing and wholeness. And so, if we want that peace in our lives, if we want healing in our lives, then forgiveness is one of the paths towards that, because often if we refuse to forgive we get filled with anger, amongst other emotions, for what happened to us and how it continues to haunt us. And rather than directing our anger at the person to whom it comes from, we instead direct it others who had nothing to do with it, because that anger will seep out in other areas of our lives. And our hurts then hurt others, others begin to carry around rocks with our names on them. Or as Richard Rohr says, and I’ve quoted before, “pain that is not transformed is transmitted.” Forgiveness is the process by which we begin that transformation, that process to healing and wholeness, peace and shalom.

Carrying Stones: Why We Need to Forgive

Here is my message from Sunday.

On this weekend in which we remember and celebrate the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the others who worked in the civil rights movement, work which is not yet done because we have not achieved the dream, and we might remember as well that Dr. King earned his Ph.D. at a Methodist University because it was the first predominantly white university to have a black dean of the chapel, I thought it appropriate as we think about forgiveness to hear some of the words of Dr. King, who had some things to say about forgiveness, and if anyone might have had a right to strike back against some of those who injured him, it would be Dr. King and his fellow workers. In a speech given to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, entitled “Where do we Go from Here”, which also happens to be the title of his last book, Dr. King said the following:

 “I’m concerned about a better World. I’m concerned about justice; I’m concerned about brotherhood and sisterhood; I’m concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that. And I say to you, I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to humankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. For I have seen too much hate. [...] and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we aren’t moving wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who loves has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.”

What Forgiveness is Not

Here is my message from Sunday. The scripture was Matthew 3. We also did a reaffirmation of baptismal vows.

At 3 am on Monday, October 2, 2006, Charles Carl Roberts finished his rounds collecting milk from surrounding farms and parked his truck and then went home to catch a few hours of sleep before he had to wake up and get his children ready for school.  After his wife had taken their youngest child to a mother’s prayer group, he walked his two older children to the bus stop, then went back home.  He wrote out four letters, one for his wife and each of his children, then he loaded a truck with supplies including a 9-mm handgun, 23-guage shotgun and 600 rounds of ammunition and he drove to the little Amish schoolhouse down the road in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania.  And most of you know what happened then.  The sense of shock that struck us all in that moment was not just of the five little girls who lost their lives and the 5 others who were wounded, as it was the third school shooting that week, but the shock was also about how the Amish community and the parents of the victims responded to this senseless act of violence.

Forgiveness came to be one of, if not the, dominating storylines of this senseless tragedy.  Because on the same day of the tragedy, members of the Amish community, including relatives of the victims went to see Roberts’ widow and his children to tell them that they forgave him and them for what had happened. They took food to the family. They attended his funeral and burial at Georgetown United Methodist Church, and when a fund was established to help support the families the members of the trust who oversaw the disbursement of the funds, most of whom were Amish, made sure that Roberts’ family received some of those funds.  This was not what people expected, because this was not what people normally saw nor what they thought they would do in the wake of such a tragedy, and I can say from personal experience it was not what happened just 3 months later at the high school in the community where I was soon to be appointed.  There a student stabbed another student to death, and in the wake of that tragedy as the community rallied to give support to the family of the victim, one of the members of our church tried to get help for people to provide meals for the family of the perpetrator and she was met not only with resistance, but even outright hostility, that they were not going to do anything for that family.  It should also be mentioned that the reason Roberts gave for why he did what he did was because of guilt for an alleged crime he committed that he could not forgive himself for, and because of the pain he felt after losing his infant daughter 9 years before and the fact that he could never forgive God, two of the issues we will try and tackle as we begin a seven week journey through forgiveness.

What I Read in 2022

Here are the books I read in 2022. This is more for me, but I would recommend almost all of these. 47 are by female authors -34%.

• A Short History of Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce by Massimo Montanari, translated by Gregory Conti
• Agincourt by Bernard Cornwell
• All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle Easter Terror by Stephen Kinzer
• American Dialogue: The Founders and Us by Joseph J. Ellis
• American Uprising: The Untold Story of America's Largest Slave Revolt by Daniel Rasmussen
• Appetite for America: Fred Harvey and the Business of Civilizing the Wild West - One Meal at a Time by Stephen Fried
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai City by Katherine Boo
• Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby by Candida Moss
• Big Game: The NFL in Dangerous Times by Mark Leibovich
• Bless Me Ultima by Rudolph Anaya
• Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone by Brene Brown
• Breathe: A Letter to My Son by Imani Perry
• Brother of Jesus, Friend of God: Studies in the Letter of James by Luke Timothy Johnston
• Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a  Data-Driven World by Carl Bergstom
• Canto Bight by Saladin Ahmed
• Click: The Magic of Instant Connections by Ori Brafman
• Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers Who Helped Win World War II by Liza Mundy
• Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America by Maggie Haberman
• Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit: Growing in Christlikeness by Christopher J.H. Wright
• Death of Kings by Bernard Cornwell
• December '41: A World War II Thriller by William Martin
• Do Fathers Matter?: What Science is Telling Us About the Parent We've Overlooked by Paul Raeburn
• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown
• Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - And Why Things are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling
• Faith After Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to do About It by Brian D. McClaren
• Forget the Alamo: The True Story of the Myth that Made Texas by Bryan Burrough
• Forgiveness is a Choice: A Step-by-Step Process for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope by Robert D. Enright
• Forgiving What You Can't Forget: Discover How to Move On, Make Peace With Painful Memories and Create a Life That's Beautiful Again by Lysa TerKeurst
• Foster by Claire Keegan
• Freedom by Sebastian Junger
• Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder and Vladimir Putin's Wrath by Bill Browder
• From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back edited by Elizabeth Schaefer
• Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law by Mary Roach
• Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford
• Good Enough: 40ish Devotions for a Life of Imperfection by Kate Bowler
• Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese
• How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery in America by Clint Smith
• How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World by Steven Johnson
• Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
• Jane Austen: A Life by Carol Shields
• Liberalism and its Discontents by Francis Fukuyama
• Life Lessons: Book of James by Max Lucado
• Life on the Vine: Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit by Philip D. Kenneson
• Los Alamos by Jospeh Kanon
• Love for Imperfect Things by Haemin Sunim
• Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
• Nature's Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age and the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Made the Present by Phillip Blom
• Neuroscience and the Fruit of the Spirit by Bryan Spoon
• Never by Ken Follett
• Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life by Harold S. Kushner
• No Beast so Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Man-Eater in History by Dane Huckelbridge
• Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman
• Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez
• One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard L. Brandt
• Open by Andre Agassi and J.R. Moehringer
• Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s by Nicole Hemmer
• Perfecting Ourselves to Death: The Pursuit of Excellence and the Perils of Perfectionism by Richard Winter
• Pirate Hunters: Treasure, Obsession and the Search for a Legendary Pirate Ship by Robert Kurson
• Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations by Amy Chua
• Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall
• Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West by Catherine Belton
• Putin's World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest by Angela Stent
• Race Against Time: The Untold Story of Scipio Jones and the Battle to Save Twelve Innocent Men by Sandra Neil Wallace
• Recitatif: A Story by Toni Morrison
• Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson
• Rough Riders: Theodore Roosevelt, His Cowboy Regiment and the Immortal Charge Up San Juan Hill by Mark lee Gardner
• Sex on the Moon: The Amazing Story Behind the Most Audacious Heist in History by Ben Mezrich
• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
• Sparring Partners by John Grisham
• Stonehenge by Bernard Cornwell
• Stories of Jedi and Sith edited by Roseanne A. Brown
• Sword of Kings by Bernard Cornwell
• Sword Song by Bernard Cornwell
• Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation by Erika Krouse
• Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission by Mark Leibovich
• The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America's UFO Highway by Ben Mezrich
• The Associate by John Grisham
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcom X and Alex Haley
• The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World by Desmond Tutu
• The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
• The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson
• The Boston Massacre: A Family History by Serena R. Zabin
• The Boys from Biloxi by John Grisham
• The Burning Land by Bernard Cornwell
• The Cold Millions by Jess Walter
• The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
• The Devil Never Sleeps: Learning to Live in an Age of Disasters by Juliette Kayyem
• The Disney Revolt: The Great Labor War of Animation's Golden Age by Jake S. Friedman
• The Empty Throne by Bernard Cornwell
• The Flame Bearer by Bernard Cornwell
• The Fruit of the Spirit: Becoming the Person God Wants You to Be by Thomas E. Trask
• The General and the Genius: Groves and Oppenheimer - The Unlikely Partnership that Built the Atom Bomb by James W. Kunetka
• The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown
• The Journey: Forgiveness, Restorative Justice and Reconciliation by Stephanie Hixon and Tom Porter
• The Judge's List by John Grisham
• The Last Chairlift by John Irving
• The Love Song of W.E.B. DuBois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers
• The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel by Beth Allison Barr
• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
• The Name of God is Mercy by Pope Francis
• The Name of War: King Phillip's War and the Origins of the American Identity by Jill Lepore
• The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century by George Friedman
• The One-Hundred Foot Journey by Richard C. Morais
• The Pagan Lord by Bernard Cornwell
• The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Murray
• The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis
• The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mercy of God's Mercy by Timothy Keller
• The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed by Wendy Lower
• The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down by Colin Woodward
• The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
• The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach  to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson
• The Taking of Jemima Boone: The true Story of the Kidnap and Rescue that Shaped America by Matthew Pearl
• The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer
• The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation by Anna Malaika Tubbs
• The Unfolding by AM Homes
• The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe In by Richard Rohr
• The Vinedresser's Notebook: Spiritual Lessons in Pruning, Waiting, Harvesting and Abundance by Judith Sutera
• The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic by Jillian Peterson
• The Wives of Los Alamos by Tara Shea Nesbit
• Toxic Positivity: Keeping it Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy by Whitney Goodman
• Twin: A Memoir by Allen Shawn
• Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer
• Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold and the Fate of the American Revolution by Nathaniel Philbrick
• Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus' Wife by Ariel Sabar
• War Lord by Bernard Cornwell
• War of the Wolf by Bernard Cornwell
• Warriors of the Storm by Bernard Cornwell
• We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier Boys School by Erin Kimmerle
• Wesley and the Quadrilateral: Renewing the Conversation by Stephen W. Gunter
• What I Told My Daughter: Lessons from Leaders on Raising the Next Generation of Empowered Women by Nina Tassler
• When Strivings Cease: Replacing the Gospel of Self-Improvement with the Gospel of Life-Transforming Grace by Ruth Chou Simons
• Who Killed Jane Stanford: A Gilded Age Tale of Murder, Deceit, Spirits and the Birth of a University by Richard White
• Wholehearted Faith by Rachel Held Evans
• Why I am a United Methodist by William H. Willimon
• Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation by Alan Burdick
• Wooly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive One of History's Most Iconic Extinct Creatures by Ben Mezrich
• You are Not Special and Other Encouragements by David McCullough, Jr.
• Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service by Carol Leonnig

Gabriel's Song

This was my message for Christmas Eve. The text was Luke 2:1-20:

Within the nativity story, angels play a critical role and a familiar part of the story, if nothing else than the angels appearing to the shepherds in the fields as we just heard, and as Linus reminds us every year as being part of the story of the meaning of Christmas. But the angels in the fields are even more than just this moment. Jesus’ birth story actually begins with angelic announcements, and that’s actually the angel Gabriel. He first appears to Zechariah in the temple telling him that his wife Elizabeth will give birth in her old age, although we’re never told that age, but Zechariah doesn’t believe him. and Gabriel begins that message by telling Zechariah, not to be afraid. Gabriel then appears to Mary to tell her that she too will become pregnant, and again begins with the injunction do not to be afraid. An angel also appears to Joseph, although this time in a dream, and we’re not told whom this angel is, but again the message begins “do not be afraid.” And of course, as we’re talking about angels in the Christmas story we cannot forget angel second class, Clarence Odbody, in Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life.  I think my favorite portrayal of an angel is not in a Christmas story, but instead was done by John Travolta who portrayed that archangel Michael, in the movie of the same name.  A smoking, hard drinking, hard living, slob, with a rather colorful vocabulary.  Someone no one would ever believe was an angel if it weren’t for the two wings growing out of his back.  And you know that John Travolta is a really good actor when he, a scientologist, can play the leading messenger for God.

We actually don’t know very much about angels from the Bible.  Most of what people think about them, or think they know about them, comes from extra-biblical sources, some of them quite modern, and we could talk about them but then we’d have to end up talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.  But that is not to say that angels aren’t found in scripture because they are.  The first time we hear of an angel is after Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, the entrance is guarded by cherubim who has a flaming sword, think of it as the world’s first light saber.  The cherubim are winged creatures who act sort of as guardians, and if you remember Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark correctly, they are the images formed onto the top of the ark of the covenant.  Later we will also hear about seraphim, who are winged creatures said to be found guarding God’s seat inside the Temple in the Holy of Holies.  If I remember correctly, it’s the cherubim that hang from the ceiling and the seraphim that come up from the floor, or maybe it’s reversed, I can never remember which is which.  But while they are angelic like creatures, outside of the wings, these are not really angels as we typically understand them or think of them, or as they are found in the rest of scripture.

In the Fullness of Time

Here is my message for Blue Christmas. The text was Galatians 4:4-7:

When I lived in Santa Fe, this is pre-ministry years, one of the houses I lived in was on the southside of the city, with windows that covered the entire southside of the house, which meant it had fantastic views, but it was hard to heat in the winter and the birds hated it because they kept running into the windows. One time a bird hit the window so hard, I thought for sure he had broken his neck, but when I went out later to collect him, he wasn’t there. Turns out he wasn’t dead, just stunned. But, if you’ve ever seen a bird recover from hitting a window, there is a certain ritual that they all go through. First is they sort of fluff out their feathers and sit for a while a little drooped over. Then they’ll start to walk around, and shake out a foot, and then a wing, and then another foot, and then the other wing, and fluff up their feathers, and they keep doing that for a while. It sort of reconnects their mind with their bodies, and reminds them that they are a bird, and how to work everything, and how to be normal again. They don’t just get right up and fly again, it takes a while. They have to return to a new sense a normal. In fact, birding groups recommend that if you find a bird that’s been stunned and is not in a safe area to recover, to place it in a container where it can do this process, in a dark, warm space, which will help calm it down, and then leave it alone for two hours before checking on them again.

Gifts of Christmas: Emmanuel

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Isaiah 7:10-16:

There are lots of things for which religion is used, and one of them is to explain suffering, with the corresponding side of that of giving hope. And different religions give different answers, but there is one thing that separates Christianity from everyone else is the fact that we believe the answers are found not in ideas, but in a person, and that person is of course Jesus. Whom we also refer to, especially in this time of the year as Emmanuel, which means God with us. And so that is the final gift that we celebrate receiving from God through Christ. Just a quick recap, the first gift was reconciliation, that through Christ we are invited into right relationship with God and with each other. And the second gift was the freedom we receive through the Christ, of being freed from the slavery to sin and death, and into forgiveness and eternal life, but also the freedom to stop thinking about ourselves and instead to become servants to the world, just as Christ did. And that leaves us with the greatest gift which is that Christ himself is the Word made flesh, as the gospel of John says, also known as the incarnation. God come to dwell amongst us, our Emmanuel. And we first here of this from that passage we heard today from the prophet Isaiah.

Now it is from Isaiah that we get most, but not all, of the things that we take as telling of the coming of Christ, but let me just say that these are particularly Christian understandings. Within Judaism they were not necessarily viewed as messianic predictions. Especially for Isaiah, he was not prophesying about some time in the distant future, but about the here and now, and that is true for this passage. As Isaiah is talking about this young woman, it’s a woman that is actually there. There is lots of speculation about who she is, with guesses that she is Isaiah’s wife, or perhaps Ahaz’s wife, or another member of the royal court, but she could just be a pregnant woman walking by that Isaiah is using as an example. Because the whole point of this interchange is about trust. Ahaz, the king, doesn’t trust God, or at least he’s not showing that trust. God tells him to ask for a sign about what’s happening, to see a sign of reassurance, but Ahaz refuses, and also tries to wrap that refusal in religious language, sort of ironic.

Gifts of Christmas: Freedom

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Isaiah 11:1-10: