Christmas Eve 2023 (Nativity of our Lord I)

Luke 2:1-20

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

Our beloved Christmas story from Luke’s Gospel takes place in Bethlehem some six miles south of Jerusalem, in the hill country of what is known today as the West Bank in the Holy Land.

At the time of the holy birth of Jesus, Bethlehem was the setting for throngs of people coming for the emperor’s census, to be counted by the Roman authorities. The Holy Family were pilgrims of a sort, travelers on a journey to a place far away from home.

In the centuries since then, all through the year but especially at Christmas, other pilgrims have made their way to celebrate and remember the birth of Jesus, following a route to the Church of the Nativity which was built over the spot where it’s believed that Jesus was born.

In 1865, one of the pilgrims was an Episcopal priest named Phillip Brooks. In a letter to his father, Brooks wrote that, while in the Holy Land, he traveled by horseback from Jerusalem to the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem on Christmas Eve. In his letter, he recalled,

how he stood in the old church at Bethlehem, close to the spot where Jesus was born, when the whole church was ringing hour after hour with the splendid hymns of praise to God, how again and again it seemed as if he could hear voices that he knew well, telling each of the ‘Wonderful Night’ of the Savior’s birth. [i]

Several years later, Brooks published the words to the carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” In its first stanza, Brooks writes of “the everlasting light that shines in the dark streets of Bethlehem.”

This year, as war wages on in Israel and Gaza, the Christmas celebrations in Bethlehem are muted, the streets are dark, and the town truly lies still.  Because of the war, tourists and pilgrims who make their way to Bethlehem are absent, and the Christian congregations who are located there are gathering instead in prayer for the hostages still in captivity, for the innocent victims of war and for peace to come to the region.

At Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church in Bethlehem, the creche shows the baby Jesus surrounded by rubble. Describing it, the church’s pastor explained how in this image of Jesus “[they] see a light of hope and life coming out of destruction, life coming out of death.”[ii]

That is one of the truths of the Gospel: that God comes to us in the most forlorn places, bringing hope and life into our lives.

Brooks’ carol echoes that message, declaring, “the hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.”

The hopes and fears of all the years.

We all have hopes. Simple ones for a white Christmas, or to see the joy on children’s or grandchildren’s faces. And more complex ones, like peace in the Holy Land and on the whole earth. It’s easy to name our hopes, big and small.

But we also are invited to name our fears - whether they are fears of things that go bump in the night, or fears about the future and what the world is becoming. We are invited to place our fears in the manger with the Christ child.

Often, in times of fear or sorrow, I pray that God’s peace will settle upon us, like a blanket of new fallen snow, calming our racing hearts, quieting the competing demands for our time and attention, helping us draw near to God with confidence in God’s grace and mercy, and comfort in God’s presence.

After all, peace is what is promised by the prophet Isaiah when he declared that “the child [who] has been born for us is named …Prince of Peace.” (Isaiah 9:6) And peace is what the angel of the Lord proclaimed to the shepherds when they were watching their flocks by night. (Luke 2:8)

As we hear the Christmas story this year we are invited to join with Mary, Joseph and the shepherds in pondering what God has done and join with the Christians in Bethlehem praying that God grants us all peace.

Amen.

---

[i] https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/da2e233e-6c0a-4239-8b15-63d40119e116/downloads/1c02f5svp_630072.pdf?ver=1702898697613

[ii] https://religionunplugged.com/news/2023/12/11/nativity-crche-in-bethlehem-places-baby-jesus-in-gazas-rubble

25th Sunday after Pentecost

Psalm 16

A time of anguish, rumors of war, earthquakes and famines. The authors of our texts today are describing a world full of uncertainty, of fear and of trials to be endured by believers. The threat level is elevated and imminent. We believe Mark’s gospel was written soon after the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, so those first hearing his words would have been witnesses to the destruction of that sacred space and the ways God’s people had worshiped for generations.

And it’s into this air of anxiety that God breathes words of hope and promise through the psalmist.

Although Psalm 16 is attributed to David, the first king of the united Israel, its author is unknown. Because of the different historical backgrounds of the psalms, scholars believe there were multiple psalm writers throughout ancient Israel’s history.[i] The ambiguity of the Hebrew grammar allows people of all genders to hear their own voice in the words of the psalmist.[ii]

This psalm is written as a plea for God’s safety and security. The opening verses acknowledge that the world is falling apart, and nothing makes sense.

The psalmist says when she feels danger, she runs for her life, and finds shelter and refuge under God’s wings.

It is in life with God that we find our safe place, the place where we do not have to be troubled or afraid. There we can look at the people and events around us and find some clarity. Fear no longer drives our decision-making. People-pleasing no longer motivates our actions. Because our safety and security is found in God.

Because God chooses us first, therefore, we are free to choose God over against the lies of the world and the evil we encounter.

In our life together, we are invited to make a home with God and find our place of belonging. A place where God’s peace and Word settles in our hearts. A place where we are not alone or helpless because God is within reach.

When this psalm is sung, the refrain is, “Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure.” (v. 9)

Our gladness – our happiness, joy or contentment – isn’t fleeting or circumstantial. It is a completeness that comes from finding our identity in God as God’s children and not searching for that identity and belonging in other places.

Our rejoicing isn’t superficial. It is the response to the grace we’ve received from God who desires relationship with us more than judgment and loves us even when we are not loving toward ourselves or others. It is the response to knowing whose we are from the inside out and knowing that God’s love is unshakable and irrevocable. The Hebrew translates as “ecstatically shrieking”; this isn’t a quiet and reserved thanksgiving but a full-throated shout to the Lord!

And finally, our rest is not temporary. We have found our place and we settle into life with God, sheltered from the uncertainty around us and protected from the tumult or topsy-turviness of the world. And there we can remember that God is God, and we are not, and find our rest.

Of course, there will be times in our lives when we don’t feel safe or secure or God feels distant. Then the refrain provides a focus and invites to examine what’s going on. What doesn’t feel true? Where am I struggling? What is going on in my heart or relationships, my soul or interior, and with my body? And we’re invited to ask God about the things that scare us, the places where we feel unsafe, and the ways God feels absent. And listen.

Life with God isn’t magic, but spiritual practice. So, when we fall out of practice or we recognize the ways we have left God out of our lives, we’re invited then to return to God - to return to home - with all our heart, soul and body.

Let us pray…

Good and gracious God,

We give thanks for the refuge you provide from a sin-filled world.

Thank you for the grace you give each one of us to find new life in you where we are loved and forgiven.

Thank you for making a home for us and providing us with what we need each day.

Gladden our hearts, lead us in rejoicing and help us rest secure in your love.

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

---

[i] Fred Gaiser. “Summary of Psalms.” Luther Seminary. Enterthebible.org

[ii] Joel LeMon. “Commentary on Psalm 16.” Luther Seminary. Workingpreacher.org

Second Sunday after Pentecost/ Lectionary 11A

Romans 5:1-8

Grace and peace to you.

For most of the summer, our epistles or New Testament readings will come from St. Paul’s letter to the Christian church in Rome. It is the longest of Paul’s letters, which is why it is the first one in Scripture. Scholars believe Paul wrote it between 55 – 58 CE while he was living in Corinth, and unlike some of the other epistles attributed to him, this letter’s authorship is undisputed.

While Romans is not one of the four Gospels in our canon, Martin Luther once called it “the chief part of the New Testament and the [clearest] Gospel.”[i] Luther wrote that a Christian finds most things one ought to know in this letter,

namely, what is law, Gospel, sin, punishment, grace, faith, righteousness, Christ, God, good works, love, hope, the cross, and how we are to conduct ourselves toward everyone.[ii]

A summary of Paul’s teaching to the Church, the letter

is about God's saving work in Christ for Jew and Gentile alike, both of whom fall short of doing the will of God yet receive grace and mercy from God.[iii]

Whenever we hear one of Paul’s letters it’s helpful to remember that we are not the intended audience. We are eavesdropping on a conversation he is having with another group of people.

Often Paul wrote to communities where he had planted churches and addressed specific conflicts that were happening in those places. In his letter to the Romans, while he knows some of them by name, he is writing to a community or congregation of Christians that are largely unknown to him; he is planning to go there and meet them but that hasn’t happened yet. [iv]

Because we are on this side of history, we know it never will. He will go to Jerusalem where he will be arrested and lose his freedom, and when Paul does go to Rome it will be as a prisoner of the state and not a free missionary. [v]

But that’s another part of the story.

In this letter, instead of counseling the Romans on a particular aspect of their life together, Paul addresses fundamental parts of their – and his and our – life in Christ.[vi]

And as if we found scattered pages laying on the kitchen table, we pick up the letter in chapter five.

Here Paul writes about new life in Christ and the fruits of that life.

He begins,

Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; (5:1-2)

I don’t know about you but, today, with our human sinfulness and brokenness on display throughout the world, in places of government, in intensive care beds in our U.S. hospitals and in places like Ghana where their public health officials have to fight COVID-19 with inadequate equipment, in the faces of hungry neighbors here and on the streets of places like India, this reassurance that we have peace felt like balm, soothing and restoring me.

And yet, if we only understand peace as a sense of calm and rest, we lose out on the fullness of what Paul is describing.

Peace with God is reconciliation with God. It is the peace of being in relationship with God, a relationship that only happens through Jesus Christ.

This relationship is only possible because of the grace - God’s favor or goodwill – we have received. It is never because of our works, or our efforts, but God’s own divine action upon us. Grace isn’t a transaction.

“This grace in which we stand” is the place where we are freed from sin and we are living in faith in Christ and Him alone.

Luther wrote, “Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace.”[vii] Karl Barth wrote in his commentary on Romans that faith doesn’t offer us any shortcuts, but it does offer us hope that God will accomplish God’s purposes. [viii]

Continuing his letter, Paul wrote,

hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (5:5)

So maybe this peace with God, which is ours through our new life in Christ, is balm after all:

healing that comes from the Holy Spirit poured into us by God who abundantly loves us and gives us everlasting life;

and reconciliation – the restoration of relationship – that only happens when we see each other as God sees us, whole and beloved.

Let us pray…

Good and gracious God, Thank you for your Son Jesus in whom we have faith. We stand in Your grace that brings hope for our lives and our world. Show us how to bear your love into the world and see our neighbors as you see us, whole and beloved. Amen.

[i] Martin Luther. “Preface”, Commentary on Romans. Translated by J. Theodore Mueller.vii.

[ii] Luther, xxv-xxvii.

[iii] Arland Hultgren. “Summary.” Enter the Bible. Luther Seminary. https://www.enterthebible.org/newtestament.aspx?rid=6, Accessed 6/13/2020

[iv] Anders Nygran. Commentary on Romans. Translated by Carl C. Rasmussen, 1-8.

[v] ibid

[vi] ibid

[vii] Luther, xvii.

[viii] Karl Barth. The Epistle to the Romans. Translated by Edwyn C. Hoskins. 153.

Palm Sunday (March 25, 2018)

Mark 11:1-11

Today, at the beginning of Holy Week, we heard first about Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem and then we heard the account of his execution just days later. Our human brokenness is realized in our Lord’s crucifixion when the same disciples who confessed Jesus as Lord ran away and hid after he was arrested.

We’ll visit the events of the Three Days – from the last Supper through Holy Saturday – later in the week during our worship on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, but today I want us to stay a little longer with the crowds shouting Hosanna, crying out to Jesus to “save us.”

Marcus Borg, a theologian and scholar who wrote about the historical Jesus in a number of books including one titled The Last Week, described what was taking place that day. It was the beginning of the week of Passover, the “festival that celebrated the Jewish people’s liberation from” Pharaoh who had enslaved the people of Israel centuries earlier.

The Roman governors of the region lived nearer to the Mediterranean coast, but they regularly traveled to Jerusalem for the major Jewish festivals. Proceeding down the western Watershed Ridge, Pilate and the imperial army would have approached Jerusalem in a mighty procession with armored foot soldiers, the cavalry on horses, weapons, banners and all the sounds of a conquering army.[i]

According to Mark’s gospel, which was written in Rome, to Christians living in Rome, between 65 and 70 CE, Jesus approached from the opposite side of Jerusalem,
from the eastern Mount of Olives, riding into the city,
not on a stallion, but on a borrowed colt. Bishop Mike Rinehart of the Louisiana-Gulf Coast Synod notes, “Royalty arrives on a donkey in times of peace (Genesis 49:11, Judges 5:5, 10:4). [and it] arrives on a horse in times of war.”

For Roman citizens, familiar with the governors’ triumphant marches, Jesus’ arrival would have been a clear and obvious challenge to the status quo. Instead of riding high atop a warhorse, Jesus, the Prince of Peace, rides into town on a donkey, not as a conquering hero, but as a humble servant king.[ii] Instead of a lavish demonstration of human power and military might, Jesus displays the already (but not yet) present kingdom of God. The kingdom is not yet fulfilled because we still live in sin, but God is present in the midst of our suffering, in the midst of persistent injustices and unacceptable deaths.

Most of us have never lived under occupation, nor known the oppression that enslaved peoples have known. Few of us, including me, have even witnessed it first-hand. But Jerusalem was an occupied city, where Israelites lived under Hellenist Greeks until 164 BCE and then fell again in 63 BCE to Rome. The emperors were brutal and exploitative, and when there were revolts, whole cities burned and rebels were crucified en masse.[iii]

While it is ancient history for us, for Mark’s audience, those massacres would have been as familiar as the horrors of the Holocaust are to us today. In the midst of this destructive and disruptive violence and dis-ease, Jesus affirms that “God’s resolve for peace in human communities is unshakeable.”

As large as the crowds were on the road between the Mount of Olives and the City of David, they wouldn’t have included everyone. Some might have been obligated to attend the governor’s procession or been curious about the spectacle. And John’s gospel tells us, “[the Jewish religious leaders] had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue.”[iv] That meant being rejected, exiled from worship and cut off from community. So, some people would have stayed away because they were afraid. The cost of choosing instead to follow Jesus was high.

Now as then, following Jesus means choosing another Way, one that isn’t rooted in fear or force but in the Good News of God’s saving power and life-giving grace. The Good News, as Pastor Bobby Wilkinson writes, “those who wield death … have no real standing against the One who wields the power of new life.”[v]

Entering into this Holy Week, we are invited to hear the gospel call to prayer and action for the sake of the world and to take the risk of following Jesus in plain sight, all the way to the cross.

Let us pray…
Hosanna, Lord God,
Thank you for Your Son Jesus who comes into the world and brings life to all of us who choose death;
Accompany us through this Holy Week that we would confess what we have failed to do and receive your forgiveness and mercy;
Lead us by Spirit to bring life and light into our community as witnesses to Your love.
Amen.

[i] Marcus Borg. The Last Week. 2-3.
[ii] “Passion/Palm Sunday, March 25, 2018.” https://bishopmike.com/, accessed 3/22/2018.
[iii] Borg, 14-15.
[iv] John 9:22
[v] https://robertwilliamsonjr.com/palm-sunday-time-trump/, accessed 3/23/2018.