Category Archives: The Liturgical Year

The Truth about Love: A Resurrection Sermon

Posted by on March 31, 2013 4 comments

And now, after the end, now at the beginning, will shall speak, yet again of Love. Love eludes us. Only slightly more frequently and more intensely does love seize us, make us love’s own in the very moment when we find ourselves most lethargic, most unable to take another step. At the moment when we know nothing of love, love owns us, makes us transparent to the actions and call of love.

Love is implacable. It will be satisfied with nothing other than the complete consumption of our whole self, indeed of the very notion of self. Love cares not for our self-thought, cares not for our constant introspection. Love is movement, the movement that happens precisely as our bitterness, anger, sorrow, and rage seem to consume every fiber of our being. Love is the short-circuit that somehow breaks through, somehow catches hold when every element of our feelings are captive entirely to hate, cynicism, rage, futility, tears.

Love brings us to our knees, draws forth our hands, making them to reach out in both supplication, and in service, precisely at the moment when all that we are clenches our fists. Love brings us to tears when our eyes have never been more tightly shut. Love is an openness that flows nonsensically, from a frozen, cold, dead, unopenable heart.

Love is slavery. A slavery more mysterious, more nonsensical than any we have known till now. It is the slavery of joy, a joy that persists in the face of all sorrow. It is not taught. It cannot be learned. The slavery of love cannot be bought, obtained, trained for, or made real by any power or process we could devise. One never knows it until it happens, until it takes hold. When suddenly, in a moment that calls for nothing other than wisdom, for measured, well-thought out decision-making, there isn’t even the faintest hint of a decision to be made. In that moment all that stands before us is the inevitability of the call of love. The call that can only call forth in us the response of obedience: “Here am I! Send me!”

Love is freedom. It is a freedom that persists in the midst of grief. It is a liberation that persists, dwells, never forsakes those who suffer at the hands of its call. Love is the liberation of the traumatized, the forsaken, the forgotten. But more than that love is the liberation from our petty dramas unto a life of self-abandonment. It is a freedom that breaks every fetter, save for the fetter that it, itself is. It makes all else irrelevant, inconsequential, utterly bereft of power. The freedom of love is the freedom from being held back, even by one’s most deep-seated pathologies, sins, violences, lies, and dysfunctions. The freedom of love is liberation unto gift, mission, shouts of praise—amidst the fullness of lament, protest, rage, and yearning that this world might give way to the coming Kingdom.

Love is desperation. Love screams for the consummation of its promises. Love never ossifies. Love calls forth, unceasingly. Love demands that love alone remain. Love cannot be contained, cannot be limited, cannot be reasonably dispensed, cannot be orderly. Love, being love, can do nothing other than demand, proclaim, and scream for its sovereignty, its victory, its fullness.

Love is hope. Love believes a future when the foundations crumble and explode all around us. Love believes a future when we sit in dust and ashes. Love screams against any resignation that would see our present distress as the final word. Love is a senseless, stupid hope, a hope against hope that there yet is another Word, a dawning Kingdom, a New Creation, a making right that is coming, and that cannot be stopped.

Love is boldness. It is a boldness that remains in the face of insurmountable fatigue. It is that small, imperceptible movement, that unnoticeable gesture of a hand, raising itself in protest against death. It is a resolve that remains when all reasons for hope have vanished from memory and thought. Love believes all things.

Love suffers. Love that does not suffer is no love at all. Suffering is the mark of true love. All love that seeks to hold itself back from suffering is the most repulsive of lies, the most abominable of counterfeits. No, love is only as it places itself in the path of pain, only as it abandons its safety, its desires, its rights, its reasonable requests, it’s hopes for satisfaction, for respite, for being cared for in return. Love is love when all these things melt away in the sheer gravity of Love’s imperative. Love is love when it suffers freely, asking nothing in return, save only to be remembered.

Love dies. Power triumphs over love. Love is trampled underfoot. It is the destiny of love to be defeated. Love is love precisely in that it gives itself over to defeat rather than dominate another. Love that refuses death has nothing to do with love. Love comes to an end because its gaze always lies outside itself. Love cannot secure its own survival, indeed, love is nothing less than the rejection of survival as a thing to be pursued. Loved only pursues the other. Love lives only for them.

Love rises. Love triumphs over death, over power, over reason, over fairness, over hate, over nature, over logic. The love that suffers, the love that dies, that very love has complete victory. Love is the movement from an unimaginable, extinguished future to a confidence that nothing shall ever separate us. Love is resurrection. It is the cry for resurrection and the coming of resurrection. It is death and life, abandonment and salvation.

Love will never leave us alive. Love will kill us. To love is to die. To love is to lose. To love is to weep, scream, and yearn for a victory that we can never own, never produce, never anticipate. To love is to give ourselves up to death.

Love will leave no one among the dead. Love will not finish its work until death itself is defeated. Love is death’s death. To love is to rise. To love is to have nothing, yet possess everything. To love is to have one’s tears wiped away, to shout for joy, to rejoice in a victory that we never owned, did not produce, and did not anticipate. To love is to be caught up, inexplicably in an indestructible life.
To love is to die alone, forsaken by God and humans alike. To love is to be resurrected into a life beyond anything we could ask or think. To love is to share the ambiguity, suffering, death, and future of Jesus of Nazareth.

Love is never something we do, never a practice we perform, never a thing we learn, never a craft in which we become proficient. Love is an inexplicable, unconscionable, and immoral grace that we learn only by undergoing it. Love is what God does to us, for us, with us, in us, and on our behalf. Love is God’s robbing us over ourselves, our sin, our power, our narratives of success, of victimhood, of all forms of self-seeking.

Love is the suffering of God. Love is the power that lies beyond all powers. It is the power of God to abandon everything for the sake of the worthless, the rebellious, the sinners, the unclean. Love is God’s refusal to let go of even one of us wayward creatures. Love is what God puts Godself through so that we might never be separated from God.

Love finds us. The only thing more true than love’s elusiveness is its coming to us in power. We are those who have been seized be love. In spite of ourselves—and really, really, it is in spite of ourselves—we have been found by love. Oh how love could be dismissed as foolishness had it not so surely found us! Had it not stormed forth from the tomb, wounds and all and gone ahead of us to Galilee! How easy it would be to brush it off and move one with real life had we not been found, been seized, been transfigured, been redeemed, been unforgettably loved, and loved yet again! How easy it would have been!

But such easy paths are no longer possible for us. Something far more difficult, and infinitely more wonderful has happened to us. We have been found by love. Our bloodlines have been redrawn by the coming of Love. Our flesh, our bodies have been claimed by the fire of an unquenchable love. We are left in the wilderness of love. We are left clinging to each other as the death continues to rise up in our sinews and souls. We weep together, we bleed together, we die together, we live together, we laugh together, we sing together, we shout together. We are together. And this is the work of love. And this love will triumph, for in Jesus, it has.

Christ’s baptism, Christ’s confession

Posted by on January 8, 2012 1 comment

A fitting reflection I think, for this Sunday, the Baptism of the Lord:

When He had Himself baptised with water by John, Jesus confessed both God and [humankind]. A better way of putting it is that because He confessed God, the God whose will was soon to be done on earth as it is in heaven, therefore He confessed [humankind], the [humans] who are in view in this doing of God’s will. Because He is committed unreservedly to subordination to God, therefore He is committed unreservedly to solidarity with [humankind]. He who as God’s Son was very different from all [people], being one with the Father who sent Him, and therefore Himself God, negated this difference, this distance, this strangeness between Himself and others, even to the last remnant. He became wholly and utterly one of them, not in an act of secret or even public condescension, like a king for a change donning a beggar’s rags and mingling with the crowd, but by belonging to them in every way, by being no more and no less than one of them, by having no point of reference except to them. He became one of them, not in order to renounce full fellowship with them when the game was over, like the king exchanging again the beggar’s rags for his kingly robes, not in order to leave again the table where He had seated Himself with publicans and sinners , and to find himself a better place, but in order to be one of them definitively as well as originally, unashamed to call them brethren to all eternity because He was their Brother from all eternity (Heb. 2:11), a veritable King in this true form of His, and at His place of honour. With the men of His people, then, He received the Word of God which came to John and to which John bore witness. With them He looked forward to the intimated new act of God which would change all things. With them He looked forward to the establishment of God’s kingdom, the threatened judgment, the remission and taking away of their sins. With them He obeyed the call for conversion issued to his people. With all the rest He had Himself baptised with water. With them He thus confessed His sins. His sins? If we do not say this, we question and even deny the totality of His self-giving to [humankind], and therewith the totality of His self-giving to God. We say that He had Himself baptised with the rest only improperly, contrary to the meaning of John’s preaching and baptism, in a demonstration which had neither truth nor necessity for Him. We say at root that this was just a theatrical show. But it was not a theatrical show. The seriousness with which others, frightened before God and setting their hope in Him alone, confessed their sins, is infinitely surpassed hereby the divine earnestness with which this One, when faced by the sins of all others, their confusions and corruptions, their big and little acts of ungodliness, did not let these sins be theirs, did not regard, bewail or judge them from a distance with tacit or open accusation, did not simply characterise them as sins by His own Otherness, but as the Son of His Father, elected and ordained from all eternity to be the Brother of these fatal brethren, caused them to be His own sins, confessed them as such, and therewith confessed that He was baptised in prospect of God’s kingdom, judgment and forgiveness. No one who came to the Jordan was as laden and afflicted as He. No one was as needy. No one was so utterly human, because so wholly fellow-human. No one confessed his sins so sincerely, so truly as his own, without side-glances at others. He stands alone in this, He who was elected and ordained from all eternity to partake of the sin of all in His own person, to bear its shame and curse in the place of all, to be the man responsible for all, and as such, wholly theirs, to live and act and suffer. This is what Jesus began to do when He had Himself baptised by John with all the others. This was the opening of His history as the salvation history of all the others.

~Karl Barth, CD IV/4, 58-59.

Advent and the end of religion

Posted by on November 27, 2011 10 comments

There’s a somewhat famous quote from Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison (November 21, 1943, pp. 188-89) on the nature of Advent: “By the way, a prison cell like this is a good analogy for Advent; one waits, hopes, does this or that — ultimately negligible things — the door is locked and can only be opened from the outside.”

Interestingly in the same letter Bonhoeffer mentions how much he misses table fellowship and how he’s begun praying Luther’s morning and evening blessing every day. He then says: “Don’t be alarmed! I will definitely not come out here as a ‘homo religiosus’! Quite the opposite: my suspicion and fear of ‘religiosity’ has become greater here than ever.” So then, perhaps we must say that Advent, according to Bonhoeffer’s prior analogy, as a prison cell that can only be opened from outside, should be seen as the end of religion. All religion must have a door that can, at least partially be opened from the inside. Advent proclaims the end of religion as such, speaking of a God who must come to us wholly from beyond us.

To retreat into the comfort of religiosity, the smooth apologetic for Christianity that arises from proclaiming homo religiosus (or its more trendy equivalent these days, homo liturgicus) is to retreat from the very hope of Advent itself, the hope against hope that cannot be satisfied by out own designs, but only by the earth-shattering coming of God in Jesus.

Good Friday

Posted by on April 22, 2011 1 comment

Ethics and religion and church all go in this direction: from the human to God. Christ, however, speaks only and exclusively of the line from God to human beings, not of some human path to God, but only of God’s own path to humans. Hence it is also fundamentally wrong to seek a new morality in Christianity. In actual practice, Christ offered hardly any ethical prescriptions not already attested among his contemporary Jewish rabbis or even in pagan literature. The essence of Christianity is found in its message about the sovereign God to whom alone, above the entire world, all honor is due; it is a message about the eternally other, the God removed from the world who from the primal ground of his being has loving compassion for those who render honor to him alone, the God who traverses the path to human beings in order to find there vessels of that honor precisely where human beings are nothing, where they fall silent, where they give space to God alone.

Here the light of eternity falls upon that which is eternally disregarded, the eternally insignificant, the weak, ignoble, unknown, the least of these, the oppressed and despised: here that light radiates out over the houses of the prostitutes and tax collectors . . . here that light pours out from eternity upon the working, toiling, sinning masses. The message of grace travels over the dull sultriness of the big cities but remains standing before the houses of those who spiritually speaking are satisfied, knowing, and possessing. It pronounces upon the death of people and nations its eternal: I have loved you from eternity; stay with me, and you will live. Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued. What is weak shall become strong through God, and what dies shall live.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “The Essence of Christianity.” In Barcelona, Berlin, New York: 1928-1931. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008. pp. 354-55.

Remember that you are dust

Posted by on March 14, 2011 6 comments

Last Wednesday I facilitated much of our church’s observance of Ash Wednesday, leading out in the reading of Scripture, confession, and the application of ashes. I have done this many years before and it has always been a profound time of mediation on the salvation of the Gospel, but this year it was unique. For the first time it was I alone who applied the ashes, meaning that I got to apply them to every person in the congregation (a mere 20 people, perhaps not a great feat by conventional counting standards, but still).

This meant not only applying the ashes and declaring to my loved ones (almost all of whom I’ve known deeply for years), “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return,” but helping many of them kneel and get back to their feet without falling down. In the time I’ve known so many people in my church I’ve seen people get much further along in years and watched their health change (and watched one sister die). Declaring their mortality to them as I supported their weight, clasping their arm to keep them from falling or slipping — that was a different experience. The proclamation of mortality was so much more deeply real, not because of anything in the liturgy, but because of the truly real, truly tangible presence of Christ to me in these concrete people with whom I am united.

Feeling the trembling hands and supporting the feeble knees of people I have known for years,  telling them that they are destined to return to dust, and that our sole hope lies in God’s utterly new act of resurrection from the dead, that was something beautiful and frightening to me. I knew as I applied the ashes and spoke those words that I would walk with these people through their deaths and visit their graves when they quite literally have returned to dust. I knew then, once again, how deeply vulnerable and defenseless we all are before the ravages of this broken world. And I knew then, once again, that in these broken vessels, in the process of returning to dust, was the light of Christ, the bringer of new creation, new life, and unlimited hope, a hope that is not seen.

And save us when we fall

Posted by on March 10, 2011 Comments Off

Thanks to Jason for posting this confession, which I utilized last night in our Ash Wednesday service (which went very well, I believe). A worth confession for many of us indeed.

Vision and mirage

Lord Jesus, you have faced temptation;
you know how difficult it can be
to distinguish between vision and mirage,
between truth and falsehood.

Lord, help us when we are tempted:
And save us when we fall.

Help us in the church:
when we confuse absence of conflict with the peace of God;
when we equate the shaping of ecclesiastical structures with serving you in the world;
when we imagine that our task is to preserve rather than to put at risk;
when we behave as though your presence in life were a past event rather than a contemporary encounter.

Lord, help us when we are tempted:
And save us when we fall.

Help us in the world:
when we use meaningless chatter to avoid real dialogue;
when we allow the image presented by the media to blind us to the substance that lies behind it;
when we confuse privilege with responsibility, and claim rights when we should acknowledge duties;
when we allow high-sounding reasons to cover evil actions.

Lord, help us when we are tempted:
And save us when we fall.

We pray for all who have been brought to the edge of their endurance;
for those whose pain is unending;
for those for whom the earth is a cruel desert and existence a constant struggle against overwhelming odds;
for those who suffer through their own folly or through the malice or folly of others.

Lord, help us when we are tempted:
And save us when we fall.

Lord Jesus, you have passed through the test of suffering,
and are able to help those who are meeting their test now.

Lord, help us when we are tempted:
And be with us to the end.

– Terry C. Falla, ed., Be Our Freedom Lord: Responsive Prayers and Readings for Contemporary Worship (Adelaide: OpenBook Publishers, 1994), 306–7.

The impotence of the liturgical year

Posted by on December 22, 2010 82 comments

Around Advent a lot gets written about the importance of the liturgical year. Advent is the Christian New Year. It marks the beginning of our true, authentic, Christian time. And marking time according to our Christian calendar offers us a way of forming our lives that resists the machinations of corporate capitalism, the nation state, etc. I’ve spoken like this for years myself.

I’ve been a part of a church community that very rigorously follows the liturgical year for nearly a decade. I love the liturgical year. I’ve taught a year-long class on it using (among other things) Robert Webber’s popular book Ancient-Future Time as a text. For the last four years I’ve made sure to be a part of planning and facilitating our Holy Week celebration because I so deeply love that time and all it witnesses to.

Okay, so that’s my Christian year street cred. Do with it what you will.

In light of what I’ve experienced in practicing this way of keeping time and in the many theological and philosophical books currently in vogue that have a strong emphases on the liturgical year, I’ve come to have some doubts about its ability to do all we tend to hope. The Christian year we are told, forms us differently than the secular calendar, it immerses us in the story of Jesus and the church, training us to resist other loyalties, allegiances, priorities, and practices. This is commonly accepted in certain theological circles these days.

This claim, however, somehow seems to avoid being put to any empirical testing even though it is an empirical claim. The argument is made that liturgy does in fact form and shape a people that resist global capitalism, aren’t seduced by American militarism, and so on, and yet when asked where this particular liturgy-formed people is, there is usually just some quick excuses and then a return to extolling the virtues of the liturgy. Maybe the reason is that the liturgy that most Christian communities practice has been corrupted by secular calendars and methods. But empirically there’s not really any evidence for churches with untouched, uncorrupted liturgies birthing people who live more faithfully. There’s no sign that high church liturgies that haven’t been influenced by “the world” inherently produce social bodies that do all the things liturgical enthusiasts insist are encoded into the liturgy. One could cite the massive amounts of pristine and pure liturgy that went on in the Medieval Crusades, Hitler’s Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, or the famous scene in The Godfather when Michael Corleone renounces Satan and all his works as his minions slaughter his rivals.

My point is simply this: liturgical enthusiasts claim that practicing liturgy (and the Christian year in particular) effects an empirical change on the faithfulness of the church in the world. It does something, we are told. And yet it doesn’t. And when asked about this inconsistency such enthusiasts give very scant answers. The fact is that, as far as I can see, the correlation between Christian faithfulness and liturgical observance doesn’t really exist in any meaningful way. There is rampant unfaithfulness in churches with the best and most uncorrupted liturgy and there is remarkable faithfulness and vitality in churches who have the most compromised and immaterial worship forms around. And vice versa. As such I see no reason to be persuaded that liturgy does what its enthusiasts claim.

To be clear, I’m not saying that liturgical practices are bad or something, or that observing the Christian year is not a good thing. Only that it doesn’t “just do it” the way it is popular to imagine these days. It suffers from the same vulnerability as all our attempts to fashion a common life together, not merely that it might become stained and corrupted by secular calendars, but that it might become, in itself an object of hope that we reify. We need much more humility, much more realism about our claims for what things like the liturgical calendar can do. To be sure God can and does meet us in worship, but more often than not it is a meeting like that of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist with the Lord (Luke 1:8-20). While burning incense, going about the usual liturgical practices of their calendar, this priest was confronted, unprecedentedly with the Word of God in a meeting that terrified, overwhelmed, and left him literally speechless. It is in this coming of God, this free coming that we must place our hope, not in the “work” of our fragile attempts to offer praise. To the extent that our “work,” our liturgy becomes our answer to the problem of Christian faithfulness, we offer a different answer than that of the gospel.

With all that in mind, recognizing the impotence of the liturgical year to do what some enthusiasts would like it to, I suggest that Advent would be better spent talking about God than about our calendar and how we imagine it organizes us and sets us in the right over against the corrupt world. We do better to simply cry out for God’s coming than to make peace with God’s absence by fixating on our celebrations, with all their traditions and trappings. This impotence is built into the Christian year itself. It has always been meant to be something we simply look through, are helped along by, not something we look at, something we assign divine agency to, or hope in. Advent does not want us to talk about calendars and what they might do for us. It wants us to talk about God, to cry out for God, to long for God, to have literally no hope if God is not coming to us in a way exceedingly abundantly beyond all that we could every ask or think — even in our greatest liturgical calendars and celebrations.

The Prayer of Holy Saturday

Posted by on April 3, 2010 Comments Off

Triune God, who loves in freedom and hast chosen us from all eternity to be your creatures and your partners: in humility majestic and in powerlessness almighty, you have made our humanity your own.  In Jesus, you came closer to us than we are to ourselves, yet more like us though so greatly different from us; and in him rejected by his own and destroyed by law, religion, politics, you lived our life, you died our death, and you occupied our grave.

God the Son, for us, between your dying and rising, you lay buried in a tomb and descended into hell.  Cursed for our sin and extinguished by our perishing, you suffered all our agonies of pain and judgment and abandonment, succumbing to the evil one who held us in the grip of fear and guilt, and our world in bondage to injustice and to death.

God the Father, for us you freely gave up your beloved Son, sacrificed and surrendered him to death; and thus bereft, you added to our tears of shame, bewilderment and rage your own infinity of broken-heartedness and indignation at the tragic, proud estrangement of your children, and the wasteful corruption of your beautiful creation.

God the Spirit, for us you held together the forsaking Father and forsaken Son with unifying, resurrecting bonds of love, while death’s hostility, our hearts of sin, and all the hatred of a crooked universe tore your divine family asunder.  And still you groan beyond all utterance for creation’s liberation, interceding for your church when our faith stumbles and our tongues fall silent before the continuing tyranny of evil.

God the Three-in-One, whose unity is realized in communal exchange between the Father, Son and Spirit; eternal Lord, whose changeless, ever changing being is fulfilled in the dynamic of history and becoming: across the abyss of separation on the cross and in the grave you have reconciled the world and swallowed up our death, making space for our humanity within your divine community.  Hear our prayer for a world still living an Easter Saturday existence, oppressed and lonely, guilty of godlessness and convinced of godforsakenness.  Be still tomorrow the God you are today, and yesterday already were: God with us in the grave, but pulling the sting of death and promising in your final kingdom an even greater victory of abundant grace and life over the magnitude of sin and death.

And for your blessed burial, into which we were baptized, may you be glorified for evermore.  Amen.

~ Alan Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection, 455. (Repost)

It really is Good Friday

Posted by on April 2, 2010 5 comments

The glory of God that calls forth our worship is not God’s absoluteness, that is, not an identity perfected by secure possession of it. God is not God because God holds the divine identity and does not let anyone else have it. That is the mark of Satan. God is God because God shares that identity, the Father with the Son, and through the Son the Father with us. Here is a very different image of the meaning of God as the foundation of the universe and, therefore, of our own lives. God then is the power to communicate life. God’s will is the will to communicate life. In this regard we believe that Jesus in his dying is doing God’s will and is revealing God’s wonderfulness. Therefore, it really is Good Friday! You don’t have to wait for Sunday; it’s really Good Friday. There are dreadful aspects, the human barbarity, but these dreadful aspects are not at the center. And to us the Eucharist, the bread and wine which we eat and drink, represents to us Christ’s death as life-giving, self-giving expenditure. That is why in our communities we eat to represent his death.

Arthur McGill, Death and Life: An American Theology, 78.

A very different power

Posted by on March 30, 2010 2 comments

This is one of my favorite quotes from Alan Lewis’s superb book, Between Cross and Resurrection. I figured it was definitely worth reposting this week:

It is a very different God, and a very different power, that we have discovered in the story of divine self-emptying, God’s capacity for weakness, the ability - without loss of Godness – to suffer and perhaps to die. This is the triune God of Jesus, fulfilled, majestic, glorified through self-expenditure in the lowly ignominy of our farthest country. There is power here, resurrecting, death-destroying, Devil-defeating; but it is the power of love, defying human expectation, which flowers in contradiction and negation, allowing sin its increase and giving death its day of victory, but only the more abundantly to outstrip both in the fecundity of grace and life. To live in the face of death an Easter Saturday existence, trusting in the weak but powerful love of the crucified and buried God, is itself to be objective, turned outward, away from self-reliance and self-preoccupation, away from our own determination to conquer death, which is in fact self-defeating and destructive. Instead, we are invited bravely and with frankness to admit or own defenselessness against the foe and entrust our self and destiny to the love of God which in its defenselessness proves creative and victorious.

Alan Lewis, Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 431.

Holy Week Sermons

Posted by on March 30, 2010 1 comment

In light of the events to come this week, here are some of my sermons and talks from past Holy Week celebrations.

How to be reflective and thoughtful about Lent

Posted by on February 17, 2010 5 comments

Just follow Micheal’s advice.

How to be a complete moron about Lent

Posted by on February 17, 2010 48 comments

Just follow Jim West’s Nadab’s advice.

The Kingdom of God is Coming! And it is Coming for You!

Posted by on December 24, 2009 7 comments

A Christmas Eve Sermon by Nate Kerr.

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered.  This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria.  All went to their own towns to be registered.  Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn. In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “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.  This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.”  And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”  When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them. After eight days had passed, it was time to circumcise the child; and he was called Jesus, the name given by the angel before he was conceived in the womb. (Luke 2:1-21)

During this advent season, I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about the name that is given to this one that is to be born of Mary, this Savior, this Lord.  The name is “Jesus.”  Yes, this is the name – “Jesus” – that my mind has been given to think over and over these past few weeks, not “Christ.”  (I’ll have to admit, in my own mind and thought, I haven’t been doing my part to keep “Christ” in “Christ-mas.”)  It is not that I don’t think Jesus is the Christ!  Indeed, I do!  But it is because I am convinced that Jesus — this child who grew up to be a man, this human being born of the virgin Mary, this one who was born in a town called Bethlehem and whose life really was threatened by a king named Herod in childhood, and who eventually was hounded by the religious and political powers of his day to the point of death – it is because I am convinced that it is this Jesus and this Jesus alone that is the Christ that I’ve been thinking so much about this name “Jesus.”  Specifically, I’ve wondered why it is that the story of this one’s birth culminates with giving him this name.  And so as I’ve given myself to thinking about this name “Jesus” during this advent season, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in that part of the gospel story where Mary is visited by the angel, and is told that this one to be born to her should be named “Jesus,” for “he will save his people from their sins.”  This is what Matthew tells about the importance of the name “Jesus.”  And this makes perfect sense.  For the name “Jesus” just means, after all, “the one who saves.”

But what does this mean?  Certainly, we could think of all kinds of ways in which we use the phrase “Jesus saves.”  And if we were honest with ourselves, we’d probably have to admit that more often than not the way we use that phrase has more to do with our own hopes and dreams and fuzzy warm feelings than with what Jesus’ life itself tells us about the nature of “salvation.”  So thinking about this name “Jesus” leads us immediately to ask:  What is the nature of the salvation that we are to expect from this one whose name means “the one who saves”?  And this question leads us to another passage that is at the heart of the Christmas story, that of the annunciation or the visit of the angel to Mary, which is a story that we often read early in advent season as a way of getting on to the good stuff – the birth itself.  But if “Jesus” was the name given to Mary by the angel, perhaps we should go back and consider from the beginning what Mary herself understood this name to mean.  And so we are led to Luke 1:38-55, which includes the famous “Magnificat” or “song of praise” which Mary offered up to God upon receiving the news that she will give birth to the Savior.  And these are the words that we read:

In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit  and exclaimed with a loud cry, “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.”  And Mary  said, “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name.  His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.  He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

It hardly needs comment; and it is rather sad that it needs saying.  But we should not just say it, we should proclaim it:  This is the gospel!  This is the good news of Christmas! This is the salvation that we speak of when we say that Jesus is the Christ, that Jesus is Lord!  Salvation means justice!  Salvation means peace!  Salvation means healing and reconciliation! In a word, salvation means liberation, freedom – freedom from the death-dealing powers of this world and freedom for a new world, a new creation in which the dead have life, the poor have hope, the sick have healing, the oppressed and captive have release!

And this is what is so important about the name “Jesus” – the name Jesus tells us a story, a story about the concrete ways in which salvation happens, about when and where Jesus’ Lordship is proclaimed and embodied.  I mean, think about this story:  To be born, God inhabits the belly of a virgin and in the form of Mary and her faithful husband walks right into the middle of Bethlehem, during tax-season, right into the middle of the worst economic oppression imaginable, where the poor get poorer and the rich get richer.  God in the form of the wise men walks right into the palace of Herod, perhaps the most blood-thirsty and power-hungry king of his time, and announces that a new King has arrived on the scene.  God in Jesus becomes an emigrant from his homeland, escaping to Egypt and eventually to Nazareth, so that upon his return to Jerusalem he might be crucified as nothing but an immigrant Jew.  This is the story of Christmas, this is the story of Jesus – in Jesus, God identifies with the economically oppressed, the poor; God identifies with an oppressed people under the rule of a tyrant government; God identifies with the immigrant and outcast, the oppressed races of an increasingly racist society.  And to these oppressed people Jesus grows up and says:  “The Kingdom of God is coming!  And it is coming for you!”

So, you might be wondering, what does all of this have to say about how we as a church “celebrate” Christmas?  Tonight we gather in anticipation of Jesus’ coming; tomorrow we will celebrate that coming.   But listen closely to Mary’s song.  Mary does not say that Christmas is a time for us to celebrate with soothing upbeat pop songs and shiny wrapping paper, but with the scattering of the proud.  Mary does not say that Christmas is a time for us to feel good and to think “everything will be okay,” but for the powerful to be brought down and the lowly to be lifted up.  Mary does not say that Christmas is a time for those with full stomachs to fill their plates with second helpings, but a time for the hungry to be filled with good things.  Certainly, many of us will experience all of these things tomorrow – we will exchange gifts with shiny paper and bows; we will listen, sing along with, and perhaps even dance to familiar and joyful songs; we will feel good and upbeat for a few hours in the midst of what might otherwise for many of us be a most miserable and depressing time; we will eat good food and we will enjoy it shamelessly!  And this is all right and good, to the extent that in doing all of this we are celebrating the fact that indeed Jesus has come, the Kingdom has arrived, and indeed we are called to remember that we were once lost and now are found, that we were once slaves to powers from which we have been liberated!  But this celebration is only truly a celebration as long as it includes genuine anticipation – anticipation of the ways in which Jesus today, just as he did 2,000 years ago, walks into the midst of the powers of this world and brings liberation, healing, and the transformation to lost and broken lives.  And so we will only celebrate faithfully tomorrow if we celebrate in the mode of what Mary calls the “fear of the Lord.”  We will only celebrate faithfully when we recognize and remember that there are those amongst us – perhaps sitting right next to us – who will not be given presents with shiny wrappers; who will not sing songs and play games and laugh; who will not eat to fullness.  And in remembering this, we will only celebrate faithfully when we realize that this isn’t really our true Christmas celebration, that our celebration does not end here but only begins, and that our true celebration happens beyond the walls of our churches and homes.  We will be celebrating faithfully tomorrow when we remember that the church celebrates Christmas when, in the midst of an increasingly failing economy, the church understands ‘property’ as that which is to be given away rather than being hoarded for the sake of securing profit and comfort; or when, in the midst of an increasingly broken healthcare system, she attends to the broken bodies in her midst and makes sure of their healing; or when, in the face of an increasingly unjust penal system, the church visits prisoners and speaks a word of unheard of reconciliation; or when, as citizens of a country increasingly concerned with securing its borders and keeping out foreigners, she welcomes the immigrant (legal or not) into her homes and buildings; or when, or when, while as inhabitants of a political world order determined to identify its enemies in order to kill them, the church embodies the gospel truth that the only  enemies one knows are those that are to be loved and forgiven.

That is the good news of the gospel.  That is the Christian message. That is the life that this one man named “Jesus” lived.  And that is how the church, as the body of Christ, celebrates Christmas today – no matter what we may do in our homes and with our families tomorrow.   This is how the church is to celebrate Christmas:  the church itself comes to be identified by story of Jesus – in Jesus, the church identifies with the economically oppressed, the poor; in Jesus, the church identifies with oppressed people under the rule of tyrant governmental powers; in Jesus, the church identifies with the immigrant and outcast, the oppressed races of an increasingly racist society.  And to these oppressed people the church stands up and says:  “The Kingdom of God is coming!  And it is coming for you!”

Easter Report

Posted by on April 13, 2009 24 comments

This is an open thread for people to describe their Easter experiences this year. The (western) church’s most developed, profound, and meaningful times of worship, proclamation, and prayers occurred yesterday. What did people hear, see, smell, touch, discover in the experience of Holy Week this year?

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