Word

Christ Church, St. Joseph, 27 January 2013

One of the advantages of having a teenager in the house is that they help you stay up on what’s current in slang. (Maybe that’s an advantage. Maybe not, depending on what new words you get to learn!)

A few years ago, my son, who is now 22, took to answering certain questions by saying, simply, “Word.”

For example, I might say, “Son, would you empty the garbage can in the kitchen?” And he would answer, “Word.”

Some times that would result in the garbage can getting emptied… and sometimes not! So one day I asked him what it meant, and he explained that in today’s slang, “word” means “yes.”

I rather like that. As a person who cares about words and thinks words matter a great deal, I like that “word” means “yes.” It implies a connection between words and action.

Of course, the connection between my son saying he’ll take out the garbage and my son actually taking out the garbage could never be taken for granted! But that’s about teenagers, not about words and action.

Jesus shows us the proper relationship between words and action. But I’m getting ahead of the story. 

Ezra Reads the Book of the Law, by Julius Schnoor von Carolsfeld

Let’s begin with today’s lesson from the Hebrew Scripture. Two things move me every time I hear this story from Nehemiah (8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10, NRSV).

The first is that the Israelites were moved to tears when they were reunited with God’s Holy Word. For all the people wept when they heard the words of the law, Nehemiah tells us.

It is not clear historically whether the scrolls actually got lost for a time, or if they were simply neglected for a time. We do know that when Nehemiah became governor, he led the people back to God. The scrolls were brought out to be read publicly by the chief priest from a stage built for that purpose.

And the people were so moved they wept. Nehemiah and the priest and the teachers had to tell the people: Do not weep! Go, eat, drink and share with the poor, for this is a day of joy.

Today’s Psalm is a continuation of that theme: Being in touch with God’s word, knowing and hearing and sharing God’s word revives the soul, gives wisdom to the innocent and light to the eyes, and is cause for rejoicing, the psalmist says.

The second thing I love about this story is that it makes clear that Holy Scripture must be interpreted. So they read from the book, says Nehemiah, with interpretation. They gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading. 

Now, I fully realize that this business of interpretation is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, knowing that making sense of scripture is an act of interpretation is liberating.

It is liberating because it enables us to learn and grow and listen to the Holy Spirit and change our minds about what it means. For example, we all know that at one time, Holy Scripture was used to justify slavery!

We all know that at one time Holy Scripture was used to silence women and to prohibit them from exercising spiritual leadership in the church! Thank goodness, we have left those interpretations far behind!

On the other hand, we also know that nothing has caused more dissension within the church, nothing has been more likely to divide God’s one, holy, catholic and apostolic church into warring factions than different interpretations of Holy Scripture. At their worst, disagreements over the meaning of God’s word have caused blood to be shed.

But at their best, disagreements in interpretation also cause us to engage each other in dialogue and to seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Indeed, arguing over the meaning of God’s word is a fine, long tradition of the church, going all the way back to Peter and Paul, who seriously disagreed on what Gentiles had to do to become followers of Christ!

It took several hundred years after the death and resurrection of Christ for the church to hash out differences and disagreements, and draft the creeds that we take for granted today. And the process continues because the world continuously hands us new problems and issue and situations, and we must decide how to anchor our responses in our growing and sometimes changing understanding of God’s Holy Word.

Here’s where Paul’s “one body” metaphor is so very helpful. The parts of the body are profoundly different in appearance and function, yet each belongs equally to the body.

If we can but remember that we are all part of one body, then contending interpretations need not pull us apart. They become part of our ongoing conversation with God and each other through God’s Word and the Holy Spirit.

Now comes today’s Gospel story (Luke 4:14-21, NRSV). Jesus has been baptized, and he has been in the wilderness 40 days. He returns to Galilee, Luke tells us, filled with the power of the Spirit and begins to teach in the synagogues.

Jesus Reading from the Prophet Isaiah, by Greg Olson

When he gets to his hometown Nazareth, he goes to the synagogue as usual. And what does he do there? He stands to read Holy Scripture and is handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah.

Then, Luke tells us, Jesus unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written… That suggests to me that Jesus wasn’t just following a lectionary as we do today. Rather, he was choosing the passage he wanted to teach on that very special day in his hometown near the beginning of his ministry.

And what is the passage? It is one of several passages in Isaiah we identify as “the servant passages.” So Jesus reads it, and then he interprets it. He makes himself the interpretation of it! 

Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing, he says. And we know from the remainder of the Gospel according to Luke, he not only teaches it, he lives it.

In that moment, Jesus embraces servant ministry. He takes the identity of The Servant from Holy Scripture and declares it to be his own. And he lives out the calling of servanthood: ministry to the poor, the sick, the prisoner, the stranger. In Jesus, word and action are one. 

So... how will this scripture be fulfilled in our time? By Christ’s body in the world—those who not only claim him in words but follow him in servant ministry.

And that would be us.

AMEN

Show Forth!

Christ Church, St. Joseph, 6 January 2013

 

Here’s a startling thought: If it weren’t for today, Christmas might mean nothing to us!

  

Today is The Epiphany. We have all heard many times that “epiphany” means “to show forth” or “to bring to light” or “to manifest.”

Being a visual thinker myself, I just imagine what we all have seen in hundreds of cartoons: a light bulb going on over someone’s head!

As a teacher, I frequently scan the faces of the students in my classes, looking for that telltale dawning, the expression that says, “Aha, I get that!”

I can assure you it does not happen nearly often enough! But every so often—just often enough to keep a teacher going—the light dawns on a heretofore blank face, and the teacher silently rejoices.

Today, the light bulb going on over our heads is an important step in our journey from the manger to a more grown-up understanding of Incarnation.

The Wise Men from the East by James McConnell

In Matthew’s Gospel (2:1-12, NRSV), that more grown-up understanding is represented by the wise men from the east who show up in Nazareth to worship the baby Jesus and give him gifts.

Tradition has it.., and this is important because we actually know very little about this event from an historical point of view! So, tradition has it that one of these gentlemen was Asian, one African and one Caucasian, and that is how they are depicted in countless artistic representations of the story.

All Matthew tells us is that they were gentiles from “the East,” a general reference to all those mysterious, far off lands and peoples known primarily to Jews like Matthew as “not Jews.”  And that of course is central to their importance to us.

Those of you who follow the Daily Office know that just three days ago was the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus. That’s the day, eight days after birth, that Jesus was taken to the temple to be circumcised and named… according to Jewish faith and custom.

In other words, the Feast of the Holy Name is a celebration of Jesus’ Jewishness. We Christians have a strong tendency to want to forget that Jesus was born, lived and died a devout Jew, never once giving any indication he intended to or thought he was starting a new religion.

Thankfully, Matthew, and only Matthew, for this story does not appear in the other Gospels. Thankfully Matthew tells us with this story that Jesus is for us, too. And not just for us, but for all the peoples of the world, and equally so.

We tend to think the concept of “diversity” was invented in the 20^th Century as a tool of “political correctness.” We would be wrong. Matthew and early Christians who interpreted these stories about Jesus were there way ahead of us.

Here’s another slightly shocking thing about this story. These guys probably weren’t kings at all. Matthew calls them “wise men,” which might translate better to “nerd” than “king”!We also call them "Magi," and that word comes from "magician."

We know they were people who believed that the positions and alignments of stars and planets at the moment of a person’s birth were important indicators of who that person was and how they mattered. Today we call such people astrologers and they write horoscopes for mass media!

Of course, today we also have astronomers—the academic and scientific descendents of the wise men. But the distinction between astrology and astronomy is pretty much a modern invention. Two thousand years ago, they were largely indistinguishable.

My point is that the meaning of this story, as with many of the Biblical stories is..., well, it’s the meanings given them by humans struggling to express and explain the experience of God and the miracle that God cares for us and came to live and die among us.

And so we have the wise men bringing gifts to the Christ child, the very gifts we receive from God in the first place: the gold of love, the incense of adoration, the myrrh of pain and suffering. That’s Incarnation.

Here’s how one 13^th Century poet explained it, speaking from God’s point of view:

 

Behold, I give thee gold, that is to say My Divine Love;

frankincense, that is all My holiness and devotion;
finally myrrh, which is the bitterness of My Passion.
I give them to thee to such an extent
that thou mayest offer them as gifts to Me,
as if they were thine own property.

(Mechthild von Hackeborn, 1241-1299; The Book of Special Grace, Part 1 Chapter 8)
(From Edge of the Enclosure, online, 5 January 2013)

So… how do we today “show forth” what was first shown to us in a humble dwelling in Nazareth so long ago?

We are given the same gifts today: God’s love, God’s steadfast devotion and righteousness, indeed God’s suffering for our sake. We are given these gifts so that we have something to give--both back to God and, as Jesus put it, to our neighbors as ourselves.

AMEN

                     

Incarnation: "The Word"

From a blogsite of Loyola School of Theology

St. Alban's Episcopal Church, 12 December 2012     

So there we were, just a few hours ago, kneeling at the manger, falling in love all over again with Baby Jesus. Babies grab our hearts. The least maternal among us cannot resist offering a finger for a tiny hand to grasp.

Then along comes the Gospel according to St. John. Every Christmas Day, we read this poetic and compelling yet mysterious prologue to John’s account of Jesus the Christ. It refers to “light,” which we associate with Christmas, but we’re less sure about ”the Word” and its connection to anything.

Where, we might be tempted to ask, is the babe? Where is Mary, the blessed mother, Joseph, the faithful father? The shepherds? Why can’t we just stay at the manger and play with the baby for awhile?!

Here’s a Gospel trivia question for you: Where and how does Jesus the human first appear in the Gospel according to John? In verse 29 of Chapter 1, as a 30-year-old man, when he comes to the river Jordan to be baptized!

John is the only gospel writer who does not tell the story of the babe in the manger.

In John’s interpretation of Christmas, the babe in the manger is “the Word” that not only was with God, but was God, “the Word” spoken in an act of self-communication. He echoes the creation story, and tells us again that God exists outside of time, and that light and life itself are from God.

We readily identify with a human baby. Not so much with an abstract concept.

John reminds us that we can know God only as God comes to us in self-revelation. Nothing we can do—not our most noble aspirations, not our most pious devotions, nor our most dedicated acts of service—can earn or precipitate such an event. Christmas is a celebration of God’s gracious act of coming to us.

But we need John’s account to also remind us that the babe in the manger was rejected. He tells us that The Word came to a world that should have known him, and to people who understood themselves as “chosen,” yet he was rejected.

The remainder of John’s account is story after story of debates and disagreements between Jesus and the religious people of his day, their ultimate rejection of him, and the price he paid, not only for them but for all humankind.

 Of course, some did accept him and we are their descendants and the heirs of their faithfulness. But they aren’t the company we quite expect to find ourselves in: fishermen, a tax collector, a Samaritan woman with a checkered past.

Part of what got Jesus into trouble with the religious authorities of his day was that he just wouldn’t hang out with the “right” crowd. What a motley crew they were!

And what an unlikely community to be called into being to change the world. But they did!

This tells us much about God and God’s intentions: If the apparent division between Creator and creature can be overcome, if a community to change the world can be forged from such a motley crew, then all other divisions and prejudices can be overcome as well.

Certainly it still often seems that God is far away and uninvolved. We have only to listen to the news of wars and violence at home and abroad. We have only to visit the Refuge of Hope or the food bank or walk the streets of our cities to see more than enough human need and misery. And we often feel powerless.

But if we accept in faith that God has seen fit to materialize in human flesh and form, then we can begin to see that we live in a universe of possibility we can hardly imagine.

I learned recently via Twitter that a journalist I follow by the name of Ann Curry started a movement called “26 acts of kindness.” It is people all over the country who are responding to the slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut by going around doing all kinds of wonderful things in the names of the victims.

Here’s a few I’ve seen in my Twitter feed:
-giving a toddler whose dad had no cash a ride on the carousel at the mall
-paying for an elderly person’s groceries
-buying $26 gift cards at Target and giving them to the cashier to use as needed
-putting flowers and a thank you note under the windshield wipers of a city maintenance worker’s truck

My favorite is the woman who tweeted that she’d done her 26 acts of kindness but couldn’t stop. Suddenly, she saw human need and something she could do about it like she never had before.

Please understand I’m not suggesting that “26 acts of kindness” is the underlying “reason” that Sandy Hook happened, or that any good that comes out of that event in any way justifies the tragedy.

I’m also not suggesting that the people doing the acts are Christians. I don’t know if they are. They might just as well be Muslims or Jews or Buddhists or nothing for all I know!

I am saying that God comes into this world, over and over again, through human acts of love and kindness and reconciliation.

Here’s how one of my spiritual mentors, Fr. Richard Rohr, explains it: In Jesus, God achieved the perfect synthesis of the divine and the human. The incarnation demonstrates that God meets us where we are as humans. God freely and fully overcomes the gap from God’s side. …For the Christian, spiritual power is always hidden inside of powerlessness, just as God was hidden and yet revealed in a defenseless baby. 

May we this Christmas Day begin to see how we as people of the Word can be God’s healing and reconciling self in the world.

Amen.