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.

 

 

 

 

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 redemptive work of God

2 Samuel 5:1-5; 8:15-9:13 

 Handsome and talented, winsome and strong, also deeply flawed, proud and punishing, and then wise and benevolent in his old age, David is the ideal on-screen hero. I am, frankly, stunned there isn’t already a six season Netflix series about him. The bible gives him a hefty portion of Old Testament airtime with 1 & 2 Samuel, 1 Kings, and 1 Chronicles, casting for him the perfect villain in King Saul. Predecessor to the throne, this former army general with real main character energy, is both immensely kingly then increasingly mad. He’s super jealous of David and hungry to hang onto power. Dangerous and prone to fly into terrible rages, King Saul is calmed only by the gentle harp playing of his nemesis, young David, which must drive him all the more mad.

Then we’ve got the wise Yoda figure in the prophet Samuel (whose own life is also a compelling show waiting to be made). He anoints Saul to be Israel’s very first king, and then later secretly anoints David when David is only a shepherd boy - the youngest and least likely of his many brothers to be anything but a country bumpkin, but he’s got skills, battling lions and bears to protect the sheep, and he’s a songwriting savant, making music all alone out in those green pastures near quiet streams, so maybe the series could be a musical. 

 

Then there’s the bond of a soulmate, a deep, abiding friendship with a close and intimate confidant, Jonathan, who, as a boy, watches the little kid David slay the giant Goliath in front of two mighty, cowering armies, (thatscene would be the title sequence for sure!) and then introduces himself, and the two become fast friends, and Jonathan loves our hero as he loves his own heart.

 

Jonathan also happens to be the mad king’s son, and he stands between the two to protect David’s life on several occasions. They meet up in fields and caves when David is in hiding from Saul’s fury, amassing a pirate crew of renegades and living off the land. Jonathan tries relentlessly to make peace and bring David back into the king’s good graces, and finally, in grief and sorrow, lets him go when he sees Saul will never relent.  Jonathan and David promise forever to stand by one another no matter what, and then Jonathan and Saul die in a different battle with the Philistines. (Goliath’s side gets them after all).

 

There is the love of a princess, who becomes his wife, and later is horrified by David’s unrestrained public display of emotion. Then another woman, Abigail, who saves her own husband from David’s wrath, deeply impressing him and then marrying him when her husband dies, and more women who become wives as well.

 

And there’s his sleezy, cascading into evil, obsessing over the married Bathsheba and impregnating her, then sending her husband to the front lines of battle commanding the rest of the army to retreat so he would be killed, and David could marry Bathsheba and cover up his shame. David’s greed, arrogance and cruelty are exposed in a humiliating confrontation with the new prophet, Nathan, whom God sends to David to set him straight. Crushed with grief and regret, David repents. And even though that baby does not live, he and Bathsheba remain married and other children follow, including Solomon. And Bathsheba herself rises to power, advising her own son once he assumes the throne.  

 

David’s vivid life is dogged by the threat of death, frequent betrayal, sheer terror and staggering loss, and along the way he builds the city Jerusalem, and unites the tribes and establishes the nation of Israel. He steals, cheats, rapes, lies, kills, and sacrifices those he loves for his own power and well-being. And he is also rules with wisdom and love, and is generous, kind, loyal, trustworthy, tender, and heartwrenchingly vulnerable. He ends his life passing on drawings and plans for the construction of the temple like a mantle and blessing to his son Solomon. 

 

But what’s especially compelling about David is how his heart is laid bare in the Psalms. Trust and gratitude, anguish and wonder, contrition and pettiness, anger, longing and love – half of the book of Psalms is written by him. It’s like having a glimpse of his inner world, his relationship and ongoing conversation with God. David’s prayers became the prayerbook of the Church, and of Judaism before us. Jesus himself was raised praying these same Psalms that we pray. For three thousand years - from sanctuaries to hospital bedsides, at caskets and christenings, chanted by monks and whispered in concentration camps, David’s words have been recited in every language on the planet, and the conversation with God continues. 

 

Now, having reacquainted ourselves with David, let’s imagine this week’s episode of our King David TV series begins with a flashback. A messenger, racing and breathless, arrives at Jonathan’s house, and stammers out to the servant who opens the door that Jonathan and King Saul have just been killed in battle. The household flies into a panic, people race around grabbing what they can and prepare to flee. A nursemaid bursts into an upstairs room where a young boy of five is napping. She snatches him up out of bed and carries him out, half asleep, still limp in her arms. Running to the stairs she whips around a corner and the boy slips from her grasp, dropping over the railing to the stone floor below. She screams and races to his side, and the flashback ends. 

 

We jump 20 or so years ahead to today’s reading. David has been king for some time, and most of the rest of Saul’s family has long been wiped out by David’s side in the ongoing battles for power.  The battle dust and construction dust died down, I imagine David finds himself in a period of relative peace. Perhaps he’s standing at a window on a beautiful sunny day, a soft breeze rustling the olive trees in the garden below. Calm is nice, but it can also bring up sorrow and ghosts, and David longs for his dear friend Jonathan. There is nothing David can do to change the past. But in the quiet of this pause, the question arises, What will I do with what’s left of my life?

 

And here comes up again that word we learned with Ruth – whose whole story is an illustration of this. The word is hesed, which means something like belongingnesss; here it is translated simply kindness. From the willingness to listen deeply, the song of God’s way rises up, and David summons a servant and asks, Is there anyone left of the family of my enemy who tried to destroy me, that I may embrace in God’s belongness, for the sake of Jonathan who did that for me?

 

And there is one person left, Mephibosheth, the boy whose tragic fall on the day of his father’s death began this episode. He survived all the killings between these enemy households over the years, overlooked, perhaps, because his disability made him seem unworthy of notice. Certainly, he was not seen as a threat or a player on the political gameboard. So David finds Mephibosheth. And the man must think he’s finally been discovered as the last of Saul’s household, and will surely die at the hand of the king. But instead, David raises him to honor, to eat at the King’s table for all his remaining days, giving him servants and Saul’s former lands. David goes on to care for him as his own son, and act as surrogate grandpa to Jonathan’s grandson Mica. 

He who was forgotten and forsaken, living in obscurity in someone else’s household, is welcomed in, given home, security, and belonging in the loving care of his father’s best friend and grandfather’s mortal enemy.  

 

God’s redemption is relentless and never-ending. In our own places of brokenness and unfinished business, we are met with grace. And from our vulnerability, not our strength, we are drawn into God’s unfolding salvation of the world.  When we seek to live honest and open to God, pouring out our pain and our praise, we’re formed for God’s purposes, and made ready to recognize the nudgings of the Holy Spirit when they come. 

 

Sometimes the task before us is clear and we know what is ours to do. And sometimes the chaos of life’s moment sets the terms and we put our head down and faithfully hang on.  But periodically a chapter ends, or a space opens up, and in the quiet the question may arise, What will I do with what’s left of my life?

 

When the search for an answer involves surrendering to God’s purposes, we will be drawn into the redemptive work of God, and the belongingness of God that embraces the world will be made manifest in our lives. 

 

God joins this human life with us, in all its fullness and its emptiness too. That Jesus rose from the dead means there is no darkness so deep that he is not there, no peace so restorative that he does not share it with us, no journey so difficult that he does not walk with us, no sorrow so great it will define us, no brokenness so complete that it cannot be made into a source of wholeness and life by the God who brings life out of death. This is the belongingness of God. This what God does and is always doing. 

 

Big-screen lives like David’s capture our attention, but mostly God works redemption in ordinary places like around dinner tables, and through ordinary acts like grandparenting a child who needs it.

 

And the work God has for us to do most often begins in our own impossibility, loss or brokenness. It may heal something unfinished in us, reawaken something dormant, or break us open for something entirely new. But always, it will bring deep joy, because we are made in the image of ministering God to minister to others, and when we participate in God’s world-healing hesed, we’re tasting already the meal that awaits us all at the table of the King forever. 

 

Amen.

In, Through and Despite

Genesis 37, 39-50

Episode 5: Joseph

This is the story of the family of Jacob” are the opening lines of the 12-chapter novella that wraps up the book of Genesis. It centers around Joseph, Jacob (aka Israel)’s favorite of his 11 sons, (that is, before Ben comes along, making it 12 – the 12 tribes of Israel).  

In 2012, artist Sue Hensel stood at the front of our sanctuary with a large canvas and pastels and drew this image, while I stood at the podium in the back of the sanctuary and read through the entire story of Joseph from beginning to end. 

Every time we came to the phrase, “The Lord was with Joseph” we all stopped and sang it, and then we continued with the refrain periodically throughout the rest of the story.

 

But here’s the thing, every time it’s said, “The Lord was with Joseph” Joseph is in kind of crappy circumstances. He’s sold into slavery, and “the Lord was with Joseph and he became a successful man.”

He’s thrown into jail “but the Lord was with Joseph and showed him steadfast love, he gave him favor in the sight of the chief jailer.”

“The Lord was with him; and whatever he did, the Lord made it prosper – in the dungeon.”

 

Joseph was 17 when he arrived in Egypt, and into slavery. Being falsely accused by his boss’s wife lands him in that dungeon prison for many years – including the two years the baker who had promised to mention him to Pharoah after Joseph did him a solid had forgotten about him, before suddenly remembering, when Pharoah’s dream could not be interpreted by the top magicians, that one Hebrew guy in the dungeon who was good with dreams.  So by the time Joseph stands before the Pharoah and gets put in charge of Operation Outlast Famine, he is 30 years old.

When this all began, Joseph, whom the text is careful to mention is both handsome and good looking, was a cocky kid, the favorite their father, bragging about his crazy dreams to his inferior brothers and driving them crazy with rage.  

But as we follow the terrifying trajectory of his life, from stability to upheaval, from security to volatility, from ease to agony, from recognition to rejection, again and again, the constant through line is The Lord is with Joseph.  And regardless of where he is or what is happening, God keeps working through for the goodness of others. Joseph had no choice in what happened to him, no control over any of it. God did not spare him suffering, that’s not what God does, God comes into suffering with us.  And the Lord was with Joseph.

 

His brothers’ lives went a different way.  After faking Joseph’s death and selling him to slavers, they had to live with what they’d done. They had to go home and face Dad. And Jacob’s grief was crushing and continuous. He would not be consoled. And the brothers must now keep their terrible secret from their family for the rest of their lives. 

 

When they arrive in Egypt two years into the devastating famine, among the desperate crowds, they have lived these past 22 years as slaves to their guilt and shame. But the one they’d sold into slavery, who spent many of those years in captivity, had been made free long ago.  Unburdened by bitterness, outrage or ego, available to God and to those around him, the 39-year-old Joseph is unrecognizable.

 

It’s not just that his boyhood dreams have come true, and everyone is bowing to him, including his brothers, it’s that he has been formed into a person attuned to God. 

 

Later, after they’ve all been reunited and their father’s grief has ended, after everything Joseph does for his brothers - moving all their families and households there, setting everyone up in the good graces of the Pharoah and on vast stretches of land, promising to continue caring for them all through the rest of the famine, the brothers are still trapped in guilt. They still can’t accept the gift that has been given to them.  When Dad dies, the brothers are afraid Joseph will take his revenge on them. 

 

They scheme to tell Joseph that their father’s dying wish was that Joseph forgive them. But when they do, Joseph weeps. Then, using the phrase that throughout our whole scripture is our alert that what we’re about to hear is the good news that pulls us back into the Way of God, Joseph says, “Don’t be afraid!”

He continues, “Am I in the place of God? You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good. He brought me to this position so I could save the lives of many people. No, don’t be afraid. I will continue to take care of you and your children.” So, he reassured them by speaking kindly to them.” (Gen 50:19-21)

 

We’ve talked about this before, but I think about it often, that the Greek word for “forgive” means literally, let go. Just let go. Stop hanging onto something, stop feeding it, clinging to it, holding the weight of it. Just let go.

 

Joseph had forgiven his brothers ages ago, but they hadn’t forgiven themselves. They were invited to let go and they kept hanging on. Set free, they were still living in the Way of Fear. 

 

What are we hanging onto that it’s hard to let go of?

 

It might not be guilt or shame; it may be anger or a story of betrayal. But right now, walking through the world in these days and hours leading up to the US election, it feels like everyone is on edge. And I wonder if what we’re hanging onto is fear itself. Apprehension. Dread. 

 

This week Barb Blue preached to me the gospel/good news that pulls us into the Way of God when she texted after her bible study, “There is no election result that can thwart God.”

 

God is about saving us, which is to say, God is about restoring us to shalom – to wholeness, reconnecting us to our maker and all our siblings on this earth. All creation belongs to God, and God cannot be thwarted. And the story of Joseph tells us there is no arrogance or rivalry, no hatred or jealousy, no horrific betrayal, no appalling violence, no cover up, no great success, no accusation or smear campaign, no captivity or languishing, no faulty memory or failed magician, no famine, or scheming, or shame, or guilt, or fear that can thwart God.

Nothing in history, in the present moment, or yet to come is bigger than God’s redemptive plan for the world. There is nobody outside of God’s sights. We’re all in this story.

 

We might have trouble tolerating our smug siblings, we might even imagine doing violence to them or fantasize about sending them far away forever.  Or we might be the ones with the arrogance problem, looking down on our brothers and sisters with disdain. Either way, God cannot be thwarted from working God’s purposes in and through any and every scenario we manage to cook up or mess up. Nothing we can do can stop God from loving the world and saving it, from loving us and saving us.

 

We can’t control what will happen. Or what will happen after that. Simply wanting one thing or another doesn’t make it so, just as fearing one thing or another can’t keep it from coming.

 

So what if, instead, we let go?  What if we accept what is, and decide to assume the inner stance of least resistance to the light that no darkness can overcome shining in us and through us? What if we practiced trusting that the Lord is with us?

 

Today we’re invited into the posture of Joseph. Not the insufferable, 17-year-old Joseph with the bragging problem, but the Joseph who had been through it, whose trust in God was deep and embedded, who had learned through two decades of unpredictability and strain to ride out the waves of both constantly changing circumstances and monotonous confinement, with his heart tuned to God. The Joseph set free by forgiveness who used the gifts he’d been given whenever they were called upon. 

Our biblical ancestors are not examples to model ourselves after, so I don’t want to put Joseph on a pedestal.  But the story is not really about Joseph, it’s about God. It’s always about God. God whose purposes cannot be stopped. And Joseph seemed to learn how to practice assuming the stance that offers the least resistance of openness to God, waiting and ready when God called on him to act.

 

Nearly seven hundred years after Joseph, David, fleeing the wrath of a murderous king (don’t worry- we’ll get to that story!) wrote this:

Psalm 36:5-7 (NLT):

“Your steadfast love, O Lord, is as vast as the heavens; your faithfulness reaches beyond the clouds. Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your justice like the ocean depths. You save humans and animals alike, O Lord. How precious is your unfailing love, O God! All humanity finds shelter in the shadow of your wings.”

 

What if we choose to simply move into this world today, tomorrow, and the next day, in the shadow of God’s wings? What if we practice assuming the stance of least resistance to the Holy Spirit, who hovers over chaos and breathes life into dust, hovering over our chaos and breathing new life into our world?

 

It’s not up to us to save the world, that’s God’s job.  Don’t be afraid! Are we in the place of God? As we live our lives and make our mistakes, God is not only present in our personal realities, but God’s larger purposes are unfolding in, through and despite us. We can join in on knowingly, with eyes wide open and hearts and hands readily available to listen and respond to God’s call, or we can join in by accident without our awareness or conscious involvement. We can see it and celebrate God’s salvation, or we can miss it. But we can never stop God’s redemption or prevent God’s presence. God will do what God does, and God cannot be thwarted.

Amen.

Where we've been - 

Episode 1: The Beginning

Episode 2: Noah (conversation - so this sermon is from 2014)

Episode 3: Hagar, Abraham & Sarah 

Episode 4: Jacob

 

Moments of Redemption

  1 Samuel 3:1-20

I wish someone would make a mini-series about Samuel’s life. It would open with this scene of the voice calling to the boy Samuel, and flow forward to all world-shifting drama Samuel will be in the dead center of: war, oppression, sweeping tragedy and great triumph, battles and brutality, victories and defeat, the Philistines’ capture of the Ark of the Covenant – the most sacred object of God, containing the ten commandments, Aaron’s staff and a bowl of manna—and after enduring horrific curses, their hasty return of it.  The little boy Samuel will grow up to become to the people of Israel judge, prophet and priest -converging these distinct roles in a single person as Israel becomes a monarchy. He’ll appoint Israel’s first king, the mighty, handsome warrior Saul, who ends up egotistical, self-serving and eventually going mad, and then sneakily anointing the youngest, backwoods, nobody, poet, shepherd kid to take his place who turns out to be King David. For the rest of his days, no matter who is in charge, Samuel will remain God’s spokesperson in Israel.

This child here in the temple, on the cusp of his first, unfortunate prophesy, will become the key figure that holds Israel to its identity. It would be something to watch, really gripping TV.

 

But the story would be punctuated with flashbacks too. Why is this child sleeping by himself in the temple near the Ark of the Covenant? Why is he being cared for by an elderly priest and not at home with his family? In one scene, we’ll see his mother arrive in the temple from afar, an annual pilgrimage, She’ll hug him close, give him a beautiful new robe she’s made him—she seems to love him fiercely. But then she’ll leave again. The next year she’ll return with another handmade robe and a passel of younger siblings he hardly knows. But here he sleeps, alone. 

 

And then we’ll understand, a few episodes in, when we see this same spot where he is lying now, curled up on a mat with a blanket, years earlier. There his own mother lay in a distraught heap, sobbing, begging God for a miracle, promising that if God finally gave her a child, she would dedicate him to serve God his whole life. Eli the priest found her there, and told her God had heard her cries.  

 

Three or four years later, she returned to the temple, to this priest that had seen her in her distress. This time she brought her young son and handed him over to Eli for care and instruction.  And then Hannah sang one of scripture’s handful of epic, prophetic songs of praise for God’s faithfulness, a song that harkens back to Miriam on the banks of the Red Sea when the Egyptians were defeated and God delivered the Israelites from slavery, and forward to Mary when Elizabeth recognizes she is carrying the Messiah who will deliver us all from death. 

 

We’d need to do justice to Hannah’s song, so our mini-series would probably need to be a musical - or an opera! – and here would build a swelling orchestral, triumphant and poignant emphasis on the surprising coexistence of her great sacrifice and her overwhelming gratitude, as she released what she most wanted in all the world and recognized God’s unshakeable hand at work in the world, the way her son will too one day. 

 

At the end of the song, of course we’d have to zoom in on little Sam, who would probably be sitting on the floor in this same spot he sleeps now, perhaps balancing a carved, wooden sheep on his knee and softly baaing, oblivious to all that’s about to happen to him or through him. He’d look so cute, and ordinary, that we’d scarcely believe this kid will become one greatest prophets in all Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

 

But the really, juicy interesting parts of the show, I suspect, would be around the priest Eli. Eli, who didn’t plan to raise this boy but ended up doing so. Eli, who had already raised two, extremely disappointing sons.  He’s a good priest but a lax father, and his sons have become thugs, mafioso types, blustering bullies. The bible actually calls them “scoundrels who had no regard for the Lord or the duties of the priests to the people.” Instead of serving God and caring for the people, they take what they want from whomever they want and make a mockery of God, stealing, abusing women, and demanding people’s meat sacrifices in the temple be served to them instead of offered to God. Eli begs them to repent, but they don’t listen to him. 

These sons are the great sorrow of his pained and troubled heart, and he has been warned by an unnamed prophet that God is not happy, and his sons will die on the same day as each other, and instead of Eli’s household, a different great priest will arise to lead the people.

 

And so, we return to the evening in question. 

Little Samuel is sound asleep near the sacred vessel of God’s power and presence, and then God calls him by name. Samuel? Samuel? 

“The word of the Lord was rare in those days, and visions were not widespread,” we’re told. And yet, YHWH speaks. And not to a great leader, but to a child, an adoring mother’s grateful sacrifice, a regretful priest’s young “padawan.”   

 

Three times the voice awakens him, three times Samuel runs into Eli’s room and shakes the priest awake, “Here I am, did you call me, Eli?” And twice Eli sends him back to bed. 

But the third time – (“though his eyesight had gone dim”, “the lamp of God had not yet gone out”) - Eli perceives what is happening.  “Samuel,” it says, “did not yet know the Lord,” but Eli did, and he sensed that the God of Adam, Abraham, Miriam and Moses, and the boy’s faithful mother, Hannah, was summoning the child. So, he tells little Sammy, “If it happens again, say, ‘Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.’

 

God calls again and Samuel answers, ‘Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.’ And God launches Samuel’s prophesy career then and there, with a real corker, one that, we’re told, will make BOTH ears of whoever hears of it tingle!  Samuel is to tell his dear teacher and guide that God plans to punish his household and wipe out his line because his sons are evil and he’s done nothing to stop them.

The poor child doesn’t sleep a wink. 

 

When Eli greets him in the morning and asks what God said last night, Sam’s afraid to tell him. But here is Eli’s great, redemptive moment. Here he steps into his own obedience as priest, surrogate father, and shaper of a prophet.  From humility and his awareness both of who God is and who this young child might turn out to be, Eli says two things. First, he says, “No matter what, however bad it is, you must tell me, Samuel, or may whatever it is happen to you.”  And, then, after Samuel shares the terrible vision, Eli answers, “God is God. Let God do as he sees fit.” 

 

 The very next words are, “As Samuel grew up, the LORD was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground. And all Israel…knew that Samuel was a trustworthy prophet of the LORD.”

 

For the remainder of his life and beyond, Samuel will continue to listen for the voice of God and obey – even if he feels annoyed about it, or if doing so puts him at risk, he will guide the people of God through turbulent times. And he will raise two untrustworthy sons of his own and suffer a similar disappointment to Eli. He’ll have a great retirement party and then get reluctantly yanked back on duty. And even after he’s dead, he’ll be conjured back to predict the outcome of a battle and make the on-his-way-out King Saul dearly regret having summoned his cranky ghost.

 

But on this evening, when God calls to Samuel and he awakens to the call of God on his life, the boy can know none of these things, and neither can those whose lives and futures he will have a hand in shaping. 

 

But one person does sense what is coming, and chooses to accept and join in, even if it’s not the way he would have wanted it to be. One person does recognize the hand of God at work, even if God’s voice doesn’t come to him. 

 

So here’s where our mini-series would have a little twist.  

While our show will be ostensibly, and truly, about Samuel, it’s really about God working through it all, the lives of every one of them, and we would probably be surprised to see it most in Eli. 

 

We’ve been talking about receiving our lives, what is, what’s difficult, what God is doing, what will be, and today we’re talking about receiving what God has already done.  That is to say, God is redeeming this world because God has already determined that this life and everyone in it exists for the love and belonging God embodied in Christ Jesus. God has already reconciled the world to Godself in Christ. God has called good God’s wildly diverse and harmonious creation, and God has condemned what defiles and dehumanizes, what divides and destroys.

 

 Redemption begins in judgment; resurrection starts in death. God’s word speaks this judgement into the world. The judgment of God is just and can be trusted. Because God's judgment is rooted in the love that breathed this world into being and summons all in love back to the Creator. So, God will always judge good and evil, and condemn that which violates the belonging of people to God or one another. And God took it all into the heart of God when Jesus breathed his last and death seemed to have won. And then, in resurrection, the power of death to destroy and divide was broken, and love will be the final word over it all. God’s judgment is God’s grace. God’s judgment puts death to death and raises all to life.

 

Eli receives God’s judgment spoken through the child Samuel. Even while Samuel is afraid to speak it, Eli recognizes God’s judgment is coming, and knows it is true and right. Heartbreaking, no doubt, but just and good, necessary even. He recognizes in this moment, watching what is happening with this boy, that his own leadership is ending, and God is doing a new thing, through this child. And he sees that God is giving him the chance to participate, still. Always. God is inviting Eli to share in redemption, his own redemption, the ongoing redemption of Israel, by raising this boy to listen for the word of God, and by encouraging him to speak it, as frightening as it may be, to stand up and speak out God’s word of judgment and God’s word of hope.

 

Later on, little Samuel’s first prophesy will come true. In the terrible battle when Israel is brutally defeated, and the Philistines capture the ark of the covenant, both Eli’s sons will be among the dead that day.  And Eli, then 98 years old, waiting at the gate of the city for news of the battle, will accept word of his sons with resignation, but when he hears about the Ark, he will cry out and fall backwards, break his neck, and die.  

 

And on the surface his story will have ended tragically. But the story is more than the surface glance, and Eli participated in God’s redemption all along. After the death of what his life was to be, he was resurrected into his purpose. He taught the great prophet Samuel to say, Speak Lord, your Servant is Listening. He recognized the voice of God calling to the boy, and accepted the judgment of God speaking through him.  Eli encouraged Samuel to speak what is true, to love God above all else and to care for God’s people.  

And it began this evening, this moment.

 

What God is doing is far beyond what we can see or know in any one moment. It includes the faith and the failings of all those gone before, and weaves us into a narrative that reaches beyond time.  While kings and nations rise and fall, mothers sacrifice and fathers sorrow, courage and trust weave through ordinary lives, God’s judgment and grace hold us all. And God does not waver in redeeming this beloved world, and drawing us all into the project.

 

God meets us in death and brings life. There is nothing that qualifies us to join in this redemption except our humility and our willingness to learn to say, Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.

Amen.

 

 Read previous sermons about Hannah and Samuel

Saving / Being Saved

Mark 11:1-11 

I was raised with a high anthropology – which is to say, a view of human beings that puts a lot of power in our hands. I could choose whether or not to “accept” Jesus into my life, and evidently, my word was powerful enough to keep Jesus out of my life.  If people were not “following” God, their lives would be worse, and their afterlife doom, but it’s our choice. Human beings, in this view, hold an enormous amount of power. When it comes down to it, more than God, actually. Because we can tie God’s hands. We can keep God from acting, just by our inaction! Oh well. God would’ve saved us, but we said no thanks, and there was nothing God could do about it. God seems unable to override human beings’ refusal to accept God’s saving, or humans’ basic ignorance that that decision was ever in their hands to begin with. If we don’t say Save us! Which is what Hosanna! means, then God just won’t do it. 

But maybe you didn’t grow up like that. Maybe your underlying messages of human idolatry were not about eternity but about now. Maybe your hosannas were pointed inward, toward your own outstanding self. And the work of saving -whether that’s your own self, the world, or maybe even others, was your work to do. If we don’t do it, it won’t get done. Maybe Jesus didn’t factor in, except as a motivator or an example, and God’s role was simply to serve as an ethical ideal on which to base all the world-saving work we humans need to get busy with.  This is also a dangerously high anthropology, that is, this also seems to think human beings are far more capable and in control than we really are. 

But the bible has a pretty low anthropology. In the bible people are portrayed as mostly having no idea what we’re doing.  In the gospels, the disciples, who walked side by side with God incarnate, still had no clue what was happening most of the time. Even when Jesus told them, over and over again, how it was all going to go down, they still didn’t get it.  

And when the crowds naively celebrate Jesus’ coming into Jerusalem on a donkey, they laid down cloaks and branches heavy with misunderstandings and expectations. Their version of Hosanna! Save us! assumed they were welcoming into town the one who was coming to overthrow the oppressive Roman empire occupying their land. Here comes power to speak truth to power and overthrow power and give power back to the powerless!  Hosanna!

A high Christology believes Jesus is capable of saving.  So the palm Sunday crowds were ahead of us there. Because saving is what Jesus does; Jesus saves. Not our belief in Jesus, not our patterning our lives after Jesus, but Jesus, himself, saves the world, whether we believe in him or not, whether we follow him or not. The crowds were wrong about him and what he was there to do. But so what?  God does what God will do anyway. 

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem, he didn’t fit the people’s ideas of him; and all throughout the next week he resolutely refused to live into their expectations. He kept on undermining their hopes of glory and power with vulnerability and weakness, and then he let himself be killed, which was a killer to their dreams and plans.  

When we cry “save us” what we usually mean is, we want to not feel so much pain, or we want to be freed from the consequences of our choices, we want bad people not to be in charge of things, or we want to be spared from some impending tragedy or have security – even eternally. What we usually mean by “save us!” is “give us more control!” or at least make things turn out how we would like them to.  We use God as a means to our own end, a tool in our own self-development project or societal change platform. Our telos, or ultimate goal toward which our life is pointed, is usually our own comfort and well-being, the safety or security of those we love. 

When we cry Hosanna! Save us, Lord! we do NOT usually mean save us from our delusions, save us from our self-centeredness, save us from our mistrust of others and fear of vulnerability, save us from pride and thinking we have more control than we do, or save us from forgetting that you are God, and we aren’t, and denying that those we most dislike are also your beloved children. We’re not usually asking to be saved from our idolatry or ego. We’re certainly not asking to be humbled and brought low like Christ himself; we’re usually asking to be propped up and protected.

But that’s ok.  When we point our longings and fears toward God, God knows what we need hears our hearts, even if we can’t name what salvation is or imagine what it could look like, God brings it anyway, because this is who God is and what God does, regardless of who we are and what we do. 

And even when the people who cheered his arrival on Sunday turned around and cheered his demise on Friday, it didn’t alter God’s course.  We think death ends everything and is the strongest power of all, but in Christ God moves in and through death to bring new life. Because God brings life and salvation to the world.  This is what God does. And nothing, no matter what, can stop God from saving the world. 

So, first, here this good news, which comes as a blow to our high anthropology: You are not powerful enough to stop what God is doing.  And what you do will not save the world. You’re not really in control of much of anything. None of us are. It’s part of being human. And you are too important to God to let go of.  And so is this world. God’s YES is always bigger than our human Nos, or I don’t knows.  All this means your most excellent actions, most generous sacrifices, highest deeds of goodness cannot bring God nearer or give you any security at all.  And, your most horrible mistakes, most self-centered spitefulness, and worst deeds of cruelty, cannot make God retreat further or disqualify you from God’s love.  

We are making some terrible mistakes in the world. We are hurting each other badly. Our selfishness and division have very real and heartbreaking impact. Choices we make have appalling consequences and contribute to horrific suffering. And trapped inside of time, we can’t undo what we’ve done.  Nevertheless, nothing, nothing can stop God’s love and redemption. Nevertheless, Jesus saves.

We can participate in that salvation with awareness and gratitude, choosing to align our lives with the inbreaking Kingdom of God and seeking live as we were created to live, connected to God and others. Or we can participate in that salvation with naivete and ignorance, or even live our one life with deliberate malice. But make no mistake, we participate. One way or another, we are part of God’s redemption story. God will do what God is doing – in us and through us, or despite us and without our approval. God uses anything and everything to move the world toward healing and hope. God’s presence inhabits every moment. God’s voice cannot be banished or silenced, God’s work cannot be hindered or obstructed. Love prevails. Most often in unexpected and ordinary ways; most often through weakness. We can watch for it or not. We can recognize it or not. We can receive it willingly, or resist it pointlessly. But the love of God has claimed this whole story, Christ has come into this world, and turned it all inside out, and nothing can stop God.

Every year we read this text in one gospel voice or another, and every single year, we just breeze past and generally ignore a certain character that, in Mark, takes up over half the passage. This is, of course, the donkey. When Jesus tells a couple disciples to go untie a random colt from a random doorstep and bring it to him, and he gives them words for if someone asks them what they’re doing, it happens just like he says it will.  What this shows us is this: They may not have any idea of the big picture, or even what’s about to unfold, even though Jesus keeps trying to tell them that he’s here in Jerusalem to die. But in this small moment with a random donkey, they DO glimpse the Divinity of Christ, and they get this small taste of their own participation in something bigger. With this act of trust and courage, their actions join what God doing in the world. They go into this strange parade having been guided and having obeyed. 

God is always up to something way bigger than we can see or understand. Even though our participation is often misguided, driven by our own agenda for what being saved would feel like, nevertheless, God uses our actual experiences to bring love and healing into the world. Nevertheless, we are part of a story that reaches beyond us and yet encompasses our lives entirely. God’s healing comes into our most vulnerable and broken places, not because we are impressive and powerful but because we are not.  Jesus, in vulnerability joins us, and invites us into our own brokenness alongside one another to share in God’s redemption where it comes, where it is needed. 

This next week is going to suck for the disciples. And not just this next week, which ends in Jesus’ death, not to mention the death of all their beliefs and dreams and plans. Life is going to be overwhelming and disorienting for them for some time to come.  

So, the week begins here, in this moment of participating, with this donkey, and this goofy parade, where a whole crowd of people says the most true thing in the universe, even though none of them have any idea what they are actually saying or what it really means:

Hosanna, blessed is the one who comes to save. 

Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!

Hosanna in the highest heaven!’

 Amen.