First Sunday of Advent

 Isaiah 64:1-12

What is the last thing you had to wait for?

Do you remember the nervousness that accompanied the waiting? The way you repeatedly checked the clock or your watch or phone, willing the time to pass more quickly? Or how impatient you felt as you watched for a sign that the waiting was coming to an end?

In the novel This Magnificent Dappled Sea author David Biro tells the story of a young Italian boy whose life is saved when a New York rabbi volunteers as a bone marrow donor and is a match for the boy. Months after the boy’s health was restored, arrangements were made for the Americans to travel to the village where he lived and everyone is eager to meet the man who had saved the young boy’s life. The author describes the boy’s anticipation and excitement waiting outside customs for the rabbi and his family, the way they recognized each other from photographs, and how the whole town filled the street and swarmed around their car when they arrived in the village. Chaotic but joyful scenes began a new season in their lives.

Today we are beginning a new church year and a new season in our liturgical year. Advent comes from the word adventus which means approach or arrival, and during these next four weeks we are invited into a time of waiting with eagerness and anticipation, but what are we waiting for?

One narrative tells us these next four weeks are about grand surprises and perfect presents, blazing displays of colorful lights, popular carols and Christmas music, fanciful food and family celebrations. And, before you call me Scrooge, those things can bring a lot of happiness in their own hectic and hurried way.

But Scripture and Christian belief tells another story – a story that invites us to remember that we are waiting for something new and that God is the one who fulfills our waiting.

In our first reading, we heard from the prophet Isaiah. The passage is in the portion of Isaiah called “Third Isaiah” written after 538 BCE when Cyrus of Persia conquered Babylon and allowed the Israelites to return to Jerusalem.

The prophet, now an old man, has returned to the ruins of his city and together, with the people of Israel, they cry out to God.

For a generation, they had wanted to return and now, they are there and it isn’t what they expected.

If there has ever been an Advent when we could relate to things not being as we expected or hoped, this is the year.

So, as tempting as it is to skip these troubling texts and find more encouraging words in Scripture, words that leap to Christmas joy, we need to hear these laments because they are honest.

These verses give us the words we need when it feels and looks like everyone around us is celebrating but we are struggling.

They help us name the distance, and even the absence, of God that we feel when we are suffering from pain or loss.

And, they give us language, and permission, to yell at God when the world around us doesn’t make sense.

We actually only hear one part of the full lament. The full text begins in 63:15, but we pick it up at the beginning of chapter 64 with the prophet’s plea:

1O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,

The prophet invites Yahweh to intervene forcibly and physically in the world, to obliterate any distance between creator and created, and show up in the same way God that had delivered Israel from previous enemies and calamities.[i]

The words are spoken even as the world feels like it is falling apart and all we feel is anguish and agony. They are spoken with confidence that God is with us even when we feel alone.

Here we are. Your promises tell us you are here too. Restore us, O God, let your face shine on us and we shall be saved.

The next verses confess Israel’s sin, in the same persistent patterns that we have of ignoring God and forgetting our dependence upon God. The prophet’s words are filled with sorrow and shame, or what some old-timers might call “sorry-ness” – when you have nowhere else to go and nothing else to do but fall on your knees and confess how hard hearted you have been.

Incredibly, in the confession, the poet tries to point the finger at Yahweh. Toward the end of verse 5, he tries to lay the blame on God, saying, “We only acted that way because You hid from us.” Sometimes the responsibility we bear for our own transgressions is too much, but, even then, God does not turn us away.

Here we are. Forgive us for what we’ve done and not done, what we can name and what we cannot bring ourselves to name. Restore us, O God, let your face shine on us and we shall be saved.

And then “the prayer continues with a mighty ‘yet.’”[ii]

8 Yet, O LORD, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.

In this one verse, the prophet moves us from past to present. We know God’s actions and character from the stories shared with us by our ancestors in faith; we trust in God’s mercy and goodness; and now we name God as Lord and Father, and ask God to be faithful, renewing us and recreating us that we may know hope and healing.

The prophet also calls God “our potter.”

Over the last year and a half or so, I had the opportunity to begin learning pottery and I discovered that wheel thrown pottery begins with a process called centering. As the potter, you take a lump of clay and, with some force, you throw the lump of clay onto the wheel and slowly begin pushing the clay down and coning it back upward and pushing it down and then up again. You’re always watching to see whether the clay is centered; there’s a lot of joy when you’ve centered it and you begin to see a shape come into its own as you work with it. It’s harder when the clay gets off kilter or wobbly and you realize it’s not centered anymore; and it’s surprising how quickly it can happen. And how obvious it is - there’s no hiding it. Sometimes, you can salvage it, or create something “organic” but just as often, all you can do then is set the clay aside, adding some water to it so it won’t dry out and become unusable. After some time has passed, you can come back to that clay and begin again.

Imagining God as the potter, I can picture both the joy and the consternation that must accompany watching creation as we first draw near, centered on God, and then we turn away, distracted and deceived into thinking that we don’t need God at the center of our lives.

But the prophet knows that despite whatever disappointment we’ve inspired, the potter will not reject us.

Remember that we belong to you. Restore us, O God, let your face shine on us and we shall be saved.

As we enter into this Advent, may we have this same confidence that God hears us, forgives us and restores us. In God’s own time, as we wait expectantly and hopefully, God is doing a new thing, with all of us.

Amen.

[i] Walter Brueggemann. Isaiah 40-66. 233.

[ii] Brueggemann, 234.

Reign of Christ or Christ the King Sunday

Matthew 25:31-46

On this Christ the King Sunday, the lectionary readings help us remember that neither Christ’s kingship nor the kingdom of God are made in the image of the world, with ostentatious displays of wealth or power, or with legions of sycophants.

Instead of parades, pomp and regalia, we get Jesus, speaking to his disciples, two days before Passover and his arrest and crucifixion.

And by now we shouldn’t be surprised that he is telling them a story or parable. Sometimes these verses are called “The Great Judgment” or “The Judgment of the Nations” but this speech isn’t speculation about the end times, and it isn’t about “being ready for the end.” Addressing a Christian community that has been persecuted, Matthew is delivering a word of salvation and grace.

Jesus begins by describing the Son of Man sitting on a throne of glory with all the nations gathered before him.

And, I wonder how often we miss that detail. All the nations - all the peoples, believing and unbelieving - are gathered there. And Jesus is the shepherd of us all, of the whole world.

Jesus then says the shepherd king separates the sheep from the goats.

Jesus the Good Shepherd has both sheep and goats in his flock. The same Good Shepherd lays down his life for all of his flock on the cross and “draws all to himself.”[i]

All means all. Absolutely nothing and no one is outside the kingdom of God, and nothing, not even evil, willful disobedience or ignorance separates us from the love of God.

So what do we make of the separation that Jesus describes? What could it mean?

One possibility is that the first group, those on the king’s right hand, is called righteous and rewarded with blessing for the works they did while the other group, those on the left, is called cursed and punished for what they failed to do.

But Jesus hasn’t shown a lot of interest in making goodness or badness the criteria for entering God’s kingdom or providing reward or punishment to his followers. He eats dinner at sinners’ homes and spends time with pariahs like tax collectors and prostitutes. And, in other parables, he welcomes “unreformed bad people [such as the prodigal son] as acceptable” and he lets both bad and good - weeds and wheat – grow together until the harvest.[ii]

Another way to hear Jesus’s words is that the hungry, thirsty, stranger or prisoner are angels hiding among us in disguise, so we better feed them, give them something to drink, welcome them and visit them, just in case God is watching.

But Jesus hasn’t shown much interest in seeing us prove our worthiness or earn our place in his kingdom either.

Instead, we are called to humility.

The Beatitudes give us the reversals that say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, …the merciful.…the poor in heart.” (Matt. 5:3,7-8) and when the disciples are arguing about who will sit at his right and at his left, Jesus reminds them:

whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, 27 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave (Matt. 20:26-27)

And then Jesus gives them the two greatest commandments:

'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' [and] 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' (Matt. 22:37,39)

What is interesting to me is that the righteous group is just as surprised as the so-called accursed group at the judgment they receive. They weren’t keeping score or trying to earn a reward. They were in relationship with their shepherd king, and they were living out of their identity as sheep of his flock and subjects and being obedient to him. Their lives weren’t a game or competition, but a practice of faith in the every day.

In the same way, when we go about our lives in the world following Jesus, we don’t need to be worried or anxious about judgment and end times or wondering where we stand with God. To quote Martin Luther, “No one can know or feel he is saved; he can only believe it.”[iii]

Jesus, our Good Shepherd, draws us all to him, and we are to be obedient to the commandments we’ve been given and let our lives reflect our desire to love God and love our neighbor.

Let us pray…

Sovereign God,

Thank you for your Son Jesus, our shepherd king who gathers us to him, that we would know your abundant grace.

Help us live out of our identities as your beloved flock, following your Son.

May your Holy Spirit guide us and empower us to reflect your love and mercy in all of our actions and words.

We pray in your Holy name.

Amen.

[i] Robert Farrar Capon. Kingdom, Grace and Judgment. 505.

[ii] Capon. 507.

[iii] Capon, 511.

Twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost / Lectionary 33A

Matthew 25:14-30 

Today’s readings continue to prepare us for the end of the Church year which we’ll reach next Sunday when we celebrate the Reign of Christ the King. These apocalyptic texts challenge us to remember that the same God who created us and put us on the earth is with us “from age to age” (Ps. 90:2) and, in St. Paul’s words, “has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us.” (1 Thessalonians 5:9)

The parable in Matthew’s gospel appears at first to contradict that. It puts into words the fear many of us have that when we face God, the Master will chastise us, call us wicked and lazy, (Matt. 25:26) and cast us into an outer darkness where we will suffer. (Matt. 25:30) But I think it warrants a second look.

Remember that Scripture reveals who God is?

When our interpretation of the parable focuses on the math of the five talents, the two talents, and the one talent and what each slave did to increase their yield, we aren’t focused on God. We are focused on human efforts and abilities.

To begin with, the master entrusted the slaves, or servants, with the abundant wealth that he had. A talent was a measure of money worth fifteen years of labor. One received five, another two and another one: 75 years of earnings, 30 years, 15 years. Each received an extravagant trust.

And then the master went away for a long time, leaving them each to live with this abundance. The text doesn’t tell us that the master demanded anything from them during that time. The master trusted each of them to live according to his ability. But the Greek word ‘ability’ used in v. 15 isn’t skill or expertise. It is ‘power’ or ‘capacity’.

So what is the ‘ability’ or ‘capacity’ that’s being measured?

For all of us who aren’t mathematicians, or financiers, I think we can breathe a sigh of relief that the parable isn’t about financial or mathematical acumen. Instead, what is measured is our capacity to live as a disciple of Christ, a follower of Jesus, a servant to all.

Martin Luther defined sin as being curved in on one’s self. The temptation of our human nature is to keep focused inwardly on ourselves, on the expertise we bring and the work we are doing, and only to look outwardly to see how others are falling short.

So, when the master returns and speaks to the slaves we immediately hear the accusation and cursing to the outer darkness that is delivered to the third one but it’s really easy to miss what he says to the first two.

(I know I had missed it.)

The master responds to the first two servants with an invitation, “Enter into the joy of your master.”

A cynical reading might say the master is joyful because his wealth increased, but that’s not the context where we see joy expressed in Matthew’s gospel or elsewhere in Scripture.

There is joy when the birth of the Savior is announced (Matt. 2:10);

there is joy when the Gospel’s good news is heard and received (Matt. 13:20); and,

there is joy when the disciples discover the empty tomb (Matt. 28:8).

Joy is not mere happiness or contentment with our current circumstances, or increased safety or security, but a response to God’s presence with us, in all places and all situations.

The judgment against the third servant still sounds harsh, but in the context of gift and invitation, we see that person has chosen to bury himself and to ignore the gift and trust given by the master.

Artist and poet Jan Richardson writes that

when we cannot imagine other possibilities we tend to hoard what we have, clinging to what is comfortable or at least familiar, and not only to hoard but to hide.[i]

Unable to escape his own fears, he’s created a cell of his own design that he cannot escape.

The Good News is that God invites us into a kingdom of possibilities where we live fully in the abundance of God’s love, mercy and compassion and enter into God’s joy and delight.

Let us pray…

Good and gracious God,

Thank you for your Son Jesus who died for us and in whom we have salvation.

Help us remember your love and mercy for us does not end in death and suffering but joy.

Free us from our fears and show us how to enter your joy that we would live the abundant life you give us.

We pray in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus the Christ.

Amen.

[i] Jan Richardson. “Parabolic Curves.”  https://paintedprayerbook.com/2008/11/11/parabolic-curves/, accessed 11/14/2020.

Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost / Lectionary 32A

Matthew 25:1-13

This is a strange parable.

The setting is unfamiliar; it reflects a culture that celebrates weddings differently than we do today and describes customs that sound odd to us. The community is under duress and being persecuted for their religious beliefs; they’ve already waited for the return of Christ longer than the first generation of Christians expected and now Matthew is urging his listeners to keep the faith, confess Christ and wait expectantly for Christ’s return. Two thousand years later, that plea has lost its immediacy, and it all just sounds strange to our hearing.

But at the heart of the parable, Matthew is addressing two questions: “When will Christ return?” and “What shall we do while we wait?”

In these last few weeks of the Church Year, “the lectionary texts [are] about the coming of the Son of Man” as the season of Advent nears. Advent or “the season of coming” prepares us for Christ coming both as the conquering Son of Man at the end of time and as the helpless infant in a manger.[i]

But meanwhile we wait.

In Matthew’s parable, the bridesmaids are waiting together for the bridegroom’s arrival. Matthew divides them into two groups and describes them as wise and foolish but doesn’t say more about what makes one wise and the other foolish. What we do know is both groups fall asleep while they wait.

Matthew tells us later that the wise ones carried extra oil with them while the foolish ones only had what their lamps could hold.

Martin Luther understood the oil as faith but how can we run out of faith? And if the burden of having enough faith falls on us, how do we square that with Jesus’ own words in Matthew 17 when he said to his disciples,

“For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.”(Matt. 17:20)

Others think of the oil as “good works” but then, how can we buy more good works? And how do we reconcile that with our Lutheran understanding that salvation is only possible through God’s loving mercy and not something that we ourselves can do? I don’t think we can.

I don’t think the oil matters. What is important is that we are invited to wait, and how we wait matters.

One of my preaching professors, Karoline Lewis, has told the story of her father-in-law, who was 96 when he died. Sam was a World War 2 veteran, and he didn’t talk much about the war, but one day, not too long before he died, he asked for his grandchildren to come over and he bequeathed his items from the war to them. And as he told the stories behind the items, he talked about his experiences in the war, and

He talked about the waiting. [You see, Sam] had been selected, singled out, not to be sent to the front, but to stay behind [because he] was good in math. He showed [his family] his notebook in which he had calculated multiple ballistic measurements. And as he worked on his equations, he waited for his fellow soldiers, his friends, to return.

Some did. Some did not.

He could not understand how he was spared. Yet in the waiting and the wondering he knew God was there, and there was nothing else he could do but trust that truth.[ii]

The waiting we are invited into in this parable is waiting with uncertainty. Waiting when we have no control over what happens next. Waiting even when we don’t understand why it is taking so long. Waiting even when we feel unprepared.

The foolish bridesmaids were not foolish because their lamps ran out of oil. They were foolish because they left to search for more oil.

They forgot why they were there. They were there to wait for the bridegroom, even if that meant waiting in the dark.

A few years ago, Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor wrote a book called Learning to Wait in the Dark where she describes the darkness as anything that scares us and then lifts up the idea that Christ finds us there, saying:

Between the great dramas of life, there is almost always a time of empty waiting — with nothing to do …— a time when it is necessary to come up with your own words and see how they sound with no other sounds to cover them up. If you are willing to rest in this …., where you cannot see your hand in front of your face and none of your self-protective labors can do you one bit of good, then you may come as close to the Christ as you will ever get —

We must not be afraid, or frantically search out ways to bring light in; instead we must remember that the Light of the World shines brightest in the dark, and Christ comes to us in our waiting.

Let us pray with the psalmist, saying,

“Lord, make haste to help me…
come to me quickly, O God.
You are my helper and deliverer;
O Lord, do not tarry.” (Ps. 70:1, 5)
Amen.

[i] Brian Stoffregen. “Exegetical Notes.”

[ii] Karoline Lewis. “How to Wait.” Dear Working Preacher. Luther Seminary.

All Saints Sunday

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Today’s gospel text comes from the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, a sermon Jesus preached to the crowds who had begun following him after he had begun showing up in their neighborhoods and towns and healing people. He had traveled all around Galilee, where Nazareth was, and he was known there and even farther north and east, throughout Syria.

Sometimes we turn these verses, known as the Beatitudes, into a set of rewards that say, “IF you will do this, THEN you will be blessed.

As if God’s love for us is transactional.

As if God’s blessing depends on us. 

But thankfully God’s love and grace for us is not dependent on us. As Luther tells us in his Small Catechism in the explanation of the first article of the creed, God provides for us and protects us “out of pure, fatherly and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness” of ours![i]

So why does Jesus say these things if it isn’t to put a carrot out in front of folks, to encourage us to be better people? 

Remember Scripture is always revealing who God is and what God is doing. God is the actor, not us. So when we hear Jesus’ words, we want to ask, “What do his statements reveal about who God is and about God’s character?”

On this All Saints Day verse 4 stands out:

“Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted.”

Today we particularly remember those whom we have loved who have died during the last year. And certainly we hope ritual and remembrance bring comfort to those who grieve and mourn, and we trust that God is with you today and every day.

But Jesus isn’t saying “Oh, lucky you, here’s your reward for your suffering.” Loss and death are not blessings, and in the depths of new grief, especially, I don’t think anyone feels “blessed”.

Instead Jesus is saying, “God sees you are hurting and the same God who created you and loves you, will comfort you, wipe away your tears and sit with you in your grief.”

This is the God who is portrayed in the beatitudes, one who sees and honors those who are suffering.

It is in words like the ones Jesus preaches today that Scripture is so clearly a living Word that we hear differently in different seasons of our lives. It is not a historical document chiseled in granite, but a Word that God speaks that we may hear and know who God is, and who we are as God’s people.

In Jesus’ words, we are reassured that God does not simply leave us in a deep pit and say, “there, there.”

But, sits with us in the midst of ugly tears and sleeplessness, in the too-quiet house or at the desk where a stack of papers waits for our attention.

Later in his sermon, Jesus says, “Blessed are those who are merciful because they shall receive mercy.” And while the word here is “merciful”, I heard it today as “full of mercy.”

I believe God’s comfort is mercy itself. One definition of mercy is “kindness or help given to people who are in a very bad or desperate situation.”[ii]

A distant and impersonal God who sets the world in motion and then leaves wouldn’t draw near to us in grief.

A God who wants to play “gotcha” and punish us when we make mistakes wouldn’t be there to wipe away our tears.

Instead, we know this loving God whose mercy, compassion and steadfastness is revealed to us first in the cross.

When sin and brokenness bring us to the foot of the cross, aware that we cannot live and be who God created us to be on our own, God doesn’t leave us there either. God forgives us and gives us new life.

I think Jesus is saying to all of us, who are full of God’s mercy for us, that whatever fills us up are the things that the world will see overflowing from us. When we are full of God’s mercy, we will be merciful to others.

Psalm 57 isn’t a psalm that’s assigned in the lectionary so we don’t usually hear it in worship, but in its first verse, it names why God’s mercy is so important to us all. It says:

Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful, for I have taken refuge in you; in the shadow of your wings will I take refuge until this time of trouble has gone by. (57:1) 

The psalmist often calls upon God to be the God that Scripture has already revealed. The God we call upon is the same merciful God who saved Noah from the flood and Isaac from death; the same God who parted the Red Sea so the Israelites could escape from Pharaoh; the same God who spared Nineveh from destruction. 

And, in God’s mercy, God provides us with refuge, a place apart from the time of trouble, or the destroying storms. God shelters us, like a mothering hen gathers her brood under her wings (Matt. 23:37)

The psalmist tells us God does not leave us alone to wait out the storms. Living in the shadow of God means God is always nearby. God remains with us and promises us that “the worst thing is not the last thing.”

That is the resurrection promise: that evil and death will not win; in Christ, God’s love for us and the world wins, and we are freed from our fears and transformed.

The Beatitudes aren’t a system of rewards, and we have confidence in God’s love and mercy for us. As we are sent into the world this week, I wonder where we can notice what God is doing, and, with God’s help, how we can participate? How can we let the things of God overflow from us? How can we extend God’s mercy to others? How can we provide refuge and safe shelter to others? How can we accompany others so that they do not have to be alone?

Let us pray…

Good and Gracious God,
Thank you for your love and mercy, and for making us all your saints in your kingdom.
We give thanks especially for those who have gone before us and showed us how to live faithfully here on earth.
By your Holy Spirit, continue to fill us with the things of God that our words and actions would reflect who we are as Your people.
We pray in your Holy Name.
Amen.

[i] Martin Luther. “Explanation of the First Article of the Apostles Creed.” Small Catechism.

[ii] Karoline Lewis. "A Merciful Advent." Luther Seminary. https://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=4225