Signs of the Season

So here we are at the dawn of a new year in the church calendar. That sounds strange, doesn’t it? Here we are at the end of November and I’m saying ‘Happy New Year’ to you. Even after my whole life in church it still catches me up short, too, but today is the day when the whole church year starts moving in a new direction.

Advent is the name for this season. It comes from a Latin word and the ‘vent’ part is related to the verb for ‘coming.’ The ‘ad’ part refers to all the advertisements you’re going to see between now and Christmas urging you to spend money you don’t have on things no one needs. Actually, that’s not true. I mean it is true that you’re going to see those ads, but it’s not what the word means. An advent is an important arrival and it does come from Latin roots that mean ‘coming to.’

What is the important arrival we’re waiting for during this season? In a sense we’re looking in two directions in Advent. The church year really walks through the life of Jesus. It begins as we look towards the promise of a coming Messiah – a savior for God’s people – and it moves to the story of Jesus’ first advent – first arrival among us in the manger of Bethlehem. But we are also looking ahead to the second advent of Christ.

We are also moving into a new gospel for the coming year. This last year has been the year of Mark and today we start to hear a lot more from Luke, who will be our primary companion in the gospel readings from now until next Advent. Luke is the one who gives us most of our images of Christmas. This is the gospel that talks about the shepherds in the fields and the angel appearing to Mary and ‘no room in the inn’ – all of those important Christmas images are in Luke and nowhere else.

That’s not the section we read from today, however. Today we read from a section of Luke that talks about Jesus’ second advent, his second coming. Jesus is talking to those gathered around him in the Temple in Jerusalem and he is telling them to pay attention for the signs of his return. The signs will be fearful for the nations. They will look at the sun and the moon, the star and the seas, and they will be afraid -- dropping dead from fear and foreboding, even. The return of Jesus on the clouds will be a source of confusion for the world, but for Jesus’ followers it is something to look forward to. “Be strong. Take heart. Keep your heads high,” Jesus says. “Your day of liberation is drawing near.”

He goes on to tell them to pay attention to the signs that can see in the fig tree. They know that when the blossoms appear on the fig tree it is a sign that summer is coming. In the same way they should be alert because the signs should tell them that the reign of God is ‘drawing near.’

That phrase keeps repeating. ‘Drawing near.’ Your day of liberation is drawing near. Summer is drawing near. The reign of God is drawing near. Jesus wants us to pay attention because something is drawing near and he does not want us to miss it.

Are you in danger of missing it? Do you get anxious like me at this time of the year – afraid that maybe there will be so much activity – so much frenetic busy-ness – so much distraction that you will miss it? I don’t even know what ‘it’ is, but every year I have this sneaking suspicion that all the stuff I fill December up with is keeping me from paying attention to something God is trying to tell me.

It feels a little like those tests they did where they took a bunch of people and showed them a series of playing cards. They would flip them over one at a time and the test participants would just have to stop them if they saw something wrong. The researchers replaced two of the regular cards with cards that were wrong – something like a red club or a black heart. The test participants could not pick out what was wrong.

They were so programmed to see a deck of playing cards a certain way that they couldn’t pick out errors, but they did get more anxious as the test went on. On some level below the surface they knew something was wrong and they just couldn’t figure out what the problem was. That’s how I feel about this season. Something is going on and I don’t want to miss it.

When Suzanne and I were living in England during the year I served a church there in the early 90s, I picked up on a British habit that seemed very curious to me at the time, but which I appreciate more and more. It had to do with gifts. When our British friends would receive a gift, it would receive a lot of attention. No matter how small, no matter how seemingly insignificant, the recipient and whoever else was around would begin to evaluate it.

It could have been a tea kettle and they would start to say things like, “Ooooh, it is dear, isn’t it? That color is very bright and it will look quite attractive in the kitchen beside the cozy. And look at the spout, it’s at a very good angle for pouring. Look how its lid fits just so in the opening. I quite like that handle, too.” They would turn it over and admire it from every angle. And for the rest of the day they would talk about it with whomever they met. “Don’t you know, Alex and Suzanne gave me this tea kettle and it’s dear, isn’t it? Look at the spout, it’s a very good angle, isn’t it? It just wants putting out with biscuits for an afternoon cupper.”

My first reaction to all this was to think, “My goodness. Come on. It’s just a tea kettle. Don’t make such a fuss.” But then I started to think about how we often receive gifts in our culture. We are so used to the qualities of mass production that we are not very attuned to the uniqueness of the things we get. We are grateful to receive a gift, but very often we don’t consider the gift. We don’t see the wonder in it. We just put it to use or add it to our collection.

Over time I began to see that what my British friends were doing was expressing wonder and love in their response to the gift. I mean, they are British, after all, and not well-known for expressing affection. But in spending so much time on something as simple as a tea kettle they were saying, “This gift is important. It is touching to me that you would give me this item and I want to appreciate it in the best possible light. I’m going to stop and marvel in this item because I am marveling in this moment and I am thankful for you.” At least, that’s what I choose to believe they were doing.

Recently I have been reading for my prayer time a prayer book that uses the work of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as its focus. Hopkins lived in the 1800s and became a Jesuit priest in the Catholic Church. He had a rather frustrating career as a parish priest and then as a professor in Dublin, Ireland and he never had a poem published during his lifetime. Even when he died at the age of 44 his best friend, named Robert Bridges, who collected his poems, refused to publish them for fear that they would not be received well. It wasn’t until 30 years after his death that they were published and now he is recognized as one of the best poets in the English language.

What I am discovering is that Hopkins had this English ability to appreciate a thing in its uniqueness. In his journals he would look at something as simple as a bluebell and describe it so vividly that it was impossible not to see that flower as a sign of God’s glory. Just listen to how he describes this:

I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it. Its inscape is strength and grace, like an ash tree. The head is strongly drawn over and arched down like a cutwater. The lines of the bells strike and overlie this, rayed but not symmetrically, some like parallel. They look steely against the paper, the shades lying between the bells and behind the cockled petal-ends and nursing up the precision of their distinctness, the petal-ends themselves being delicately lit. Then there is the straightness of the trumpets in the bells softened by the slight entasis and by the square splay of the mouth.[i]

Isn’t that amazing? I mean, I have no idea what all that means, but the attention that Hopkins is giving to a flower – seeing in it the beauty of God. I tried it the other day. I was out by the garden space in the watershed here at the end of the church building and I decided to try and describe the scraggly magnolia tree. It is not a picture of perfection like the bluebell Hopkins had, but by the time I had spent ten minutes writing about this tree I was convinced that it contained the universe. And I know now that should that tree fall before I do, I will mourn its loss. Because I paid attention, I see something new. Even that magnolia is filled with the glory of God.

I can only hope that God sees in each one of us a little bit of that wonder. Hopkins uses the word ‘inscape’ to describe that inner structure of all living things that is a bit of the divine within. If we can see the inscape of each living thing, each person, we will perhaps be seeing as God sees and not missing ‘it.’

So this is my annual Advent charge: Be alert. Keep watch. “Be careful that your hearts do not become weighed down in stupor and drunkenness and care for the matters of this life and that day catch you not expecting it like a trap.”

This season is too important to let it pass by in a blur. Don’t just do something; stand there. Stop and be. Watch and pray. Your soul, like the Virgin Mary’s, is giving glory to God. Don’t miss it. Thanks be to God.

Luke 21:25-36

"Now there will be signs in the sun and moon and stars and upon the earth an imprisoned dismay among the nations who will be in anxious watch at the roar of the sea and waves. People will be dropping dead from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the civilized world, for the powers of the heavens will be rocked. At that time they will see the son of humanity coming in a cloud with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, be strong and keep your heads high, because your liberation is drawing near."

Then he told them a parable, "Look at the fig tree and all the trees; when you see them put forth blossoms, you know that summer is already drawing near. In the same way, when you see these things taking place, you will know that the reign of God is drawing near. I tell you the truth, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words shall not.

"Be careful that your hearts do not become weighed down in stupor and drunkenness and care for the matters of this life and that day catch you not expecting it like a trap. For it will come in upon all the residents upon the face of the whole earth. So be awake at all times, praying that you will be able to escape all these things that are about to take place and to stand before the son of humanity."

---

[i] Gerard Manley Hopkins, quote in 40 Day Journey with Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. by Francis X. McAloon, [Augsburg: Minneapolis, 2009], p. 30.

Beyond the Superhero God

When I was younger I liked comic book heroes. My favorite superheroes were the ones who wore bright colors and stood up for great values like truth, justice and the American way. Captain America, the Green Lantern and the Flash were some of my favorites.

Today superheroes rate when they get their own movie and it seems like more and more of our summer blockbusters are made from old comic book characters. But today Hollywood is giving us characters that have intense inner struggles – who are tortured by their strength and who aren’t really sure what to do with their powers. Think of the Incredible Hulk. He may ‘do good,’ but when he goes green he is an really destructive force. Tony Stark is an engineering genius who can craft incredible things out of metal but when weapons his company creates go to help insurgents up to no good, he figures out how to become Iron Man and how to use his skills in other ways. He confronts his dark side.

Or think of Bruce Wayne – Batman – a brooding superhero. The series of movies that feature him have gotten progressively darker in recent years. Last year in “The Dark Knight” Bruce Wayne, the millionaire businessman who moonlights as a crime fighter, is confronted with a villain who only wants to bring chaos into the world. Despite all of his gadgets and strengths, he seems helpless to stop the bombings and terror attacks of this enemy. He thinks of himself as the good guy but he is tempted to become evil himself in order to stop the Joker.

Heath Ledger played the Joker and he was very convincing. At one point he is facing off with Batman and he denies that there is any good at all in the world. He talks about the people of the city and he says, “You see, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these...these civilized people, they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster. I'm just ahead of the curve.”[i]

Batman holds on to his convictions, though, even when he finds that the one man he felt had integrity, the District Attorney, is shown to have fallen himself. In the end he takes the blame for others’ wrongdoing on himself because he thinks they need a clear hero – “a hero with a face” as Bruce Wayne puts it. At the end of the movie a child sees what Batman is doing and asks his father, who is Batman’s friend, why the former superhero is now being ostracized by the city. “He didn’t do anything wrong,” he says.

The father, a policeman, Lt. Gordon, says he had to run, “Because he's the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So we'll hunt him because he can take it. Because he's not our hero. He's a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.”[ii]

Now there are many ways to look at this. You can look at Batman as a kind of stand-in for all the messy ways we look at the use of power in the contemporary world. Maybe Batman is the United States, struggling to understand how to use its military and economic might in a world that seems bent on chaos. “Maybe,” the movie is saying, “we have to compromise some of our heroic image of ourselves in order to do what needs to be done to combat forces that are truly evil.”

Maybe the Joker has a point and the world is fatally compromised. That’s biblical. Psalm 53 verses 2 and 3 says, “God looks down from heaven on humankind to see if there are any who are wise, who seek after God. They have all fallen away, they are all alike perverse; there is no one who does good, no, not one.” So perhaps the message of the movie is that in a world that is flawed, it’s not a question of being morally pure, it’s a matter of being willing to get down in the dirt and play the world’s game.

That might be one way to look at what God was doing in Jesus, too. I mean, after all, there is God looking out at a world in which there is so much fallenness, so much brokenness, so much evil and what is God going to do? It’s not like God doesn’t have superhero powers. Omnipotence? That’s a pretty awesome superhero power to have. Omniscience – the ability to know everything there is to know? Omnipresence? You put ‘omni-‘ in front of it and God’s got it.

So God could have sent Jesus down to be the superhero God. He could have been faster than a speeding bullet, stronger than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. But that’s not how we think of Jesus, is it? Jesus was not superhuman, he was fully human. Oh, there were some remarkable features to this man. We have stories of Jesus healing and walking on water, feeding the 5,000 and turning water into wine. But the thing that makes Jesus most remarkable is not that he could do stuff we can’t do. The most amazing thing is that he became just like we are. Bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.

Did he do this to play the Joker’s game? To get down in the dirt and play rough with the world on its own terms? To expose the fact that God was really not that good after all? That the God of Israel in the end was just like all those Greek and Roman gods who treated humans like their playthings and who really just wanted to get their own way?

No, he didn’t. Given every opportunity to wipe the world out, to teach sinners a lesson about messing with an omnipotent God, to give up on his people, to leave them for dead…Jesus didn’t do any of those things. Instead he came armed with the most unexpected weapon of all – the most underappreciated superhero power there is. Jesus came because God so loved the world. It’s love that changes the equation.

“But,” you might say, “Look where that got him. It got him a cross. It got him whipped and stripped and hung. It got him crucified. Doesn’t that just prove the Joker’s point? The world knows how to treat a good man. It kills him.”

Maybe that’s the point if your whole orientation toward life is formed by the world that welcomes love with a cross. But if you have thrown in with Jesus, another world emerges. If your values are not of this world, everything gets turned upside down.

All of this is on display in the court of Pilate, the Roman governor who was the one who was given the case of Jesus of Nazareth. Pilate was a man of this world, a leader of this world. He was someone who knew power and knew how to use it. He was being worn down by the troublesome territories of the Jews, with their one, true God and their restlessness – always threatening to rise up in rebellion.

So when the local religious leaders brought him a wandering teacher who had shown up in Jerusalem, he thought he’d get right to the point. “You are the king of the Jews.”

Pilate was probably expecting it to go one of two ways. Either the man would shoot back. “Yes, I am, and you’re going down, Pilate!”, in which case he would expose himself as a rebel leader, or he would become defensive and deny that he was any threat to the Empire. But Jesus answered as if he were the one doing the interrogating: “Are you calling me the king of the Jews because you believe that or have others said that about me?” Jesus sounds like he really wants to know what Pilate believes about him…as if it Pilate’s soul is the one at stake here.

“I’m not a Jew, am I?” Pilate replies. It’s a way of saying, “Look, I don’t have a horse in this race. Whatever happens to you is no skin off my back. Your people brought you here and they are the one’s clamoring for your death. What did you do?”

Jesus answers and again it’s like he’s the one who is conducting this interview. “My kingdom is not of this world. If I had a kingdom in this world – if I were getting down and dirty to play the games you are playing – my servants would be fighting you in the streets. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”

Where is Jesus’ kingdom? It is beyond, above, around, within. He’s not going to settle for a stake in a backwater Palestinian state. He’s after something much bigger. He’s after a kingdom that has already been claimed, already imagined, already established since before before.

You don’t become the king of this kingdom by force. You can’t even see it if you train yourself in the ways of this world. It is always lying just beyond beyond. Philippians tells us that “Jesus, even though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death-- even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” [Philippians 2:5-11]

This is the way Jesus became the king. Not with an army. Not by the sword. But by emptying himself to become like a slave. By living among the least and the lost. By accepting a cross. By dying there.

For this Jesus has been ridiculed and despised. For this Christians have been tortured and mocked. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche scorned Christianity as a religion of weakness and said that it was a philosophy that held individuals and nations back from greatness because it restrained them with the idea that the meek will inherit the earth. What possible good could there be in following this kind of king?

I’m going to have Thanksgiving with my family this week. We’ve got 10 folks coming from as far away as Oklahoma to be here. We’re going to sit around the table and give thanks for what God has blessed us with and we’re going to eat turkey and watch football and tell stories.

But whenever we get together, just beyond the veil of the visible is the most powerful person I have known in my life. She never had much. She never wanted much. She lived her whole life in pretty slim circumstances. But my grandma had something that was so potent that not even death could extinguish it. My grandma had love.

It was the “stop whatever you’re doing and receive the person in front of you” kind of love. It was the “always have food for them” kind of love. It was the “I believe in your best self” kind of love. It was the “I’ll never stop loving you” kind of love. It’s the kind of love God has for the world kind of love.

That’s the kind of king who’s conquering the world. That’s the kind of king who followed up the vacated cross with the empty tomb. That’s the kind of king who wants you and me to be a different kind of people with a different set of values. People who look ahead to a day when God’s kingdom will come and Christ will come again to reign in glory. People who shape their lives in this world not by what the world tells them to do, but by the values of the world to come.

So what are you going to do differently? Who do you know that needs to know that the world they think is crushing them has no claim on their allegiance? How can we show those who are weighted down by sin and sick to death with disease and who are faltering under a load of cares and miseries that a new day is coming and, in fact, it’s already here? Because wherever there are followers of Jesus doing what Jesus did, the kingdom is breaking in. They’re not superheroes. But then again – neither is Jesus. He’s just the mild-mannered king of the universe claiming the earth by taking up his cross. Thanks be to God.

John 18:33-37

Then Pilate entered again the praetarium and summoned Jesus and said to him, “You are the king of the Jews.”

Jesus answered, “Do you say this on your own of did others say this to you about me?”

Pilate answered, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own people and the high priests handed you over to me. What did you do?”

Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world my servants would be fighting in order that I not be handed over to the Jews. But now my kingdom is not from here.”

Then Pilate said to him, “So then you are a king.”

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world – that I might bear witness to truth. Everyone whose being is from truth hears my voice.”

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[i] The Dark Knight, 2008, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468569/quotes.

[ii] Ibid.

Not a Mite Would I Withhold

You’ll have to watch me today because this could easily dissolve into a sermon about money today. I admit the temptation is there. We had our Administrative Board meeting last week and there’s a significant budget shortfall for the year. I’m looking at all those things we have designated for second-mile giving this year and I’m praying in confidence that we will meet those needs as a congregation as we have done every year.

This is not a sermon about meeting the budget, though. It’s not a sermon about tithing, the biblical practice of giving a tenth of our income to God. It’s not a sermon about stewardship or sowing seeds of faith or any of the other terms that we use when we talk about our financial giving.

It’s not that a sermon about any of those things would be wrong. We don’t talk about it enough, actually. Jesus talked about money a whole lot more than he talked about sex or any of the other areas we spend so much time worrying over. And money is important because what we do with our money says a lot about who we are and what we value. Jim Wallis, the editor of Sojourners magazine, is fond of saying that a budget is a moral document. Our national budget says something about what we value as a society. Our personal budgets say something about we believe as individuals and where we give our allegiance.

But this is not a sermon about money or budgets – it’s a sermon about giving. Now that sounds like I’m still talking about money, I know, but I’m after something more. I don’t want to be like the old junk dealer who was talking to his donkey. One day a man came out of his house and he saw the local junk dealer out by the road with his cart full of junk hitched to the most pitiful-looking donkey he had ever seen. The donkey was lop-eared and shaky and didn’t look like he could pull a child’s wagon. But there was the junkman saying, “Come on Sally. Come on Old Paint. Come on Sturdylegs. Come on Pete. Let’s get this cart moving.”

The man went up to the junk dealer and said, “What are you doing? Who are you calling? There’s only one donkey here.”

The junk dealer leaned over and whispered, “I know, but if Sally thought she was the only one pulling this cart she’d never do it.”

So I’m not here to try to pull one over on you today. I really do want to talk about giving and I want to do it because the gospel story today is a story of giving and a story of living…really living and what it takes to do that.

The story is a very simple one that involves an act so simple that it might have gone entirely unnoticed it Jesus hadn’t pointed it out. It involves a poor, bereaved woman and two coins that she puts into a collection box. She probably didn’t even know it at the time, but she was showing something amazing about how God works and about how life works.

We are near the end of the story by the time we get to Mark chapter 12. Jesus has finally come to Jerusalem after telling the disciples over and over that this was where the end would come. This was where the whole journey would reach its climax. He was headed for the cross, he had told them. Headed for death. And then to be raised again.

The tension was mounting. The crowds had gathered. Everybody expected a showdown or a throwdown or some sort of satisfying resolution to this challenge Jesus presented.

Jesus engaged in a series of conflicts with the religious authorities and those who were vying for power. It was Jesus vs. the scribes, Jesus vs. the Sadducees, Jesus vs. the Pharisees. All with an audience trying to decide for themselves: Who was the more believable representative of God’s message? Whom could the people trust?

The chief priests, scribes and elders were the first to hit him up with a challenge, questioning his credentials. “Who gave you the authority to do these things you do?” they asked. Jesus artfully avoided their question by asking them to weigh in on John the Baptist, another prophet much beloved by the people and much reviled by the leaders. When they didn’t answer, Jesus refused to do so, too.

The Pharisees and Herodians were next with a question about taxes. Should good Jews pay taxes to a pagan Roman emperor or not? Again Jesus stumps them with a good line. “Give to the emperor the things that are his, and to God the things that are God’s.” How were they going to say that anything wasn’t God’s? They were stuck and they knew it.

The Sadducees followed with a ridiculous question designed to catch Jesus in the controversy over whether there was a resurrection of the dead. A scribe tried to enlist him in a conversation about which commandment was the greatest. And at the end of it all the critics were silenced. Jesus had handled himself so well that Mark says no one dared ask him another question.

But Jesus wasn’t done. He wanted to make sure his message got through. So right there in the crush of the Temple he turned to those listening and put in a dig at the scribes, the most learned men of the faith. “Keep watch on what the scribes do,” he said. “They like to wear the latest fashions, they like to be noticed whenever they go out in public, they eat up the fortunes of widows, they like the best seats in the synagogue and the best places at feasts. They will receive the greater judgment.”

Then we get some detail about where Jesus is. He’s standing there in the Temple and he’s in full view of the collection box. People are coming and putting in money. Then she shows up. A widow who approached the box and put in two small coins – mites they are called in some translations, not worth much more than a penny.

What do we know about this widow? Was she destitute because of the scribes who, Jesus said, “eat up the fortunes of the widows”? We don’t know. But Jesus sees a lesson here. He calls the disciples, a much smaller group for a much more intimate story. “You see that woman, that widow,” he says. “She has given more than anybody else. They all gave out of their abundance, but she has given out of her poverty. In fact, she’s given all that she has to live on.”

That’s how many translations put this, and when we translate it that way it makes the widow into a great model of sacrificial giving. She gave all that she had to live on. What a radical model for human beings to follow.

But it’s more than that. The literal Greek is that she gave her bion. Now you may not think you know that word, but you do. “Bio” is the found in words like biology and biography. It means life. It’s more than just what she had to live on…she gave her life.

This is not just Jesus giving the disciples a model for how they were supposed to give money – its Jesus one more time telling them what he is doing in Jerusalem. In the face of unjust scribes who devour the houses of widows, what does this widow do? She gives her life.

Who else does this? Who else will stare down the injustice and unjust powers in this world and give his life? It’s Jesus. This woman is, as New Testament scholar Katherine Grieb says, “a type of Jesus Christ who similarly chooses to give ‘his whole life’ in the face of those unjust structures that destroy it.”[i]

Good for Jesus, you say. He was God, though. What sort of model is that for us? And the widow – well, she was pretty extraordinary, wasn’t she? Does Jesus expect all of us to be a type of Jesus Christ?

I often hear this when I am having discussions with people about their giving. I ask it myself. How much does God expect from us? Most of us can see the good that comes from giving. We like to see the church responding to needs in the community. We like to see new programs taking off to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. We like to welcome new staff to help our ministry grow. When Drury or Jeff tell us about where our church donations go we feel good, (I hope!), about where that money is going.

But I feel the same way when my seminary asks me for money. Or the United Way. Or the Boy Scouts. I am giving because I see that my gifts are going to make something good better. But I am not going to give to those things to such an extent that it affects my ability to live in the manner to which I have become accustomed…am I? Would Jesus want me to give until I don’t have enough to live on?

What the widow’s gift shows me is that, in fact, what Jesus wants is for us to give until we are ready to die. Until we are ready to die to the world that has a claim on us that is so tight that we can’t see the reality of what God is doing in the world. When I am giving to God but still am hung up on what I can get from the world, I am no better than the scribes giving from their abundance. When I am giving but still clinging to my car or my plasma TV or my clothes to give value to my life, I am giving from my abundance. When I give so much that I discover what it really means to trust in God, then I am giving in a way that lets me die to the world and to live with Christ.

The Iona Community has a prayer that goes, “Help us not to offer you offerings that cost us nothing.” That’s what all the others were putting into that box. Offerings that cost them nothing. Offerings that may even have been to their advantage if the right person saw them. Offerings that did not begin to touch the deep joy and deep need to give that was implanted in their souls, that is implanted in each of us and which we sense every time we are touched at our core –when a baby is born or a sunset draws us in with its glory. Only the widow was giving from that place that knows that no half measure can suffice to give thanks for this life we have received from God.

I’m going to close with a poem. Franz Wright is a poet who became a Christian when he was far down the road in life. After struggling in many ways, he placed a lot of hopes on his baptism. He saw it in the same way that Paul talks about it, as a dying with Christ so that we can live with Christ.

His poem “Baptism” begins with his statement that the insane person he had been is dead.

I drowned him and he’s not coming

back. Look

he has a new life

a new name

now

which no one knows except

the one who gave it...

his first breath as an infant

past the waters of birth

and his soul’s, past the death waters, married --

Your words are spirit

and life.

Only say one

and he will be healed.[ii]

I’m out of my league in unraveling all that that says, but what I hear here is that the poet Wright is longing to find life and health and hope by dying to the world he has known. He will give his whole life to find what comes beyond “the death waters” of baptism. Nothing else will do. Jesus wants his whole life.

Just as Jesus wants yours. It is what giving is all about – modeling our lives after the savior who gave up everything to love us to life. Thanks be to God.

Mark 12:38-44

As part of his teaching, he said, "Watch the scribes from a distance. They like to walk about in long flowing robes and to be greeted respectfully in the market. They like the best seat in the synagogues and the best spots in banquets. They eat up the homes of the bereaved and pray with great show. They will receive the greater judgment."

As he was sitting there in the sight of the collection box, he watched how the throng threw money into the box. Many rich people were throwing in great amounts. But a poor, bereaved woman came and threw in two small coins, which were worth about a cent. He called his disciples and said to them, "I tell you the truth: This poor, bereaved woman has given more than all those who are giving to the collection box. All of them gave out of their abundance, but she, from her poverty, gave all that she had, all she had to live on."

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[i] A Katherine Grieb, “Blogging Toward Sunday: Two Widows True to Type,” Nov. 2, 2009, Theolog, blog of the Christian Century, http://theolog.org/2009/11/blogging-toward-sunday-two-widows-true.html.

[ii] Franz Wright, “Baptism,” Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, [Alfred A. Knopf:New York, 2007], pp. 44-45.

New Day Coming

An interesting thing is happening in funerals these days. A subtle shift is taking place, particularly for families who may only come to a clergyperson or a church at the time of a death. Funerals are moving from a service recognizing the victory of God’s love over death through resurrection to a celebration of the individuality of the person who has died. Now there is a place for remembering the individual and the unique ways he or she revealed God’s love, but what’s happening in some cases now is that all of the service is about the dearly departed.

The British writer A.N. Wilson has seen it go much further in his country. In a recent newspaper article he quoted an English vicar who said, “I wonder why on earth I am present at the funeral of somebody led in by the tunes of Tina Turner, summed up in the pithy platitudes of sentimental and secular poets and sent into the furnace with I Did It My Way blaring out across the speakers.”[i] (Did you know that ‘I Did it My Way’ by Frank Sinatra is the most popular funeral hymn in parts of Britain?)

I haven’t felt like that vicar too often, but I do see it coming. We are a forgetful people and we live in a forgetful, more secular culture. When we lose touch with the story and the faith that makes us Christians, what’s left? All we’ve got is Frank Sinatra and a photo display of our greatest moments.

But that’s not all that there is to say. As Christians we are people who have a different notion of time and it affects what we say about death and what we believe about it. It also affects what we say about those who have died after accepting Christ’s mercy and grace.

Today is All Saints Day, one of the high, holy days in the life of the church. John Wesley, the original Methodist, referred to it in his journals as one of his favorite days of the church year. It’s a day when remember how God has used human instruments to reveal God’s glory and grace. “We have this treasure in earthen vessels,” Paul says, “so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.” [2 Corinthians 4:7-10]. That’s what saints do – they make visible in their bodies the life of Jesus.

That sounds like a high calling and it is. It’s the greatest thing we can be called to. But it’s also not just reserved for an elite group – the Mother Theresas and Apostle Pauls among us. It is what Paul called all of the Christians he wrote to: “To all God’s beloved in Rome who are called to be saints” [Romans 1:8] “To the church of God in Corinth…called to be saints” [1 Co. 1:2]. “To all the saints who are in Jesus Christ in Philippi” [Philippians 1:1]. And if the Corinthians and Philippians can be saints, then maybe we might aspire to the same.

So today we remember the saints, we celebrate the saints, and we do something else – we look forward to the time when we will gather with the saints to praise God and to eat. Did you catch that vision from Isaiah today? “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of well-aged wines, of fat things full of marrow, of well-aged wines well refined. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces.” We are headed for something special.

That’s what makes the Christian view of time so special. We do not believe that the world is right when it says that history is an endless cycle of the same thing over and over. We do see familiar patterns and we know we make a lot of the same mistakes that human beings have always made, but this doesn’t mean that we’re not going anywhere. The arc of history does have a direction and a purpose.

So when Christians start telling the story of the world they start with a God who took the chaos of the primordial waters and started crafting a creation. God pushed aside the firmaments and made space for life to flourish. God started making fish and birds and land animals and every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. God made spiders and centipedes, platypus and porcupines, and finally God made a man and a woman and said, “This is good. This is very good.”

That’s where this story begins – an earth where God could look upon the work of God’s hands and see that it was good. But then sin entered the world. The first humans ate from that tree in the center of the garden and anger, murder, lust, jealousy, pride, and a host of other sins began to eat away at the relationship between God and the people. There was still goodness in the earth and in the people, but it was covered over and distorted and marred by the evil that was filling the land.

So God began a liberation project. Starting with Abraham and Sarah God made covenants with the wayward people. God promised to bless the people and to make them a great nation so that all the earth could be blessed. Abraham heard the promise. His children heard the promise. They were still far from perfect people, but they knew that God had joined God’s story with theirs. God had joined God’s name with theirs. When Moses asked God in the burning bush to give him a name, God’s response was: “I am the God of Abraham and Isaac. I am the God of Jacob. I am the God who is known by whom I choose to be with.”

So God freed the Hebrew slaves from Egypt and led them across the Red Sea. God led them into a new land and made a nation out of them. God was angry when they strayed and wept over their failure, but God did not abandon them and kept talking to them through the prophets and giving them visions of who they could be if they remembered that they were God’s people. Isaiah the prophet promised a new day coming when the death would be no more and the people would feast on the holy mountain.

Then the story reaches a climax at one particular point in Israel’s history. In one moment all of God’s work in conquering sin and death was done and made plain. The liberation project was completed. The great ‘I Am’ who spoke to Moses became the great ‘I am for you’ as Jesus died on a cross.

It was God’s way to go the distance and to reveal the depths of the divine love. In Jesus we knew a God who would give up his very life to bring us home. It was a love beyond all loves.

And here we are. On this side of the cross. With the victory won and the tomb empty. The whole purpose of history has been revealed. We know God’s name – This is the God of Israel and the God of Jesus Christ. We know where it all ends. We stand on the future which is in God’s hands.

So what is the point of this time in between? This time between the cross and the kingdom feast? It is a time for us to call on God’s name and to listen for our names. It is a time for us to work to model the kingdom that is to come in the here and now.

In Steven Spielberg’s movie Schindler’s List, we get a portrait of the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust in Europe during World War Two. The movie begins with typewriters typing the names of Jews being displaced from their homes by the Nazis in Poland. Stern, Horowitz, Heinz, Pfefferberg. At various other times there would be huge lists from which the clerks would yell out names as people boarded trains for work camps and ghettos and gas chambers. Names are called out over and over.

It is much more powerful to hear names than to simply say six million people died in the holocaust. This movie tried to say Solomon Eisenstein died in the holocaust, Yitsak Mantz died in the holocaust, and many others we don't remember died as well, but they each had a name. We name them because their memory still goes with us in this life among those who remain in their struggle to find life after this evil.

The film ends with the remaining survivors coming to place a stone of remembrance on the grave of Oscar Schindler, who saved them. One more name of a flawed human being who tried to bring a little divine light into a dark world.

We each bring our own names to this service today. Names of people we know and love who continue to speak to us. God continues to use the memories of these saints to move us and form us. And as we gather these names together, as we light candles of remembrance, we lift them up to celebrate what God was able to do through them. This is not a day to praise the saints, but a day to celebrate Christ's work in the saints. That is what makes this a high holy day.

What the communion of the saints looks like beyond this life is beyond our knowing or telling. The Bible can only approach it through images and so we talk of pearly gates and streets of gold. But the most consistent image through Old and New Testaments is that of a feast. Jesus talks about a wedding banquet where even the poor are honored guests. He tells his disciples at the Last Supper that they will meet again at a similar meal in the kingdom.

In Isaiah’s vision of the feast God gathers all the peoples of the earth together on a mountaintop. And God lays out a spread of the most fattening, cholesterol-loaded food you can imagine. Everything's cooked in butter, there's real cream for the coffee and you can eat cheesecake for dessert ‘til the cows come home. Best of all God will be there among the people, among the saints, wiping away every tear from their eyes and abolishing death as a thing which can separate us. That's what this feast at the end of time is all about.

It seems so hard for us to imagine, but you know what? We get a foretaste of it every time we gather around this table. When we gather here we don't just gather as a group of people in the here and now sharing a common meal. Because at table are Christians of every place and time. At this table time means nothing and we enter a new realm where the impossible becomes possible. We participate in the communion of saints and we imagine what the world can be like if we start living like kingdom people.

Last Tuesday I went to Washington for the dedication of the new urban ministry project that Wesley Seminary is beginning with two downtown churches. Our own Shelly Newsom is moving into the residential community there this weekend. In one of the presentations a Wesley professor, Jessica Duckworth, talked about how she had two rules for the students in her classroom. One was that there was to be no whining about lay people. The second was that there was to be no talk of dying churches. She has a crucifix in her classroom to remind the students that the dying is over. Jesus opened the door for resurrection when he left that cross. So what lies ahead for every church and every person who will begin a relationship with Jesus is life.

Jesus is here at this table, arms open wide to embrace us. Inviting us to come and find out what life is all about. Eternal life is not a gift to be unwrapped after death. It is a treasure to enjoy today and now. This may look like just another ordinary table. But you know the stories we tell around this table and they are like no other stories on earth. And we can't ever look at this table in the same way again. Thanks be to God - who works through saints and makes us saints as well.

Isaiah 25:6-10a

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of fat things, a feast of well-aged wines, of fat things full of marrow, of well-aged wines well refined. And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth; for the Lord has spoken.

It will be said on that day, "Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation." For the hand of the Lord will rest on this mountain.

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[i] A.N. Wilson, “Tina Turner and a ‘me’ generation no longer knows how to cope with death,” Daily Mail, 22 Oct. 2009, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1221815/A-N-WILSON-Tina-Turner-generation-longer-knows-cope-death.html#ixzz0VXaw9PO3/.