Sermons

Thurs. April 1, 2010

Maundy Thursday

In these last days of our holy week, we invite the disciples of Jesus in every age to gather for a meal, have their feet washed, love one another, bid farewell to a dear friend, suffer through his death and grieve our own losses.  Which of us has not done that in our everyday experience?  This evening reminds us of our common union with Christ in his and our experience.

We join this evening propped around the table with his disciples, dipping bread in bowls of hummus licking our fingers.  The oil lamps flicker and our clay cups clash as we celebrate the Passover.  While all this is going on, Jesus strips off his outer robe, wraps a towel around himself and washes the feet of those gathered.  It would be the normal role of one of the household servants.  But it is their leader who is doing this, and the room falls silent foot after foot.  Peter objects.  Jesus tells him the necessity.  In some ways this is just the furthering of the Christmas story, in which Jesus wraps himself in human flesh, suffers and dies eventually to resume his rightful place with the Creator.

I struggle every year as to how to re-enact the foot washing, but I remind myself always and everywhere that the important symbol of foot washing is our humble service of each other as we respond to the new commandment we have been given, to Love one another.

In the next few minutes, we will remember the Passover feast, the Passover of the Lord in the breaking of the Bread and the drinking of the cup.  There are some among us who have concluded a time of Communion education; I daren't call it First Communion, because everyone who is baptized no matter their age is welcome at this table, the Lord's Table for us.

But we will also take the time as the service concludes to remove the adornments of our worship environment, to remind us when we gather tomorrow on Good Friday, that Jesus, the son of God was stripped of his clothes, his dignity, his friends, to remind us over and over again that it is in the simplicity of our very being, that true servant hood is found, and the bare altar will remind us of the sacrifice of the Lamb of God.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Christmas Eve 2009 Midnight

Writer Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October) once said: "The difference between reality and fiction?  Fiction has to make sense."  Isn't the Incarnation something that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to a lot of us?  God becoming human?  A virginal conception or birth?  Angels singing in the heaven?  The marginalized getting the word first?  Of course, it doesn't make any sense, just like life doesn't make any sense a lot of the time.  But like life, we believe the incarnation is very, very real.  Alfter all, a fictional writer would have given the story a different ending.

Now you and I have heard this story many times before, and although the time intersection of Augustus, Quirinius, Herod and the travelling census never occurs...in the historical research of our modern era...Luke does try to make it plain to us and the other gospel writers too was that they all believed Jesus was really the anticipated Messiah, who the prophets foretold.  Each of the Gospels was written to point to Jesus as the one.

And central to all of them was one major theme - hope.  Hope in the face of great loss, hope in a future, hope in a life different from this earthly one, hope for a new kind of justice and compassion, hope for the coming of God's realm in the here and now.  The Prophet Isaiah and the prophet Micah with him would recognize us and our time.  Both were writing to a nation in distress.  Jerusalem was under siege in both cases, the economy was in tatters, the king had been humiliated, the people saw little hope.  Micah sees that there is more to our existence than what we can see.  There is also what God sees, and what God is promising to do.  In spite of distress and despair everywhere, the messenger testifies to God's future, which we may not see now, but which is promised.  Isaiah is trying desperately to prove to King Ahaz of the loyalty of Israel to counteract the growing Assyrian menace.

We have something in common with the people of those days.  many live in fear.  We look, not to ourselves, but towards the seats of power for rescue, trusting that our leaders will meet our needs and the needs of the most vulnerable among us.  We look to established professionals to protect us from perceived threats that make us feel vulnerable.  We look for pat simplistic theologies which will simply hand us answers, and save us from having to grapple with the tough questions.  One of my online preachers, says "Micah is jumping up and down, desperately waving his arms and pointing us to a small, out of the way place in a town called Bethlehem", where Hope would be born.

Funny how the prophets knows us.  How they know the ache in which we live today.  Both of them tell us that God is at work in the world.  They suggest that in the lowliest of places the stables of the world God is acting.  They also tell us God's activity can be found in us, if we let it.

The Hope which was born, the Love which was born, continues to be born into the world.  The important message of the story is Mary's joy at having a child, and feeling that this child would do great things which would change the world - that is the Hope.  The birth of that child was the Hope, and that is why we have the stories decorated with the elaborate myths.

This is the message of Christmas; that human beings have been given the potential of God's peace and love.  Each child born into this world has great potential just as Jesus did, for each human is a beloved child of God.  It doesn't matter where we are born, or to whom we are born.

The question to be asked is this: are we going to receive God anew at Christmas, to have God - Emmanuel - born in us?  If we say yes, then are we ready and willing to be God's gift of hope and love to the world?  Are we willing to let something be born in us this Christmas?  And then are we willing to share ourselves as a God-given gift to the world?