What Christmas can't do

Maybe this holiday season so far has been joyous, gentle and kind for you, filled with good will and cheer, and if so, I am glad. To me, this year it feels like Christmas came on like a freight train. I couldn’t keep up, and maybe I also didn’t really have the bandwidth for it – in the end, I didn’t even get the ornaments onto my tree. But I couldn’t just admit defeat - there is actually a red and green bin still sitting unopened in the corner of my living room. 

I love Christmas, I absolutely do. But also, if I’m honest, it can be big let-down. Along with all the shimmer and warmth, for most of us Christmas is also usually awkward and exhausting, and, except for, maybe, like 4 years in middle childhood, Christmas is almost never how we remember it was or how we hope it will be.  
 
This year many of us are walking around with the collective burden of sorrow for our communities, and our nation and world, anger or helplessness coming in waves that don’t just subside when bells start jiggling and chestnuts start roasting. 
Some of us have lost a job we loved and don’t know what’s next. Others here are wrapping our heads around a scary diagnosis - our own or someone close to us. Some of us have kids that we can't talk to, not really, no matter how much we try. Or we’re spending the holiday season overwhelmed with the grief of missing someone who isn’t with us anymore. 
And plans change, people are sick or have to work, and the dinner will have fewer place-settings than it is supposed to have. Tonight or tomorrow, some of us will drink too much, or silently worry about someone else drinking too much. And some of us will spend the next couple of days trying to ignore the gnawing loneliness, or suppress the persistent anxiety, and just be happy like we’re supposed to on Christmas because, hooray! It’s Christmas.
 
When it comes down to it, Christmas is just not big enough or deep enough to hold all the expectations and longings we pile onto it.
 
The good news is, it doesn’t have to be. We’ve got it wrong. Christmas is not a happy, hollow celebration; Christmas is a reorientation to the future. Christmas is the beginning of God’s joining us in this life - in every single ordinary, beautiful, scary, sad, unholy, joy-filled, and disappointing part of human living.
 
In fact, after the exciting events we are about to recount tonight, the Christ-child’s story will become so ordinary, so commonplace, so representative, that Luke will sum up the next dozen or so years of Jesus’ life in one line: “And the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.”
 
His next years will be full of absolutely ordinary things –cuts and bruises, stomach flu, temper tantrums, baby sisters, making friends, being teased, doing chores, laughter, anger, gladness and tears. And like every human life these years will also be full of tragedy and loss and fear and surprise. Politics and violence shaped the world when Jesus lived in it too. His early years are as a refugee in a foreign land, during his teen years many Galileans are killed in political uprisings. Throughout his childhood, Roman atrocities continue happening in the villages around his. And before Jesus turns 30, Mary will bury Joseph. His dad doesn’t get to see his son’s ministry begin. And then she will have to helplessly watch her son die.  Because Jesus lived an ordinary human life.
 
Our traditions and rituals are not strong enough or deep enough to hold all the expectations and longings we pile onto them. But God-is-with-us.  This One can bear it. He’s here to go into the darkness. He’s here to go right toward the pain and the suffering and bear it for us all. That is why he has come. 
All the strained relationships and lost opportunities, all the people we hurt and those whose hurt we can’t release. All the rage we feel at the world’s injustice, all the love we have and don’t know how to show, and all the places where we are just disappointed—we are called to confess them, in pain and sorrow, to this child, this God in here with us now, who has lived it all alongside us.  
 
To feel the brokenness, the incompleteness of it all, and pour it out to God is not some kind of failing; it’s brave faith. Telling God the truth of our sadness, anger, worry, and unfulfilled longings is an act of trust. Trust in the one who knows the longing, who is bringing the healing, who can handle our sorrow, and who will make the world whole. 
 
Christmas isn’t actually for jolly and cheer. It’s for laying our vulnerable hearts open to the one who came vulnerable among us to save us all.  
 
Tonight we will glimpse the future that is coming. Together we will sing carols of God’s in-breaking in the present tense and be returned to the deeper, ancient, eternal and ongoing redemption that can’t be stopped, and keeps on going, even when we’re distracted, or exhausted, or evil feels strong, or darkness seems especially dark. 
 
That’s all the preaching I am going to do – now the rest of you will join me -  all of us will take up the prophets’ promises, and the angels’ songs, and the shepherds’ awe, and Mary’s defiant predictions, and the Joseph’s brave obedience, and by song and story we will bring our whole selves to this glorious mystery, And however you come is how you’re meant to be.  

As we are present here to the presence of God with us now, may our hearts be open, for the next hour, may we be pulled from the ordinary into an eternal truth that pierces the darkness with light.
 
Settle in, and let’s begin.
 
 Lessons & Carols:  Luke 2:1-20
 
God comes into this life not as a mighty force overthrowing evil, as much as we may wish that were so, but as a helpless, displaced child, into the arms and care of unprepared people in a broken world. The light has come into the world. INTO the world – the very fabric of it. Inseparable from it. Tangled and tied and mixed up and stirred in, so that it cannot be extracted. The ordinary is now infused with the holy; Christ is in the world. God is irreversibly here. 
 
In this fast-paced, urgent, pressing era of shorts, reels, and loud, relentless breaking news, we may not have the attention span for the deep, quiet, steady, long game of God.  But this is why we’ve gathered here, to soak in this truth together, and surrender to the bigger picture for a time. 
When we leave tonight, we may still be weary or strained, the future will stay foggy, and the present is not magically made simple. But the end of the human story is written when the Christ child took his first breath: death will not prevail. And now, even the hard and confusing parts of our own ordinary lives are part of a cosmic upheaval of hope that we don’t control and the world can’t escape. 

Christ has come; the world belongs to God.  

Christ is here; we are not alone.  

Christ is coming; the future is God’s.

 

Let us pray.

God-with-us, 

thank you.

 Receive, our disappointments and longings, 

our desires and our failings, 

our prayer and our praise. 

And help us receive your peace, your love, 

your joy, and your hope. 

May we be hushed by the beauty of your world, 

and seized by the joy of our belonging.

May we embrace our humanity in all of its complexity, 

and embrace one another with grace and generosity. 

Root us and ground us in your enduring love, 

make our words and actions join your healing, 

and our ordinary lives contribute 

to your peace and life for all people. 

We pray these things trusting in your promises 

and resting in your love, 

Amen.
 

 

 

In Real Time

 Matthew 1:18-26

My dog can tell time.  She’s just not very good at it. She’s off by like 25 minutes, usually. 25 minutes or so before it’s time to wake up she shimmies up next to me in bed and puts her paw on me, or nudges me with her nose. 32 minutes or so before it’s time to eat she sits next to her  food and stares at us like, what’s wrong with you, don’t you know what time it is? And she’s generally pretty close on when it’s time to take a walk, but if I leave the house to get something out of the car, she thinks I’ve been gone for hours.

 

We can tell time too, but we’re not too good at it either.  We think time has to do with what we have to get done or how far ahead or behind we are. We make time about efficiency and productivity, about competition and scarcity. For most of us, if you ask what we wish we had more of, we’d say “time,” and if you ask us how we’re doing, we’d probably say “busy.” 

We might be conscious of minutes, or even seconds, but we’ve often got no sense of real time, time as God created it, time as God invaded it, time as God is redeeming it, time that gets shared in the meantime with past, present and future, with all those who exist for something other than using up time.

 

On Wednesday, Christmas Eve, we will gather together to share again the story of the beginning of Jesus.  A moment that changes time, that fills time with eternity and resets the trajectory.

The story of Jesus begins somewhere.

 

Each of the four gospels begin the story of Jesus differently. John begins in the beginning was the word and the word was with God, all cosmic and poetic, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And then jumps to grown-up John in the wilderness explaining he is there to prepare the way for the Messiah who is promised.  This story, John is saying, is transcendent and ungraspable, and even when it’s right in front of us, we miss it, and the first words Jesus says in John are “Come and see.”

Mark starts with John the Baptist too, “the Beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ” and gives us a prophecy from Isaiah, about the messenger crying out in the wilderness to all of us, “prepare the way of the Lord,” because he’s coming now, and John appears all camel hair and locusts and wild honey, and by verse 9 he is already baptizing Jesus in the river Jordan, and by verse 12 Jesus is already in a wilderness of his own, facing hunger and temptation and being prepared himself to inhabit time with us.

 We’ve spent most of Advent in Luke, who begins the story of Jesus with Zechariah and Elizabeth and the surprise announcement about John, and moves to focus on Mary, who melds past and future in a prophecy of her own. And in a resonant pocket of time God brings these people together into a timeless community pregnant with the truth that God is about to invade the world in human form, and that, for no reason they can conceive of, they’ve been chosen to bear this great mystery.  By angel pronouncement they’re brought on board, and then through silence, song, blessing and mutual support, their lives shift into a new reality.  

But they’re not taken out of real life or real time. Not only are the stakes enormous, and the confusion undoubtedly palpable, but the regular daily chores don’t stop for this strange and profound reality they must now get their lives around. Maybe after the greeting and the Magnificat, when the days and weeks go by, Elizabeth and Mary might even forget this is all going on, till they ask Zechariah a question and oh yeah, he can’t answer, or the baby within one of them kicks and it all comes rushing back. And in time marked by grape-sized, avocado-sized, grapefruit-sized, the growing promise that what is coming can’t be stopped. Right in the middle of normal life something is unfolding that defies explanation, and they can’t do anything about it except to keep living in it and see what happens next.

Today we move to Matthew’s beginning, literally, it begins “the genesis of Jesus.”  And after 17 verses of laying out the genealogy of Jesus going back to Abraham through the line of David, placing the Christ in context of all the people, prophecies and promises in God’s ongoing story, he ends with  ^“Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called the Messiah.”
Then he begins again, ‘the genesis of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way…’
And he tells us how Joseph is brought into God’s great scheme of salvation.  

We are all living inescapably in the time when all will die.  We see it all around us, the nations tremble and kingdoms totter, cruelty, selfishness and power, hunger and pain, the capriciousness of death that doesn’t care how hard we work to avoid it, that comes unannounced to children and ultimately to us all, we’re here and that is what it means to be human beings. We live, we die. 

But now, we’re told, there is one coming from outside the time when all will die. Jesus comes from the time when all will live, invading the time when all will die, coming in alongside us, with us, for us, to bring us with him into life that will not die.  And when he comes, he brings that timeless, deathless life with him, and redeems time itself, so that no longer is time for measuring and using, for wasting or succeeding. Time is for what time was made for since God made time and God made us: time is for love.

When God comes to Joseph in angel and dream telling Joseph that there is something beyond what we can see and hear and touch that is impossible but real, Joseph is called to step into a different reality from here on out. He is now claimed for love, and his life in time is for another purpose. But that purpose will unfold in the same ordinary way life always does for humans, he will do an ordinary and extraordinary thing, he will claim Mary, love her and, claim this child into his family line and raise him. Joseph’s job is to name him Jesus, literally Yeshua, or, God saves, and then to spend his life practicing trusting that this is so.

When Joseph gets up from this sleep, he will obey. The Joseph who laid down the night before will be gone. The plans he’d made, the reputation he’d built, and the terrible choice he was about to act on, which was the best of his bad options – all of it is gone. 

This is a new beginning, and from this moment on, he is a new person, defined now by love and inhabiting the eternal belongingness of God that is clocked in grace unearned and forgiveness unmerited, an abundant reality where everybody has enough and nobody is dismissed, quietly or otherwise. God-is-with-us is coming into his care, and Joseph will live present in a future that God is bringing into the world through his ordinary life. 

 

When the good news of Jesus Christ begins in the world, each person is called in as they are, from where they are. They’re called to live in trust and obedience, to surrender their lives, to be reoriented and drawn into the God-with-us project that is redeeming the world. Their clock is reset toward time, to presence and anticipation, where story and tears and laughter and trust and forgiveness mark the moments, and even in the midst of dying, lives are for participating in life that will not end. In this new reality, God gives them one another, and shows them just the next thing to do. And then when they’ve done that, the next thing will become clear when the time is right. 

This is how God has done it with all the patriarchs and prophets gone before, and how God will keep doing things with Joseph too.  After the Magi visit with gifts and a warning, Joseph will be told in another angelic dream to evade Herod’s wrath and protect Jesus and Mary by fleeing with them to Egypt, where they will live as refugees in exile for four years.

Matthew’s gospel will tell us this part too – revealing time folding in on itself, an evil king trying to kill the Jewish babies again, just like happened back in Egypt, when God plucked baby Moses out of danger by the hand of an outsider with the cooperation of those who trust God. And so, in the very place his ancestors were enslaved and from which they were freed, Jesus will find safety and refuge, and his own childhood, and Mary and Joseph’s parenting, will be shaped by walking the land of exile and exodus, where the promises of God that are coming to us in him were first spoken.

This past January my family traveled to Egypt.  We stood in temples and tombs that dated 3000 years before Christ.  And when we knelt in an ancient church and peered through glass in the floor into a small stone room atop which it was built, a room two thousand years ago Joseph, Mary and Jesus stayed for
three months, while they were living and traveling in Egypt, I felt like my solid grasp on the world, space and time, was shaken. When I saw the niche carved in the stone wall where the toddler Jesus is said to have slept, on the only remaining Christian street in Egypt, where seven churches crowd atop one another holding relics, story, and the faithful worship of our Christian siblings and forbears through a history my own imagination might not even stretch wide enough to grasp, I understood then that the same story of Jesus, God-is-with-us, is told very, very differently there than we tell it here, and that I, and you, and this congregation, is bound together in living, breathing community with every follower of Christ who has ever lived, summoned in and held by something far beyond ourselves, and all we can do is receive it and watch for what happens next.

 

Right now, life, as modern American people, feels urgent and hard, and tiring, and often sad. The world feels dangerous and confusing. But perhaps it helps to hear that we are not exceptional. That our own story is both unique and completely the same as nearly everyone who has gone before in this time when all will die. That in bodies that die, alongside children that grow up, inside buildings that crumble, and structures that collapse, on a planet in crisis,  the God who creates keeps creating anew, and the God who comes in keeps on coming in. And from time to time we taste the truth that time has been invaded by eternity, and now and then we feel ourselves in the hands of the time-keeper, where love is the purpose and the measure.

 

Maybe this week it happened for you in a Moroccan man noticing you were cold, and inviting you into his shop and offering you tea, or by the feet and voices of those alongside you with the bright sun on your heads and the sharp wind on your faces as you marched for your immigrant neighbors through the streets of our city. Maybe it was in watching another person take care of someone you love with patient tenderness, or wrestling with deep questions over coffee, or sharing with others laugher and pizza, or silence and stillness, or in being enthusiastically received when you shared your wisdom and power point for the hundredth time, or in resting your head on someone’s shoulder, that time seemed to stop passing, or passed in a blink, and you felt the truth of your life, for a moment, unbound and free, near to the God who comes and is even now here with us.

 

The good news of Jesus Christ begins in the world again. Always. Right in the middle of normal life something is unfolding that defies explanation and includes us all. So let’s help each other to obey, and trust, and pay attention, and to join in. And together we’ll see what happens next.

Amen.

 

 

 

 

Presencing, and those in it with us

 Mother Mary and baby Jesus together with Zechariah and baby John the Baptist, in 15th century painting by Lorenzo Lotto titled "The Virgin and child with Saint Zacharias and John the Baptist"

Luke 1:57-80

Yesterday a few of us gathered for brunch and before we knew it, 2 ½ hours had gone by. I had a moment in the middle of it of recognizing, while it was happening, the beauty of the timeless gift of simple presence.

 

We’re three weeks into our Advent experience with Mary, and our own practice of presencing. Last week Mike told us “presencing is is the ability to notice miracles and wonders, and the will to make an appropriate response,” like “Thank you” or silence or blessing. He called presence “The ability to feel awe, respect, and gratitude to God’s coming near, and to make some kind of answer.”

 

When the Angel Gabriel invited Mary to carry Jesus, to bear God as God comes in to love the world, she was invited have her life commandeered by love. With awe, respect and gratitude, Mary answered, Yes.

She wasn’t prepared for this and didn’t actually have what it took. That didn’t matter. God came into Mary’s impossibility with grace, and claimed her for the embodiment of love. And now, from that point onward, she must now see the world as loved by God. She can’t not see all other people as those to whom, for whom, God comes in, because it is through her own body that God is coming to them; it is by her hands, and words, and actions, and tears, and laughter that God’s love would reach into the world.  

 

And she would not be in it alone. From the moment Mary arrived at Elizabeth and Zechariah’s doorstep, she was welcomed into this truth. This small, unlikely trio became the first human beings to bear among them the coming of God into the world. They bore it song and blessing, awe and gratitude, silence and presence.  These three people were redefined as recipients of God’s grace, insiders in God’s scheme to redeem the world, and God formed them into the community of the cosmic promise to which we too now belong. 

 

Their lives were invaded by transcendence, and now right inside their human weaknesses and mundane realities, their aches and pains, their muteness or pregnancy cravings, their regular, daily existence, they were sharing together the secret of the universe’s redemption. Right up against their own impossibility and the world’s, they began learning together how to live from the “nothing is impossible for God” reality that undergirds everything, always. 

 

When the time came for John to be born, Mary was there, assisting with the birth. She was there to hear the astonishing trust and confident hope in Zechariach’s voice when his silence ended, and to witness the shock when he proclaimed the truth that God had incubated inside him for nine months, the vision of God’s future breaking in. 

 

She watched Zechariah hold that impossible little baby in his old and wrinkled hands, and she was listening the moment his mouth was opened and he announced with conviction, His name is John - his name is “God is gracious.  God is merciful, God gives us more than we could ever even know to long for”- that is his name.  

 

Look at this child! he sang out to his neighbors and friends. Look at how God’s promise to our ancestors is coming to fruition, we are part of it! I am holding it.  Oh yes, it is coming! There is no doubt that God’s salvation of us all is coming.  

 

Mary watched as Zechariah turned and gazed into the brand new, blurry eyes of this utterly impossible child in his first minutes on this earth and he said,

 And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins.

By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.’

 

And so, God was preparing Mary for what was to come. And all the while, only she, Elizabeth and Zechariah knew this savior was already among them in that room, quietly, patiently waiting to be born.

 

Soon Mary would make the long, slow, journey back home, back to a Joseph—whom we will see next week, was even at this moment being brought into this community of promise, welcomed by an angel of God into his own place and part in God’s salvation of the world, so that by the time Mary will arrive, Joseph will be ready to welcome her and the impossible child she is carrying.

 

When, a few months later, Mary and Joseph will set out for Bethlehem, they will follow again the same route Mary took back and forth, and eventually arrive at their destination, about four miles past Elizabeth and Zechariah’s town. 

Then, while they are there, the time will come for the baby to be born. 

 

And just to correct our modern, individualistic, Western winter barn myth—where Joseph and Mary are all on their own, knocking on hotel doors, and being turned away by strangers while she’s ready to give birth any second—imagine instead the communal, first century, hospitality-committed, middle Eastern reality that archeologists and scholars describe. Here they will stay, for days or weeks, with countless relatives and neighbors, in the typical, modest, one room house, with a guest room on the roof, and a manger carved into the floor next to the lowered portion of the home that served as a kitchen in the daytime and a safe place to bed the animals at night. When God comes into the world and into their arms, they will not be alone; they will be surrounded by those to whom they belong, supported in community.

 

And so, undoubtedly, Elizabeth, Zechariah and baby John will be present. Elizabeth will attend to Mary as Mary did with her, and Zechariah will attend to Joseph, with the deep wisdom and presence formed in silence and contemplation, and the trust formed in watching the promise begin in the world through the birth of his own impossible son. 

 

The world is broken, and we live with impossibility every day. You and I can’t fix what’s broken. We can’t bring redemption. But we can be here for it. We can be with each other, ready, waiting, present to the God whose presence who comes to us as gift.

 

And tonight, we can simply acknowledge that we’ve been brought in too. Our lives, too have been commandeered by love. We too are recipients of God’s grace. We too are becoming insiders in God’s scheme to redeem the world, those who can’t not see all other people as those to whom, for whom, God comes in. 

 

We too are invited to recognize that it is by our bodies and prayers, our words and silence, our actions and stillness, our tears and laughter, that God comes into the world. In our own living and presencing, Christ is born among us.

And we too are not expected to have anything to offer to the project except our own willing selves – because, as we’ve seen over and over in the lives and stories of those gone before, this happens in impossibility and vulnerability.

 

And we’re not in it alone. We too are welcomed into the community of the cosmic promise, drawn into the now vast and timeless group of that includes people, right now, all throughout God’s beloved world, and these ancestors, and Mother Mary. And inside this small expression who gathers here, just like God gave Mary Zechariah and Elizabeth, God has given us each other, so that together we too might navigate the deep toll it takes to live in such stark awareness of being so very beloved, among and alongside all these other deeply loved humans on this planet for whom God comes in. 

 

So, tonight, as we practice presencing, and consider the appropriate responses that arise in such willingness to notice miracles and wonders, we’ll add to Mary’s “yes” and Mike’s list of thank you, silence and blessing, joy, which is perhaps the most instinctive and uninhibited response to noticing of God's presence.  

In other words, as we’re learning to live from the “nothing is impossible for God” reality that undergirds everything always, we will embrace the same readiness to deep delight and nearness to giddy awe with which angels will soon deliver to unsuspecting shepherds the good news of God’s coming near.

 

Let's move into our time of prayer with this poem by Madeline L’Engle:

"First Coming" 

 

God did not wait till the world was ready,

Till ...nations were at peace.

God came when the heavens were unsteady,

and prisoners cried out for release.

 

God did not wait for the perfect time. 

God came when the need was deep and great.

God dined with sinners in all their grime, turned water into wine.

 

God did not wait till hearts were pure.

In joy God came to a tarnished world of sin and doubt.

To a world like ours, of anguished shame

God came, the Light that would not go out.

 

God came to a world which did not mesh,

to heal its tangles, shield its scorn.

In the mystery of the Word made Flesh

the Maker of the stars was born.

 

We cannot wait till the world is sane

to raise our songs with joyful voice,

for to share our grief, to touch our pain,

God came with Love: Rejoice! Rejoice!

 

 Amen.

 

Be Here Now

 

BE HERE NOW

A morning prayer (for Advent, Thanksgiving or whenever...)

 

Be here now, O my soul.

Be here now, O my God.

 

May I be. 

Just as I am without pretense or fear. 

 

May I be here. 

No other place my mind wants to take me. 

 

Not work or the worries of family or friends, 

not what I have to do or where I need to go. 

Just here. Right here.

 

May I be here now.  

No other time my mind wants to take me. 

Not past for regrets or nostalgia, 

and not future, for worry or planning or dreaming. 

Just now. Right now.

 

I trust you with this world and all those in it.

(specific prayers may be lifted up…)

Thank you God.

 

I trust you with those I love and all they are going through.

(specific prayers may be lifted up…)

Thank you God.

 

I trust you with my own soul, all that I carry and all that I am.

(specific prayers may be lifted up…)

Thank you God.

 

Of all life and being, you are God.

In every place, you are God.

In every moment, you are God.

You are here now, God.

I am here now.

Kara K Root, from Receiving This Life

The Zacchaeus in us all

 

Luke 19:1-10 There’s a little bit of Zacchaeus in all of us, and definitely Zacchaeuses we can point our fingers at in the world. At first this might not sound like a compliment.  (So, keeping in mind that while the version of the story we just read made it sound like after Jesus invited himself over to Zacchaeus’ house the whole conversation between Jesus and Zacchaeus happened right there on the street in front of everyone, by the grammar of the text, it’s more likely that the rest of the story happened inside Zacchaeus’ house, away from the listening ears of the crowd). Imagine ten years after the moment we just read and sang about. Imagine trying to explain to someone new to town what went down that day with Jesus and Zacchaeus and the rest of them. It might sound something like this: Jesus of Nazareth was coming to our town! It was the most exciting thing to happen in years. Famous for lifting up the poor, healing the sick, scandalizing the powers with his talk of God’s kingdom. Everyone turned out for a glimpse, to see him for themselves, to hear him speak hope and promise. Nobody wanted to miss it. But that little rat, Zacchaeus, that traitor to his people, arrogant and conniving, who hid behind his high walls and his piles of money, he wasn’t in the crowd. Then I saw him, down the road, racing ahead of the celebration. I watched him scurry over to a tree, and then, actually climb up it! Like a little kid! Ha! Looking over his shoulder, left and right, he thought nobody was looking, then hiking up his robes and grabbing a tree limb, he pulled himself into the branches, his feet scrambling to catch hold, and finally settled into the rustling canopy, then he held still half hidden in the branches.  How humiliating for him if anyone were to see him there! Lucky me, I did! I could barely contain my glee. He could never live this down. I would see to that.  Jesus and the crowd had just about arrived right under where he was balancing like a buffoon, but before I could nudge a friend and point up at Zacchaeus, Jesus stopped walking. Everyone grew silent. Then Jesus shouted up into the tree, “Hey Zacchaeus! Hurry up and come down from there! Today I am coming to stay in your home.” Well, if Zacchaeus didn’t drop right out of those branches, the little rat. The look on his face was astonished, ecstatic. He bowed to Jesus and stammered out that he would be most welcome, then ran off home to prepare.  We were dumbfounded; what in the world? The crowd started muttering in surprise and horror. Hadn’t Jesus been invited to stay in the homes of our most respectable people? Did he not know what Zacchaeus was? And yet, he called him by name! What did this mean?  Was Jesus even who he said he was?  Well, he went. He went to the home of Zaccheaus, the filthy tax collector. The whole household had rushed around, and rumor had it they had whipped up a feast lickety-split. No big feat though, while the rest of us might have struggled to pull off a last-minute dinner party for a visiting celebrity—would have spent weeks preparing and days making things ready—Zacchaeus always had more than enough food on hand, and more than enough servants to help prepare it. While they carried on into the night behind those high walls, the whole town was on fire with the gossip. Of all the places he could’ve stayed, why did Jesus choose the home of a despicable sinner? A bad person, who had turned his back on his own people, who lied and cheated every day? What was Jesus up to? Can you believe that? It wasn’t easy to tell you this story because to tell you the truth, I can barely remember what it was like then, what he was like before.  It must be hard for you to hear too, because you do not know Zacchaeus in this way.  You know him as Zach!  Yes! This is the same Zach! The Zach who invites all who are hungry, or down on their luck, to dine with him every night, who sees those in need helps us see them too. The Zach who uses his station to look after our village, to stand up to the Romans when they try to overstep.  Are you surprised that it wasn’t always this way? There was a before and an after; what happened that day changed everything.  After Jesus had stayed in his home, much to our amazement, the very next day, and day after day after that, Zacchaeus visited each person in the village. He brought the record of taxes and revealed in detail how he had cheated us. He apologized, and then, right there, he would open his money bag and pay back four times what he’d taken over the year. Person after person, household after household, he did this. If you think a grown man getting caught with his robes tangled around a tree branch with the whole town looking up at him is humbling, imagine him looking each one of us in the face, with the record of his own wrongdoing in his hands, confessing his sin and making amends.  The day Zacchaeus came to my house, a few weeks after Jesus had stayed with him, he looked so different it was hard to not to stare. His own eyes were clear instead of troubled, his forehead soft instead of pinched, his shoulders drawn back and his back straight and proud instead of hunched and furtive. Honestly, even as he brought himself low before me, he looked taller than he had ever looked. Can you even imagine what our community would be like without him? He's our Zach, humble, brave and compassionate, our trustworthy, village tax collector, Zacchaeus.   *               *               *               *               * Zacchaeus was lost. He had lost his humanity. Cut off from his neighbors, from himself, isolated and hated, feared and ridiculed. Zacchaeus exploited his individual power to get rich off of them, and they used their collective power to mock and alienate him. He thinks he’s such a big man but look at him, the shrimp! It’s us against him!  Then Jesus came to town. Jesus doesn’t play our games, or curate his reputation. Jesus ignores our judgments and rejects our labels. In Christ there is no ‘us and them’ only ‘us all.’ We turn one another into objects—objects of desire, objects of pity, or objects of scorn. Jesus sees only people, beloved children of God, all, every single one of us. No matter how we perceive the world or portray it, there is simply no one who doesn’t already belong to God and to all the rest of us, no person whose life is not for ministry – for caring and being cared for. When Jesus looked up into that tree that day, he didn’t see a corrupt and cowardly tool of an evil regime who had cheated his neighbors and profited on the misfortune of others. Jesus saw a beloved child of God. Filled with loneliness and longing, like everyone else. Born for belonging, like everyone else. Made to care for others, like everyone else. Unique in all the world, like everyone else. Guilty of bringing pain and suffering to others, like everyone else. Trapped in sin, aka, stuck in ‘a misdirection of the gaze' , like everyone else, helpless to free himself, like everyone else. Jesus saw a ready recipient of God’s mercy and untapped agent of God’s ministry. And whatever it looked like to anyone else, however else anyone chose to interpret what was happening in that moment, didn’t matter. Because what Zaccheaus heard was: The pain you’ve caused, the choices you’ve made, the labels you’ve earned or claimed or had slapped onto you by others, these are not who you are. You are Beloved Child of God, son of Abraham, member of the household of God, able to give and receive care.  I see you, Zacchaeus. And I’d like to spend this day with you.  Jesus came to seek and saves the lost. In every one of our lives, there are times when we are lost. Lost in pain or struggle, lost in direction or hope, consumed by the flames of anger or the fog of numbness, lost in who we thought we were or where we believed we were going. We might lose ourselves, become someone we don’t recognize for a time, or be lost to each other, behind walls we can’t break through and seem to keep building higher.  But we are never lost to God. God in God’s mercy—unearned, undeserved, unlimited grace—reaches us right where we are and brings us back home to the love of God that calls us by name and calls us back to each other. God releases us from our isolation and turns our gaze back to what’s real and true and unchanging. This is never not happening. How are you and I Zacchaeus? Where are we hiding in shame, trapped in our pain, stuck in destructive choices, or locked in labels, longing to catch a glimpse of hope as it passes by, but unable to join in?   And who are our Zacchaeuses? What terrible people would we rather mock and condemn than entrust to God’s mercy and receive in God’s love?  Whom would we be horrified to see Jesus choosing? We can’t change hearts—not other people’s and not even our own—but we can hold our hearts out toward God and each other, vulnerable, in humble hospitality to the Holy One who calls us by name, and to these holy ones we’re alongside here on this planet. Ready or not, Jesus keeps showing up among us with mercy, receiving our welcome and reorienting our lives. Thanks be to God, there’s a little bit of Zacchaeus in us all. Amen. (Sin as "a misdirection of the gaze" from Simone Weil, in Waiting for God)

The Temptation of Control

 I wrote an article for Faith+Lead about our new book and my sabbatical. 

You can read it here

The Book Has Launched!

 

Our book came out!

We've done a couple of podcast / interviews and, you guys, this is an excellent practice forum for letting go - because I HATE being interviewed. I feel so uncomfortable and out of control, so, here we go! 

We've also just been launched into empty nesthood and, Lord have mercy on me, the letting go of this stage is no joke.

So - coming at you as fellow pilgrims - learning as we go about accepting the uncontrollable and being present in this life with each other as pastors, parents and people, open to being encountered and transformed by something we can't make happen but can only receive and participate in.

Hope you enjoy it! 

I'll update links to reviews, podcasts and interviews here as they come: 

• Review: Presbyterian Outlook, by Philip Reed
• Christianity Today Interview
• Shifting Cultures Podcast
• Review: Joel Wentz "Are we trying to control our congregations and our kids??"