God's plan

In the name of Jesus; amen.

A sermon based on Matthew 2:13-23

There is no historical basis for this gospel story. Certainly it is possible that it was overlooked by the historians of the time, but there is no actual proof that it happened.

Does this make it any easier to hear?

If it did take place the death toll would have been small. Bethlehem was a little town, just like the Christmas carol claims. There would have only been a handful of boys under the age of 2 living there when this would have taken place.

Does this make it any easier to hear?

And only Matthew tells this story. Luke has the holy family returning home right after the birth so that Jesus could be circumcised when he was 8 days old as was custom, not fleeing to Egypt.

Does this make it any easier to hear?

Matthew may have made the whole thing up in order to connect Jesus with Moses who also escaped a massacre of baby boys when he was born. Matthew may have made it up in order to place Jesus in Egypt at some point in his life because Matthew was concerned with fulfilling the writings of the prophets.

But none of this makes this story any easier to hear.

The slaughter of the innocents inserts a dark cloud into the Christmas story.

“A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more.”

If we listen we can still hear her crying throughout the world: in Pakistan, Iraq, Dafur, Afghanistan, New Orleans, New York, and even here in Naugatuck.

It seems it is Rachel’s job to weep and mourn for those who are lost and for those who are no more. Her tears are reminders that pain and sorrow still exist in this world even at this time of year when we celebrate the joy of Jesus’ birth into our world.

As hard as it is to hear, this story, whether or not it actually happened needs to be told. Jesus’ birth did not provide a magical formula that protects us from evil events and evil people. In fact, Matthew wanted people to understand that a life of faith in Jesus would include persecution and suffering. Our faith and our baptism do not protect us from evil or protect us from it happening to us.

But there is good news in this story. Jesus fulfills God’s redemptive plan because he escapes Herod’s evil plan.

An angel warns Joseph in a dream to flee with Mary and the baby causing Joseph to wake and immediately run away with his family as Herod’s secret guard approaches the town with drawn swords. The good news is that Jesus escapes death as a young child so that he can face death as a man.

The good news is that even in the worst moments Jesus fulfills God’s purpose for us.

Rachel weeps, but we can rejoice even in the most tragic of times and circumstances because God’s plan is always accomplished.

That’s the good news. We may not always understand God’s plan and it might even seem at times as if God has no plan at all, but the truth is that God does have a plan and that plan is meant to truly save us because God truly loves us.

God works even in tragedy. God succeeds even in the horrific.

Evil people and evil events cannot stop God or hinder God. Jesus escapes the swords of Herod’s soldiers because God’s plan is that Jesus would make known God’s love for us and then willingly go to the cross and die to prove God’s love for us.

The sadness and sorrow of this story is wiped away by the victory of the resurrection and Rachel is comforted because her children are redeemed and renewed.

The Christmas story always includes the Cross and Resurrection stories otherwise it is incomplete and unfulfilled. And because of that we too are put into this story of a manger, and a massacre, and an escape. Except that it is no longer an escape from evil, but an escape to goodness and grace.

God’s plan is fulfilled and we are able to rejoice.

Amen.

Do not be afraid.

Christmas Eve Year A

A Sermon based on Luke 2:1-20.

In the name of Jesus; amen.

Do not be afraid.

If there is a message for this night it is this: Do not be afraid.

It is the message of the angels who prepared those whose lives would be changed with the birth of the Messiah.

There was Zechariah, the Temple Priest who angels visit at the start of Luke’s gospel. “Do not be afraid Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord.”

And Elizabeth who was barren, conceived.

When she was about 6 months pregnant the angel Gabriel visits her relative Mary with a similar message: "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."

And Mary who was unmarried and a virgin conceived,

Then tonight another angels appears with this message to the shepherds, “Do not be afraid; for see I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.”

Do not be afraid.

I can only assume that angels were quite terrifying if the first thing they had to say when they appeared to mortals was, “Do not be afraid.”

It should challenge our notions of angels, but then everything about this story of the birth of Jesus should challenge our notions about the divine.

The birth of Jesus is a story of contradictions: Women incapable of conceiving bear children. God becomes human. A king is placed in a manger. Good news is proclaimed to the lowliest first.

Having our notions about the world and the divine challenged is a terrifying thing. And so tonight the message of the angels is a message for us as well:

Do not be afraid.

This story does something to me every time I read it. Last night I watched a special on the History Channel called, “Christmas Unwrapped the History of Christmas.” I love these shows that mix expert opinion, scripture, reenactments, and images of artwork to explain a biblical concept. Their point is not necessarily to debunk the story, but to give new insight and to entertain.

They questioned the history of the story, when it happened, where it happened, and how it happened. Was Jesus really born in Bethlehem? Was there really a star that shone bright over the place where he lay?

Questioning the accuracy of scripture and our traditions associated with it can cause fear for many.

Was it really a virgin birth? Did it happen in the dead of winter or in the middle of the springtime?

The details are not as important as the truth of this story: God was born into the world and we are told, ‘Do not be afraid.”

On this night we are reminded that God came into the darkness, as John writes: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”

Another contradiction for our lives: there is no darkness that cannot be overcome by the light that is Christ.

Some will try to extinguish it. When the baby grows up he will have enemies who will try to trick him and discredit him. They will even have him arrested and put to death, but his light will live and shine brighter in the resurrection.

And Satan and the world will try to extinguish the light in our lives. We will doubt and have sorrow. We will question and we will cry out: “I am afraid!”

Hear the voice of the angel say, “Do not be afraid.”

It is a message for us to hear, to hold, and to ponder in our hearts this night and all nights.

Jesus Christ has been born to dispel the darkness, to still all our fears, and to bring the immeasurable love of God into the world.

May you live fearlessly in light of God made flesh.

Amen and Merry Christmas.

Expecting

Advent 3 Year A

A sermon based on Isaiah 35:1-10; Luke 1:46b-55; and Matthew 11:2-11

In the name of Jesus; amen.

What are you expecting?

John the Baptist was sitting in prison. He had put his life on the line; in fact he would be losing it soon, based on his expectations. He had preached repentance based on the expectation that he was preparing the way for the Messiah to come into the world. He expected the Messiah would bring with him a baptism of fire to that would burn away the weeds of the world so that the good wheat would grow. It was a baptism of fire that would save the righteous and destroy the unrighteous, but so far this fiery baptism was filled with forgiveness and beatitudes.

It was not what he was expecting.

He, like others, had expected the Messiah to be more like a warrior, someone who would overthrow the oppressive leaders who ruled over them. He believed the prophecies of Isaiah; that God would come with vengeance and save them.

John had expected the Messiah to change the world order, but the only things that had changed in his world were his surroundings and his life expectancy.

What are you expecting?
What do you expect of Jesus?

John looked around at the walls of his prison and began to doubt that his expectations of who Jesus was were correct. It makes sense, he was in jail waiting for the moment when the executioner would arrive and take his life. He wanted to know if he was right, if he was going to die for the cause he had signed up for or if he was going to lose his life with unfulfilled hopes and expectations.

“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”

Our Psalm for today is the Magnificat. In Luke’s Gospel when Mary discovers that she is pregnant with the son of God she goes to visit one of her relatives named Elizabeth. Elizabeth is also pregnant for the first time, but Luke tells us that she is beyond childbearing years and the fact that she is pregnant is a miracle. The moment that Elizabeth sees Mary the baby in her womb starts to dance and she exclaims, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord." (Luke 1:42-45.)

In response Mary sings this song we call the Magnificat, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.”

The child who leapt in his mother’s womb is John who becomes the Baptizer. From before the time he was born he expected that Jesus was the one and now he wasn’t sure.

John’s expectations of the Messiah were exactly what everyone else’s were: he was supposed to be the one who would come and set things right politically and from that everything else would fall into place. He was supposed to be the king on the throne who would rule with justice and righteousness. He was a fulfillment of prophecy they trusted in and waited for anxiously.

What do you expect of Jesus?

This is the season of expectation. We can expect presents, long lines at the mall, houses lit up with multi-colored lights, family and friends to visit… but what do we expect of Jesus?

Our expectations grow out of our hopes. John hoped for the Messiah to come and expected it to be Jesus. When Jesus didn’t quite fit the picture that John had painted in his mind he worried that he had been wrong, but Jesus was right. Jesus was exactly right.

Our expectations and even our hopes of Jesus are only a shadow of who and what Jesus actually is. No one expected a king to be born in a manger, but he was. No one expected the Messiah would rule with forgiveness instead of vengeance and terrible recompense, but he did. No one expected that he would eat with sinners and treat women as equals, but that’s what he did. No one expected that he would eventually die on a cross or that he would rise from the dead, but that is exactly what Jesus did. And if you don’t expect that he will really come again… well, guess what? He will!

Jesus came to do more than fulfill our expectations; he came to give us new expectations of God and our neighbor and ourselves.

We can expect forgiveness. We can expect to be fed at the Lord’s table. We can expect to be loved more than we deserve. We can expect to be made holy. We can expect to be lifted up. We can expect to be called to serve. We can expect to work for peace. We can expect that we will be judged. We can expect that our judgment will be pardon. And we can expect that God is with us… now and forever.

Amen.

Fruit Worthy of Repentance

Advent 2 Year A


A sermon based on Isaiah 11:1-10 and Matthew 3:1-12



In the name of Jesus; amen.

How close are you to being ready?

Do you have your decorations done? Is your tree up? Have you finished shopping? Have you baked your cookies? Have you repented?

Today’s gospel tells us the story of the appearance of John the Baptist in the wilderness. John was a strange fellow who lived out in the dessert and ate bugs and dressed in uncomfortable clothes. He was Jesus’ cousin and the whole purpose of his life was to prepare the world for the coming of the Messiah.

The way he did that was by preaching a baptism of repentance.

Now this is a bit different from the baptism that we undergo. John’s baptism was more like a Jewish ritual that was performed to purify a person. It wasn’t a one time deal like we undergo when we are baptized into the faith. It wasn’t a baptism which promised forgiveness; it was a baptism that called the baptized to repentance.

It makes a great deal of sense that we read this particular story during Advent as we prepare for Christ’s coming into the world. Remember, Advent is not just the time before Christmas when we celebrate the birth of Jesus, but it is also the time that we focus on remembering that just as Christ has come into the world Christ will come again and bring about a new thing. This thing will be like what Isaiah talks about in our first reading when peace will reign in our nations and in creation itself.

Nothing we do can bring about that new thing; only God does that, but we are called to prepare for it by making God a priority in our lives and by repenting.

I want to be clear about repentance because John is pretty clear about our need to repent.

Theologian Richard Jensen says this about repentance:

“Repentance is often understood as an ‘I can’ experience. ‘I am sorry for my sins. I can do better. I can please you, God.’ So often we interpret repentance as our way of turning to God. That cannot be. Christianity is not about an individual turning to God. Christianity is about God turning to us.

“In repenting, therefore, we ask the God who has turned towards us, buried us in baptism and raised us to new life, to continue his work of putting us to death. Repentance is an ‘I can’t’ experience. To repent is to volunteer for death. Repentance asks that the ‘death of self’ which God began to work in us in baptism continue to this day. The repentant person comes before God saying, ‘I can’t do it myself, God. Kill me and give me new life. You buried me in baptism. Bury me again today. Raise me to a new life.’ This is the language of repentance.”

In this season of emphasis on everything we need, from iphones to perfect light displays we are reminded that what we need is God. We might be able to accomplish all the decorating, cookie baking, and present purchasing, but we cannot accomplish salvation.

There is a freedom in that; a freedom in the baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire that we are promised with Christ’s coming. There is a freedom in knowing that this is one thing that we cannot do when there is so much else that is expected of us in this life.

We cannot possibly accomplish all that would be required of us if it were up to us to earn our salvation. True repentance acknowledges this one simple fact: we cannot be good enough nor do enough to make us worthy enough.

This repentance, this acknowledgement levels the path straight to our hearts; it clears the way for God to come in and do what is necessary for us. Repentance frees us because as Jensen says, it kills us and lets God renew us.

And we need this renewal, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of the world. Our “I can’ts” become God’s cans working through us. We become fruitful the moment that we see our need for God; we become the fruit on the new branch of Jesse’s tree. We become food for the world through God’s doing.

The baptism which calls us into the family of God is a one time deal, but this baptism of repentance is a constant need. It is the water that renews us and creates in us a place for God to work through us.

May this time be a reminder of your need for God and may your need for God make you into fruit worthy of repentance and new life.

Amen.

Business as Usual

Advent 1 Year A

A Sermon based on Isaiah 2:1-5; Romans 13:11-14; and Matthew 24:36-44

In the name of Jesus; amen.

The holiday business as usual has begun: the shopping, the baking, the decorating, the partying and it is heaped on top of the usual business as usual: taking care of the kids, paying bills, going to work, watching the news, not getting enough sleep, grocery shopping, cleaning the house, and all the other things that are the day to day of our lives.

And so here is Advent, perhaps the most counter-cultural time of the church year, because it reminds us that God coming into the world is not business as usual.

It wasn’t business as usual for Isaiah who proclaimed God’s coming into the world would bring on a time when the world would disarm by beating their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Tools of war would become the tools of prosperity and harvest.

It wasn’t business as usual to Paul who wrote to the church at Rome saying the coming of the Lord was meant to be a time of awaking to a new way of life that was honorable and concerned itself not with gratifying our fleshy desires, but with putting on the Lord Jesus Christ.

And it wasn’t business as usual for Matthew who believed that when Christ came it would interrupt our lives right in the middle of our everyday occurrences.

Advent becomes a time to prepare and plan, not for presents under the tree and figurines of babies in a manger, but preparation for Christ to come again, an annual reminder that it will happen though no one, not even Jesus knows when that day or hour will take place.

Advent is not just the four Sundays before Christmas when we anxiously await the time we can sing all those beloved Christmas carols while being bombarded during the rest of the week with Feliz Navidad, and Frosty the Snowman over the loudspeakers at malls and shopping centers.

Advent is the time when we remember that the hope of Christmas is tied into a hope for Christ to come again into a world filled with too many weapons and too much debauchery.

Advent is a time of focus on a day far more important to prepare for than Christmas morning.

We know that the baby was born and we know that the baby turned into a man who healed and loved the outcast, who preached a new message about God and who eventually hung on the cross to die for our sins. But to know that this child will come again to proclaim a new all encompassing peace; that this Son of God will reappear to judge between the nations… we might claim to understand the concept, but knowing it the same way we know about the birth of the baby and his death as a man is a whole other thing.

This Sunday begins a new cycle in our lectionary, those readings that we hear every Sunday. Today begins a cycle of gospel readings from Matthew, a writer concerned with the fulfillment of the law and the coming of the kingdom. Matthew wrote to a Jewish audience who would have understood the language of the law and proclaimed a message of the necessity of including non-Jews in God’s saving plan.

The Magi come from different nations and at the end of his gospel Jesus says that the disciples should go out and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

We will hear a great deal about the law this coming year and with it stories of those who follow and those who are left behind just like in this morning’s gospel.

Biblical literalists have a lot to say about this text today. Their interpretation of this Matthean text is their basis for the rapture when suddenly righteous people disappear up into heaven and the rest are left behind to deal with the apocalypse.

But the word we translate from the Greek, paralambanomai, into taken does not mean “to go up,” but “to go along with.”

Then two will be in the field; one will go along with and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together; one will go along with and one will be left.
Christ will come again in the middle of our everyday business as usual and invite us to go along with him. The sorrow of this text, according to Matthew, is the idea that there will be some who will not take the opportunity to go along with Christ, but will remain, left behind in their business as usual.

This time and these texts we hear throughout Advent serve as a reminder that God comes when we least expect and not necessarily at the most convenient time. And when God comes there will be a call to come along with, to drop what we are doing and follow. It’s a reminder of true priority, not just to squeeze in time for God in our busy schedules but to expect God at all times and in everything we do.

May these weeks serve you in your preparation for Christ to come into your lives and may they strengthen you as you serve your call to follow him.

Amen.