don't eat alone

I was traveling on the day I usually post my sermon. When I went to look for it to link to the newsletter, I realized it was left unsent, which means your inbox will get a little crowded today.

_________________________________

Singer Amy Grant has been making the interview rounds lately because she released a new song. One of the things she talked about was her “Five Phrase Mantra” she said had been a part of her life for many years. She learned it from a WWII veteran who fought in Europe and helped to release people from the concentration camps before moving back to settle in Tennessee. The mantra starts with a five-word phrase, and each succeeding phrase has one less word, all of them are intended to be said as often as possible.

The five-word phrase is “I am proud of you.” The next is a question: “May I help you?” The three-phrase is perhaps more obvious: “I love you.” Two words? “Thank you.” When it got down to one word, the old man told her it boiled down to “we.”

That reminded me of something I heard a long time ago from theologian Sam Wells who said the most important word in the Bible is “with,” a word we have used a lot in our journey through Matthew’s gospel, beginning with Jesus’ name, “God is with Us.”

As we began Jesus’ sermon on the mount last week, we noted that the beatitudes are plural, not singular: happy are those who are disheartened, who mourn, who make peace around them, not happy is the one who is those things. Jesus was also saying we are with are crucial words when it comes to life and faith.

Though we took a week off between sentences in his sermon, but Jesus kept preaching. Immediately after saying those who hungered for justice would be both blessed and reviled, even persecuted, he told those listening to him that they were the salt of the earth and the light of the world. Since we have already noted that he spoke in first person plural, here’s another grammatical note: he also spoke in the present tense. Happy are those who mourn, and also you are the salt of the earth, you are the light of the world. He didn’t say, “This is who I hope you become.” He didn’t say we will become salt and light if we do certain things. There are no prerequisites. It is a blessing. An affirmation. A statement of faith, of trust. We are beloved of God. We were made to be salt and light.

How, then, are we living into who we were made to be?

As we hold that question, let’s look closer at the metaphors.

Where we think of salt as primarily a flavor enhancer, to those in first century Palestine, it was essential for several things. It did add flavor to food. It was also used to preserve meat and fish in a time when there was no refrigeration. It was used to purify or cleanse meat by the removal of blood, which was required by the Torah. It had medical uses and it was also currency. Roman soldiers were paid in salt because it was a valuable commodity. It shows up in our language: the root word of salary is salt. When he told his listeners they were the salt of the earth, he was saying way more than they helped to spice things up.

They would have also heard the light metaphor differently as well because they understood what it felt like to have no light in ways we do not. We have to work hard to find moments in our lives completely free of light. They knew what it was like to be in real darkness. That said, notice that Jesus doesn’t create a contrast between light and dark, but draws attention to the ways we illuminate, the ways we bring light or shine on something. “Let your light shine on people’s faces,” he said, “so they can see the good things you are doing and thank God.” Jesus was talking about the way a lantern filled a room when someone lighted the wick. They might not have been able to imagine a giant spotlight, but they knew the way a small flame could create a much larger field of vision.

Salt and light are change agents. They flavor, preserve, heighten and enlighten, even expose, what is already there. They let us taste and see that God is good, as the psalmist wrote. But salt has to be added, and lanterns have to be lighted, which takes me back to my question: how are we living into who we were made to be? Just how salty are we? Who is illuminated by our presence, by our words and actions?

Keep thinking about that and let’s consider a couple of other things. One is the fact that salt never does lose its saltiness. It doesn’t go bad or turn stale. It is always salty. It never becomes useless. In much the same way, it would make no sense to light a lantern and then cover it up, wasting both light and fuel. Jesus’ words about throwing away stale salt, then, are another way of saying no one loses their value to God. To say we are salt and light is a blessing, an affirmation, much like saying we are God’s beloved children in whom God finds delight. We will be most fully ourselves when we, together, are doing all we can to flavor and illuminate those around us because the blessing is also a calling, a naming: we are salt and light.

If, then, we feel like we have lost our taste, if we feel like our light is barely visible, we would do well to ask ourselves, “why?” What, or whom, do we fear? What or who has silenced us? What have we allowed to make us feel separated from God and from one another?

As I ask those questions, I repeat that Jesus was speaking in the plural when he called us salt and light; to us as a group, not each individual. Yes, our individual words and actions matter, but here Jesus is talking about our collective impact, about our life together. What has silenced us? What are we scared of? How can we be salt and light to those with us, those around us? How can we best live into who we were made to be?

Let us hold those questions closely as we live into the days ahead and have the courage and trust in God and in ourselves to be salt and light right here where we are. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

My congregation got to meet in person for the first time in three weeks and we were glad to see each other. That is was also a Communion Sunday made it even more meaningful. My sermon was in conversation with Matthew’s account of the first section of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, which is more familiarly known as the Beatitudes.

_______________________

One of the things we have not talked about as we work our way through the Gospel of Matthew is that it was aimed at a Jewish audience. It begins with a genealogy on Joseph’s side, connecting Jesus all the way back to Abraham. At several places along the way, Matthew makes statements about things fulfilling the words of Hebrew prophets. All of it was a way of underlining that Jesus was living up to his name as God Is With Us, which we have talked about several times.

The pace of Matthew’s account has been brisk, to say the least. In four chapters we’ve gone from genealogy to birth to exile in Egypt to baptism to temptations to calling his disciples and beginning his ministry. That rhythm changes as we begin chapter five. The next three chapters make up one sermon (what we know as the Sermon on the Mount). We move from a lot of action to a lot of words. Matthew has laid out a picture of who Jesus is, and how he is letting Jesus speak for himself, if you will.

The verses we read this morning, which we know as the Beatitudes, or blessings, read almost like a poem. If we could read it in Greek and have a chance to hear the wordplay and the rhythm of them all, it would sound more like spoken word poetry or even a kind of rap, I think. I don’t mean Jesus was putting on a performance. What I am trying to say is our translations come across as more tame than what people heard that afternoon on a Galilean hillside.

And it starts with the word blessed, or as our translation has it this morning, happy. What did Jesus mean when he said those who were utterly discouraged or grief-stricken or starving for justice were happy or blessed?

For those who were listening to Jesus, the word meant more than feeling good. It was a promise of life to come, a promise that things would not always be like this. It is the same sense expressed in the words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King when he said, “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

The happiness or blessedness Jesus named was a statement of hope. Whatever is coming, we are not there yet. Jesus was not offering a benediction; he was calling people to deeper commitment and connection.

A clergy friend in Jackson, Mississippi participated in an interfaith service this past week with the Jewish congregation whose synagogue was destroyed by an arsonist. In response to the hate crime, the congregation gathered and invited others to join them. My friend said this was one of the prayers they offered during the service:

‘Standing on the parted shores of history,
We still believe what we were taught
Before ever we stood at Sinai:
That wherever we are, it is eternally Egypt
That there is a better place, a Promised Land:
That the winding way to that promise passes through the wilderness
That there is no way to get from here to there
Expect by joining hands, marching together.’

The people listening to Jesus would have understood that prayer. They were being crushed by Roman occupation and oppression. They were tired of the way things were. And to that crowd, Jesus said (my paraphrase),

Happy are those who are exhausted and crushed because they will find hope because God’s realm belongs to them.

Happy are those who are living with heart-breaking grief because they will find sustaining comfort.

Happy are those who are gentle in the face of brazen power because they will be the ones who inherit the earth.

Happy are those who are starving for justice because they will feast like never before.

Happy are those who show mercy—who don’t use their power to lord over others—for they will be shown mercy.

Happy are those who live with integrity and honesty because they will see God.

Happy are those who make peace around them because they will be recognized as God’s children.

Happy are those who are hounded and insulted because they choose the path of justice and belonging because they will get the last laugh when love wins.

I don’t know if it was as disconcerting to hear Jesus’ sermon that first time on the hillside as it is to read it now. I say disconcerting because, as I said, Jesus isn’t offering a list of blessings to make people feel better. He is calling people to commitment in these words, much the same as both he and John had said, “Repent! Change your hearts and lives. Here comes the realm of God.”

All of those he named were groups. Notice the verb: happy are those. It’s plural. He was reminding us that we are not alone, even in our grief and exhaustion, and also in our hope. As I often say, life and faith are team sports. That doesn’t mean the team is always doing good things. We have to continually choose whether we will engage the world by wielding power or by offering love. We have to continually choose to move beyond our fear and trust that God will see us through or not. We have to decide if we will be peacemakers and those who offer mercy to everyone or we will be those who let our fear get the best of us and cling to our power and privilege.

Jesus’ life is a testament to the truth that being wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved is hard work in that living out that love requires more courage and compassion than we can muster as individuals. As we will affirm again in a few moments at the Communion table, we are all in this together. We are re-membered, put back together in Christ.

And we are not there yet. The arc of the universe is still bending. We are still in Egypt. With that in mind, listen to these words from theologian Reinhold Neibuhr:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint; therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

Our gathering at our sacred table reminds us that we stand in a lineage of love, in a heritage of those who knew they would not see love win in their lifetime, yet they kept loving so that we could share the meal and prepare the table for those who will come after us. We are nourished here that we might go out to find those who are being crushed by the system, those who are overwhelmed by grief, those who are longing for peace and justice. We are nourished here to go out and find them, to go out and join them in their sorrow and grief, so that we all might be peacemakers. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Thanks to the winter storm that affected almost half the country, we had a virtual worship service once again this week. The verses from Matthew tell the story of Jesus calling some of his first followers, asking them to literally drop what they are doing and go catch people. Here is what I said.

_______________________

The more I read through these opening chapters of Matthew, and I see the speed and brevity with which he describes Jesus’ early life, the more I begin to realize Matthew is more concerned about making a bigger point about who Jesus was and what he was doing that he was about making sure we have a complete biography.

Matthew leaves out lots of stuff and makes huge transitions from one sentence to the next. In these first four chapters, Jesus was born, moved to Egypt, then back to Nazareth, went to the Jordan to be baptized by John, was tempted in the desert, moved from Nazareth to Capernaum, and now we find him calling those who would become his disciples.

At most every turn, Matthew finds ways to underline what the angel told Joseph: to name the child “God Is With Us.” That’s why every time Jesus moved to a new place Matthew mentioned that it fulfilled things the Hebrew prophets had said. It also gets echoed in the words Jesus heard at his baptism, that he was God’s beloved child in whom God found delight.

The other thing about these chapters is they also show how Jesus prepared (or was prepared) for his ministry, through his life experiences, his baptism, and the trials in the wilderness that challenged who he was and who he felt God was calling him to be. How he went from preparing to beginning to set things in motion swings on a sentence that goes by quickly:

“Now when John was arrested, Jesus went to Galilee . . .”

Some of the other gospel writers give us more details, but they all point to John’s arrest as some sort of call to action for Jesus. Matthew says that from that time Jesus began saying, “Change your hearts and lives. Here comes the reign of God,” which is almost word-for-word what John was saying when he called people to be baptized, as though he was carrying on something John had already started. Their relationship was at the heart of how Jesus came to a true sense of himself.

In turn, Jesus began to call others, one by one, to help him call people to step into their best selves, into a deeper relationship with God and with one another, because those two things always go together. To love God with our whole being means learning how to love one another as God’s beloved children.

When he heard John had been arrested, Jesus went to Galilee looking for help. He did not plan to work alone. The account of Peter and Andrew and then James and John just dropping their nets in the middle of a workday and walking off from jobs and family because Jesus said, “Follow me,” is a bit jarring and perhaps a bit difficult to imagine. Some commentators suggest they all knew each other and had been talking about it for a while. We don’t know for sure.

What intrigues me more is the offer Jesus made to these four who spent their lives fishing for, well, fish: “Come, follow me, and I’ll show you how to fish for people.”

Fishing in first century Galilee was hard work. They worked in little boats, throwing nets over the side and pulling them in to see what they had caught. They didn’t have any rods and reels. As we know from some of the other stories in the gospels, a good catch was not a given. Sometimes they fished all night and didn’t catch anything. And though the Sea of Galilee was small, it was known for its wicked storms. Fishing in those days was a job that demanded hard work and focus.

Keep holding that thought and let’s go back to John for a minute. As we talked about a couple of weeks ago, he called people to repent, to change their purpose, to refocus their lives on what mattered most because God wanted to work through them. Jesus got in line for that baptism as a way of saying he was focusing his life on who God was calling him to be.

Now Jesus was calling his fisher friends to change their life focus and work as diligently to fish for people—to help them find God—as they fished for fish every day. At the heart of it all is the reality that God’s realm, God’s ideal, comes not by some giant intervention but person to person, hand to hand, heart to heart, as we share the good news that we are wonderfully and uniquely created in the image of God and worthy to be loved.

Jesus was inviting his disciples to see that God’s realm was going to take place in the middle of their everyday relationships: the ordinary exchanges, passing words and glances, the things we do and say in the course of a day. Again, it’s Jesus’ name that gives us the clue: God Is With Us.

God is with us at work, at home, at school, at the grocery store when the line is too long, at the coffee shop when the person behind the counter struggles because English is not their first language, at work when we’ve had one too many Zoom calls for the day, at home when we feel too exhausted to talk. We could go on and on with examples, all of which are intended to remind us that God has called us to see and treat everyone as beloved children of God, as people of value, people worth catching in the name of God. Just as we are.

Jesus called Peter, Andrew, James, and John to look up from their nets and see the people who needed catching. Better said, Jesus told them to drop their nets and follow him and he would teach them how to see the people who needed catching, to be able to look beyond their circumstances and see all the others who needed to know God loved them, too.

I love the way one commentator put it:

“Jesus called ordinary people right in the middle of their ordinary lives to be in relationship with the ordinary people all around them and through them did extraordinary things.”

But he called them to make big changes. It wasn’t easy for those guys to walk away from family, from work, from what they knew to follow Jesus.

Yet the way Matthew tells the story, all four men dropped their nets and “immediately” went with him. They didn’t hedge their bets. They didn’t offer any qualifiers. They just went. They repented. They changed their purpose to see what God could do through and with them. They went fishing for people without really knowing what that was going to entail. They trusted God wholeheartedly and, as a result, helped to change the world. We are still telling their story.

God’s call on and in our lives may not seem quite so dramatic, but it is no less profound. We are called to focus our lives, first, doing what we need to do to share God’s love with them, to make sure they know they are loved, whoever they are, wherever we are. In big things, in small things, in intentional words and in passing comments, in things we plan and moments where we respond, we are called to embody the love of God in what we do and say so that God’s love can change the world.

My sermon was going to end there until I went to a memorial service today just before I recorded and something in the mix of the service made me think that rarely does life let us do just one thing or play just one role. We all have to multitask, to do more than one thing at once. I was reminded of that by a poem a friend sent early this morning by Karen Salmansohn:

the world is both burning and blooming

You get the bad news
and the sunrise in the same day.
then you laugh at a baby
wearing a hat shaped like a bear.
This is the dual citizenship
of being alive.
Rage and reverence,
Grief and grace.
You are allowed to feel both.
You are allowed to scream,
& still notice how good the soup is.
You don’t have to choose.
Let it all in.

None of us—even those who became Jesus’ disciples—get to walk away from the promises we have to keep. The disciples kept fishing, but Jesus’ call on their lives changed what mattered most. They cared less about their businesses than they did about connecting with people in a meaningful way.

That’s the call on our lives. We all have promises to keep and God calls us to remember nothing matters more than taking care of each other, and each other means anyone we come in contact with. Nothing matters more than people. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Church got snowed out in Connecticut last Sunday—or at least our in-person worship did. I ended up recording my sermon from home and sharing it on YouTube, as many congregations learned how to do during the pandemic. Rather than following the lectionary, I am working my way through Matthew’s gospel, so this week’s sermon looks at Jesus’ temptations, which were what followed his baptism.

__________________________

One of the greatest false myths of American life is the idea of the self-made person. No such person exists. Every last one of us was shaped by others, whether they were our parents and family, friends, teachers, pastors, or even interactions with people we don’t know well. We learn who we are, we don’t invent ourselves. And part of the way we learn is we make choices based on the information we have and the feedback we get from others. We have to choose who and what to trust.

I think of myself as a cook because my mother told me I was good at cooking from the time I was an inquisitive little boy asking what she was doing. She had the wherewithal to hear my question as an opening to shape my identity. When I did something, she complimented it, or the next time we were in the kitchen she would say, “I showed you how to do this the other day. Why don’t you do this while I work on something else.” I learned to trust her confidence in me and, thus, came to see myself as a cook.

I do not think of myself as a mathematician because of my Algebra II teacher. We had just moved to Houston from Africa in the middle of my junior year in high school. I had gone from a school with 400 students from K-12 to a school with 400 students in my grade alone. I didn’t know anyone. I was struggling to find myself. Up until then, I had made good grades in math, but Algebra was hard. One day in class I asked a question and my teacher’s response was, “I don’t have time for stupid questions.” I learned to trust her lack of confidence in me and never took another math class.

Jesus was fresh from hearing “You are my beloved child in whom I delight” when the Spirit led him deeper into the wilderness to be tested or tempted, depending on the translation. The root of the word means “to attempt to influence.” Matthew sums up almost six weeks in a sentence: Jesus didn’t eat for forty days and he was starving. The slanderer, or the tempter, or the devil (again, it depends on the translation) showed up when Jesus was at his most vulnerable to see whether he was going to trust that he was God’s beloved son or not.

There’s an old saying that has floated around churches for many years: “Remember who you are and whose you are.” It should really be inverted. We know who we are because of whose we are. It starts with “You are my beloved child.” And that’s kind of what temptations boil down to: will we forget whose we are and, thus, forget who we are? Because once we don’t remember whose we are and who we are, we’ll do all kinds of things to dispel our insecurity bred by less affirming voices.

Which leads me to an important side note: Most all of us have some sort of image that pops into our heads when we hear the word devil, and it’s probably fair to say most all of those images aren’t what the biblical writers had in mind. Part of the reason I say that is because the biblical writers are not united in how they name or describe the devil. When and however the tempter shows up, they work to undermine our trust in our identity as beloved children of God who are called to be people of love and justice. The tempter then fosters the insecurity that breaks our connection with God and makes us think we have to define ourselves by something other than being God’s beloved.

Some commentators I read drew a connection between Jesus’ test in the desert and Adam and Eve’s conversation with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, pointing to the way the tempter tries to sow mistrust in both cases. Listen to these words from theologian David Lose:

When the serpent comes, he doesn’t start out with a temptation but instead sows mistrust in Adam and Eve – and let’s remember that this one isn’t on Eve; Adam is there all the time and just can’t seem to find anything to say. In particular, the serpent tries to undermine the relationship of trust between God and God’s children. “Did God really say,” the serpent asks, misrepresenting and undermining God’s instructions. “You will not die,” the serpent asserts, suggesting that there are things God knows but isn’t telling. Only when this primary relationship has been undermined are they susceptible to the temptation to forge their identity on their own, independent on their relationship with God, and so take and eat the forbidden fruit.

The tempter’s approach with Jesus is different but trying to get to the same end. The slanderer tries to undermine Jesus’ relationship with God by suggesting that he should create food for himself, or throw himself off the mountain, or pledge allegiance to the devil rather than trust God’s provision. Each time Jesus resists by quoting Scripture, and each verse is specifically about God’s trustworthiness and the need to depend on God for all good things. He keeps reminding himself of God’s promise to care for all of God’s beloved. He will not let his trust in God be undermined, which also helps him remember who God has called him to be.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks drew an interesting distinction between the ways God and the serpent dealt with Adam and Eve. He said that Adam and Eve never saw God, they only heard the Divine Voice. The serpent showed them the tree and the fruit. The rabbi went on to say,

If I were asked how to find God, I would say, Learn to listen. Listen to the song of the universe in the call of birds, the rustle of trees, the crash and heave of the waves. Listen to the poetry of prayer, the music of the Psalms. Listen deeply to those you love and who love you. Listen to the words of God in the Torah and hear them speak to you. Listen to the debates of the Sages through the centuries as they tried to hear the texts’ intimations and inflections.

Don’t worry about how you or others look. The world of appearances is a false world of masks, disguises, and concealments. Listening is not easy. I confess I find it formidably hard. But listening alone bridges the abyss between soul and soul, self and other, I and the Divine.

As I read his words, I was struck that the same was true in Jesus’ story. He heard the voice telling him he was God’s beloved, and then the tempter showed him what he hoped would sow distrust.

It’s interesting that when we talk about someone trying to be someone they are not we say they are “putting on appearances,” which has to do with seeing. If we are going to truly be ourselves, we have to listen, we have to pay attention. Integrity and truth are about more than how things look. We learn to trust those whose words and actions confirm their true identity: they show a state of being the same. They know whose they are and who they are.

Which takes me back to algebra class. Late in the spring of my eleventh grade year, while I was still struggling in Algebra II, I took the ACT, which was the entrance exam for the college I wanted to attend. When the results came back, I got a higher score in math than I did in English, so high, in fact, that I placed out of my college math requirement. But my teacher’s voice was so strong in my head that it was years before I realized I wasn’t bad at math, she was just bad at teaching.

In the spring of 2002, after several months of being debilitated by my depression, I started looking for work. One thing I had figured out was that the kitchen was a depression-free zone for me. So, I decided to look for a cooking job. I found a small restaurant that was just opening and talked to the chef. He was not impressed because I had no restaurant experience. I told him about my mom and all the church dinners I had cooked, but to no avail. But I knew I was a cook, so I went back the next day and the day after that. On the fifth day, he said, “If I give you the job will you promise me you won’t come back tomorrow?”

The obvious ending to this sermon is to listen for God’s voice, for God’s affirmation and call, when it comes through others. I am happy to say that ending out loud, and I also want to ask us to think about what impact our voices have had. Whose lives have been changed by what we have said, whether intentionally or in passing? Have our voices reminded others they are beloved ones who delight God, or have we allowed our words to do damage?

We may not know the actual impact of the things we have said to others, still we can choose to be intentional about how we speak and what we say going forward. May the words of our mouths be words of love that help others see they, too, are God’s beloved. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Jesus’ baptism is one of the most intriguing stories in the Gospels, not because it underlines the institutional rite but because of the way it validates our humanity. Here’s my sermon from last Sunday.

___________________________

A little over three hundred years after Jesus walked the earth (and Matthew and the others wrote down the gospel stories that had circulated in the early church), the Roman Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the empire. One of the results of his edict was that the official church needed an official theology so they could tell who followed the rules and who needed to be kicked out or, better yet, executed for heresy.

Yes, I know that is a simplistic historical summary, but it’s still a pretty good one.

The earliest Christians, for example, didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about how Jesus could be both human and divine at the same time. There were some people who tried to explain it—even in our scripture—but they weren’t trying to lay down church law or say it was the way everyone had to see it or else. They were more comfortable, it seems, living with the paradoxes and questions that Jesus offered in the way he lived and in the things he said, perhaps because they were closer to him in time, or perhaps because they weren’t trying to support the empire while telling the life story of someone who tried to turn the empire upside down every chance he got.

Even though Jesus has often been referred to as a king, whether it’s the magi asking where to find him or the soldiers mocking him at the crucifixion, it is not a title he took on willingly or even without irony, as we see when he rode into Jerusalem on a borrowed donkey on what we call Palm Sunday. That event marked the last days of his life; his baptism marked the beginning of his ministry in much the same spirit.

One of my favorite poets, Naomi Shihab Nye, wrote about it in a poem titled, “I Feel Sorry for Jesus.”

I Feel Sorry for Jesus

People won’t leave Him alone.
I know He said, wherever two or more
are gathered in my name…
But I bet some days He regrets it.

Cozily they tell you what he wants
and doesn’t want
as if they just got an e-mail.
Remember “Telephone,” that pass-it-on game

where the message changed dramatically
by the time it rounded the circle?
Well.
People blame terrible pieties on Jesus.

They want to be his special pet.
Jesus deserves better.
I think He’s been exhausted
for a very long time.

He went into the desert, friends.
He didn’t go into the pomp.
He didn’t go into
the golden chandeliers

and say, the truth tastes better here.
See? I’m talking like I know.
It’s dangerous talking for Jesus.
You get carried away almost immediately.

I stood in the spot where He was born.
I closed my eyes where He died and didn’t die.
Every twist of the Via Dolorosa
was written on my skin.

And that makes me feel like being silent
for Him, you know? A secret pouch
of listening. You won’t hear me
mention this again.

As we think about Jesus’ baptism this morning, we need to begin with remembering that what happened to him at the Jordan River was not what we are a part of when we have a baptism. In our liturgy, we often refer to his baptism, but baptism was not something Jesus ever asked of anyone in order to be his follower.

What Jesus went to participate in was a baptism of repentance, which is a word that means more than just being sorry for something. It has more to do with turning around and starting anew, setting a new purpose. That’s why John was out in the wilderness, way past the edge of any town. Matthew says John was calling for people to change their hearts and lives, to change their purpose, because God’s realm, God’s economy was at hand. Jesus showed up to do exactly what John was asking. He came to the wilderness and got in line with everyone else in order to set his heart toward what God wanted him to do. He came to join with the others at the river, not to declare himself separate from them. He wasn’t out there as an act of personal validation; he was there as a part of a communal act of solidarity.

The early theologians—and many who have followed after them—struggled with the idea of Jesus repenting because they were determined that Jesus was sinless so why would he ever need to repent? That issue was not a concern for Matthew and the other gospel writers. As we have seen, the heart of Matthew’s story begins with the messenger saying that the child was to be named “God is With Us.” Now, just two chapters later, God is With Us is standing at the river, waiting to be baptized with everyone else as an act of repentance, a statement of purpose. Whatever Jesus had been doing with his life up to that point was not going to change. At the end of chapter two he was a young boy moving from Egypt to Nazareth. Here at the Jordan, he is thirty or so, making a statement of commitment to God.

The baptism was one of two things that happened in the wilderness. Jesus was baptized and set his heart to God’s purpose, and then he was tempted—tested to see just how committed he was to God’s purpose. (We will look at the temptations next Sunday.)

It’s also worth taking a moment to talk about what we mean by wilderness. If you have ever seen pictures of Israel and Palestine, you know even the settled areas are on the edge of the desert. So, if the cities and towns are already dry and dusty, imagine what they called the wilderness. It was a hard place, which also makes it a worthy metaphor when we talk about the places in our lives where we are perhaps most open to repenting, to making meaningful changes in direction and purpose. Even if we have never been in the desert, all of us have experience in the wilderness.

But I’m getting ahead of myself and skipping over my favorite part of the story.

When John baptized Jesus, he didn’t just pour a few drops of water over him. Jesus walked into the river and John immersed him, dunked him and pulled him up soaked in solidarity. In that moment, the skies opened and a voice said, “This is my beloved child in whom I have taken delight.”

What an amazing occurrence. Jesus committed his heart to God and then God responded by saying, “I love you and you make my heart smile.” What made it even better, is that it all happened in the middle of everyone else who had also been baptized. This was not an individual affirmation; it was a communal epiphany. Everyone was in on it. Jesus came into his own in the middle of the wilderness along with everyone else who was there. He was not in the wilderness alone any more than the Israelites had been in the wilderness alone after they fled from Egypt. They had each other. Jesus had the presence and promise of God’s declaration as he stood in the middle of all the others in the wilderness.

We, too, are not alone in the wilderness, whatever that wilderness is. We are all beloved children of God in whom God finds delight. We are worthy of love. Our baptism marks us as a part of God’s beloved community, promising that even in the wilderness—in spite of it, and sometimes even because of it—God’s claim on our lives is meant to be something everyone can see.

Jesus doesn’t need us to explain him. We are called instead to follow him in repentance: to set our hearts towards doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly as beloved children of God. We are called to tune our hearts to God’s purpose, which is to tell everyone they are beloved children of God whom God adores. May we live into our calling. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

I spent the week wondering if the magi ever knew what their visit had helped to set in motion on a couple of fronts, which led me to this sermon.

______________________________

When I was in high school I had an after school job working as a gofer—all errands all the time—in a doctor’s office. It was about a ten-minute drive and, most every day, it coincided with a short radio program that some of you may remember by Paul Harvey called “The Rest of the Story,” where he told some mostly unknown or forgotten account about someone or something that had happened. About halfway through the short segment, he would break for a commercial and then come back to tell “the rest of the story,” where he revealed the name of some famous person or tied the story to some other event.

One of the things Harvey understood was that what we often consider the end of a story is actually the place where we just chose to stop telling it. Most of the time, things keep happening, whether or not we keep noticing. That’s true even with novels, where we actually reach a last page and it seems there is no more story. There’s a whole genre of fan fiction where people have written about what happened to certain characters after the books ended. Even when Paul Harvey finished his segment by saying, “And now you know the rest of the story,” there was more that happened.

Stories keep going, as we can see in Matthew’s account of the visit of the magi.

They went home by another way, choosing not to go back to see Herod, thanks to a warning that came in a dream, and then came the rest of the story.

Matthew tells us that the magi weren’t the only ones who received divine warnings. An angel came to Joseph and said, “Get up!” (That makes me wonder if angels are less frightening on the second visit. The first time, the messenger said, “Don’t be afraid.” This time, it’s just, “Get up!”) The warning was to get up and get out of town with Mary and the baby: to flee to Egypt and stay there because Herod wanted to kill the child.

In Matthew’s telling, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were well on their way before Herod realized the magi weren’t returning and ordered his soldiers to kill all the children in Bethlehem under the age of two—an unbearable public tragedy that Matthew aligns with Rachel weeping inconsolably for her children. They lived in Egypt for a while it seems. When Herod died, the angel appeared again saying, “Get up,” but because another Herod was in Jerusalem, Mary and Joseph avoided Bethlehem and moved to Nazareth in Galilee.

It’s a complicated story that offers us many points of connection and interpretation, plus some difficult questions. This is also a difficult story, as we talked about last Sunday. In Matthew’s telling, Jesus was born into a hard and difficult world, which is why it mattered so much that he be named “God is With Us.”

Biblical historians have never been able to find historical evidence of a widespread massacre of children by Herod. That doesn’t mean something tragic didn’t happen. We already know Matthew told his story in big ways. When the magi asked about the whereabouts of the child, Matthew says Herod was troubled “and all of Jerusalem was troubled with him.” Since they were all in a closed room in the palace, all of Jerusalem was probably not in on what happened. What Matthew was saying was the emotions of this impulsive and explosive ruler were contagious. In the same way, as one historian noted, even if a dozen children were killed it would still be a tragedy.

The details of the story also connect with parts of Hebrew history that underline God’s presence in the middle of tragedy. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph fled like refugees to Egypt: the land where their ancestors had been enslaved was now a place of sanctuary. The allusion of Rachel weeping unconsolably connected the murder of the children to the deep grief at the heart of their faith, as well as the deep trust that God had never forsaken them.

Matthew tells all of this—from the magi arriving and then going home to Jesus growing up in Egypt until the angel came a third time and told them to get up and go to Nazareth (and avoid the new Herod in town)—in less time than it took Paul Harvey to air his afternoon segment. When we turn the page in our gospel, Jesus will be grown and asking to be baptized in the Jordan River. We never hear about the magi again. After this, Joseph kind of disappears from the story as well. Yet they are all crucial to how Jesus’ story played out.

Sometimes, maybe most of the time, the heart of the rest of the story is not so much what happened next but who happened to be there. The story of Jesus’ life is filled with people who show up for a verse or two, maybe a chapter, and affect how we see the rest of things, like the magi choosing to come west in the first place and then choosing to not keep their promise to Herod.

I remember the first time I drove after a snowstorm. I was going from Fort Worth, Texas to Ardmore, Oklahoma on I-35 and it started snowing hard. No one knew how to drive on it and there were not any plows, nor much of anywhere to stop. The exits were far apart. I was following in the path being made by an eighteen-wheeler in front of me when I hit an ice patch and my Oldsmobile Cutlass did a quick spin and left me in a snowbank on the side of the highway, and unable to pull myself out.

As I sat there trying to figure out what to do, a big pick-up truck pulled up on the shoulder next to me. A man got out and waved and then proceeded to pull a big chain down and attach it somewhere on the front of my car. He got back in his truck and pulled my car out of the snowbank and back on to the shoulder of the highway. Then he got out again, unhooked the chain, and drove away, and I drove on to Ardmore.

My life was changed by a man I never met.

I invite you this morning to think about who the magi are in rest of your story. Who are the people who have come looking for you? Who have offered you the gift of encouragement? Who are the Josephs in the rest of your story? Who are the ones who looked out for you? Who offered you a safe place to grow? Who protected you?

Some of those who come to mind may be people you knew for a season, or even a few moments. Others may be loved ones who have inhabited your life for years. They may be sitting here in the room with you this morning. As we think of those who have changed our lives, we also need to remember that we are also part of the supporting cast of most every person we come in contact with. How then will we contribute to the rest of those stories.

Whatever the story is, there is still more to tell. For now, we are the rest of the story, continuing to add to what the magi left behind, carrying on the legacies of love handed down to us. Then it will be time to let someone else tell the rest of the story, which is fitting to say as we come to the Communion Table where we share the meal with all those who have gone before us and all those who will come after us. We are all part of the story of God’s unfailing love. That is the rest of the story. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

The magi came a week early at our church so we could look at the second half of the story (what happened after they left) sequentially, which means we get a clear look at the way Matthew framed the birth of Jesus–and it’s a tough picture. On our calendar, the travelers always arrive at the turn of the year, which is a connection that has its own energy. Here’s this week’s sermon.

_________________________________

In late 1996, the band Counting Crows released a song called “Long December.” Why that matters is that for almost thirty years the opening lines have brought me some consolation. They say,

long December and
there’s reason to believe
maybe this year will be
better than the last

When I look back, I don’t recall a year when those words didn’t feel true to me. I don’t mean that as a pessimistic statement, just that most every year has ended with the hope that the one to come will somehow be less weighty.

About twenty years later, in 2017, Jason Isbell released a song called “Hope the High Road” that I added to my December playlist because of the lyrics in the chorus:

I know you’re tired 
and you ain’t sleeping well
uninspired and likely mad as hell
but wherever you are 
I hope the high road leads you home again
to a world you want to live in
 
As I said, these songs are a regular part of my end-of-year reflecting, but I find they make a pretty good soundtrack for the magi, the mysterious, foreign, astrologers who traveled miles and miles in search of a hope they did not comprehend and also provided one of the best bad jokes of the season:

The brought gifts: gold, frankincense, and wait, there’s myrrh!

(I’ll be here all week.)

When we stop reading with the travelers going home by another way to avoid Herod, as we did this morning, the scene closes in a quiet way, but the reality was harsher. When King Herod realized his ploy to find the child had not worked, he commanded that every boy under the age of two be executed. Mary and Joseph grabbed their little one and fled to Egypt, but not everyone had an angel to warn them. The chapter ends with Mary and Joseph moving back to Nazareth after Herod died.

It’s not the Christmas story that we are used to hearing and singing about, but it may be the one we most need to hear when we compare it to the world we live in, where we face another long December.

Matthew ties the slaughter of children to the deep pain the Hebrew people had known in their past: Rachel weeping unconsolably for her children. What was happening was not new, it was just happening to them in real life.

Professor Esau McCaulley asks,

But how can such a bloody and sad tale do anything other than add to our despair? The Christmas story must be told in the context of suffering and death because that’s the only way the story makes any sense. Where else can one speak about Christmas other than in a world in which racism, sexism, classism, materialism and the devaluation of human life are commonplace? People are hurting, and the epicenter of that hurt remains the focus of God’s concern.

Which takes us back to the angel telling Joseph to name the child Emmanuel—God is with us, or as we said last Sunday, God is really with us.

There are those who look at the world, particularly in statistical terms, and couch their hope in statements about ways in which the world is getting better. Historically, for example, almost half of humanity died during childhood. Now that figure is stands at only four percent. As many wars as there are in the world right now, we live in one of the least violent times in history, or so I’m told.

Life is not all long and hard. The tree is still up. The lights are still twinkling. And it is another long December.

I am grateful that things are improving, and I think it matters greatly that we work to eradicate poverty and dismantle racism and sexism and homophobia and learning to care for creation in a way that sustains life for us all. All of those are hopeful actions. But progress isn’t what creates hope. Progress will not make us feel less alone—that’s why I think Matthew tells this story.

If our hope depends on things getting better, what happens when they don’t and we face another long December? How do we keep going?

Nothing the angel said to either Joseph or Mary about God being with us improved any of the circumstances of their lives. None of their difficulties went away, yet they were able to move beyond their fear did because they were willing to trust that God was really with them no matter what the circumstances. It mattered that they were not alone.

It matters that we are not alone.

That trust took them to Bethlehem where the baby was born. The magi came and brought gifts, and they also brought Herod’s wrath without realizing what they were doing. Mary and Joseph and Jesus became refugees in Egypt, fleeing the violence of their home country and trusting, once again, that God was really with them, as their ancestors had done when they fled their captivity in Egypt generations before.

Herod died, as all despots do. Evil is not eternal. Mary, Joseph, and Jesus moved back to Nazareth. Jesus grew up and began to preach and teach and heal and then he was arrested and executed by another Herod. As we know, that is also not the end of the story. The story of God being really with us has continued from December to December, from disappointment to disappointment, from triumph to triumph, from birth to birth and death to death, and our hope survives in the midst of all those things as we trust that God is really with us and God’s love endures through it all, so that we can also.

It is a difficult truth that life is often filled with unjust rulers and violence and private grief and personal pain and all the rest that leaves us wishing most every year that the next one will be better than the last. That’s why the tree is still up, the lights are twinkling, and we continue to tell this story.

The story of the birth of Christ matters because it tells the accompanying truth that God does not deal with us from a distance, that Jesus was flesh and blood proof that God is really with us—even now, even here—that we may not just endure but flourish, that we may find true joy and courage in our daily lives, and that our hope may deepen, whatever the circumstances—a hope that comes from knowing God is with us and, therefore, anything can happen.

Yes, they are all long Decembers, and they are good Decembers, because we remember that the child out-lived the king and grew into the man we know as Jesus, who was killed by another evil ruler and then rose again that we might face this particular December with courage and hope because we trust God is with us. Amen.

Peace,
MIlton