The State of Marriage in these Latter Days

There is something miraculous about long marriages. Someone was asking Luther the secret to his long marriage – 55 years to the same woman. “Well, it’s simple,” he said. “We take time twice a week for a quiet dinner at a candlelit restaurant, soft music, and a long walk home.”

“That’s what it takes?” the interviewer asked.

“Yep. She goes on Tuesday and I go on Friday.”

Whatever it takes, I suppose. There are jokes like that that have been told from time immemorial and it is because marriage is not an easy thing. It is loaded down with all sorts of expectations and cultural baggage. There are no qualifying exams so anybody can do it and it is left up to two people who have no idea what they’re getting into when they promise to be with each other “for better or for worse.” And we’ve seen it go wrong in so many different ways. It’s no wonder Socrates is credited with saying, “By all means marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”

Marriage is in a state of flux in our time. It is still held up as a cultural ideal, but it is not what it was in the 1950s. The 50s were a kind of anomaly. During that period you almost had to be married. There was a survey done in 1957 in which four out of five American responding said that preferring to remain single was sick, neurotic or immoral.[i]

Things have changed today. We accept singleness as a perfectly acceptable way of living out a whole life and that’s a good change. Because of the problems young people have seen in marriages, they are more cautious about getting married. People are marrying later. Couples are choosing to live together outside of marriage, testing out the relationship before marrying or never marrying at all. And the traditional and biblical standard of sex as something only clearly affirmed within the bonds of marriage has slipped away. Sex has become a substitute for transcendence in relationships, or at least a pale reflection of it.

You know all of this. I don’t list all of these changes to beat us over the head with how far we’ve fallen. We know all of these things because we see them in our own families and in our own lives. We’ve all changed. But what I believe we suspect is that marriage has become broken in our culture. It is not what God wants it to be or what we want it to be. We want to hear a new word.

Of course, one other reason that we are debating what we think about marriage in these days because of our struggle as a nation over the application of the word ‘marriage’ to same-sex couples. Many states have now extended the civil rights offered to heterosexual couples to same-sex couples and some have even granted marriage licenses. Most churches, including the United Methodist Church, have clearly opposed the idea of same-sex marriage while maintaining the need for guarding the rights and dignity of all people.

My own sense is that this is because we have no precedence in scripture or tradition for such marriages. What marriage means to us is a union between a man and a woman. In the blessing prayer of the service of Christian marriage in The United Methodist Hymnal the covenant between the man and woman is said to represent “the covenant between Christ and his church.”[ii] The couple, in their bodies, offers a glimpse of a spiritual truth beyond themselves; they represent a relationship between God and humanity that is figuratively rendered as a male Christ taking the female church as his bride.

Again, though, I know that we don’t merely see this question in theoretical or abstract terms. In my family and perhaps in yours…in my circle of friends, and perhaps in yours…there are people I love who believe that they are diminished in their humanity because the church does not recognize their most significant relationship. It makes it all the more important, then, that we honestly struggle with what we believe about marriage because the truth is that heterosexual couples have not been too great about upholding the ideal that we think is threatened by these new understandings.

So what is our understanding of marriage? To be honest, it’s not all that clear. The Bible presents us with many different models of marriages, many of which we would find disturbing today. Abraham and Sarah, the ancestors of all Israelites, were married to each other but when they were not able to have a child, Sarah’s servant, Hagar, was given to Abraham to become a surrogate mother. It was not a happy experiment. Sarah and Hagar ended up in a bitter dispute and the servant and her child were sent off into the wilderness. But the arrangement was not all that unusual in a society that put a premium on producing male heirs and the ancient Israelites were such a society.

Polygamy is also found in the Bible. Jacob married Leah and Rachel. Solomon famously had 700 wives and 300 porcupines…er…concubines [1 Kings 11:3]. Those were not particularly great arrangements either. Leah was always the neglected wife. Solomon was led astray by all of his foreign wives.

There was also the practice of levirate marriage. According to this tradition, if a man died without leaving a son, one of his brothers was to marry his widow in order to produce a child [Leviticus 25:5-10]. We see this in practice in the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis chapter 38. It’s an R-rated story and again it’s not a very happy story. Jesus is asked this practice in the gospels when the Sadducees ask him whose wife a woman would be at the resurrection if she had been married to seven brothers because of this kind of marriage [Matthew 22:23-32]. (His answer, by the way, was that she would be wife to none of them because in the resurrection there was no marriage.) Again, this seems a strange and disturbing practice from our perspective, but for a society intent on producing male heirs, tidy marriage arrangements took a back seat.

Then through Christian history we don’t see a whole lot of references to the church taking a particular interest in marriage. Jesus attended a wedding in Cana as one of his first public acts of ministry [John 2:1-1]. Later in the letters of the New Testament we see references to the roles that men and women are supposed to take on in marriage and it’s clear that the standard is one man and one woman. Bishops, for instance, were supposed to be the husband of only wife. [1 Timothy 3:2]. Our bishop in Virginia is now a woman, Charlene Kammerer, so we would say that she should only have one husband. And she does.

But marriages themselves took a long time to come into the church. In the passage from 1 Corinthians that we have for today, Paul addresses marriage only to say that it is useful for keeping us out of trouble. Sexual immorality was leading some of the Corinthian Christians astray. Some of them were interpreting the freedom they knew in Christ to say that all of the old rules were thrown out. To them Paul said, “No, you are too tempted to wrong behavior if you pursue sex outside of marriage. There is still a role for marriage in the Christian community.”

On the other hand there were some Corinthian Christians who were saying, “It is good not to even touch a person of the opposite sex.” Since they were expecting Jesus’ return, perhaps they should give up sexuality altogether. Paul had some sympathy for this belief. He was single himself and he had dedicated himself to preparing for Christ’s return. “I wish everyone could be like I am,” he told the Corinthians.

He also knew that this was unrealistic. He affirmed the place of sex in marriage and in fact, he encouraged regular relations between married couples. “The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not have authority over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not have authority over his own body, but the wife does. Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again, so that Satan may not tempt you because of your lack of self-control.” That’s 1 Corinthians 7:3-5. Some of you are going to want to make note of that passage.

He also told people who were unmarried that, even though he saw the best form of life for himself as singleness and dedication to God, there was no sin in marriage. He just warned that “those who marry will experience distress in this life, and I would spare you that” [1 Co. 7:28]. Oh, yes, but Paul, it can be such a rich distress! (There are a few times, very few, when I think I can speak with more authority than Paul.)

As it became clear that the church was going to be in the world for awhile, obviously marriage became more common. Children were born and raised in Christian marriages and they in turn married others. But their weddings were often not in the church and very often they were not marriages built on romantic love. If you were in the upper classes, very often your mate would be chosen because of arrangements between families. If you were a serf many times you had no choice either. In 1344 a lord of a Black Forest manor decreed that all of his unmarried tenants had to marry spouses that he chose. In other places, if you were a peasant and wanted to pick your partner you had to pay a fee.[iii]

It was only slowly that weddings came to the church and then it was only to the front porch of the church where the priest would do the ceremony and then only because the priest was often the only person in a village who could read. Marriages in England only came inside the church building just before the Reformation in the 16th century.[iv]

The truth is that the church had never really developed a good theology of marriage. Because celibate priests and monks led the church for so many centuries, not a lot of thought was put into marriage. As James White, the great liturgy scholar says, “Medieval theologians had trouble saying much positive about [marriage] except that it was a remedy against lust.”[v] White goes on to say that “the predominant history of this rite has been that of a legal contract in the West, a contract which the couple performed and the Church witnessed and blessed”[vi] but did not try to explain.

It was also the case, for all of these reasons, that love had little to do with marriage. If it was about child-bearing or status or money or security or necessity then love could rank pretty far down the list. In fact, displays of love between married couples were often looked down on. You’ve heard that Virginia is for lovers? Well, in the 1690s a colonist here described a woman he knew as “more fond of her husband that the politeness of the day allows.” Ministers would often warn spouses against loving each other too much – against the clear teaching of scripture as we have seen.[vii]

So this preacher wants to say something about marriage today, knowing that it has a sometimes sad and strange history among us…knowing that there are some of us who have not been married and wonder what all the fuss is about…knowing that there are some of us who have been married and have known great pain in that relationship and who have had marriages end with a great deal of heartbreak…knowing that there are some of us who are currently in marriages that are full of light and shadow and that demand and invite our time and energy and our best selves…knowing that there are some of us who are quite happy in their singleness and not thinking about marriage…and knowing that there are some of us who lived many years with a spouse now departed who feel a tremendous sense of gratitude and loss for what that marriage meant. Yesterday we celebrated the life of Jennie Benton Turner at a graveside service. She was married to her husband Burleigh for 61 years before he died in 1999 and by all accounts it was a rich and loving relationship that reminds us of the promise of marriage.

That is what I want to say about marriage today – that there is still promise in the institution of marriage and there are blessings to be found in it. It may have changed in form many times through the centuries. It may be stretched and frayed by the challenges it faces today. It may often be broken, but for all of that it is not beyond redemption. In fact it can offer us glimpses of what the life in God’s reign in meant to be like.

Paul may have said some interesting things about marriage in 1 Corinthians but he is also credited with some other words about marriage in the letter to the Ephesians. After talking about the mutual love that ought to exist between husbands and wives, the writer remembers the first thing ever said about the relationship between men and women in the Bible. “For this reason,” Genesis says and Ephesians quotes, “a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." Then it goes on to say, “This is a great mystery.” [Ephesians 5:31-32]. The word in Greek is mysterion and in Latin it got translated as sacramentum and this is the reason why, when the church got around to thinking about marriage it called it a sacrament, something that Protestants didn’t adopt. But it is what Jim White calls a “natural sacrament,” a way in which, through human flesh, the mystery and grace of God can be known.

Ephesians makes the connection greater. It’s clear that what’s important is not only the relationship between a married couple, but a greater relationship that the couple represents – the relationship of Christ and the church. Every time a couple joins together in marriage it’s not just about them, no matter how many bridezillas and vanity weddings we may see. A Christian marriage is also about the love becoming human and being lived out through human relationships.

I do a lot of weddings. I did more last year than I’ve ever done in my pastoral ministry. And I am still dumbfounded by the willingness of couples to take on these vows knowing what a shaky institution marriage is. But I am also filled with joy and hope. Because with marriages there is also the potential for deep happiness and deep sharing. There is a commitment to stand before another person in all of your vulnerability and to be known by them. And there is the possibility of space to be opened up for children who are our greatest promise and sign of trust in the future.

Paul is surely right that anything that distracts us from following Christ and expecting his return ought to be discarded. Marriage is not one of those things, though. Marriage is a crazy, human thing that is often entered into without rational thought. In our culture, it’s often inspired by an explosive spark that kindles something overpowering between two people. Marriage claims against all odds that the impermanent attraction that brings two people together can somehow be made permanent and enduring because God is asked to be at the center of that relationship.

For all that, marriage is of God. If you are in a marriage right now, get working on it because it is work and it needs to be done well – for your sake and for the sake of any children who are part of it and for the sake of the world. If it is troubled, seek help. Pray to God for your spouse and reach out to others who can help you pray and discern what’s happening and what can be done. If you are not married, God loves you just the way you are. Despite the cliché in our culture, you don’t need someone else to complete you. But if you do go into marriage, go in knowing that you can’t do it alone – even the two of you together. There is blessing and life in marriage, but it finds its ground in the love of God.

Thanks be to God for all the human ways God’s love becomes incarnate. Thanks be to God.

1 Corinthians 7:29-31

I mean, brothers and sisters, the appointed time has grown short; from now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away.

[i] Psychology Today Magazine, May/June 2005. Referred to hereafter as PT.
[ii] The United Methodist Hymnal, p. 868.
[iii] PT.
[iv]James White, Sacraments as God’s Self-Giving, [Nashville:Abingdon Press, 1983], p. 87.
[v] Ibid., p. 86.
[vi] Ibid., p. 86.
[vii] PT.

The City of God at the Time of the Inauguration

Yesterday I was at a conference with Smith and Martha and Emma. Smith had picked up a card that has all of the liturgical colors for the year and I picked one up as well. We noticed, however, that this one had some new days marked for the color red. Besides Pentecost, which is the day we usually think of as red, there were civic holidays. Martin Luther King Day, Labor Day, Memorial Day – these were marked for liturgical observance.

This made me a little uncomfortable. Why are we adding national holidays to our liturgical calendar? Do we really need to observe them in the sanctuary? What does a church owe the country in which it is found?

It’s an old question – as old as the church itself. Way back in the 5th century Augustine, that influential saint of the church, was struggling with the question as he watched troops sack the city of Rome – the capital of the great Roman Empire. It was an unthinkable thing to happen. The greatest city on earth – independent for a thousand years – looted and burned by the Goths.

Augustine was forced to think about the distinction between God’s reign and the reign of the Romans. What he said was that God had worked through Rome, but the city of God was not the same thing as the Roman Empire. The City of God was something more – something behind and beyond the empire. It was wherever God ruled in fullness.

There was an earlier Christian who also looked to Rome with a mixture of emotions. The Apostle Paul, who gave us a good chunk of the New Testament, wrote his most significant letter to the Christians who lived in Rome. They lived in the seat of the empire or in the belly of the beast depending on your perspective.

Paul wrote them at a time when Rome was at the height of its power. From what is now England to Egypt, from what is now Spain to Palestine – Roman roads, Roman troops, Roman trade and Roman government ruled the world. To be a Roman citizen was to have a slate of protections that set you apart. To be a Roman subject was to be reminded continually of who was really in control.

Paul knew both sides of that equation. As a Jew he knew the many compromises the Jewish leaders had made in order to maintain just a puppet state. He also knew the revolutionary tendencies of the Jews in Palestine who were clamoring for a new Israel with a new king not beholden to Rome. Rome was no friend to independence and faithfulness.

Yet Christianity flourished in the empire. Paul was able to move easily from place to place down paved roadways which were kept clear of robbers and bandits. Mail could be delivered. Emissaries could be sent. Roman cities were places of conversation, culture, and religious ferment. Roman law made it possible for Paul to have a hearing in Rome following his arrest. In the end, though, tradition says that Paul was beheaded by the Roman authorities.

So it is that familiarity with the empire that Paul writes with as he tells the Roman Christians, “Let every living person be subject to the governing authorities.” We hear this and we think to ourselves, “Really? Do you really believe this Paul? We know what blind obedience can lead to. We just got out of the twentieth century and in that century we saw people gassed to death in concentration camps because they were ‘subject to the governing authorities.’ We saw people sent to gulags, whole peoples annihilated, whole segments to the population segregated behind walls of Jim Crow laws, massive resistance and apartheid, whole countries starved, all because the governing authorities were obeyed. And the 21st century is not looking a whole lot better!”

There is a school of thought that says that things all went wrong in the relationship between the church and the state when the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and made his new religion the official religion of the empire in the 4th century. Before that time Christians were often persecuted and blamed for everything that was going wrong. We think about the time and we think about Christians thrown to lions and publically executed. But we also imagine a pure church untainted by connections to power.

Constantine gave us something new – Christendom. Christianity became the unifying point of the empire and when Rome fell, it was Christendom that survived. All the corruption and power plays and wars and compromises that were part of the old empire now became part of the Church. The City of God began to look a whole lot like the cities of the world.

That’s the way the argument goes and there is some truth to it. Christians did get seduced by power and they did begin to lose touch with the gospel of Jesus. But it is too easy to fall into the belief that if the Church would just detach itself from the kingdoms of the world and renounce the idea of Christendom that we could once again discover what it was that the early Church was about.

This passage from Romans shows us, however, that the relationship between the church and the authorities of this world has always been complex, even before Constantine made us “official.” We’ve always been mixed. But Paul reminds the Roman Christians that it is not the powers of this world that have control. When order has come out of chaos, when the some sort of justice and rule of law has emerged, it is always because of the work of God. Behind all human systems of authority is a bigger picture. The big story is not the power of Rome but the power of God.

Of course, Paul, as he is writing, is expecting the end of all the powers of the earth. He has taught his followers what Jesus said – that he would come again soon to bring about a new reign. A few verses after this passage we read today are these words: “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers; the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” [Romans 13:11-12, NRSV]. Paul’s concern is to help these new Christians to live as people who are ready for Jesus to come. They should not be distracted by arguments with the governing authorities that keep them from being Christians.

So one thing Paul says to the people is: You shouldn’t live in fear of the government if you are doing good. You should always be living right according to the law of God. It’s only when you do wrong that you should be afraid. That’s why the authorities are given the power that they have.

Now we know that the authorities can misuse that authority and they often do. The other scripture passage for today from Luke shows us John the Baptist chastising tax collectors for taking more that they were supposed to take and soldiers for abusing their position and extorting money from the people under their power and protection. John would not have called these folks a brood of vipers if they hadn’t been acting like snakes.

Paul is telling us something more, though. The ruling authorities at least have the capacity to act as God’s helpers. That’s what he calls them. They have the capacity to act as God’s servants. He calls them that, too. These are not good Christian folks he’s talking about here. He’s talking about pagan Roman rulers just as prone to corruption as any Rob Blogojavich we know in our day. Even they can act in ways that reflect God’s will for the world. It’s not that God has given up on the world and is just waiting for a day when a new heaven will replace everything. The new day God promises is one in which there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

Which brings me to Barack Obama and the inauguration coming up this Tuesday. I know that we did not all vote the same in November. I know there are many of us who are unsure about this man from Illinois and from the world and maybe you have a little bit of justified fear about whether he is up to the job. But whatever his politics, this day represents something historic for our country. How many of us thought that we would see a day when we would be electing an African-American as president? We have said the words so many times – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” – and yet we have to live it out over and over again in moments like this one to know that the promise is for all and that men doesn’t mean just some men and in fact it doesn’t even mean just men.

So our country is living up to its founding words and it is a moment that was brought about, not by force of arms, not by the National Guard, not by a legal decision from the Supreme Court, but by the vote of a free people. That is no small thing. There is a long way yet to go. But on Tuesday we take a big step towards the promise that race does not have to divide us.

In addition to this, we have elected a man who talks about the power of hope. We’ve heard that word before. We are right to be skeptical when politicians use that language. We’ve been burned before. But in these dark days, it is good to be reminded that it is more than just O.K. for us to lead with our hopes instead of our fears. This is what Christians are called to do – to look with open eyes at the future, to know that there is evil in this world and that our leaders, just like us, can fall prey to it, and yet to expect that, for all that, God has plans for us and this world. And God has used broken people before to do amazing things.

God took a murderer named Moses and led a people out of slavery. God took a beauty queen named Esther and saved the people from slaughter. God took a shepherd boy named David, a tender of sycamore trees named Amos, a geriatric mother named Elizabeth and a teenaged mother named Mary, a tax collector named Zaccheus and a bully named Paul and used them to do mighty things. Who’s to say that God won’t do it again? Who’s to say that God can’t do a new thing, even with the United States of America?

So I call you to pray with me today for this country. I have to admit that I have been guilty at times of thinking that we had no stake in this land. As a Christian I know where my allegiance lies and when the interests of a flag stand between me and God I know whom I am called the serve. It’s not George Bush or Barack Obama. It’s the God of Jesus Christ.

But…but what is good about this land is something God blesses. The empire may have ruined us when it coopted Christianity, but empires don’t last – the Word of God remains. The grass fades, the flower withers but what shall stand forever? The Word of God. And as long as we draw breath in this land we are called to let that word shine forth with hope and light through every institution and in every way possible.

We have a responsibility for this land because when this country aspires to be its best, it is looking to values that are gospel values – the sacred worth of every human person, the freedom God calls us to, the common purpose that binds us together in community, the advancement of liberty and well-being from sea to shining sea. So yes, we should pray from this land and pray for its leaders and pray for its promise, because even though God can work through every land, God can work through this land.

Jeremiah the prophet spoke to the people of Judah just before they were taken off into exile in a foreign land. Jerusalem was going to fall. The people were going to live under other powers. But Jeremiah did not tell them to condemn the authorities they were under. Instead he said, “Pray for the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf; for in its welfare you will find your welfare” [Jer. 29:7, NRSV].

I don’t like adding new days to our liturgical calendar, but I do think this day in the life of our country needs noting. The kingdom Christians live in is not the same as the nation they live in. The city of God is not the city of Washington. The Messiah we proclaim is not the president. But we pray that this nation can be the best it can be and that it finds its true measure when it seeks the God who gives us life. Thanks be to God and may God bless America.

Romans 13:1-8
Let every living person be subject to the governing authorities. Authority exists under the reign of God and the authorities existing are instituted by God. So the one resisting authority has set self against the direction of God, and those resisting shall bring condemnation on themselves. Rulers, you see, are not a terror to the good deed but to the bad. Do you want to live without fear of the one in authority? Do the good and you will have authority’s praise because the authority is God’s helper on your behalf for the good. But if you do the bad, be afraid; for authority does not carry the sword to no purpose; the helper of God is wrath’s avenger to the one practicing the bad. So you must to be subjected, not just for wrath, but for conscience’s sake. This is the also the reason you pay taxes; because God’s servant’s are devoting themselves to this thing. Give to all their due: taxes to the one due taxes, customs duties to the one due custom duties, respect to the one due respect, and honor to the one due honor. Owe no one anything except love for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.

Water Born

We are a people who live with water. Even if your primary experience of it is driving across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and marveling at its vastness, water is pretty inescapable around here. We fish in it, we swim in it, we surf in it…some folks still work on the water, though that is getting harder to do.

Down at Bayford, Hooksie Walker has a boathouse right next to the landing and when I’m down there sometimes I like to look at the marks he’s made on the corner of the building. There’s a line with the name Donna next to it. And another that says Floyd. And the Ash Wednesday storm. Those marks are how high the water came up during each of those floods. It’s humbling to see what water can do.

Wind and water pushed most folks off of the barrier islands here. Cobb Island was pretty much done after the 1890s. Hog Island and the whole community of Broadwater disappeared in the 1930s. Big storms did the last of the damage…destroying buildings, overwashing the islands, killing the eel grass in the back bays that protected a lot of the commercial stock. Johnny Tankard took the youth out on a walk a couple of months ago to see the remains of Douglas Landing – a community that was also hit hard by the storms and that eventually moved on up to Willis Wharf where it was more protected.

Those big storms had some other effects, too, though. They brought change. Some things died out but some new things were born. New communities started. Some people think that things never change on the Eastern Shore but they are changing all the time. Every time the tide comes in, something new is being born.

Tohu wabohu. That’s how Genesis describes the earth in the opening chapter of the Bible. Tohu wabohu. It’s a Hebrew phrase that means totally confused and chaotic…a formless void. That’s a great phrase – one that you can use all the time. Instead of saying “That is just messed. Up.” You can say, “That is tohu wabohu.” You can go into your children’s rooms and say, “Are you going to clean this place up? It’s tohu wabohu in here.” Barack Obama should use it in his inaugural address next week: “Our economy is tohu wabohu.”

That’s how the opening chapter of Genesis describes things “in the beginning.” “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was tohu wabohu and darkness covered the surface of the watery deep. But the wind of God swept across the face of the waters.”

The wind of God. The Hebrew word for wind is ruach and it can mean wind but it can also mean breath or spirit. So think how this sounds if you have the Spirit of God sweeping across the waters. This is a restless spirit. There is energy and expectancy in this hovering that soon will be unleashed with creative force. Within a few verses there will be light, stars, planets and space. The Spirit works across a broad canvas and cannot be contained. God is going to keep doing do a new thing and change will come. The tohu wabohu will be transformed into something blessed.

In Mark we hear a different story. John the Baptist had headed out into the wilderness to prepare the way for Jesus. Like an Old Testament prophet he dressed in animal skins and ate locust and wild honey. Also like a prophet, John called on the people to repent of their sins, to turn back to God and to expect a new day.

Where did John choose to meet the people? By the water. At the river Jordan. He led the people through the water, baptizing them, but reminding them as well that there was a baptism yet to come. When Jesus came he would baptize them with that same Spirit that had been hovering over the waters at the very beginning of all things.

Then Jesus did come. Jesus who came from God but who was one of us. Jesus who had been born in a manger and about whom angels had testified and shepherds had given witness. Jesus who was now an adult ready to begin a public ministry that would lead him all the way to the cross. Jesus came and he also went under the waters to be baptized by John.

When he emerged from the waters things happened. The skies were ripped open. It was like the curtain in the Temple that was torn in two at Jesus’ crucifixion – opening the way for all humanity into the heart of God. The skies were ripped open and the Spirit – that restless, hovering, moving Spirit – descended like a dove. A voice called out from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well-pleased.”

Then Jesus was sent right out into the wilderness. There is no stopping now. Immediately, Mark says, immediately the Spirit drove him out. God was going to bring change to the earth once again. The world was tohu wabohu and there was work to be done to bring it back within God’s reign.

There is something astounding to me about the journeys that animals undertake in order to fulfill some biological imperative. The monarch butterflies who pass through here in the late fall – how do such fragile creatures make it all the way to Mexico? The birds that come through in great flocks on their way south or north. Or salmon that must return to their spawning grounds at the end of their lives after travelling miles in the vast ocean. How do they know to go home?

Their triggers are internal. Or maybe their senses are more attuned than ours to the changes around them that tell them that it is time to go. Human beings are not so in touch with themselves or with the world around them. We need someone calling us into the desert to tell us to get ready. We need something like skies torn open to help us see what was there all along. We need a savior who will walk before us and show us what it means to be human – leading us even to death to show us that life is more than we have ever imagined that it could be.

One of the places where Jesus led us is through that water. There was nothing extraordinary about the water. Sometimes people will bring back water from the Jordan River and put it in the baptismal font and it’s a nice connection but there’s nothing magic about the water. It’s meant to be ordinary. But what it becomes because of baptism – now that’s another thing altogether.

You know that in the United Methodist Church we baptize infants and children. It’s done in other traditions, too. And there are some Christian traditions like the Baptists where baptism is reserved for youth and adults who can answer for themselves. But we do baptize infants and it is one of the most powerful moments in the life of a church when that happens.

Baptism is a recognition that God claims us despite the fact that our lives are often tohu wabohu. Before we were able to claim it for ourselves, before we were born, God’s love surrounded us like the waters of a mother’s womb. And God took the risk of loving us. It was a risk and a foolish thing to do. I mean look what people do. They lie. They cheat. They hurt one another...fail one another. They mistreat each other. They even kill each other.

Baptism proclaims, though, that God knows what we can be. God knows that we can love. That we can heal. That we can work for justice. That we can envision a new land and a new day. With God’s love anything is possible – including an empty tomb.

So we baptize babies and adults because we believe that grace – another name for that love – is available to all or every age. And because we believe that we can never be fully ready, whatever our age, to understand what that grace can do. God’s love claims us and says, “You are my child, my beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Now you and I know that we do things from time to time with which God is definitely not well pleased. And baptism is no substitute for a life of discipline and holiness where we daily commit ourselves to loving God more fully and to serving God and our neighbors with our whole lives. That’s why baptism calls forth a response. And when it’s an infant at the baptismal font, the parents and the congregation take that vow for the child to raise her or him up in the faith. When it’s a youth at confirmation they take those vows on for themselves. When it’s an adult they say them, too. Grace calls for a response. But who starts the movement? God.

Two weeks ago I was back in my home church to baptize my new nephew, Carson Lee. I spoke with the children, as I do here, and told them that their job was to remember this day for Carson since he would not be able to remember it himself. But it had an extra layer of meaning for me that day because I was baptized in that church when I was an infant. I don’t know who the minister was. I don’t know the day. But I had been baptized there.

So when I go back and I hear folks, even with me now 45 years old, talking about me as “this young man” I know that I was born into a story that began a long time before I got there. And I was born into a community that had no idea how I would turn out. But they claimed me because God claimed me. And if God was going to love me anyway, they might as well, too.

That’s what happens in this water. God takes us faltering people who stumble our way into God’s story and washes us up, splits the heavens, and who says, “You are my child, my beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And we have to live up to that. We get to live up to that. We are alive because of that. Thanks be to God.

Genesis 1:1-5 (NRSV)

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

Where Do I Look for Light?

O.K., we have to start with some straight talk about Epiphany. January 6 (and the Sunday before it) is a day that the Church has set aside to recognize the revelation of the light of God in human flesh. The word Epiphany means “manifestation” and it is an ancient Christian festival that now marks the end of the Christmas season.

Why January 6th? There was an old pagan winter solstice celebration on that date in Egypt and the new Christians may have been trying to claim that day to tell a new message. Just as the solstice marks the time when the light begins to grow again and the days get longer, so Christians want to say that Jesus came into the darkness of the world and began to bring new light.

Over time Epiphany began to be associated with the visit of the magi to worship Jesus. Now here’s where we need to clear up some misconceptions. First of all, I called them magi. In tradition, over time, we started calling them kings. We even gave them names – Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar. But we don’t know how many there were or what their names really were. The word ‘magi’ tells us they were astrologers, probably followers of some Mesopotamian religion that searched the stars for signs. We like to put them in the manger scene on Christmas, but Luke is the one who tells about the manger and he doesn’t mention the magi. Matthew is the one who tells us about them and he says they came to the house where Mary and Joseph and the baby lived, so they could have come much later.

We like to put them in the manger, though, because it is important that we get the witnesses right. And we are fascinated by these exotic figures that travel from the East following a star to the place where Jesus was born. We are fascinated, but they must have been a surprise and a disturbance to the faithful Jews of Jesus’ day. Foreigners? Bringing gifts to a new-born child?

Not that the rest of the Christmas story wasn’t surprising. A young virgin giving birth to the son of God…now that’s something you don’t see every day! A host of angels bringing heavenly messages. A bunch of shepherds bearing witness! All of those things were surprising, sure, but the Jews of the day would have some way of understanding them and why God might use them. A young girl giving birth to a divinely-promised son? Why that had happened to old Sarah and Rebecca and Hannah in the Hebrew Scriptures. Angels bringing messages from heaven? That was a great part of Jewish tradition dating back to Sodom and Gomorrah and Jacob’s ladder. And shepherds? Well, they weren’t the most respected people in the community, but great King David – the greatest king in Israel’s history – he had started out as a shepherd.

All of these folks were surprising, but they were still within the fold – still part of God’s people. But these wise men – studying the stars and signs, offering gifts from far-off lands – where did they come from? They wandered in off of somebody else’s story! They certainly weren’t Jewish. What could God be doing by bringing foreigners to worship the savior of Israel? What’s going on here?

So here’s the rub – Christmas for us is a celebration of the incarnation of God in Christ, but it was also a crisis in how we understand God. For the early Church it was something that caused great splits and divisions. It still gnaws at us today. What did God mean by doing something so scandalous as throwing the doors open to other nations – Gentiles as the Jews called them?

The question is: If the good news of salvation is suddenly opened to all people – not just the Jews – by the coming of Jesus – what does that say about God? Did God intend this from all time and only make it plain in Jesus – or did God change God’s mind about being Israel’s God and Israel’s alone? Or is the God of Jesus another God altogether?

The early Church fought about this a lot. The wise men couldn’t be ignored. They made clear that Jesus was not just a local hero. He was someone of universal importance. So for the Jews and the new Christians the question was – what do we do with all these foreigners?

There was no question that the Christian movement had Jewish roots. Jesus taught in the synagogue and the Temple. He was circumcised according to Jewish Law. He was presented at the Temple with a sacrifice. He studied under Jewish religious leaders.

The new Christians began meeting as part of the Jewish synagogues, but they found themselves faced with the same hostility Jesus found to his teaching. Soon they were meeting separately.

At the same time the apostles were finding a great response among the Gentiles. So a great conference was held in Jerusalem to decide if the new converts had to become Jewish in addition to accepting Christ. The conference is recorded in the book of Acts, chapter 15 and the answer they determined upon was: “No – the Gentiles should be welcomed without restriction.” As Peter put it, “Why are you putting God to the test by placing on the neck of the disciples a yoke that neither our ancestors nor we have been able to bear?” [Acts 15:10]. It was grace through Jesus that would save people – not Jewish customs.

Obviously the Church did expand beyond Israel. It continued to grow among Gentiles and eventually they began to ask why they needed to keep any of their Jewish heritage. If Jesus changed things so radically, why do we hold on to the Old Testament? In the 2nd century folks like Marcion decided that what was in the Old Testament was the revelation of a different God altogether. So he made his own collection of Scriptures. He took Luke and ten letters of Paul and started a new movement.

The Church rejected Marcion and his interpretation. We believe that there is only one God who was revealed to Israel and through Jesus. We believe this because of passages like the one we find in our Ephesians reading today. Paul was trying to answer the questions of the Ephesian Christians and he gets to this passage and it all comes out of him in this tumble of words that can be rather confusing. In the Greek it’s all one run-on sentence, but here’s a rough translation.

Paul says, “Look, you Gentiles, this whole change has taken about for your sake. It looks like heresy to the Jews because it is so different, but it is for your sake and theirs that Christ came. It’s a mystery why God chose to do it this way. It’s a mystery earlier people weren’t given to understand, but now the Holy Spirit has come to give new understanding to apostles and prophets like me. And because it comes you can be reconciled to God through Christ.

“God had it planned from the beginning and it has always been available. It’s not really new at all. But Jesus makes it clear and because of him we all have access to this mysterious God.”

Jesus makes it clear. He came to tear down walls, not to build new ones. The same God who created us is the God who saves us. And the unapproachable, unknowable God has become approachable and knowable through the baby of Bethlehem’s manger worshipped by Gentile wise men.

Maybe we think the wise men aren’t as surprising to us as they were to the faithful Jews of Jesus’ day. We’ve been seeing them in their bathrobes in our Christmas pageants for so long that we think they are as natural as the stars in the sky. We say to ourselves, “Of course the gospel is available to everyone. Of course, they should be there.”

There are ways, however, that we close the doors to those who are seeking. We are still building walls. We are still keeping the wise men out.

How do we do it? When we forget that the Church does not exist for itself but for those who are not here, then we are keeping the magi out. When we use obscure language to talk about our faith and do not explain it, we alienate those who want to know what it is that we are talking about. When we use language like ‘we’ like I’m doing right now and assume that we’re all on the inside instead of recognizing that many of us, even in this sanctuary are still seeking, then we are keeping the magi out.

There is a video making the rounds on the internet these days that imagines what Starbucks would be like if it marketed itself like the church does. In the video a couple comes to Starbucks for the first time and is bewildered by what they fine. They have to drive past parking spaces reserved for the manager and assistant manager in order to find a place to park. They are bewildered by the insider coffee language that the store clerks use. There is a long list of announcements about things they know nothing about that they have to sit through before they can order their coffee. You can see the parallels.

Here’s what I believe and I believe it because I have walked with people who have been seeking God for a long time. I’ve seen it at Taize in France where young people from all over the world come to sing chants and sit in silence to pray – not because they have bought the whole “Christian thing” but because they suspect there may still be some power worth exploring. I’ve seen it on mission trips when disillusioned people with very little connection to God suddenly discover that they have been claimed just because they made themselves available to serve others. I saw it on Christmas Eve as people made their way here – some because they had come here often but some because something called them back to church or called them for the first time.

What God shows us in Jesus is that there is a great openness in the heart of God that is large enough to welcome every soul. What Jesus shows us in laying his life out on the cross is that God will go to death itself to find a way to bring us home. What the broken bread of the communion table shows us is that it is precisely as walls are broken down that the path to life becomes clear.

What the magi show us is that people, all people, are still searching for hope and salvation and light in the midst of the darkness. And when they find it they are willing to place their best, their treasure, their very lives at its service. Hope. Salvation. Life. We know all these things in Jesus – the baby in the manger who came to save the world. What are you holding back to give? And who are you holding back from seeing what Jesus means to you? Thanks be to God.

Ephesians 3:1-12
For this reason, I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus on your behalf, you Gentiles – for surely you have heard of the management of God’s grace which was given to me for you, because the mystery was made known to me by revelation, just as I wrote above in a few words, in accordance with which you will be able, upon reading, to perceive my grounding in the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the children of humanity in another time, but now has been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets in the Spirit. So that the Gentiles may be fellow heirs and members of the same body and sharers in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel of which I have been made a servant according to the gift of God’s grace given me by the working of his power.
To me! The least of all the saints! This grace was given to me to bring the Gentiles the good news of the unfathomable richness of Christ and to enlighten everyone as to what is the plan of the mystery which has been hidden for ages in God by whom all things were created. Now it comes forth that it might be made known to the rulers and authorities in heaven through the Church – the Church being the multifaceted wisdom of God. Now it comes forth according to the eternal plan which he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have courage and trust to approach God by faith.