Today's Sermon - Spreading - January 27, 2019

Spreading

(based on Luke 4:14-21)

          It is from Sherman Hesselgrave, pastor at Holy Trinity Church in Toronto, that I read about this passage from Luke as a song.  It’s a song similar to the one Mary sang in the beginning of Luke, often called the Magnificat.  And ultimately, together, they make up the key to understanding all of the gospel according to Luke as a song of empire breaking.  If you want to put it into a musical definition, these passages are the “key” in which we should sing the rest of Luke’s gospel.

          The text that Jesus reads from in the synagogue on this day, occur over and over in the ancient manuscripts retelling Israel’s history.  You can hear passages from Isaiah, from Jeremiah, from Nehemiah.  All the exile prophets, quoting God’s words to the Israelites, say that a new day has dawned and a change is required.  It is the song of freedom after struggle; a song of triumph and release after deep suffering and sorrow.

          Hesselgrave says that in this passage Jesus is like a Jazz singer, who singing along in an ancient anti-empire ballad, throws in a few notes from another anti-empire tune, this one about religious imperialism.  And he does so right in the heart of the synagogue.  Did they even recognize what Jesus was singing?  Because his words were very clear, “I am here to disrupt empire – social, political, and religious – are you with me?”  It is a song of great social change, directed not just at political empire but religious authority, as well.  And all of Luke follows suit.  Everything that Luke tells us is about Jesus breaking free from social, political, and religious piety.

          Jesus announces his ministry with this inauguration song and it defines his ministry here among us.  It is this song that highlights who he chooses to have as his disciples.  It is this song that highlights the lessons he teaches from this point onward.  It is this song that highlights the struggles he will encounter with the Pharisees, the Sadducees and the Scribes.  And it is this song, that ultimately gets him in trouble with King Herod, Pilate, and eventually with all of the people that turn against him.

          But in Jesus’s beginning ministry, it is this song that defines him.  And he sings this song in the synagogue for all of them to hear.  Jesus wants to make clear that it will be this message that should be spread about why he came, why he is here, and why he will do everything that follows.

          Sticking with the song theme, there is a current song sung by Taylor Swift called Fight Song,

“Like a small boat

On the ocean

Sending big waves

Into motion

Like how a single word

Can make a heart open

I might only have one match

But I can make an explosion.”

Jesus made a tsunami wave occur when he entered the scene, stood up, opened the scriptures and read in the synagogue that day.  He made a public stand upon which his entire ministry would be founded.  And that drop in the bucket, sent ripples that have spread throughout the world over the last 2000 years.

But today, we have a problem.  Just like the drop of water that causes ripples upon the water to spread out, the rings and the area that it encompasses growing larger and larger, the central drop that started it all eventually fades away until you can’t see it anymore.  That central ring eventually returns to the status quo of calm water.  That’s the problem we face today.

The revolutionary theme song against empire and piety of the righteous that Jesus was so against, has quieted to an acceptance of it again.  We’ve gone back to the status quo, we’ve gotten complacent, we’ve justified our empire building, even within the church.

Jesus began his ministry quoting the prophets that good news should be brought to the poor, to proclaim release to the captive, the recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free.   And at the very end of his ministry, right before he ascended into heaven, he said nearly the same thing.  He told his disciples to go and make disciples, teaching them everything that they had been taught, and that repentance and the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed to all nations.

My purpose this morning is to remind you what we are here for.  My purpose this morning is for you to recognize that we’ve allowed the drop of water in the ocean that Jesus started has been allowed to return to status quo of calm water.  So calm, in fact, that we don’t recognize any ripple at all.  It’s time to change that.

God has placed YOU and ME – this congregation – on this plot of land, in this building, at this address, in this very time in history, for a very specific reason.

We are here to be Christ to our community.

We are to make disciples.  We are to teach repentance and forgiveness.  We are to sing our own song of triumph and victory over oppression and hatred.  We are to break the bonds of empiricism, to share good news to the poor, release to the captive, recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free.

We are to reflect God’s light and love to those around us.

So, who wants to sing a new song and start a new ripple with me?

Today's Sermon - Sorting - Jan. 13, 2018

Sorting

(based on Luke 3:15-17,21-22)

        How do you handle mail that comes each day?  Some people stand directly over the trash can and sweep all of their fourth-class junk mail into it, leaving only the first-class mail and bills to sort through.  But, perhaps you are bit more like me; I prefer to carefully sort through each piece, making sure that I haven’t won the Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes or that I haven’t been especially selected for a five-star resort lodging for 4 nights in the Cayman Islands, all expenses paid until I turn over the flashy invitation and notice that it was simply address to Dear Occupant.

          Or what about the latest algorithm quizzes used on Facebook.  What does your name say about you?  What have you inherited from your mother?  What special message is just for you this new year?  Or what color are you and what does that color say about your personality?  Click here. 

I don’t want to burst anyone’s bubble, but just like the Star Words we hand out each year; they haven’t been especially chosen just for you – they are random and completely arbitrary.  They are simply a tool for you to make something out of, to do something with, to make meaning out of it, if you choose.

          But how do we sort through the wheat from the chaff and know when we have truly received something special and just for us when it comes to spiritual messages?  In our gospel reading this morning, we learn just a little bit about John, but we’ve read more about him in other years.  We know that John and Jesus were at least, 2^nd cousins – (There might have been some once removed or something in there, as well.)  But, we know that Jesus’s mother, Mary, was cousins with John’s mother, Elizabeth.  Whether the two of them were first cousins or not, we don’t know.  But that family relationship would make Jesus and John second cousins.  And we know from other passages and gospel accounts that John was a rather odd character.  He wore camel skins, ate locusts and honey, and was a rather wild man, proclaiming repentance and coercing people to ritually wash themselves of their sins by getting Baptized down at the river Jordan.  

          He didn’t sound unlike a man that I observed many years ago who used to stand in Market Square in downtown Pittsburgh during the summer and shout to all who would listen that Jesus was coming and that we needed to turn from our sins and “get right with God.”  He wore the most outrageous clothing – checkered pants rolled up to the knee with plaid socks, a striped shirt under a hound’s tooth coat.  He definitely got people’s attention.

From our passage this morning, John must have been the kind of man that people were expecting the Messiah to be, because there was a great deal of debate concerning John with everyone wondering if he might be the Messiah.  God had been silent in the land of Israel for nearly 400 years.  No prophet had come forward speaking on behalf of God to the people in all that time.  It was believed that prophecy would rise again when the Messiah was about to come.  So, all Israel was waiting for one who might be that authentic prophet.  John was such a prophet, and throngs came out to hear him and wondered if he might be the messenger long awaited for.  But the people also wondered if they’d perhaps missed something and that this prophet might actually be the Messiah.

John had harsh words for his hearers.  He demanded something – repentance, change, belief, and works.  Such demands honor those who would follow because the demands assume that the person can accomplish them.  Peter Drucker, an expert on leadership says this, “Leadership is not magnetic personality.  That can just as well be a glib tongue.  It is not making friends and influencing people; that is flattery.  Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”

I think Drucker was describing John the Baptist’s kind of leadership.  John’s essential message to the people that had been long silenced over those 400 years was simply this; that we be what we seem to be.  If we want to seem godly, then we are to be godly, with no sham or spin on it.  And he spelled out exactly what he meant.  He addressed the people gathered around, he told the soldiers, don’t intimidate and coerce; tax collectors, collect no more than what is due; to the general population, share with those in need.  And that these actions ought to be a way of life.  None of this was new.  The rabbis and chief priests had been telling the people this same message for centuries, but people had stopped listening.

It took an eccentric guy like John saying the message again to get people to listen.  He was telling the people, “God has already told you what to do and how to be.  So, go do it.  It’s time for you to be about that in your life.”  He minced no words.  In fact, if you were there to only listen and not actually put your faith into action, he called you out for it.  “You brood of vipers!” he would say.

And this raised another concern of the day, which was also raised during the time of the reformation, and I dare say is an issue once again.  And that is the idea of faith versus works.  Our faith is rooted in the mighty acts of God: the incarnation (how God became human), atonement (how God restores us to a relationship with Him), resurrection (that in Christ we will go to heaven after death) and finally the ongoing presence of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit here with us now.  Our faith is rooted in those essential beliefs.  But if those roots are genuine they will bear fruits of goodness, generosity, compassion, and justice. 

John was calling for a faith rooted in repentance and belief which would bear fruit in the conduct of everyday living.  He was asking his hearers to return to their lives, to where they had been planted, and to begin to bear fruit.

We have an ongoing gap between the roots and the fruits people.  It’s one of those push-me, pull-me issues that never seems to, for once, get solved.  The roots people emphasize the Bible, commitment, Jesus, prayer.  They often forget about the social concerns of the world, the pain of poverty and injustice.  The other camp of fruit people has little use of doctrine and piety when there is hunger and homelessness, racial and social injustice.  John’s message, and in my opinion – the eternal message, is that we should not have the luxury of choosing between them. 

What’s the sense of a plant that only has roots, what use is it?  There is nothing to show for all your underground work, spreading and strengthening.  The effort becomes pointless.  And likewise, what’s the sense of a plant that only has flowers or fruit?  When the heat is on and you get tested in your faith, you have no grounding.  There is nothing there to support you.  You will wilt and wither.

I’m not sure why we polarize over time and become one or the other types of people, but the strength of a plant is having strong, spreading roots and glorious, delicious fruits.  There may be seasons and times when we need to work on one or the other, but we are best when both our faith and doctrine and our commitments and works are working together.

The crux of John’s message comes in verse 17 however, when John says that it is time for God to take His winnowing fork and start removing the wheat from the chaff.  To understand this, we need to know the way in which wheat was separated from the shell.  After wheat was cut and gathered into bundles, the stalks were removed and thrown into a pile on a flat surface on the top or side of a hill.  This was necessary to make use of a breeze.  The stalks were cracked open and crushed by a sledge, a heavy wooden platform with wooden or metal teeth designed to do the job effectively.  The sledge was normally pulled by an animal.  After the hulls were broken, he would use a winnowing fork, a slender pitchfork with five or six wooden tines.  The grain was tossed into the air over and over again so that the heavier wheat kernels would fall to the ground and the useless chaff would blow off into a pile downwind.  After this, the kernels were placed onto a large round disk and tossed about so that the last of the unwanted sticks, leaves and dust could be removed.  After this sorting was done, the chaff was burned.  

What kind of sorting do you need to do in your life to get you back on track?  What useless things can you toss out and throw away?  What grounding in scripture, acts of compassion, or kernels of commitment do you need to work on, keep and save? 

Today's Sermon - Searching - based on Matthew 2:1-12

Searching

(based on Matthew 2:1-12)

You’ve probably heard and sung the song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas”?  Well, Christmas is not just one day.  It’s an entire season.  And the first day of Christmas actually begins on December 26^th, and the season of Christmas ends on the twelfth day which is January 6^th, today, known as Epiphany.

The scripture reading this morning is the Epiphany text and it’s the same every year.  In our Christian tradition, Epiphany marks the day when the wise men, or magi, or three kings, whatever you want to call them come to visit the baby Jesus.  In Greek, the word epiphaneia means “manifestation” or “appearance,” and on this day, we celebrate how the Christ child appeared to all the world (represented by the wisemen from the East), not just to the Jewish shepherds who were watching their flocks the night Jesus was born or to the local townspeople of Bethlehem who first met the couple, Mary and Joseph, as they came looking for a place to stay.

The gospel of Matthew traces Jesus’ genealogy all the way back to King David and even to Abraham.  But these magi came from far-away lands, probably Persia, and they came from a different culture and probably spoke a different language than Jesus and his immediate, human family.

So, for people who weren’t Jewish, who didn’t’ look like Jesus, who didn’t speak the language that Jesus did or shared the same culture or ethnicity as Jesus, for people like me and you, the presence of the magi represented an epiphany, a manifestation of God to us, the rest of the world, and it signified that all would be welcomed and included in Christ, and that all should come to bow down before him and worship him, even those who lived in far-away lands, like Persia or China, even Europe and the Americas.  That is the great Epiphany, manifestation or appearance, that the Christian tradition celebrates in January.

For those of you who don’t know it, I collect Nativity Sets from all over the world and this is one of the reasons why.  Each set represents the manifestation of Jesus to their culture, their traditions and their heritage.  In the visitation of the three kings on Epiphany, Jesus has come to all of us.

For most people, however, when we think of the word “epiphany,” the inclusive message of the gospel is not usually what immediately comes to mind.  An epiphany, for most of the world is an “aha” or a “eureka!” moment when metaphorical light bulbs go off above your head.

That word, “eureka” in Greek, means, “I have found it!”, and legend has it that as the scientist Archimedes was getting into the bathtub, he saw the water level rise as he climbed in, and all of a sudden he just understood the concept of volume and density. It hit him, right then and there. So, he shouted, “Eureka!” (“I have found it!”) and was so eager to share his discovery that he supposedly leapt out of his tub, forgot to get dressed, and ran through the streets of his town naked.  Well, that’s what legend says anyway.

Perhaps when the wisemen finally made it to Bethlehem, stopped at the palace to ask the King about the newborn King, and then finally found the baby Jesus with a humble couple in a small modest home, they too may have shouted, “Eureka! We have found him.”

In this New Year, perhaps you are in search of something: a new beginning, a new purpose, a new practice that helps your physical, mental, or spiritual health.  Or perhaps you are looking for an epiphany, a sudden realization that helps you make sense of this journey called life.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once said, “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.” Epiphanies are like that, they stretch your mind, your understanding, your social and cultural norms, and you are left changed in some way.  Perhaps in this New Year, you are trying to find your way to an epiphany.  Unlike the magi who went searching for an epiphany and actually found him, our epiphanies often happen when we’re not expecting them.

Like Archimedes.  He probably spent hours at his desk searching for the formula for volume and density.  He probably racked his mind trying to think of it, knowing that it was there, but not able to grasp it.  Maybe he was at the point of giving up when he gave a sigh and said, “I need a bath.”  And right then, as he’s doing something he’s probably done a thousand times before, an epiphany found him.

I wish I could provide for you what you’re searching for today, that answer to your question; that revelation you seek; that epiphany you so long for.  But I can’t.  I can only hope and pray that something, somehow will touch you and change you.  I can only hope and pray that God will break through, maybe through a song or a special event or in something that you’ve done a thousand a thousand times but suddenly see with new eye and a new heart, and help you find an epiphany moment.  

Here are some things I believe we can do, to help us find our way to epiphany.  The first is simply to look and listen for God, each and every day in all that you do and in all that you experience.  The second is to study God’s word a bit closer in a new and interesting way.  The third way is to be part of a community that welcomes you as you are and loves you enough to challenge you and maybe even change you a little or whether that community is here at church among those sitting here in the pews or if it is among family and friends outside these walls.  Our lives of faith are personal, but they aren’t meant to be private.  I can’t tell you how many epiphany or eureka moments I’ve had through conversations with amazing, yet ordinary, people who’ve allowed God to use them to speak to me.  And finally do something different.  Allow yourself to experience some cognitive dissonance, some discomfort, some change.  Try doing something uncomfortable, something different, something that’s out of the ordinary and out of the box for you.

Scripture tells us that the magi went home by another road; they went back a different way.  So, go home a different way or walk down another street.

In order to start this epiphany search and allow those moments to possibly break through for us, I’m doing something different for you during these winter months leading up to Lent: I’ve started a Scavenger Hunt Game for all of us to play, if you’re interested.  Most of the instructions are available in both the newsletter and in the half sheets in your bulletin.

Explain:

Each Sunday, there will be a small sheet of instructions for that week’s Scavenger Hunt.  You’ll need to go and read and study the lectionary passage from that morning a little closer to find the clues.  Once you’ve found the clues, you’ll be able to do the challenge.  I’ve made this week’s clues and challenge pretty easy to figure out.  You can figure out the clues on your own, if you want to, but I’ve made it so that the challenge can not be done alone.  Instead, it must be done with another person or persons.  You can do as many challenges as you wish, all of them or none of them, it is solely up to you. 

However, the week’s challenge must be completed by the following Saturday at midnight.  You will not be able to go back to a previous week and do an expired challenge.

The challenge will always include sending me a picture of what you are supposed to do or find with you and your partner or team in the picture.  You can send it to my email address at revwaltp@gmail.com.  That information will always be on each instruction sheet, in case you forget it.

On Sunday afternoon, I will post a collage of those pictures with no names attached - just the pictures - so you don’t need to be worried that your information is anywhere on Facebook and on Instagram.

I will also post the instructions for the upcoming week’s challenge.

For every challenge that you complete successfully, your name will be entered into a drawing.  And at the end of the eight weeks, we’ll pull a winner.  So, the more you enter and do the challenges successfully, the more options you have of winning.  But whether you win the prize at the end or not, I hope you find something in the process.  Maybe, through this process of doing something new and unusual, an epiphany will come find you.  Or unexpectedly, you’ll find it. 

Happy Three Kings Day, my friends.