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It’s a difficult time. Headlines announce what we already know: Wall
Street is bouncing back, but Main Street continues to limp along.
Homes are for sale, businesses struggle, offices and storefronts
advertise their availability, which is to say, their emptiness. It’s
a demanding time, a deadly time. Troops leaving Iraq will go now to
Afghanistan. Kim Jong-Il rules North Korea, accelerating its
production of long-range missiles and, we fear, nuclear weapons. In
Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad leads his country toward a nuclear
capacity feared by national neighbors far and near. And somewhere in
Pakistan, or Afghanistan, perhaps, God knows, Osama bin Laden waits
and plots. Possibly worst of all, Tiger Woods has fallen from hero
to heel (or at least human) in a few short days. It’s a difficult
time, when narrow selfishness demonically guides the powerful.
The church recognizes the difficulties of our time. Methodists
Bishops recently published a pastoral letter for their churches and
people. Titled “God’s Renewed Creation: Call to Hope and Action,”
Bishop Park has asked us to read it to you this Advent. At seven
typed pages it’s about twice as long as a sermon, so I’ll spare you.
But I’ve put several copies on our “Welcome Table.” The Bishops’
letter notes some of the challenges of our time: “pandemic poverty
and disease, environmental degradation, and a proliferation of
weapons and violence.” (God’s Renewed Creation: Call to Hope and
Action, A Pastoral Letter from the Council on Bishops, available at
the website of the New York Annual Conference: www.nyac.com) The
Bishops’ letter also lifts up a lament for our world and its people,
noting a polluted planet; anxious people; communities in crisis; and
economic inequality and political corruption. We know, even as our
Bishops remind us, of the difficulties of our time.
But difficult times are not new. “We’re born to trouble,” Job
laments through faithful centuries, speaking for both Jews and
Christians. As naturally as the sparks fly up from a campfire or
steam rises from a nuclear reactor, we face demands as people. It’s
always been like this. Difficult times, demanding situations, deadly
rulers, or depressing seasons are nothing new.
In fact, commonly difficult times are the setting of our most of our
scriptures, including our gospel lesson for today. Luke wants to
tell us about Jesus, but he begins by remembering John the Baptist.
Bishop Will Willimon compares John to one introducing the featured
speaker. John is to Jesus as Ed McMahon was to Johnny Carson.
“Here’s Jesus!” (Will Willimon, “The Introduction,” in Pulpit
Resource, December 2009, pages 41-45.) Whatever the introduction,
the world into which both Jesus and John arrive is a difficult
world. It’s a lot like our world, actually, if you understand the
players and their time. The gospel lesson we hear is set in
difficult time, too.
And that is the point. “In the fifteenth year of the reign of
Tiberius,” Luke begins. It helps to remember that Tiberius is the
successor to Augustus Caesar. A gifted general, Tiberius became a
reluctant Caesar. His reluctance created an environment of intrigue,
and when John and Jesus come of age, Tiberius is busy killing his
enemies to retain his Roman throne. “When Pontius Pilate was
governor of Judea,” Luke continues. Pilate’s excessive brutality,
not his condemnation of Jesus later forced even the Romans to remove
him from power. And Luke proceeds to catalog a list of rogue
despots: Herod, Philip (Herod’s brother), and Lysanias. Historian
Will Durant called their time, “an age that … produced so many men
of intellect without morals, ability without scruple, and courage
without honor.” (Will Durant, The Story of Civilization, Volume III,
Caesar and Christ, page 531.) That time, the era of John the Baptist
and Jesus the Christ, was as depressing, as dangerous, and as
difficult as our own.
In fact, Luke’s message is that Jesus arrives in a difficult time to
announce and to embody a new realm. Jesus arrives in human life at
the most difficult of times, Luke says, to transform life from the
bottom up. Jesus challenges Tiberius and Pilate and Herod – each of
them characters at both the beginning and at the end of Jesus’
earthly life. Jesus replaces power with peace. Jesus rejects
violence in favor of God’s loving acceptance. Jesus embodies a
sacrament of God’s love: the ordinary becomes holy, and we see the
world the way God hopes it will become. Or, as John the Baptist
announces, in our lesson, using a quote from Isaiah the prophet:
“Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be
made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways
made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.” (Luke
3:5-6, New Revised Standard Version) That’s a vision of nothing less
than difficult times radically transformed by God.
This vision of a new and lovely world is common in our Bible. Why so
common? God, being love, is naturally in the transformation
business. God enjoys changing difficult times into joyful times, and
difficult people into loving, hopeful people. When you think of it
that way, the epistle lesson, this opening of the letter to the
Philippians, is an example of just such a transformation. Here is a
lesson written by Paul, you remember. Paul is much maligned, but
whatever else he was or wasn’t, he was a man transformed by the love
of Christ. Luke introduces us to Paul, then named Saul, as the man
holding the coats of the mob who stoned Stephen. But on the way
Damascus to make more trouble for followers of Jesus, Saul the
persecutor becomes Paul the apostle of a living Christ.
This is the very same Paul who can say in today’s lesson: “I thank
my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in
every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in
the gospel from the first day until now.” (Philippians 1:3-5) Such
generous, gentle, and loving language! We easily forget that this is
a changed man, and the love he now embodies is the mark of his
transformation. He says to the Philippians, “…all of you share in
God’s grace with me….” (Philippians 1:7) You listen in on that
intimate conversation and it’s hard to remember the Paul’s prior
life as Saul, the persecutor. How did the change happen? Two words:
God’s grace. God, being love, is in the business of changing lives.
God transforms despair into hope, death into life, and shame into
joy.
As you come to our Lord’s Table today, remember that it’s a symbol
of God’s transforming love. We’ve literally fought wars about what
it means, exactly, to say that the bread is changed into Christ’s
body. Literally, or not? Is it still bread, but a symbol of
something more, as some say? Or is it now, actually changed, some
say “transfigured” quite literally into Christ’s holy flesh?
Important questions, perhaps. But there’s a much deeper truth at
stake here today. As you come to this table, remember that a
sacrament is anything ordinary that God transforms, by love, into
something quite holy. This is a table of change, mysterious, Godly,
holy change. And what is being changed is not merely the bread and
wine, but us. We are being changed, by God’s grace.
As you come here today, in your own difficult days, remember that
God remains in the change business. Maybe God changes the wine and
the bread into blood and flesh; but more important and more to the
point, God changes our despair into hope, if we will but allow it.
God transforms our depression into joy, here and now. God lovingly
empowers us to loosen our deadly grip on our own lives long enough
to look around us at our neighbors in need and at our world in
crisis. In that moment God reworks our hearts, so that we’re no
longer at the center of everything, masters of the universe, no
matter how small or how large we deem our universe.
Here’s the miracle. Together at the table, we are God’s children,
and God, in Christ, is our master. With God in the center, we might
find this miracle: our world is no longer quite so difficult, and
love, after all, might just have a chance on this warped, sinful
planet, beginning with us.
Amen.
Mamaroneck United Methodist, December 6, 2009.
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