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dropping our guard

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

I found some new things (well, new to me) as I read the story of Jesus’ baptism this year. Here’s what I said in my sermon.

___________________________

When it comes to Bible stories, particularly the ones we have heard during Advent and Christmas, and now going into the season after Epiphany, we often carry a sense of familiarity, as though we really understand the details of the story. We forget to remember that we don’t really have a grasp of what life was like in first century Palestine. We don’t often think about what people ate, or what their houses were like, what they did for work, or remember that they had to walk to get from place to place.

For the most part, the gospel accounts are not concerned with many of those details. As we have noticed before, they leave out a lot of stuff, from how much time has passed between events to the tone with which things were said.

Keep that in mind as we look at and listen to John the Baptist as he spoke to those who had come to be baptized. First of all, understand that he was at the Jordan River, which was close to the distance of a marathon from Jerusalem. Most everyone who came out to hear him had walked there and would have to walk home. There were no hotels along the river, nor were their restaurants. Yet, Luke says, crowds came. They wanted to hear what he had to say.

And John greeted them by saying, “You children of vipers!” (Probably not the welcome they had hoped for.) Then he told them they needed to repent—to change their hearts and minds—or they would be cut down like a dead tree and used for firewood. (Another comforting image.)

We might expect that they would have been at least taken aback, if not offended by his words; instead, they wanted to know more. (Which might have surprised John.)

They said, “Okay—so what should we do?” Don’t just yell at us–help us understand how to change.

That’s what the word repent meant in those days: to change your heart and mind. We are accustomed to thinking it means to be sorry for what we have done wrong, but it is larger than that, and more hopeful. John wasn’t calling them to simply be remorseful, he was calling them to pay attention to their lives and their relationships, to not allow themselves to simply go through the motions, to take an honest look at their lives and do things differently.

In response to their questions, he gave them practical things to do to help them understand what a changed life looked like: if you have more than you need, share it; don’t cheat others in your business for your own gain; and don’t use your power to your advantage.

All of those changes meant letting go of the way they were used to living, and to make changes that needed to happen; still, another word for change is loss. To change the way we live means to lose our comfort and the way we are used to being in the world.

Not too many chapters away from where we read this morning, Jesus said, “Lose your life to find it,” which is another way of calling us to change.

Now I get to tell you my favorite thing that I learned this week.

Our word lose comes from an old Norse word that meant “to disband an army.”
What it means to lose our lives is to disband our security forces, to let go of what we think we need to be safe so we can find out what it means to be faithful and compassionate.

We get lost in other ways as well. In our hymn “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling,” we sing of being “lost in wonder, love, and praise,” which means dropping our guard so that we can truly feel the presence of God. We can lose ourselves in a piece of music or a great story. When we are with the ones we love, we lose track of time.

As I offer those images, I don’t want to overly romanticize what it means to lose someone or something. My mother would have been 93 today. She died nine years ago this week. Since her death, my brother and I have both had to learn how to disband the armies we used to distance ourselves from each other and learn how to be family.

To disband our armies, for whatever reason, means to leave ourselves unprotected, which is risky and scary and hopeful all at once. And when we choose to feel vulnerable, love finds us.

The way the gospel writers tell it, Jesus didn’t make the trip out to the Jordan to see his cousin just to put on a show. He came to be baptized. He came to mark a change in his life, to repent. For thirty years he had lived in Nazareth. We don’t know what he was doing, though we could guess he might have worked with Joseph as a carpenter. And then he made a change—he repented—and that started with coming for baptism. He was not the same after that.

Luke doesn’t have all of the details included in the other gospels, but the image he paints is interesting. Look at the phrasing in the verse: “When everyone was being baptized and Jesus also was baptized and was praying, the heavens opened up.” Much like we said when we talked about the scene of Jesus’ birth and new understanding that the Greek word doesn’t mean inn, but means “a guest room,” which meant Jesus was born in the middle of a crowd, his baptism was in the context of a larger community as well.

There in the middle of the swirl of people and water, Jesus (and perhaps everyone else) felt the breath of God and heard a voice say, “You are the child I dearly love; I find delight in you.”

The story with John calling people baby snakes and ends with God saying, “It’s you! I ADORE you!” in response to Jesus’ commitment to change—his repentance—so he could grasp who he (and everyone else) were in God’s eyes.

Jesus walked back from the Jordan as a changed person, as we shall see in the weeks to come as we move through Luke’s gospel. He began to teach and preach and travel in ways he had not done before. When he finally got back to Nazareth, they hardly recognized him because of the strength of his compassion and focus.

As followers of Christ, we are called to repent. We are called to keep taking honest looks at ourselves, even when things seem to be going pretty well. We are called to see where we have become complacent or overly comfortable, where we have allowed our protective forces to camp for too long such that we have lost sight of who we are in God’s eyes. To fully grasp what it means to be wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy of love (“It’s you! I ADORE you!”) means to risk that same kind of love in what we say and do.

With that in mind, I want to ask you a few questions. These are not things you have to answer out loud. Think of them more as a guided meditation. Make sure you are sitting comfortably. Close your eyes if you like. When you hear God’s call to repent, to change your heart and mind, what or who comes into your thoughts? What armies do you need to disband inside yourself so that you can lose yourself in loving God and others? Who do you know who needs to hear that they are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved? What practical things can you do to help them see that love?

As we ponder these things, may we remember that repentance is not a one and done kind of thing. It is a way of life. A way of being. A way of choosing to keep disbanding armies and opening our hearts every chance we get. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

word choice

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

word choice

another word for change is loss
another word for loss is absence
another word for absence is space
another word for space is distance
another word for distance is apart
another word for apart is away
another word for away is beyond
another word for beyond is without
another word for without is grief
another word for grief is change

Peace,
Milton

tidings

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

tidings

Christmastide
has ebbed and
the waves of
wonder that

crashed against
the sea walls
of our hearts
are slipping away

trees go down
lights go dim and
it dawns on me
tides don’t stop

they come in
one after another
waves break
just like hearts

one after another
we come and go
oh tidings of
comfort and joy

Peace,
Milton

star struck

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
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0

The magi show up every January and those of us who step into pulpits are expected to talk about them. Here’s where their journey took me this year.

____________________________

The magi are among my favorite characters that show up in the story of Jesus’ birth because we don’t really know who they were. Some translators call them wise ones; others, scholars. The word magi is just a transliteration of a Greek word that can mean magician, sorcerer, astrologer, or a sage from another religion.

They didn’t make it to the manger. A close reading of Matthew’s account implies that Jesus, Mary, and Joseph stayed in Bethlehem for some time—maybe a couple of years.

The magi appear to be trusting souls. First, they followed a star because they trusted it would lead them to someone special. Second, they went to see King Herod because they were looking for a spiritual leader and they thought he would know about it since he was the actual king. Apparently Herod didn’t because he became agitated and angry, so much so that Matthew said everyone in Jerusalem felt the force of his wrath.

Herod pulled himself together and pulled the magi aside to try and get all the details and then asked them to promise to come back and report exactly where they had found the child. When the travelers became aware that the king was not someone who had anyone’s best interest at heart other than his own, they didn’t go back to the palace and home by another way so Herod could not find them.

Sometimes the magi are referred to as kings, but they don’t appear to be people with a lot of political power. They appear to have some financial means to travel across the desert, and the brought expensive gifts, but they didn’t make any claims for themselves other than to tell of the star that had led them.

Herod, on the other hand, guarded his power—except that he wasn’t the real power. He was called Herod the Great, yet he was on the throne in Palestine only because the Romans let him sit there. When he caught wind of the young messiah, he saw Jesus as a threat, not a source of hope and love. Where the magi searched out of wonder, Herod acted out of fear. The sages looked at the child and saw possibilities; Herod saw Jesus as a a problem to be dealt with.

Where our reading stopped this morning makes it seem as though this part of the story ends when the magi slip out of town without Herod knowing. I have heard and preached worthy sermons about the value of knowing when to go home by another way. That’s an important lesson.

But the story continues, and it troubles me a bit. Listen to the next few verses.

When Herod knew the magi had fooled him, he grew very angry. He sent soldiers to kill all the children in Bethlehem and in all the surrounding territory who were two years old and younger, according to the time that he had learned from the magi.

What I have been wrestling with is that these good-hearted, well-meaning sages who came looking for the messiah set terrible things in motion with their inquiry.

Hear me clearly: I am not saying the magi were responsible for the death of the children Herod killed. What I am saying is they did not have control over, nor could they foresee, the consequences of their words and actions. And I have spent a few days wrestling with what we can learn from them as we think about how we choose to live.

The fact is that Herod was a wicked, evil, mean, and nasty man and would have hurt anyone whom he thought threatened his hold on the throne. If the magi had gone back and told him what he wanted to know, he would have done the same thing and gone on a killing spree. They didn’t cause the massacre—and he appeared to have learned about Jesus’ birth from the travelers’ honest and trusting questions.

Let me circle back to where I began: I love the magi. I love their sense of hope and wonder. I love that they were willing to take off across the desert because they saw a star that intrigued them, that spoke to them, even though they had no idea where it was leading them.

What I want to hold in creative tension with that is that the world—then or now—is not that simple. They followed the star and didn’t look at much else. Herod was simplistic in his worldview as well, seeing his power as the only thing that mattered.

As we share in the wonder of the magi, we can also learn from them. When our lives become centered around only one thing, we can lose sight of our place in the world, our connectedness, and the impact and consequences of our choices. Jesus said life was about two things: to love God with all of our being, and to love our neighbors as ourselves, which, when you listen closely, means life is about a whole web of relationships. Time and time again, when people challenged Jesus about things he did because he was going against tradition or breaking a law, he responded by telling his accusers to look around and to look at more than the one drum they were beating.

When we are tempted to reduce what matters to one issue, we need to look around, to see beyond ourselves. And this is where we need each other to be God’s messengers. Much like the angel came and told the magi to go a different direction, we can help each other see the bigger picture, whether that is to look for guidance like the star, or to become aware of consequences we may not see. We need to help each other find other ways to go that remind is life is complicated and wonderful.

We are all inundated by voices claiming that their one issue or angle is the truth with a capital T, that what they have to say is all that matters. Sometimes we can fall into a similar kind of tunnel vision on issues both great and small and lose sight of the relationships that sustain us and the God who calls us to choose those relationships over any single issue. We can’t see everything that’s coming, but we can see how the call of Christ calls us beyond ourselves. Following that call will lead us to live lives of love. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

route map

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

route map

the four-gate airport in New Haven
(travel-sized, my friend Mandy says)
announced new routes to five cities
and it made me wonder how many
new connections I have made lately
or what it means to be an airport

even if it is only metaphorically
a place of connection with lines
arcing across the map to show all
the people who offer landing space
in this beautiful temporary where
we measure distance and approach

the routes are paths of forgiveness
murmurations of friendships that
fill our world map with a picture
of what it means to be a part of
this quilt of curiosity and belonging
everything from sand to stardust

I am holding a picture of the last time
we saw each other and our embrace
as you prepared to board your flight
the hug lets us hold what we wanted
to keep while we are not together
a souvenir of absence and memory

travel and travail share a history
both words are rooted in suffering
until the former took off on a journey
to route to each other is a labor of love
whether I am the host or the guest at
the gate walking toward one I love

Peace,
Milton

epiphany

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

epiphany

I’m working on a sermon
about the saddled sages
who were sane enough
to follow stars and
wise enough to ignore
the king’s directions and
find another way home

I used to see a desert sky
as their background
but recent years have
given me the view of
rioters climbing Herod’s
walls as the wise ones
slipped out the back

the smell of violence
didn’t match their gifts
so they trusted hope
rather than promises of
an angry frightened king
set their eyes on star shine
beyond the smoke and hate

I can feel our country
bracing for the anniversary
without another way
home in sight just yet
wise ones feel far and few
and hope is a long journey
made of single steps

whatever happens hope
will outlive the king
we have to keep telling
each other as we face
the journey ahead
the stars are with us
whatever comes

Peace,
Milton

trash talking

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
0

trash talking

after staying up late to
watch the ball drop
and listen to musicians
I didn’t recognize

we did not need fireworks
lightning lit up the sky
and the rain fell like
it was washing the world

so far this morning I have
fed pups drank coffee
done Wordle (NERVE)
and written these words

it is the first day of the
last year in the first
quarter of the latest
century on the calendar

and it is Wednesday
the middle child of weekdays
whose first reminder is
I need to empty the trash

which makes me think of
those who had to sweep up
wet confetti after the crowd
cleared in Times Square

were I to walk the neighborhood
under the year’s first clouds
I would see the storm’s detritus
of leaves and branches

the world doesn’t change overnight
the world changes every day
either way we have to keep
picking up after ourselves

Peace,
Milton

growing

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
1

This week sermon looked at two texts, one from Luke and one from Colossians. Alongside of the reality that we don’t know much about how Jesus grew up is the picture of who he grew up to be: who he became. How do we continue to become, to grow?

___________________

One of the realizations that repeats itself for me during Christmastide is that we only know a small slice of Jesus’ life. The gospels are not exhaustive biographies, running over into two or three volumes. They weren’t trying to tell us every detail. They were telling the heart of the story that mattered to them. Mark, for instance, starts with John the Baptist standing out in the desert. John spends half of his gospel telling the story of the last week of Jesus’ life. Matthew and Luke highlight different details about Jesus’ birth, as we have read over the past few weeks, but it takes one verse in Luke for Jesus to grow up, which Lynn just read. I will repeat it the way I learned it as a kid:

And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and people.

Jesus didn’t come into the world fully formed, physically, emotionally, mentally, or physically. He had to grow and grow up, like every other human being. He had to become the person we see in the gospels, which meant he had to choose to grow and learn from the people around him and the things that happened to him.

I wish we had more stories about when he was a kid. Many years ago, a singer-songwriter named Rich Mullins wrote a song called “Boy Like Me/Man Like You” and he wondered,

well did you grow up hungry? did you grow up fast?
did the little girls giggle when you walked past?
did you wonder what it was that made them laugh?

did you ever get scared playing hide and seek?
did you try not to cry when you scraped your knee?
did you ever skip a rock across a quiet creek?

Jesus had experiences, encounters, and conversations that shaped him. Out of those things he chose to be the messiah he became, even as he came into the world as the incarnation of God. He experienced emotions, tragedies, accomplishments. He grew in wisdom and stature.

Maybe this is a funny thing to say about the Christ Child, but he had to learn that the world didn’t revolve around him.

What I mean by that is he had to learn how to live in community, how to be a We and not just an I, how to grow into the person who said that the two great commandments were to love God with all of your being and to love your neighbor as yourself.

In our second passage, which is part of Paul’s letter to the church in Colossae, which was a town in what we know as Greece, he was writing to people whose circumstances were quite different from the way Jesus grew up, even though they were not so far away geographically. Paul wrote, as he did in most all of his letters, to challenge and encourage people to grow in their faith. He knew, as we do, that we are all wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy of being loved, and he knew that we have to choose to do something with that love if it is going to make a difference in our lives and in the lives of those around us.

And he used the metaphor of a wardrobe—of clothing—to talk about it:

Dress in the wardrobe God has picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.

That is the translation from The Message, which works to say things in contemporary language, and sometimes gets a little too hip. That last sentence can also be translated, “And cover everything with love, which is the bond that leads to maturity.”

To mature is to grow. We, like Jesus, have to learn that the world doesn’t revolve around us. We, too, are shaped by our experiences and relationships. From those things and the way we choose to internalize those things, we become who we are—and that becoming continues until we die. We may stop growing in stature—in fact, we even start physically shrinking a bit as we age (in height, anyway)—but we do not have to stop growing in our capacity to incarnate God’s love among and between us. We can continue to mature, if we choose to continue to learn all that God’s love has to teach us.

Paul listed attitudes and actions as though they were garments: compassion, kindness, humility, grace, forgiveness, love. It strikes me that none of those things can be reduced to a single garment.

His metaphor of a wardrobe reminds us that we need to dress for the occasion, for the moment, much like we dress for the different seasons. What we wear in the summertime is not adequate for our winters. To put on our big coat in August makes no sense. Misty and foggy days like today, with temperatures that are not at an extreme make hard to know what to wear, so we dress in layers.

We clothe ourselves to match our circumstances. So it is with the way we respond to and live with one another. Compassion is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Neither is kindness, or humility, or forgiveness. We try things on and sometimes they don’t fit. We wear the wrong thing and learn not to dress that way again. And, though the world does not need more fashion critics, we need to grow in trust so we can help each other by saying what looks good and what outfits might need to be retired.

That’s why clear and open lines of communication are important. That’s why we don’t give anonymous feedback. We speak the truth in love. And we have to learn how to do that and practice with each other.

We have to learn and grow and mature, just like Jesus did. As we mature, we create a greater capacity for us to grow together—and by that I mean both grow at the same time and grow closer to one another.

I will close with the words our scripture readers say at the end of each reading: May God grant us wisdom to learn from these words. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: role call

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
5

role call

were I to place
myself in the story
I think I would choose
to be a shepherd
who did not have
to prepare a thing
they simply abided
watching sheep sleep
until the angel choir
burst into star song
and sent them sprinting
towards Bethlehem
and then they went
back to abiding
that sounds like
a good Christmas

Peace,
Milton

advent journal: put the heart in

By
Milton Brasher-Cunningham
-
2

The last Sunday in Advent is always a hard one for me because it’s hard to find something fresh to say, which is why I bounced off of a passage from Philippians today. Here’s where it took me.

____________________

I’m going to take a risk with you this morning: I’m going to start two sermons in a row talking about Christmas movies.

Okay, so it’s not that big a risk.

One of the consistent things at our house during the holidays is we watch Hallmark movies. For the most part, the plot is the same and the actors change. Someone has to go back home because of a crisis of some sort, or because the big corporation they work for wants to buy the town, and they meet up again with an old love. Then they have to choose between corporate and community, between power and love.

And—SPOILER ALERT—love wins.

One of the reasons the movies continue to be popular is that’s a good story line. It feels good when love wins, particularly when it doesn’t always feel that way in real life.

Another tale that we tell every Christmas is the story of our faith, which is also a story about love and the promise that love is stronger than life or death or power or whatever else love encounters, but it is not a plot line that fits neatly into a formula or ties up all the loose ends. Life and love both have lots of loose ends. One of the difficult things about telling the story again is it can feel predictable—like a Hallmark movie.

What I mean is we can, perhaps too easily, allow ourselves to think, “I know this story,” without letting it settle into our hearts and the tangle of loose ends our lives hold on this particular Christmas, both personally and collectively.

Perhaps the many layers of loose ends we see in our systems and institutions emphasize the reality that we live in a nation—and perhaps a world—obsessed with power and money. The people who consistently get attention are those with both, and many of them spend a lot of energy clamoring for more. The people who are consistently not only left out but are often demonized are those who have very little.

Leading up to our most recent presidential election, the two candidates raised and spent almost four billion dollars. I don’t even know how to imagine how much money that is. I can put it in this context: The average SNAP benefit—what people get a month to help them buy food—is $187. A month. That four billion dollars would pay that bill for over twenty-one million people.

Instead, we got to see attack ads.

Paul wrote his letter to the Philippians understanding full well what brazen power can do. He had been in Roman prisons. He had seen how the empire destroyed families and even nations. He wasn’t writing a Christmas letter to the young church, but he was telling the same story of how love speaks truth to power—and he used it to call people to live out that love in the way they treated one another.

He said, “Adopt the attitude that was in Christ Jesus: Though he was in the form of God, he did not consider being equal with God something to exploit.”

Jesus wasn’t born to take control. We have heard and said it so many times that we can miss the shock of it—God entered the world as a baby, as a helpless human being born into a family without influence or privilege.

The incarnation of God is an act of love, not power. Jesus didn’t come to conquer or take over. He came to join with us as a human being, to show us how to live into our humanity, into our lives as those wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.

Paul said that is the foundation for how we treat each other:

“Therefore, if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort in love, any sharing in the Spirit, any sympathy, complete my joy by thinking the same way, having the same love, being united, and agreeing with each other. Don’t do anything for selfish purposes, but with humility think of others as better than yourselves. Instead of each person watching out for their own good, watch out for what is better for others.”

As we hear those words, let’s go back to Bethlehem.

When you imagine what Jesus’ birth was like, what do you picture? Is it a staid, even stark, scene like our little nativity here? At Ginger’s church, the littlest ones are the animals for their Christmas pageant and they are encouraged to dress as their favorite creature, so there are bears and lions and dinosaurs and Poohs and Eeyores all gathered to welcome the baby. I don’t know how the tradition started, but its good theology.

The word in Luke 2 that the King James Version translated as “inn” really means guest room. Some families had an extra room they rented out; that is to say they had two rooms. The manger was in the room—not in a barn—because the animals were brought inside for safekeeping at night, into the room that was also the kitchen and the bedroom and whatever else it needed to be. Jesus was born in the middle of it all, into the middle of a big welcoming mess.

With that image in mind, here these words again: “If there is any encouragement in Christ . . . .”

The root of the word courage means heart, so to encourage is “to put the heart in” whatever it is we do and say, to not just go through the motions out of habit or duty; to not let ourselves go along with things because that’s just the way things are; to choose not to take the easy road of cynicism but to choose the challenge of hope; to imitate Christ by not exploiting our advantages but seeing them as ways to, as Paul said, watch out for what is better for others.

I know. It’s the same old story. But it’s a great story. And this time around, we are the ones in the movie, if you will, we are the ones that have the chance to tell the story of how God’s love alive in us can change things when we encourage one another, when we put our hearts in it. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

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