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Rev. Marc van Bulck
Luke 23:33-43Rev. Marc van BulckOxford Presbyterian Church When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots to divide his clothing. And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.”
One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
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Last week, a friend and colleague of mine posted a picture of a billboard sign that she had seen on social media. The billboard read, “If Jesus had preached the same message that ministers preach today, he would have never been crucified.” Do you think that’s true? It’s a challenging statement to be sure. It’s provocative. It’s a statement that I think is meant to challenge us to examine how closely our lives and our mission align with the person of Jesus Christ…and perhaps invite us to be honest with ourselves about some of the compromises we often make in our day-to-day lives. As Walter Bruggemann, one of the greatest scholars and theologians of the Old Testament in the twentieth century, once famously said, “The Gospel is a very dangerous idea. Jesus did not get crucified because he was a nice man.”
What do you suppose that means?
What I suppose it means is that the way of being that Jesus represents, the way, the truth, the life, and the Word of God made flesh embodied in the person of Christ threatens and challenges those who are comfortable in their power just a little too much. And generally speaking, those who are comfortable in their power don’t particularly like seeing it threatened. But that’s what Christ the King Sunday is all about.
This year, Christ the King Sunday happens to fall during the culmination of an election season where conversations about power and authority are very much a part of our cultural consciousness. One of the conversations that we have during our New Member Experience is the historic Presbyterian confession in the third chapter of our Book of Order: “God alone is Lord of the conscience.”
What that means is that, as valuable as our leaders in power are in our community, in our nation, and in our world, and as much as a society like ours needs them to function, at the end of the day, God alone is our ultimate moral authority as people of faith. There is no authority that any president, senator, House member, governor, judge, parent, or pastor for that matter could hold that goes above the authority of God.
God, alone, is the ultimate authority over creation. That kind of power looks a lot less like a millionaire in an office in Washington somewhere and a lot more like a man from Nazareth crucified on a cross like a common criminal.
This conversation about Christ’s power (and what that really means when Jesus talks about being a king) is one that Luke has been building up to for quite some time. The Benedictus (otherwise known as the Song of Zechariah) introduces this language of lordship. The Magnificat, Mary’s song of praise that she sings after receiving the Good News from the angel Gabriel that she would bring forth a son, contains language anticipating a king. Luke has been building to this. If you could imagine somebody who is somehow only just now reading Luke’s Gospel for the first time (if that were possible) without knowing how it’s all going to end, this would be right about the time when you would be waiting for the big reveal. And when this reveal finally arrives, it’s Jesus crucified on a cross, naked and humiliated like a thief.
When a crown is finally placed on Jesus’ head, it’s not a crown of jewels and gold but a crown of thorns. There’s no royal coronation. Only a sign that says, “This is the King of the Jews.” This is the big reveal in Luke’s Gospel. If someone were reading this for the first time, they might think, “How is this possibly Good News?”
When we as Christians talk about Christ as King, I think we would be very wise to think very carefully about what it is exactly we mean by that. The image of a king, historically, has often been the image of colonialism. The images of royalty are often images of military power and might. In the Old Testament, Joshua imagined his Lord to be the God of the sword.
But that’s not the kind of king who shows up here in Luke. When Jesus rode into Jerusalem on that colt on Palm Sunday four chapters ago, he wasn’t emulating Pilate’s royal military parade. He was mocking it. This isn’t so much about power as it is about power laid down. God’s power laid down for the sake of redemption. In Jesus’ eyes, that’s what real power looks like rather than laying waste to one’s enemies through domination, violence, and colonialism. A Christ who suffers in solidarity with all who suffer because God comes to claim those who are powerless.
What’s interesting about this passage is that even the criminals who are crucified there with Jesus can sense the irony in this situation. One of the criminals taunts Jesus, but the other one says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” You’ll notice that he doesn’t actually say that he’s sorry. He’s not begging Jesus for help.
But something has happened to this man where he can sense that there is some kind of kingdom somewhere even though there’s no reason for him to believe that’s true when hanging from a cross. Something has changed. It’s almost as if he has a slightly different angle of sight or perception into reality that’s worth thinking about for a bit. Something has fundamentally shifted for him even at the moment of his death when he has entered into the presence of Jesus. This is about so much more than just singing pretty hymns and saying proper prayers in Sunday School, and on Christ the King Sunday it’s worth thinking for a moment about what exactly that means for him and for us.
Will Willimon, the great Methodist Bishop in Alabama, tells a story of a time when he encountered someone whom he believed had experienced that slightly different perception on the world because of the presence of Jesus. He was doing his bishop’s visits one afternoon, and he went to this Methodist church. They were running a kitchen down in the basement or the homeless community. While he was down there, he met an older gentleman who was washing dishes, and in his attempts to be a sort of a chipper presence, he said, “Hello, sir! Are you enjoying what you’re doing?”
And the old man said, “No, I hate it.” “You hate it?” the bishop asked. “Yeah,” he said, “These street people never thank you. They always mess up our fellowship area, and when we leave the whole building smells like cigarette smoke and homeless people, and we’re left to clean up the mess. I don’t mind telling you it annoys me. So, no, I don’t enjoy it.” Bishop Willimon asked him, “Well, then why don’t you quit?” And the man replied, “Because Jesus put me here.” Then after a brief pause he asked the bishop, “Where did Jesus put you?”
What that man essentially meant was “This may not be my favorite thing in the world to do. It’s not easy, comfortable or especially glamorous, but I believe this is where the crucified Jesus would be. And at the end of the day, Jesus is my king. God, alone, is Lord of my conscience. God has altered my perception and my reality, and I believe that the crucified Jesus would be right here in this church basement just as he was there with those two common criminals.” And then he asked the question, “Where did Jesus put you?”
Some of you may have noticed in your bulletin that our second hymn this morning is “Joy To the World.” But it’s not the version that we normally sing. This morning we will be singing what’s called the Richmond Arrangement of “Joy To the World.” Those of you who have sung in the choir probably know that our Presbyterian hymnal also contains “alternative versions” of some of our most beloved hymns. Versions where the words are the same, but the tune is very, very different from what we’re used to singing. The Richmond Arrangement of “Joy To the World” is one of those versions.
This may seem confusing at first, but there are very important reasons why some of these versions are in the hymnal (even if we don’t sing them very often). For example, in “Joy To the World” (the way we’re used to singing it at Christmas), the notes go from low to high, as if to suggest that we are lifting up our voices in praise to the highest heaven.
However, the Richmond Arrangement was not meant to be sung during Advent or Christmas (which on our church calendar is considered the beginning of the liturgical year). It was meant to be sung on Christ the King Sunday (which the church calendar considers to be the end of the year). In the Richmond Arrangement, the notes go from high to low, symbolizing that the joy from God also descended from heaven into the deepest depths of human experience. Even as deep as the tomb itself.
Even though it’s perhaps not as familiar or as comfortable for us to sing, it serves as a poignant reminder of just how far we’ve come since last Advent and of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. And that is truly Good News.
So, this morning, as we bring this church calendar year to a close (and another begins next Sunday with the season of Advent), we will sing “Joy To the World” this morning a little bit differently. As we do, I hope that you will take a moment to ponder its meaning in your heart, and perhaps as we sing together you will take a moment to ponder the question: Where did Jesus put you?
May it be so. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.
Luke 10:38-42Rev. Marc van BulckOxford Presbyterian Church —
Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.” But the Lord answered her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”
— When I was in Sunday School, this story was one of those stories in our children’s illustrated Bibles. I can vividly remember sitting in our classroom looking at pictures of this story. There was Mary sitting with her hands folded neatly in her lap, her doe-eyes fixed on Jesus, hanging on every word that happened to be falling from his heavenly lips. And in the background, there was Martha, looking frazzled, running around in the kitchen, up to her ears in soapsuds, her hair pointing in every direction, and just generally looking like the textbook definition of what we would call a “hot mess.” Then as we turned the page to the next picture, we saw Jesus gently raising a finger to Martha, gesturing towards the doting image of Mary, and saying, “Oh, Martha. Can’t you stop running around for five minutes? Look at how spiritual your sister is being.” That’s the way this story was told to me growing up in church, and I wonder if that’s the way this story was told to you, too. Almost every time I preach on this story, no matter where I am, I can almost always look up at the congregation from behind the pulpit and see someone pointing to their friend and saying, “That’s you!” And I get it. I really get it. The problem is, I think this story is actually a little bit more complicated than that, and that makes it kind of a difficult story to think about. For one thing, I have heard this story preached in some, frankly, pretty sexist ways. This story has a long and unfortunate history of being used to create these really cartoonishly horrible stereotypes about women or even worse try to pit them against each other. I think that’s a very toxic and unhelpful interpretation of what’s going on here. I also think that over the years a lot of people have walked away from this story with the impression that Jesus criticizes Martha for working too hard whereas Mary is all prayerful and spiritual, and that’s what made her his very special favorite. Fun bit of Presbyterian trivia: John Calvin famously said that this was one of his least favorite stories in the Bible because he felt that it was too negative towards the Protestant work ethic. Whatever, dude. The problem is, I don’t think either of those interpretations are what Jesus is really getting at (although it’s really easy to see why this story might give you that impression). So, let’s break this down. Why does Martha get such a bad rap in this story? The popular explanation is that Martha is so caught up in work and running around that she can’t stop for five minutes to listen to Jesus, right? But let’s defend Martha for a minute because I think that’s a little unfair. The translation, “work” or “many tasks” in verse forty comes from the Greek, “diakonia,” which literally means “service” or “serving,” which to be fair to Martha is exactly what Jesus a good deal of Luke’s Gospel telling his disciples they should do! What story did Jesus just get finished preaching right before he showed up at Martha’s house? Anybody got their Bibles open? Jesus just finished preaching the story of the Good Samaritan! A story about a guy who goes out of his way to serve and help this other guy who’s been beaten on the side of the road because he’s in need! Jesus just got done pontificating the virtues of this Samaritan’s service and many tasks! Twelve chapters later, he will pull this fancy Greek word out again and tell his disciples “For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves…I am among you as one who serves” (22:27-28). Bingo, bango, bongo. Isn’t that exactly what Martha is doing here? Isn’t Martha going out of her way to try to practice abundant hospitality in her own home exactly like Jesus has espoused we should do multiple times in this Gospel? So, why is Jesus pumping the brakes? Clearly something else is going on here, and I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s probably more subtle than we realize. And I’m going to give you guys a little spoiler. I don’t care if you’re a “Mary” or a “Martha.” Every single one of us sitting in this room has been guilty of it. Including me. Take a look at the exact moment in verse forty when Jesus decides that it’s time to throw a flag on the field and call a foul. Until now, Martha has been the perfect host practicing immaculate hospitality towards her guest until the moment that she decides that’s fed up with her sister’s shenanigans, and she finally says to Jesus, “Do you not care that this is going on? Why don’t you march in there and tell her she screwed up?” Now, why do you think that might have been just a teensie, weensie faux pas in party planning etiquette? Perhaps without even realizing it, Martha has now put her guest in a tight spot, which is probably not great hospitality if we’re honest. Hindsight is always 20/20 of course, and I suspect that if Martha could have been given a do-over, she probably would have thought to herself, “You know what? That’s probably not something our guest needs to be worried about. I should just go in there and talk to Mary in private, myself.” Right? The issue is not that Martha’s trying to be a good hostess. That’s good! However, perhaps the real issue is that sometimes we can get just a little too caught up in ourselves that even our best intentions can go haywire. I think churches can sometimes be guilty of this, too. It can be as small or as simple as seeing a visitor walk into our church for the first time and doesn’t know anybody, and then someone fusses at them because “they can’t sit in that pew. That’s so-and-so’s pew!” Or it could be the opposite. My sister once told me a story of a church she attended that was so eager to welcome LGTBQIA+ persons into their congregation. They were so excited when they finally got to welcome their “one gender nonbinary person” that they accidentally wound up tokenizing this person. Are you familiar with that word, “tokenizing?” It means that, in our enthusiasm to try to project this perception of welcoming inclusivity, we can accidentally wind up putting folks on the spot maybe one too many times. We might ask them to explain being an LGTBQ person is like, or what being a person of color is like, or what being from another country is like, or what being homeless is like, or what having a disability is like over and over again until eventually it almost seems to be the only thing we can think of to describe that person. We forget that there are other aspects of their lives. Other interests, passions, hopes, fears, and dreams. Instead we almost start to treat them more like a mascot than a fully-formed person. It doesn’t happen on purpose. In fact, a lot of times, we don’t even realize that we’re doing it. It just sort of…happens. It can happen in mission work, too. A little earlier in the service, you heard me talk about David LaMotte who will be visiting our congregation in late September. Among other things, David is the founder of a non-profit organization that partners with low-income elementary schools in Guatemala. Several years ago, he told me a story about this work. “We gave a little funding to help with a construction project,” he told me, “Several years ago, there was a real change in public education in Guatemala where they decided that no child could be turned away. They cut away all fees for students to be in public schools. That led to a real expansion of the numbers of kids who were in the schools. This particular school just exploded. The numbers just went through the roof. “So, what they wanted to do was expand the school up onto the second level, and rather than expanding outward, they expanded upward. They went to several different donors to help with this project. We were originally planning to help fund the construction of one classroom, but as the project continued, what was really needed was a good solid, cement and steel railing all around the whole second floor to keep the kids safe as they’re running around up there. “Now, a railing doesn’t sound nearly as cool as a classroom, right? It would be great fun to say, ‘We built this classroom at this school,’ which was originally what we intended. But the fact was that they didn’t need a classroom. What they really needed was a railing. And one of the problems is that this kind of work is often donor-driven. The donors want to see certain things because it makes them feel good rather than what’s really needed by the schools, and the libraries, and whoever it is that you’re trying to have a relationship with.” Sometimes, he told me, it’s easy to get so caught up with ourselves, that we can actually lose track of why Jesus might have put us here in the first place. Sound familiar? Falling into this trap is very easy to do, and part of what makes it so challenging is that oftentimes we don’t even realize that we’re doing it. I doubt that Martha realized that she was doing it in this story. And let’s be clear: it’s not just Martha. Jesus’ disciples make this same mistake over, and over, and over again and most of the time, it’s way more egregious than this little faux pas at Martha’s house. I also think that Jesus is trying really, really hard not to be a jerk to Martha. Some of you may have noticed that in verse forty-one, Jesus repeats her name twice. “Martha, Martha…” It’s important to remember that this is not Jesus being annoyed. In ancient literature, repeating somebody’s name usually indicated compassion and understanding, not judgment or criticism. Jesus is trying to say, “Listen, I get it. I know this is hard.” Because it is hard. I think Jesus understands that, in the grander scheme of things, this way of life that he’s trying to teach is hard. We’re human, and we’re messy, and we’re going to make mistakes. I think Jesus knows that his friends are going to screw it up. That his disciples are going to screw it up. That we’re going to screw it up. I don’t think this is Jesus’ way of trying to call Martha out in front of her sister or embarrass her. I also don’t think that Jesus is trying to say, “Uh, hello! Pay attention to me!” I think this is Jesus’ way of trying to recognize messy, human patterns are inside all of us, and they can sometimes cause us to lose track of the mission. We can get so caught up in ourselves that we can actually lose track of why Jesus has put us where we are, and I think Jesus is trying to say this in love. I don’t think Jesus is trying to cancel Martha. I think Jesus is trying to say, “This is a thing, and we need to acknowledge it not out of punishment or embarrassment but because that’s how we grow. That’s how we learn. That’s how we hopefully get better, and know that there is a lot of grace involved.” Maybe there’s an important lesson there for all of us. Maybe, if we’re honest, we can see a little bit of ourselves in this story. I know I can. Maybe a bit more than I would like to admit, and maybe you can, too. Maybe we can see a little bit of our church in this story sometimes. Perhaps the lesson of this story is that sometimes it’s important to just be real about that. Not out of punishment. Not out of feeling embarrassed but because that’s just how we keep it real. That’s how we continue to learn, and grow, and become closer to the people that Jesus calls us to be. Obviously Luke wrote this story down for a reason. Maybe it’s to invite us to see a little bit of Martha in ourselves, to pump the brakes and say, “Yeah…maybe me, too,” and to know that, just like Martha in the end, there really is only need of one thing, and that’s the grace of the person of Jesus who walks with us on this journey together. And that’s really, really Good News.
May it be so. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.
Revelation 21:10; 21:22–22:5Rev. Marc van BulckOxford Presbyterian Church ---
And in the spirit he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God. I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb. And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life. Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. Nothing accursed will be found there any more. But the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him; they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And there will be no more night; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever. --- As many of you know, we have been making our way through the book of Revelation over the past several Sundays. Revelation is a strange book. It’s not exactly the easiest to read or understand. It’s filled with dense metaphors and surreal imagery, symbolic references to seals, horsemen, dragons, and beasts. On the surface, it may seem like a strange choice for these Sundays that follow after Easter, but it’s a deeply appropriate one. At its heart, Revelation is a vision of the Kingdom of God. A vision where the forces of empire, oppression, and injustice that seem to hold an almost impossible sway over creation are ultimately overthrown by God’s reconciling mission for goodness and will for life in the world. When we gather together during this season of Easter and proclaim that the stone has been rolled away, and Christ is risen, indeed – in a way, this is our way of saying that John of Patmos’ vision for God’s world is still our vision today. John’s vision is a vision for a new world. Not a different world, but a renewed world. A reconciled world. A world where the divine presence is so tangible everywhere that it almost feels as if heaven and earth are touching each other. Have you ever had that experience? Do you ever feel like there are places where you can get away, places you can visit where you feel just a little bit closer to God? Maybe it’s out in nature or being near the ocean. We sometimes refer to these places as “thin spaces,” but in John’s vision for the world, he imagines a time when the presence of God is so limitless, so universal, and so boundless that the whole world feels like a “thin space.” But he doesn’t describe God’s kingdom as being like out in nature or being on the beach. He describes it as like being out in the big city. I have to be honest. I’m not really sure I’m feeling the metaphor here. I used to live in the big city. I used to live in Boston, Massachusetts. I will tell you, cities are dirty. They’re crowded. They’re loud, and they’re noisy. Is that really the best description we can come up with for heaven? When I think about heaven, I think about angels in the sky or being in the presence of God. When I think about the city, I think about being yelled at by strangers on the subway and the sidewalks smelling like…well, maybe we just won’t go there. But if you think about it, cities are also places where people have to work together. In the city, people live together in a community. Human beings depend on one another every day to work, for the preparation of food, to get around in buses or trains. In Genesis 2, God says, “It is not good that the [human being] should be alone” (v. 18). But there’s one other detail in John’s vision that caught my eye. In God’s kingdom, the doors are always open. The gates, in fact, are always open. Now, think about that for just a second. When was the last time you heard a joke about heaven? Every time anyone has ever, and I mean ever told a joke about someone going to heaven, the gates are always closed. It always starts with St. Peter standing at the pearly gates asking, “Why should we let YOU in?” Am I wrong? That is not how we think about heaven, is it? If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve all sort of been brought up to imagine heaven as a kind of gated community, haven’t we? But that is not what John says. John says, “That image is wrong!” In chapter twenty-one, verse twenty-five, John writes that in God’s kingdom, “its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night…” In God’s kingdom, the gates are never closed. The gates are always open, and it’s written right there in the Bible. Now, isn’t that wild? Speaking of the city, when I was living in Boston, Massachusetts as a freshman in college, like most college students, my track record for attending church on Sunday mornings was…well, maybe we won’t talk about that either. But one week I decided to go looking for a church. As I walked along the streets, I came across a large church with the words, “All are welcome!” written across the marquee, and just underneath it was a second sign in great, big, bold letters that read, “No trespassers.” If we had had smartphones back then during the Dark Ages, I would have taken a picture of that. The irony of seeing those two mixed signals right next to each other was almost unreal to me. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. Now on the one hand, I know what they meant, and I knew what they were trying to say. This was a church in an urban area, and they had to be mindful of safety. We have safety measures of our own right here at Oxford Presbyterian Church so that our staff can feel safe while doing their work. I get it. And also, there was something about the bluntness of the way those two signs were placed right beside each other that was still jarring to me at the age of nineteen. I was never quite able to get that weird feeling out of my mind, and I never went back to that church after that. Maybe that’s why they call Scriptures like this one “apocalyptic.” They describe these heavenly visions for God’s perfect world here on earth, and then we look around at the one we’re in, and we realize that right now it’s pretty far from perfect. When I read John’s vision for God’s world that we profess that God has called us to help build, I can’t help but think, “We’ve still got a lot of work to do, and we’ve still got a long way to go.” We look around at our world and realize that, in so many ways, it is still very broken. I believe that one of the ways that we try to live into that vision for the Kingdom is by trying to be a welcoming community here at Oxford Presbyterian Church. A community where no matter your age, race, or point of origin, whether you feel devout with faith or have doubts, questions, or even skepticism, no matter your gender identity, your sexual orientation, or your political persuasion, no matter how you are abled physically, mentally, or emotionally, you are welcome here because you are a part of the Body of Christ. And we welcome one another because it is God who has welcomed us first. We say those words every Sunday morning not because we’re perfect at it but because that’s the community we seek to be. That’s the community we want to be, and we say those words Sunday after Sunday in the hopes that, with God’s help, we can grow just a little bit closer to the Kingdom in our own way in our church. A few verses earlier, John of Patmos quotes the prophet Ezekiel from the Old Testament: “My dwelling place shall be with them…I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (37:27). But if you look very closely at our reading this morning, John doesn’t quote that exactly. He adds a small little change in verse 3: “He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples” (21:3) Plural. This comes from the Greek. In the Old Testament, Ezekiel was talking about God’s chosen people, but in God’s city, the new Jerusalem, the Table of God is not just populated by the chosen anymore. The table now includes all peoples and all nations over all the earth. It includes Gentiles and Jews. It includes enemies and friends. It includes the churchgoers who have been walking into church in their Sunday best for years, and it includes the homeless woman who doesn’t know if it’s okay to sit in the pew next to you. It includes the graduating senior who got a gold star in Sunday school, and it includes the teenager who doesn’t really believe any of this stuff but whose parents dragged them here anyway. It includes the gender nonbinary teenager. It includes the man who would break into a church in the middle of the night looking for food or maybe a place to sleep. It includes sinners, forgiven sinners like you and like me made in the image of the one who created us. This is John’s vision of the Kingdom, a God who dwells among us. All of us. Peoples, plural. No matter who we are, what we do, or where we go. All the nations of the earth gathered together at the Table at last. To our graduating seniors and our graduating college students (those of you who are still with us), our hope here at Oxford Presbyterian Church is that in some small way, we have been a community that has opened the door for you. Take a look at the faces of the people sitting around you in the pews this morning. I hope that you will remember the ways that they have tried to open the door for you. Your parents, your Sunday School teachers, your friends. The faces of those who are still here, and perhaps also the faces of those who are not. I hope that you will remember the ways that they opened the door for you. I hope that we have been a community that, however imperfectly, has tried to live into that vision of the Kingdom where the gates are always open to all, and where God's vision of justice and peace is alive in our hearts. Because now it is your turn. It is your turn to go out and live a life that seeks to open those gates a little wider in the choices you make, in your example that you set, and in your witness of where your own life will take you in this world. When we talk about “the Kingdom of God” in places like this, this is what we’re talking about. When we talk about God’s world, God’s family, and God’s Table, this is what we’re talking about. Whatever path your life takes you on (whether that path involves houses of worship like this or not) I hope that you will be part of building that world. I hope that you will find a way to use your unique gifts, skills, passions, and joys to contribute to that kind of world. Whether that kind of life winds up including religious language for you or not, I hope that you will find a way to help bring the world just a little bit closer to looking like that because that is exactly what we mean when we talk about the Kingdom of God. That’s the world that we were always created to be from the very beginning. It’s the world that God still hopes that we can be, and that’s the world that you have been called to help build. And it’s not easy. We still have a long way to go, and there is still a lot of work to be done. So, go live your life. It’s a good one. Live fully, and vibrantly, and with purpose, and be part of building God’s world because you are a child of God, and don’t let anyone ever tell you any differently. And know that no matter who you are, or what you do, or where you go, the door is always open, and you are always loved by God. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.
Revelation 5:11-14Rev. Marc van BulckOxford Presbyterian Church --- Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels surrounding the throne and the living creatures and the elders; they numbered myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, singing with full voice, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!” And the four living creatures said, “Amen!” And the elders fell down and worshiped. --- When I was a teenager in high school growing up in South Carolina, I was involved for a period of time with a group known as the Presbyterian Youth Connection. Some of you may be familiar with it. This was a group of Presbyterian youth from different churches in our local presbytery who would gather together once a quarter to work together with other adults (usually pastors or elders) to address local ministry goals. These meetings were usually out of town, so I would often hitch a ride with one of the local pastors who was nice enough to carpool. During one of these trips, this pastor shared with me that before receiving the call to enter the seminary, he had been an investment banker in another life. Just as he was considering ministry, he had received a job offer from an extremely prestigious institution in New York City. He would be making a six figure salary within his first five years, and by his projections (if he played his cards right) would be on track to be a millionaire before turning forty. Instead he walked away from all of it and enrolled as a Master of Divinity student at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. And here he was, serving a church and carpooling teenagers to the local presbytery office. As a junior in high school I was slightly gobsmacked. “Do you ever regret it?” I asked, “Is there any part of you that ever wonders if you made the right choice?” “No,” he said, and he gave me a kind of strange smile. “I’m the richest man on earth now.” I don’t remember many of our conversations in the car during those trips back and forth, but that one always stayed with me. It’s not very often that you encounter people who see the world that way. A world where the real riches in this life don’t come in the form of any salary package, any scholarship, any tenure, or any promotion. The real riches are worth far more than all the money and wealth on earth. It reminded me of a quote that I saw floating around on Facebook this weekend from the actor, Jim Carrey. “I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of,” he said, “so they can see that it’s not the answer.” Maybe he’s right. Whatever the real answer is, that pastor giving me a ride on the way to the presbytery believed he had found it. I wonder if we live in a world that really believes that. Do you? John of Patmos, the author of the book of Revelation, believed that. Over the next several Sundays, Pastor Lawrence and I will be making our way through the book of Revelation from the pulpit. Revelation is remarkable, strange, beautiful, challenging, and political. It’s a deeply misunderstood work of Scripture. It is attributed to somebody called “John of Patmos” who most likely lived sometime during the second half of the first century or early second century. It’s worth pointing out that this was not John the apostle who wrote the Gospel of John. It’s easy to get them confused. John was a very common name back then (well, it’s still a very common name today). The book of Revelation talks about the apostles of the four Gospels as highly regarded figures of the past. So, this was apparently written by someone who came after them. Revelation is part of what’s known as “apocalyptic literature.” It comes from the Greek, “apokalypsis,” which literally means “revelation” or “unveiling.” These writings frequently dealt with visions and dreams that were often deeply symbolic (and sometimes bizarre or even frightening), and the writers often used these images as literary representations of the times they were living in and the times they believed might be to come. At its most literal, the word, “apocalypse” means “one period of time coming to an end and another beginning.” There are other examples of this kind of apocalyptic literature in the Bible, too, such as the book of Daniel which also deals with visions and dreams. For now, though, let’s focus on this specific vision in our reading this morning. “‘Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!’ Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, ‘To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!’” It’s kind of a strange image if you think about it. Worthy is the lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might. I don’t know if these are usually the sort of things that we associate with a slaughtered lamb. They’re probably about as far from that as you could possibly get. In the same way that a pastor driving teenagers to a presbytery meeting is about as far from being the richest man on earth as you’re likely to get. That is, unless of course, you happen to see the world very differently from the way the rest of the world does. If you happen to see the world the way that John does. The way that the Kingdom of God sees it. The way that Jesus does. Jesus doesn’t see the world the way that we see it. In the Kingdom of God, the world as we understand it is often turned upside down. During the passion story, when Jesus was crucified next to two criminals, one of them cried out saying, “We are getting what we deserve…but this man has done nothing wrong. Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus answered him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:41-43). I don’t think that many people who found themselves in that situation during the first century thought of themselves as being particularly close to paradise in that situation, but when you see the world the way that Jesus sees it, a crucified thief who throws himself at the mercy of his Lord in repentance and devotion is closer to the Kingdom than even the most decorated pastor. These images reveal the truth about who God is and how God really sees the world. That’s why “revelation” literally means “unveiling.” It’s unveiling the truth about how God sees the world that we don’t always see. Or that sometimes maybe we would prefer not to see. Pulling back the curtain like in “The Wizard of Oz” and showing us what’s real. The real truth. When that pastor driving me to that presbytery meeting called himself the richest man on earth, what he meant was that the curtain of the Kingdom of God had been pulled away in his own life, and in that moment he knew the truth. When John of Patmos talked about things like power, wealth, and honor, he wasn’t thinking about millionaires, celebrities, or powerful world leaders. He was thinking about the image of a slaughtered lamb. The crucified Christ because in the Kingdom of God, that’s what real power, honor, and glory look like. In God’s reality someone like this repentant thief on a cross might be much closer to paradise than any of the rest of us have figured out yet. That’s what’s so beautiful, strange, and challenging about apocalyptic books like this. They show us these strange images and ask, “Do you really believe that?” I suppose that’s the question. That’s the challenge. That’s the paradox of our faith. And it’s a question that is probably never fully settled with us. So, we keep reading these strange texts until one day, with God’s help, we do. This line from Revelation is part of our hymn of praise this morning, “This is the Feast of Victory.” I don’t know that, as Presbyterians, we sing this hymn quite as often as other traditions do. In the Lutheran church, this is considered one of the great hymns of their liturgy, and they sing this vision from Revelation: “Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!” Following the Gospels and the Psalms, more hymns are attributed to Revelation in the Christian tradition than any other book of the Bible. Maybe of all the scholars and theologians who have tried to interpret Revelation over the ages, it was ultimately the hymn writers who got it right. Hymns after all can capture those great mysteries of our faith. They can tap into emotions and truths of the human soul and the spirit of God when sometimes words, themselves, fail us. So, this morning, we will sing this hymn with all of its mystery, its awe and wonder, and we will proclaim God’s kingdom where the humblest among us are the richest on earth and where a repentant thief on a cross is within arm’s reach of paradise. Let us turn now to hymn #513, “This is the Feast of Victory.” We will be singing verses 1, 4, and 5.
Luke 13:31-35Rev. Marc van BulckOxford Presbyterian Church --- At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, ‘Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.’ He said to them, ‘Go and tell that fox for me, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem.” Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” --- I want to talk about Herod a little bit this morning. Herod is barely mentioned in this passage, but I find myself thinking about him whenever I read this text. I grew up hearing Bible stories with the name, “Herod,” in them, but the first time that name actually meant anything to me was when I saw the musical, “Jesus Christ Superstar,” at seventeen years old. Just before Jesus is put on trial by Pilate, Herod bursts onstage wearing a white tails tuxedo with a top hat and cane, singing and tap-dancing to a raucous, ragtime musical number called “King Herod’s Song.” When the number begins, he is crooning and gloating about how excited he is to see Jesus and how confident he is that Christ can do anything. By the end, he is yelling and screaming, calling him a fraud, and shouting at him to get out of his life. The whole thing is completely bonkers, and I found it utterly fascinating. “Who is this guy?” I wondered. The real Herod Antipas was the ruler of Galilee from 4 B.C. until about 39 A.D. He inherited his rule over Galilee and Perea from his father, Herod the Great, but the Romans were not exactly Junior’s biggest cheerleaders. Rather than allowing him the title of king, the emperor appointed him a “tetrarch” or a ruler of only a fourth of the kingdom. His so-called “power” was a bit of a joke, and his supporters in the Roman higher-up’s were virtually non-existent. Many of the commentaries have expressed confusion as to why the Pharisee would say that Herod would want to kill Jesus. Ten chapters later in Luke, Herod is given the chance to condemn Jesus to death when he’s under trial by Pilate, but Herod refuses to do so. So, why would this Pharisee say that he wants to kill him here? It’s hard to say for sure, but I think it’s important to remember that Herod was a deeply paranoid, conflicted, and inconsistent person. When Herod’s stepdaughter/niece danced for his pleasure at the royal court, Herod was so intoxicated by her that he promised to give her anything she wanted (Ew!). So, she named her price – the head of John the Baptist. The different Gospels have different interpretations of Herod’s state of mind in these stories. In Mark’s version of this story (for example), Herod expressed great sadness over the idea of killing John (6:26). Herod didn’t always understand everything John said, but the Gospels tell us that he really liked the guy and, in a weird way, likely respected him (6:20). And yet Herod decided to keep his promise and kill John the Baptist anyway even though he didn’t want to. It’s almost like there’s this pattern of Herod saying, “I want to do this, but I know that I shouldn’t. I know that this is wrong, but I do it anyway.” It makes sense to me that the same Herod might seem ready to kill Jesus one day and ready to call the whole thing off the next. I suspect that, on some level, we can all relate to that. Not all of us have tried to have someone beheaded or have tried to sexually objectify a family member or blood relative the way Herod did. But I suspect that most of us have probably acted on things in our life that we’ve known are wrong, unhealthy, or dysfunctional – and yet we wanted to do it anyway. It’s part of the human condition. It reminds of Paul’s words in Romans 7: “I do not understand my own actions…I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do….if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.” (vs. 15, 19-20) Have you ever felt like that? I have. We may not be guilty of all of the same atrocities that Herod is, but maybe part of what’s so oddly compelling about him is that there is something recognizable about the human dilemma of going back and forth. Maybe we do see some small part of ourselves in some small part of him…and it’s fascinating to me that the lectionary raises this during Lent. We may also not know if Herod really wanted to kill Jesus or not. Herod may not have even fully known for sure, himself. All we are given in this story is a rumor. The word on the grapevine. A group of nameless Pharisees who come to Jesus during office hours and say, “Listen, Jesus, you didn’t hear this from us, but we just thought you might want to be aware that Herod is talking, and this is what we’ve heard him saying…” Whatever the truth really is, Herod has chosen to keep it subterranean. He’s not showing up to confront Jesus, face-to-face. Rather, Jesus has to find out second-hand from a group of so-and-so’s who heard it from this person who got it on good authority from that person and so on. When I was a seminary student undergoing Clinical Pastoral Education, one of my supervisors once told me that this is pretty common behavior when someone is struggling with shame. This sort of subterranean way of communicating things is often a coping mechanism for behavior that we know deep down is wrong, and some part of us is ashamed of it. Jesus seems to hint at similar thoughts, himself. It’s hilarious to me that Jesus responds with “Go and tell that fox for me…!” It kind of makes me wonder if there were any other choice words he might have liked to use. But if you think about it, the image of a fox works. Foxes are sly, crafty animals. They often conduct their business in sneaky ways. They’re pretty good at keeping things off the books and under the radar. Lent is, in many ways, a season that challenges us to examine the issues in our own lives that keep us from growing closer to God that we often keep off the books and under the radar. Jesus calls out Herod’s foxiness here, but while Herod goes out of his way to keep his agenda hidden from view, Jesus brings his own into the light: Herod’s way is to take life and diminish it. Jesus’ way is to give life and restore it. “I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem.” It’s no accident that Jesus’ words, “today, tomorrow, and the next” describe a journey that culminates on the third day. We know that when Jesus reaches Jerusalem, he will be crucified, dead, and buried, and on the third day will be raised. These words will take on a completely different meaning for Jesus’ followers when this is all said and done in the end. “It is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem” almost feels like a jab at Herod’s empty threats. But on another level it’s also a haunting reminder perhaps of what Jesus’ ultimate destination is (in this life at least). He knows that Jerusalem waits for him, as does the shadow of the cross. Yet Jesus is committed to his mission and his calling from God. Herod, in contrast, is conflicted, noncommittal, and undecided. It’s not the last time we will see these qualities on display. Even his own disciples will eventually deny, abandon, and even betray him before this is over. Perhaps we also see something of ourselves in them, too. Jesus refuses to be intimidated, dissuaded or deterred by these shenanigans and empty threats about Herod from this Pharisee. He is completely devoted to the mission (even though he knows that it will lead to death on the cross) because Herod’s world, for all of its power, for all of its bluster, and all of its military might is ultimately built on shame. Jesus’ world is built on the Kingdom of God. That’s the thing about people like Herod. They can’t associate glory with something like a crucified Christ on a cross. That idea just doesn’t make any sense to him, but that’s exactly what the Kingdom of God looks like. That kind of glory (the kind that is found in the Kingdom of God, the kind that is found in our crucified Lord) is the kind that people like Herod just fundamentally cannot understand. It is just too bonkers. Too upside down. Too far removed from the way they see the world because the way they see the world is too dependent on earthly power. But that’s what the Kingdom of God does. It turns our notions about power and our world upside down. The power of this world is from dust, and to dust it shall return. The glory of God is from everlasting to everlasting, and no ruler or conqueror will ever overcome it in the end. Perhaps one of the challenges of Lent is that it raises questions about some of our own notions, too. Which world do we ultimately serve? For Jesus’ followers, the answer to that question was a lifelong journey. Perhaps, in a lot of ways, it is for us, too. The Good News is that, like those disciples, it is not a journey that any of us walks alone. “How often have I desired to gather your children together,” Jesus says, “as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” Christ knows that the journey of faith (and, indeed, the journey of being human) is not easy. The Good News, however, is that the mother hen will not abandon her brood. Jesus remains faithful and committed to the end, and thanks be to God for that. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.
Luke 9:23-36Rev. Marc van BulckOxford Presbyterian Church --- Then he said to them all, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it. What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose or forfeit themselves? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words, of them the Son of Man will be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. But truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.” Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” —not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen. --- I have never seen the heavens or the earth open up before me. I have never seen anyone’s face change. I’ve never heard the voice of the almighty from on high. However, I’ve certainly had experiences that filled me with awe and wonder. Moments that I could not entirely explain or even necessarily put into words. Moments where I felt that the presence of the divine was so close that I could almost hear its voice whispering in my ear. Perhaps you’ve had moments like that, too. I remember the moment I experienced Christ transfigured before my eyes. I was fifteen years old. As a child, God was a cosmic authority figure who was to be obeyed much like my parents, my teachers, and the adults around me. If my sister and I misbehaved as children, we were punished by the grown-ups who were in charge, and as far as I was concerned, God was no different. As far as I was concerned, you had two choices. You could either behave, or you could misbehave. You got presents in your stocking, or you got coal. You went to heaven, or you went to hell. You were good, or you were bad. If my Sunday School teacher asked me a question, I would tell them what I thought they wanted to hear. I knew that Jesus was a loving, kind, forgiving person, but the truth loomed in the back of my mind. The rules were rules. I may not have known for sure if punishment would come from God above, but I knew it could come from someone if I didn’t straighten up and fly right. This was the only reality I had known. It was not always comfortable for me to think about. But it was the world I lived in. Until Jesus transfigured. When I was a teenager, I started going to youth group. Nick Yoda, who some of you may remember preached at my installation service here in this sanctuary and stood in this pulpit was my youth pastor growing up. He looked at us awkward, lanky teenagers and said, “The world we live in has lied to you. Your entire life, each and every one of you has been given messages from this world about who you are expected to be, how you are expected to act, how you are expected to believe, what you are expected to wear, who you are expected to talk to, and what happiness is expected to look like.” He was right, and for the longest time, that was what I assumed the face of Jesus looked like until Nick looked at us and said, “None of it is real.” I remember thinking about my parents, my teachers, and adults. I thought about my friends, I thought about peer pressure, I thought about all the screaming images from the media shoving messages of shame and inadequacy down our throats. I thought about who I had convinced myself God was. And suddenly it all just seemed so fake. It was terrifying. It was exhilarating. Like realizing for the first time that the Emperor had no clothes. The God of the universe was not some cosmic judge demanding my strict obedience while dangling my fragile, vulnerable soul over the threat of hellfire and damnation. Rather Christ moves out onto the edges, into scandalous and unexpected places to smuggle love, mercy, and peace into a world that desperately needs it. When I looked into the face of that Jesus, his face seemed completely transformed. And in that moment, so was I, I suppose. I was no longer in the same place where I had started. This Jesus was now taking me somewhere else. In our Scripture reading this morning Peter and the disciples are learning that they will be transformed by this experience, too. Their journey will not leave them where they had started either. After this amazing experience on the mountain with visions of Moses and Elijah, Peter offers to make three dwellings so that they might stay and commemorate this. But Jesus has no intention of staying. He tells the disciples that it is time to journey back down the other side of the mountain. If we were to read a little further, Luke offers a second story just after this spectacular heavenly experience. They encounter a man whose child has been seized by a demon, and the disciples are given a glimpse of the other side of ministry. We don’t know if this is a literal, spiritual entity who has possessed this child or if this an ancient euphemism for some unknown medical condition. A lot of hay has been made out of questions like this over the centuries. In the end, I’m not sure it really matters much either way. What matters to Jesus is that a child is suffering, and a parent is pleading: “This is my only child. I beg you to look at my son.” When Jesus and the disciples were up on the mountain, they heard the voice of God say, “This is my Son. Listen to him” (which means “obey him”). Now they hear the voice of another father. “This is my only child. Please look at him.” It weighs heavily on Jesus. After healing the boy, he cries out in lament. “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and bear with you?” Who is he talking to? Is he feeling frustration because his disciples were not able to heal this boy on their own? Is he angry at the demons of this world that inflict such needless pain and suffering on the vulnerable and the least of these like this child? Or is Jesus feeling the larger weight of the brokenness of this world? A world that will soon reject and kill him because it knows not what it does. Luke’s readers remembered that Moses felt this same deep pain back in the Old Testament when he and the Israelites were wandering out in the wilderness. In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses cried out the same thing. “A faithful God..yet…a perverse and crooked generation…” (32:4-5). Maybe Moses felt the weight of the brokenness of his world, and centuries later, Jesus can feel the full weight of his own. Maybe we do, too. After spending almost the entire weekend glued to the news watching the horrors unfolding in Ukraine, this image in our Scripture reading of a father pleading over his child resonated with me in a way that it never has before. It reminded me of a video that’s been making the news of a father in Ukraine having to say goodbye to his only daughter so that he can stay behind and fight. That image weighed heavily on my heart, and I’m sure it weighs heavily on yours, too. The story of the transfiguration shows us both sides of this great mystery of our religion. It shows us the great, spiritual highs, and it also shows us the other side of the mountain. The side of the mountain where discipleship looks less like supernatural radiance and more like humble acts of service, lamenting the injustices of this world, or sometimes simply sitting with someone who is quietly suffering. These are the two sides of the mystery of our faith like two sides of a mountain, and what the story of the transfiguration shows us is that they are bound to one another. The message of the transfiguration (and perhaps the message of Jesus, himself) is that this mystery is filled with awe and wonder, but that awe may ultimately be in vain if it does not lead us (as Christ himself leads us) into the company of the least of these. The story I shared with you when I was fifteen was one story of how Jesus was transformed for me. I suppose it hasn’t and won’t be the last. Perhaps you’ve had stories like that of your own, and perhaps you will have many more. The story of our faith along both sides of the mountain is a lifelong journey. That’s why we keep coming back to passages like this again and again. May Jesus guide our own steps on this journey together throughout all our lives into the company of the least of these and into the presence of the divine. May it be so. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.
John 18:33-37Rev. Marc van BulckOxford Presbyterian Church--- Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So 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, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” --- This past week I was listening to a podcast where someone asked the question, “How old were you when you had seen ‘The Wizard of Oz’ enough times that you had confidence in the ending? How old were you when you didn’t have to stop the movie because you got scared of the flying monkeys or the Wicked Witch of the West? When you had seen it enough times to know that it was going to turn out all right and that you didn’t have to be afraid?” This morning, we come to the ending of a liturgical church year with what we call “The Reign of Christ” or “Christ the King Sunday.” It is the Sunday where we as people of faith proclaim that Christ is ultimately sovereign of the universe. The ending of the larger story ultimately belongs to God. It’s all well and good for us to say that in places like this, but sometimes living our day-to-day lives like we really believe it can be easier said than done. We, of course, do not live in the ending of the story. We live somewhere in the middle where evil is very much alive and well and at work in our world. We live in a reality where pain, loss, sickness, oppression, injustice, suffering, violence, and sin are very real and undeniable. It’s very easy to turn on the news, to open the newspaper, or sometimes even just walk out our front door and to feel a sense of despair. In these moments, the ending feels less like a hopeful promise that belongs to God and more like an uncertain future unraveling before our eyes. Perhaps like a child who might want to stop the movie because the ending is starting to feel too scary or uncertain. So, we come to Christ the King Sunday year after year to remember that while these forces are real (and always have been, for that matter, since the beginning of time), we also remember that these forces do not have the final say. We remember that our predecessors here at Oxford Presbyterian Church, our predecessors going back further in history, or even our predecessors going back to Biblical times faced and endured truly frightening circumstances and challenges of their own. We remember that they, too, knew what it was like to face an uncertain future, and yet the promise of the covenant that God alone is Lord endured. We remember these things not to let ourselves off the hook. Not to say, “Well, if God has everything under control, I can just kick back and let God take care of all of this. I don’t have to do anything” That’s not what this means. A covenant takes two to tango, as the old saying goes. We remember that promise that God is committed towards holding up God’s end of the covenant so that we might have the strength, courage, hope, imagination, and love to uphold ours. With God’s help and however imperfectly. So we remember this promise year after year, again and again until one day we too might have confidence in the ending, and we might live like we believe it. Our Scripture reading for Christ the King Sunday this year comes from John’s record of the Gospel. Jesus is on trial under Pontius Pilate. The nature of Jesus’ kingship is exactly what’s on trial. It’s a topic that John’s Gospel has talked about before. The difference though is that now Jesus is starting to really define it. Jesus is described as “king” or “King of the Jews” nine times during the trial, but Jesus’ kingdom is not of this world. It is a kingdom that doesn’t participate in the same rules as ours. For people in Jesus’ day, a king looked like someone riding in on a horse, killing all the bad guys, and taking the throne. This is what everyone assumed the messiah would look like, and it was exactly what many expected Jesus would do. That’s what a king does. The king we see in the person of Jesus, however, wears a crown of thorns and a purple robe. We have certain authorities in our earthly life (parents, teachers, law enforcers, leaders of our nation and of our world). Is this what we would expect authority to look like? To someone like Pilate (and perhaps to someone like us if we had been there), this is completely and utterly baffling. By our earthly rules, Pilate is the one in charge. He turns to the religious leaders and says, “So, this is your king? I’m going to crucify your king.” And now the religious leaders have to make a choice. They have to choose between earthly rules and heavenly ones, and in chapter nineteen, verse fifteen they finally say, “We have no king but the emperor.” It is a complete and total abandonment of their most preciously held religious beliefs. The political pressure is just too much, and it is just utterly, utterly tragic. Meanwhile, Pilate tries to get a straight answer out of Jesus. In verse thirty-three Pilate asks, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus says, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” What’s interesting is that Pilate avoids the question. He seems a little flustered by this. “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own people have sold you out. What have you done?” Jesus says, “If I were a king, my kingdom must not be from around here. Otherwise why would my own people hand me over?” “So, are you a king?” Jesus answers, “You say that I am.” It almost begs the question: who’s really on trial here? Pilate doesn’t know how to answer this. He keeps trying to dodge the question, change the subject, or finally just start talking to someone else. He is trapped between trying to navigate two worlds (both the world of a religious identity and the world of a political identity), and he’s beginning to realize that he can’t have it both ways. It reminds me a bit what Jesus is credited as saying back in Matthew’s Gospel. You can’t serve two masters (6:24). Perhaps the truth is that it’s not just Jesus or even Pilate who’s really on trial here. It’s us. The reader. Because the truth is: we can't have it both ways either. That's what Christ the King Sunday is all about. Throughout the trial, Jesus sees the world and what is happening around him with the eyes of the Kingdom of God, but Pilate and the crowd can’t do that. Like us, they are still living in the middle of the story, and the middle feels too much like existential confusion and despair. It feels like an uncertain future unraveling before their eyes, and so as sin so often has since the beginning of the story, they succumb once again to violence. Perhaps, some two thousand or so years later, we’re not so different. Perhaps that’s why Christ the King Sunday is so important. Like we said, we have certain authorities in our earthly life, and we need these authorities in order to function as a society. However, we also need to be reminded that while we need these authorities, these authorities are ultimately just as human, just as fallible, and just as capable of violence and sin as they were in the beginning. That’s why our faith reminds us that at the end of the day, our ultimate authority as people of faith in our day-to-day lives is the person of Jesus. God alone is Lord of the conscience. That’s why Christ the King Sunday is so important. That is the hope, the promise, and the covenant of our faith, and thanks be to God for that. May one day, with God’s help, we can live like we believe it. Amen.
Psalm 90:1-17Rev. Marc van BulckOxford Presbyterian Church--- Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. You turn us back to dust, and say, “Turn back, you mortals.” For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night. You sweep them away; they are like a dream, like grass that is renewed in the morning; in the morning it flourishes and is renewed; in the evening it fades and withers. For we are consumed by your anger; by your wrath we are overwhelmed. You have set our iniquities before you, our secret sins in the light of your countenance. For all our days pass away under your wrath; our years come to an end like a sigh. The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then their span is only toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away. Who considers the power of your anger? Your wrath is as great as the fear that is due you. So teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart. Turn, O Lord! How long? Have compassion on your servants! Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love, so that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil. Let your work be manifest to your servants, and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and prosper for us the work of our hands— O prosper the work of our hands! --- Over the past few months, I’ve been listening to the music of George Harrison who of course, was one of the Beatles before going off and having a successful musical career of his own after the band broke up. He was sometimes known as “the quiet Beatle,” and while he might not have always been as famous as John, Paul, or Ringo, George is my favorite Beatle. George Harrison released a number of solo albums after his time with the group, but my favorite album is probably his very first one after the Beatles split up. It was entitled (perhaps appropriately), “All Things Must Pass.” Listen to some of the lyrics. “Sunrise doesn’t last all morning,” says the title song...“Sunset doesn’t last all evening…The darkness only stays at night timeIn the morning it will fade awayDaylight is good at arriving at the right timeBut it's not always going to be this grey...All things must passAll things must pass awayNone of life's strings can lastSo I must be on my way and face another day…” The first time I heard this song and these lyrics I was surprised by their poignancy. I was also surprised to learn that George Harrison was only twenty-five years old or so when he wrote them. The song is a bittersweet reflection on how all good things must eventually come to an end and how nothing really lasts forever; our lives are truly finite, and in the end all of us are really only here for a very short time. Our Scripture reading from the ninetieth Psalm is almost eerily similar right down to the words, “all our days pass away” in verse nine. Like this song, Psalm 90 is a meditation on our human mortality but not for the sake of being morbid. The Psalmist expresses awe and reverence for the fact that we are mortal, but God is everlasting. Our lives are like a dream in the night, like grass that is renewed in the morning, but in the evening it withers and fades. Mortals turn back to dust, but God is our dwelling place for all generations. For God, a thousand years are like yesterday or like a watch in the night. God was our creator before the mountains were brought forth from everlasting to everlasting. It is a prayer of awe, reverence, and humility in the presence of the divine. “The days of our life are seventy years, or perhaps eighty, if we are strong; even then...they are soon gone, and we fly away...so teach us to count our days that we may gain a wise heart.” I have found myself wondering, “What do you suppose that means to gain a wise heart?” The translation in the pew Bible might offer us a clue. The passage contains a superscription at the start of the reading, “A Prayer of Moses, The Man of God.” This is the only passage in the book of Psalms that does this. Now, I want to be clear because it’s easy to get confused. The Psalmist is not saying that Moses wrote this. The subtitle is not “A Prayer from Moses.” It’s, “A Prayer of Moses” (which is really just Bible code for “A Prayer About Moses”). In other words, this Psalm was probably written as a tribute or a remembrance of Moses’ story. Moses, of course, was a figure in the Jewish memory who came to grips with mortality in his own story. After forty years of leading God’s people through the wilderness, Moses came just short of entering the Promised Land but was not allowed to actually pass through. Despite being so close to the destination that he had imagined for so many years, Moses’ journey had come to the end of the line. That destination and that future would be realized by his successor, Joshua. It was a future that Moses would work toward his entire life but one that he would ultimately never live to see. It may be tempting to think, “Isn’t it a pity?” Yet we are reminded that his experience is also our experience. The work of the Church and, indeed, the journey of faith is often the work of shepherding in a future that we, ourselves, will likely never live to see. There’s an old Greek proverb that reads, “A society grows great when old [women and men] plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” We look around our sanctuary this morning and remember that we stand on the shoulders of our predecessors who brought us here today. Church leaders, teachers, mentors, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents who answered the call to the ministry of the Church, who made promises at baptisms—many of whom did not live to see the future that we find ourselves living in today. Perhaps you can remember the names of some of those people—in your church, in your life, in your school, or in your families. The children of God who planted the proverbial seeds that grew into the trees in whose shade we now sit. For the Psalmist some two or three thousand years ago, Moses was one of those names, and they hoped that they, themselves, would live lives of faithful service that their children and their grandchildren might one day remember, too. “Satisfy us in the morning...” the Psalmist writes, “...that we may rejoice and be glad all our days...let your work be manifest to your servants, and...to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and prosper for us the work of our hands.” The ninetieth Psalm is about both remembering the past and looking to the future. The Psalmist invites us to remember where we have been and also to look ahead to where we are hoping to go with God’s help. On Stewardship Gratitude Sunday, we give thanks for the proverbial trees in whose shade we now sit, and we give thanks for the hands that planted them. As we enter and leave the sanctuary each of us will be hanging leaves on our Gratitude Tree in the narthex with the names of the places, people, and things in our lives and in our ministry for which we are grateful. I hope that some of you will remember some of those names. We also look ahead with an eye to the future and to the mission to which we believe God has called us. A mission where God’s creation is more faithfully and sustainably cared for where systemic poverty might finally become a thing of the past. For many of us, this is a future that we will likely never see (at least in this lifetime). And yet… Stewardship Gratitude Sunday, in many ways, represents a moment in time that both challenges us and invites us to ponder the questions, “What is God calling us to help plant today so that we might help build a future for the ones who are coming next? What will be the work of my hands that I hope will prosper to the glory of God? What is my life?” The story of Moses and Joshua and the words of the Psalms remind us that the work of the Church is something that cannot and should not be done alone. Like Moses, Joshua, and the Psalmist before us, the work of the Church and the calling of God is a calling that is much ultimately bigger than any one of us. It was the work of those good and faithful predecessors who came before us, it is the work of the Church today, and it will continue to be the work of those who are here long after we’re gone. To give glory to God is to commit the story of our lives to an ultimately much bigger story that God is telling. Perhaps that is what the Psalmist means— to have a wise heart. James Limburg, Professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary, once translated verse twelve this way: “Lord, teach us to make each day count, to reflect on the fact that we must die, and so become wise.” In other words, while all things indeed must pass, teach us to commit our lives to a future that we may never see because the future belongs to God. May it be so. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.
James 3:1-12Rev. Marc van BulckOxford Presbyterian Church--- Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness. For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh. --- I will admit that when I read this passage, particularly the words, “Not many of you should become teachers,” it does remind me of a particularly humiliating story during my brief stint as a substitute teacher when I was in my mid-20’s. I was serving as the part-time Director of Youth Ministries at First Presbyterian Church in Bentonville, Arkansas, and for about a year or so I worked part-time as a sub to pay the rent. At first I was pretty good at it. One day, I was called to teach high school math. The next week, fourth grade science. Then English class. I was even a P.E. coach at one point if you can believe that. After a while I started thinking, “I’m starting to get pretty good at this.” The next week, I got a call from one of the local elementary schools asking me if I would like to teach second grade. And I said, “Sure! I’ve done middle school and high school. I’ve got this. How hard could it be?” It was one of the worst days of my entire life. Class started at 8:15 in the morning, and by 8:45 I had completely lost control of the classroom. Children were running around in every direction, climbing over desks and chairs, twisting and contorting into bodily positions that God never intended for the human body. Every fifteen minutes I would hear “Can I go to the bathroom?” “No, you cannot go to the bathroom!" I would yell, "Sit down! Everybody just sit down!" It was a nightmare. Teachers (real teachers) started poking their heads inside the door with concerned looks on their faces saying, “Hey, is everything okay in here?” “No, everything is not okay.” I didn’t even try to pretend. Any attempt at learning in the classroom that morning had turned into The Lord of the Flies. When I finally got home, I called my sister (who teaches elementary school professionally in Charleston, South Carolina). I told her what happened and asked, “How on earth do you do this every single day?" She just laughed and said, “Well, it’s not for everyone, brother.” So when I hear these words from James, “Not many of you should become teachers,” I think, “No kidding. You don’t have to tell me twice.” "...for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” Of course, James is not talking about substitute teaching second grade. He’s talking about the ways that we model ourselves in our communities, in our families, in our church, and the examples that we set every day both for better and sometimes for worse. When I was a teenager, my dad sat me down one day and told me that I had now reached the age where there were kids who were younger than me. “They are watching you whether you realize it or not,” he said, “and they will mimic what you do.” It’s maybe one of the best pieces of advice anyone has ever given me. “Be careful what kind of example you set because the responsibility is enormous.” Several years ago, George Lucas, the filmmaker, said something similar. He gave an interview with John Seabrook (a journalist from The New Yorker), and he said, “Everyone teaches…in almost anything you do, you teach whether you are aware of it or not. Some people aren’t aware that they are teaching. They should be wiser. Everybody teaches all the time.” I think there’s a lot of truth to that. I think that’s also what James is getting at in his letter here, too. Our passage this morning is one of the few examples of a complete, self-contained essay that James (or someone like him) likely wrote at an earlier date and then later chose to include in this book of the Bible. Last Sunday, Pastor Lawrence talked a bit about the role that James’ book of the Bible plays in the eternal debate between faith vs. works. Well, this essay may be one of those examples where the two overlap. James was not a big fan of “talking the talk” too much if you couldn’t “walk the walk” just as well. In fact, James was not that big a fan of talking that much at all. In verse 2, James identified being able to control your tongue as the pinnacle and perhaps highest aspiration of spiritual perfection. It is perhaps the most difficult spiritual discipline of all to master and, at least in James’ view, one of the most dangerous if we don’t. The letter of James is an example of what we call wisdom literature in the Bible. In the wisdom writings of the ancient Mediterranean world, the Jewish tradition, and the Greco-Roman empire, one of the points upon which all three wisdom traditions agreed was that when you open your mouth, tread carefully. If we were to go back and look at the writing of ancient Egypt, the book of Proverbs and Sirach, to the wisdom literature of Plutarch and Seneca, one of the points that they all have in common was that silence was better than speaking. Listening was better than talking. Understanding (not needing to “be right”) was the pathway to wisdom. If one absolutely needs to speak, one should keep one’s words brief and at all times under control. Under no circumstances, the ancients wrote, should speech be used as an expression of rage or jealousy. Perhaps that’s what Francis of Assisi meant when he coined the now famous and well-known expression, “Preach the gospel at all times and if necessary, use words.” Y’all, I am going to be real with you for a minute. I am not good at this. This is one of those passages of the Bible where people like me who like to talk, who like to preach, who like to engage in dialogue, who like to argue sometimes, and who like to be right are not held in a particularly flattering light. Of all the passages in Scripture that I love and find inspiring, this is one of those that I don’t particularly enjoy reading because deep down I know that it’s right. Many of us have known how it feels to put our foot in our mouths or have said something that we later regretted. We’ve all probably felt frustrated and (at one time or another) wanted to say, “Okay, now that they’re not in the room, let me tell you what I really think about so-and-so!” “How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire,” James writes, “and the tongue is a fire.” He’s right. It’s so easy, and it doesn’t take much. When I think back to my embarrassing experience substitute teaching, one of the things that surprised me about my experience teaching was just how quickly and how easily everything fell apart. I'm not exactly sure what it was I said or didn’t say or what it was I did or didn’t do that caused it, but whatever it was happened very quickly within the first fifteen minutes. One wrong word, one wrong decision from even a well-intentioned person who simply didn’t know any better – and in an instant, the whole thing had gone to hell. James warns that the exact same thing is true in churches, in our relationships, in our families, in our nation, and in our world - and he even uses the Greek word for hell. Our words and our language can be used to encourage one another, to teach one another, to lift each other up, and to help us solve problems – and they can also be used to tear each other down, to gossip about each other behind our backs, to self-medicate through venting (which is not always necessarily a bad thing) or sometimes just to stir the pot and grind our own gears for the sake of it. I’ve done that. We’ve all done it. It’s human nature. The thing about words is that, like fire, once the damage has started, it's very difficult (sometimes even impossible) to undo it. Which is why James writes that words (like fire) should be treated with caution. Everybody has to vent from time to time, and sometimes that’s a really healthy thing to do. However, if that listening ear starts to become a permanent replacement for understanding one another, for working out our issues with one another face-to-face as neighbors, or we start to replace our compassion for one another with resentment, cynicism, and the hunger for bitterness, then (James writes) the Body of Christ becomes toxic. “It stains the whole body,” James writes, “full of deadly poison.” But then he really goes for the jugular: “With it [the tongue] we bless the Lord and Father and...curse those who are made in the likeness of God.” Ouch. That really hurts. It’s not that far off from what Jesus said in Matthew 25: “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to...members of my family, you did it to me” (25:40). I was reminded of a memorial service that was offered a few years ago in memory of Dallas police officers who had been killed during a shooting. During the service, former President George W. Bush had been invited to speak, and he offered some remarks that I found really moving. “Too often,” he said, “we judge [others] based on their worst examples while judging ourselves by our best intentions.” Wisdom literature like James is not always easy to read because (perhaps a little ironically), it doesn’t really hold its tongue. It doesn’t hold anything back and is not afraid to speak the spiritual truth that we need to hear even when it’s uncomfortable. The good news perhaps is that James offers some word of encouragement and perhaps a challenge: “My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.” It doesn’t have to be this way. In verse 6, James describes our words as almost having a world-creating capacity. Every day, we have the choice to decide what kind of world, what kind of community, what kind of family, what kind of group of peers, what kind of nation, and what kind of world we are going to help shape based on the words that we choose. Every day, each and every one of us wakes up in the morning with that choice: what kind of example am I going to set today? It is both a challenge but also an opportunity. Because others are watching whether you realize it or not, and they will mimic you. Or to put it another way, everybody teaches. What will you teach today? The choice, according to James, ultimately is yours. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.
Psalm 34Rev. Marc van BulckOxford Presbyterian Church--- I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul makes its boast in the Lord; let the humble hear and be glad. O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together. I sought the Lord, and he answered me, and delivered me from all my fears. Look to him, and be radiant; so your faces shall never be ashamed. This poor soul cried, and was heard by the Lord, and was saved from every trouble. The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him, and delivers them. O taste and see that the Lord is good; happy are those who take refuge in him. O fear the Lord, you his holy ones, for those who fear him have no want. The young lions suffer want and hunger, but those who seek the Lord lack no good thing. Come, O children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord. Which of you desires life, and covets many days to enjoy good? Keep your tongue from evil, and your lips from speaking deceit. Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and pursue it. The eyes of the Lord are on the righteous, and his ears are open to their cry. The face of the Lord is against evildoers, to cut off the remembrance of them from the earth. When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears, and rescues them from all their troubles. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and saves the crushed in spirit. Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord rescues them from them all. He keeps all their bones; not one of them will be broken. Evil brings death to the wicked, and those who hate the righteous will be condemned. The Lord redeems the life of his servants; none of those who take refuge in him will be condemned. --- This week I learned about a woman named Emily McDowell who designs snarky empathy cards. Emily is a cancer designer and lived through the disease in her 20’s. According to her website, she started designing snarky empathy cards because she wanted to... “...speak to the human condition with honesty, humor, and heart. Our cards are designed for the relationships we really have, and our mission is to help people connect when they’re not sure what to say. [I} was inspired to start writing cards because [I] had a hard time finding cards in stores that reflected [my] life and the kinds of relationships [I] had, and [I] saw an opportunity to help people to connect in a more honest way.” I took a few minutes to read through some of them this week. I jotted down a few of my favorites: “I wish I could take away your pain or at least take away the people who compare it to the time their hamster died.”“I know there’s no normal to go back to, but I’m here to help you build a new one (and I’ll bring snacks)”“Well, this just sucks. I wish I had a better way to say it, but my brain feels totally stuck right now. But I just want you to know that even though I might not always have the right words, you will always have me. I’m not going anywhere. So, I hope you’re cool with that.” I enjoyed reading through Emily’s snarky empathy cards. They made me chuckle, but her story resonated with me even more. “The most difficult part of my illness,” she writes, “wasn’t losing my hair, or being erroneously called ‘sir’ by Starbucks baristas, or sickness from chemo. It was the loneliness and isolation I felt when many of my close friends and family members disappeared because they didn’t know what to say, or they said the absolute wrong thing without realizing it.” As a minister, these sentiments remind me of the ways that going through a crisis can often alienate us from a community. When somebody finds themselves unemployed, for example, it can often be very difficult to show up in worship the following Sunday because so much of our identities are tied up in our jobs in our culture, and there can be feelings of shame wrapped up around experiences like that. When my parents first got divorced years and years ago, I could remember feeling embarrassed to go back to church. I worried about whether my friends would judge me, look at me differently, or talk to me differently. It’s also not uncommon for both members of the marriage to leave church completely when this happens. Emily’s cards reminded me this week that sometimes even in spite of our best intentions, these seasons of life can be deeply difficult and painful. They can still leave us feeling adrift, alone, or ashamed, and sometimes unsure how to find our way back into the community or if we even can. Faith communities in ancient Israel during the time of the Old Testament struggled with this, too. They were human just like we are, and throughout the Psalm we hear some of that language of loneliness. “This poor soul cried,” writes the Psalmist, “and was heard by the Lord...the Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” The Psalmist gives voice to this hope and this longing to find reconnection back to the community in the image of a feast or a banquet table. It’s what we call a Psalm of Thanksgiving, and some of this language may remind us a little bit of Jesus’ language of the bread of life from last week. Verse 8 says, “O taste and see that the Lord is good.” However, while Jesus’ words remind us of the Lord’s Supper, this passage is actually referring to something even more ancient. In ancient Israel, when someone experienced a healing from a disease (for example) or managed to overcome some other form of trauma, it was customary for that person to throw a feast and give thanks to God. In a way, it’s not that different from what many people still do today. Many of us have known friends or loved ones who, after having gotten out of a toxic or unhealthy relationship, have thrown parties - not because they want to celebrate the pain that they have endured but because they are experiencing a profound sense of relief that this particular season of hardship has passed and that they were lucky enough to have friends and loved ones who supported them along the way. Rolf Jacobson, Professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary, talks about when he was first diagnosed with cancer and lost both of his legs to amputation. Ever since then he has said that on big anniversaries of that amputation, he will throw a feast with family and close friends to commemorate that “this poor soul cried, and was heard by the Lord, and was saved” and that he has heard from many friends and loved ones who have also had cancer or survived other major traumas and have adopted similar traditions, themselves. I think customs like these serve as reminders of the hope that we don’t have to feel alone, that we don’t have to be isolated from the beloved community, and that we don’t have to feel that our identity or our sense of dignity has to be defined by the struggles that we have endured: that the feast of God celebrates the hope of healing and reconciliation even for someone such as us. When the Psalmist writes, “O taste and see that the Lord is good,” readers back then would have probably remembered the words of Deuteronomy 14. The last laws written in Deuteronomy 14 talk about taking one's tithes and throwing a feast like the one Psalm 34 is talking about. However, the Torah took this idea a step further. Don’t forget to also invite the widow, the orphan, and the alien while you’re at it “because they have no allotment or inheritance with you” (Deut. 14:29). Widows, orphans, and aliens were often considered to be second-class citizens at best. They were often individuals who had been moved to the very margins of society (sometimes even by their own religious leaders) and left to manage on their own devices. To the writers of the Hebrew Scriptures, tasting and seeing that the Lord was good didn’t just look like giving thanks to God for the moments when we’re lucky enough to get through crises. It also looked like recognizing when there are those among us who aren't so lucky and who still feel lost, alienated, or marginalized. It’s an important reminder even for communities of faith. Maybe especially so. Some of you may have heard me tell the story of a UCC minister who attended a congregation that maintained strict restrictions during worship on Sunday morning when it came to communion. During this particular Sunday, a young lady named Pam had approached the chancel to receive communion when the minister noticed a small, rainbow-colored sash pinned to her vest and recognized it as a symbol of solidarity with the LGTBQIA+ community. The minister, recognizing this symbol, quietly informed Pam that she would not be invited or permitted to receive communion that morning and quietly directed her to an area along the side of the sanctuary with a few others whom it had been determined would be inappropriate to serve. At this time, an eighty-two-year-old elder named Ellen was watching all of this unfold. Ellen looked down at the small piece of bread in her hand that she had been given, made her way across the aisle, took her bread, broke it, and offered it to her. I found myself thinking about Pam’s story again this week because on the one hand, it reminds me of all the reasons why people often feel afraid, uneasy, or uncertain about walking through the doors of a faith community. These notions can feel wrapped up in feelings of shame or fear of being judged. Maybe sometimes with good reasons sadly. It also made me hope that, on a good day, our communities of faith can look more like that eighty-two-year-old elder named Ellen. That we can be communities who believe that there is always room at the table for one more. For outcasts, for the grieving, for those who have been made to feel unwelcome, and for those who have been moved to the margins. On a good day, this is what I hope that a worshiping community can be. When the Psalmist writes, “Taste and see that the Lord is good,” this is the kind of healing, reconnection, and reconciliation that I like to hope that they had in mind. My hope is that when someone walks through the doors of a church like ours, the community that they might encounter might be the opposite of what they fear when they fear the worst. My hope is that the Church can be a community who loves them, who cares about them, who supports them, who embraces them, who reminds them that they are not alone, that they are surrounded by God’s presence, and they are part of a family and a community of faith who will not let them fall. In the world of the Psalmist, there is an expression in Hebrew that is often offered as a toast at a feast or a banquet table. The expression is L’chaim, and it literally means, “To life!” May we be the faith community that cultivates this life together that all may taste and see that the Lord is good. May it be so. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.
John 6:24-35 Rev. Marc van Bulck Oxford Presbyterian Church --- So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus. When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” Then Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” --- Years ago when I was a seminary student, I dated a young woman for about three months. We came from very, very different traditions of Christianity. One evening, she shared with me that she was eager to see her two younger step-brothers get involved with the church. I asked her“Why?” (which I suppose is probably a strange question coming from a seminary student), and she responded, “Because I just want my brothers to be happy. I want them to have good lives and to be good citizens. I just want my brothers to grow up safe.” I responded, “If ‘happy’ and ‘safe’ are what you’re hoping for, you might want to consider keeping them as far away from Jesus as you possibly can.” I knew what she meant (and I’m sure you probably do, too). At the time, I’m sure I was probably trying to project some edgy bravado while trying to impress this girl. On the other hand, there is probably some truth to that. Throughout the story of Jesus’ ministry, we see that neither the lives of Jesus nor his followers often turn out particularly easy or safe. Yet I think it’s still very seductive sometimes (even for pastors) to imagine if we just did all the right things, Jesus might put in a good word for us, and things would turn out the way we want them. Do you know what I mean? “If I say just the right prayers...If I just teach my kids the right beliefs...If I have just enough faith...If I do just the right things...If I live just the right kind of life... ...maybe everything will work out in the end, right? Of course, as many of us know from experience, life doesn’t always work like that, does it? Sometimes we don’t know why. I think this is the question that Jesus’ followers are struggling with a little bit in our Scripture reading this morning. The story picks up just after the feeding of the five thousand, a miracle which apparently made Jesus pretty popular. So popular, in fact, that verse 15 says, “they were about to...take [Jesus] by force,” so Jesus and Company decide to get out of dodge. The next day the crowd shows up again saying, “Surprise! We’re back! Jesus, after yesterday’s excitement, we’ve been doing some thinking, and we’ve decided we’re ready to sign up for your Sunday School class!” Jesus responds, “The free bread wouldn’t have had anything to do with that, would it?” “Noooo! We just, er, love listening to sermons…” Much to their chagrin, Jesus does not send through a second run at the buffet line. Instead we get his spiel about the bread of life, which they find slightly less exciting apparently. The language here in John’s Gospel is a little funny. Earlier in the story, Jesus had also been seen walking on water. The crowd asks, “When did you come here?” meaning, “How did this guy get all the way across the lake without a boat?” However, I think John is sneaking a secret double-meaning into this story, too. In Greek, their question reads a little closer to “How did you come to be here?” or more literally it might read, “how were you begotten here?” Some scholars have suggested that John may have seen this story as a metaphor for a much larger and more existential conversation about Jesus’ ministry. “Why are you here? What are you doing here in this boat? In this town? In this world? In the person of this human being? Why are you here?” It’s not the first time John’s Gospel has hinted at this question. When Jesus turned water into wine, he overheard a similar question from the head servant. How did the good wine come to be here? (2:9). The woman at the well asked Jesus, “Where do you get that living water?” (4:11). How does it come to be? Now the question is finally being asked about Jesus, himself, and he kind of turns the question back around on them, too. “Why are you here?” “You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food [of] eternal life.” To which the crowd responds, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever you say. If there’s bread involved, we’ll look for anything you like.” Jesus says, “You’re not getting it.” The reason is because this crowd lived during the Roman Empire where life was transactional. “You scratch my back. I’ll scratch yours. You do something for me, I do something for you.” In this world, you were taught from the day you are born that this is the way the world is. There is no unconditional love or an unconditional life. Wake up. You live in the real world now. It’s probably also how many of us see “real life” today, too, if we’re honest. They have been taught and indoctrinated for too long that this is just the way life is that they can’t possibly imagine a God who would be any different. Part of why Jesus and the crowd keep hitting a brick wall and going round and round in circles is because Jesus is not just talking about bread and loaves. He’s trying to challenge the whole way that they have been taught about looking at the world, at life, and at relationships. They really have a hard time with it. They even try to argue with him. “Well, Moses and our ancestors got bread. They did what they were supposed to do out in the wilderness, and they ate.” Jesus says, “Yeah, they did, and they died. The bread they ate in the wilderness is not what I’m talking about. Not really. I’m talking about the bread of life. I’m talking about something more. Something that can’t be earned, paid for, or deserved. The bread of life is not given to you because you somehow scratched God’s back, and now God is scratching yours. Grace (real true unmerited grace) can only be freely given by the Living God and received with gladness like a plant receives water.” Some of you may remember hearing my friend, Nick Yoda, preach at my installation service. He’s the pastor at Pleasant Ridge Presbyterian Church in Cincinnati. Nick wrote a story some years ago about an encounter that took place on his honeymoon. Having only been married a mere three days, Nick writes: I was still on my best behavior at trying to be a loving husband. Christa and I had checked into our hotel and my lovely spouse looked at me, told me she wanted to take a nap and asked if I would go on a mission for her. Gladly accepting my task at hand, I was soon wandering the streets of San Francisco in search of McDonald’s French fries. And there it was…the ‘golden arches.’ I was about to be the best husband in the world.” As Nick opened the door to enter, he took note of the homeless man named David sitting on the curb asking not for money but for a meal. Ignoring his plea, Nick took his place in line and scanned the menu. “It is moments like this,” Nick writes, “that morality can get on your nerves. I was on vacation and the last thing that I wanted to be on my honeymoon was a pastor!” Nick started to think about the horrific amount of money they had spent on plane tickets, hotel stays, gourmet food, tours through the wine country, wedding souvenirs, and the rented convertible. All this guy was asking for was a simple meal. Nick found his conscience getting the best of him so he decided to strike a deal. After scanning the menu, Nick walked out of the restaurant with a Big Mac, an order of fries, and a large Coke. He asked the McDonald’s employee to pack the fries in a separate bag for his wife, and his heart leapt with joy. “I’m going to be a great husband and a great pastor at the same time!” he said, “My ego elated, and I stepped out of the restaurant to present this man with his meal.” As Nick handed this man the Big Mac and drink, the gentleman got up from where he was sitting and started to walk away. A bit taken aback, he asked, “Aren’t you going to eat that? I just went out of my way to buy you a meal.” The man opened the brown paper bag and unwrapped the Big Mac from the plastic. He took the sandwich in his hand, broke it in half, and said, “I have a friend who I am going to share this with.” Nick wept all the way back to the hotel. Robb McCoy, pastor of Two Rivers United Methodist Church asks, “How many times have you heard people say, ‘I come to church to be fed,’” but how many of us really understand what that means? In that moment, as David took that half a sandwich back to his friend, Nick believed that this man truly understood (perhaps better than most). “I saw the golden arches,” he writes, “but David saw the bread of life.” I don’t know how much of a theologian David was. What I do know is that his story (and Nick’s story) raise questions about what really being fed looks like. For Nick, in that moment, being fed meant (quite literally) getting some drive-through for his wife. Perhaps in the larger sense, it meant trying to put together the perfect honeymoon. The beautiful venue, the car, the wine country, and all that. When my lady friend back in seminary thought about “being fed,” it looked like seeing her stepbrothers having a nice life, growing up to be well-behaved boys in Sunday School, and being good citizens. I think pastors and churches can get caught up in this, too. Maybe if the church grows to a certain size, if we have enough kids in Sunday School, or if we meet a certain stewardship goal, then (finally then!) we will be fed, right? What’s striking to me about Nick's story is that when he saw the bread of life on his honeymoon, it didn’t wind up looking like any of that stuff. It looked like a gentleman on the curb who was grateful to share what little he had because his friend was hungry. I wonder if Jesus would have looked at someone like David and thought, “He gets it. He really gets it.” I don’t know. What we do know is that Jesus’ followers really struggled with this. If we read a little further, verse 60 says, ”Many of his disciples...said, ‘This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?’” They complained and left. Jesus doesn’t really chase after them either. He says, “Yeah, it is hard.” Then he turns to the other disciples and says, “Do you also wish to go away?” Reading this story makes me wonder how different our churches would be if we really saw being fed the same way. What would that change about the ways we do ministry? What would it change about the things we saw as priorities and the things we let go of? These are hard questions that don’t have a lot of easy answers. Many of Jesus’ followers preferred not to think about these things. “This teaching is difficult,” they said, “Who can accept it?” Who, indeed? Because from the Gospels’ point of view, Jesus is not primarily concerned about survival in the end. His disciples are. We are, but Jesus doesn’t see life in heaven or on earth the way that we see it, and Jesus knows that the road ahead isn’t exactly going to get any easier. Maybe that’s why the Gospel is never truly settled with us. I doubt David’s life was particularly easy either. When I think about the life I would want for myself, I can’t imagine that a life like David’s is the first one that I would probably choose. And yet if understanding the bread of life means understanding it the way that David did, some part of me can’t quite shake the feeling that that’s the only life really worth living in the end. I wonder if Peter couldn’t quite shake that feeling either. Jesus says, “Do you also wish to go away?” Peter says, “Lord, to whom can we go?” I wonder if deep down, that’s why Peter is there. Maybe deep down, that’s why we’re here, too. They said to him…“Give us this bread always.” Jesus said, “I am the bread...whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” May it be so. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.
Mark 4:35-41 Rev. Marc van Bulck Oxford Presbyterian Church
On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?”
He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
When I was seventeen years old, I saw the musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, for the first time. Written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice as a rock opera concept album in 1970 (and then later as a Broadway musical), Jesus Christ Superstar tells the story of the last week of Jesus’ life from the primary perspective of Judas Iscariot. Leading up to his arrival in Jerusalem and (ultimately) his crucifixion, the story focuses on the “fully human” part of being “both fully human and fully divine” and was received somewhat controversially among some Christian groups at the time.
As a late adolescent, I found the musical both challenging and fascinating. The finale depicts Jesus carrying the cross to the place of his execution while the spirit of Judas Iscariot and even the heavenly angels surround him singing:
Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ Who are you? What have you sacrificed? Jesus Christ Superstar Do you think you’re what they say you are? I only want to know. I only want to know... Who are you? Who are you…?
That image made a profound impression on me at seventeen. The notion that the true nature of who Jesus is might be so deep and so powerful a mystery that even the heavenly angels might sing, “Who are you, Jesus the Christ?” was both captivating and compelling to me. Of course that’s not quite how the Biblical account of Jesus’ life tells the story. This was just part of the stagecraft of theatrical storytelling, but in its way, this moment in a theatrical production gives voice to one of the great mysteries of the Christian faith. Who is Jesus the Christ really?
That’s the question. In many ways, it’s one of the great questions and mysteries of the Christian faith. Many of us have likely pondered that question at some point in our lives. Who was he really? Theologians (dating back to the Apostle Paul) have debated the finer points of that question for centuries.
The question of “Who is Jesus?” is one of the central themes in Mark’s Gospel. The disciples do not yet have a sense of who he is. Jesus has been teaching them parables and explaining them in secret, but this whole enterprise still seems very odd and peculiar to them. Peter won’t finally come out and call Jesus the Christ for another four chapters.
The reading this morning shows us Jesus’ disciples waking him in the middle of the night when a storm hits their small boat out in the middle of the Sea of Galilee. “Teacher,” they ask, “do you not care that we are perishing?” I think the question is sincere. I think at this point in the story, they’re genuinely not sure if this guy cares or not. At this point, I don’t think they’re even really sure who he is. Even after Jesus calms the storm, the story ends with them asking, “Who then is this?” (Verse 41).
Jesus’ calming the storm has often been interpreted as a sort of metaphor for the Church throughout history: a parable about having faith in the midst of trying times and calming the storms of our own human anxieties. It’s a good interpretation.
However, some of the details in this story don’t make sense. For example, why are they even taking this trip in the first place? Jesus hauls them out in a boat in the middle of the night, but why? Why not wait until morning? The Sea of Galilee is about three miles across at its widest point. It’s not a huge lake, but still a dangerous lake (especially if you were caught out in the middle of a storm), and fishermen would have seen storms before. Plus, there are Gentiles on the other side.
There’s that weird mention at the very beginning in verse 36 that there were all these other boats out on the lake. What happened to them? Did they sink? Did they capsize? As much as we may roll our eyes at the disciples for being these doofuses with very little faith, what exactly is going on here? Jesus is actively messing with boundaries, saying, “Let’s cross this sea, at this time of night, in this exact way, going in this direction,” and I think the disciples have some very valid reasons to wonder what exactly they’re meant to make of all this.
Jesus asks, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” but I think it’s also worth noticing that he doesn’t exactly dismiss the storm as trivial either. When his disciples wake him up, Jesus doesn’t say, “Oh, this is no big deal. This storm will pass. Just go back to sleep.” He wakes up and rebukes the wind. He acknowledges that this storm poses a potential threat, and he addresses it. So, if even Jesus acknowledges that this storm is enough of a threat to warrant some divine assistance, then what exactly are we talking about when we talk about faith? What is it exactly that Jesus has in mind here?
I think the Gospel of Mark may have some clues. Throughout Mark’s Gospel, faith is often portrayed less as having all of the right answers or never getting scared. It’s portrayed more as sort of a radical hanging on. “Stick with me,” Jesus says, “even if you don’t fully understand it.” In Mark’s Gospel, what Jesus appears to want is for people to be followers. He’s less interested in them fully understanding all the answers or having this big, heroic, grandiose faith. Jesus seems to simply want his followers to follow him.
Matt Skinner, professor of New Testament at Luther Seminary, points out that when Jesus springs into action the exact words that his disciples say are “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” That’s not the same as “Jesus, we need help.” This is something much more. This is more like “Jesus, we are overcome with despair. We are about to give up.” It is then that Jesus acts.
I wonder if that’s the key here for Jesus. I wonder if the urgency here is that Jesus can sense that his disciples are at the point where they are about to lose all hope and give up, and what pings on Jesus’ radar is “Just hang in there a little bit longer. Just stay in it, however imperfectly. It doesn’t matter if it isn’t perfect. Follow me, and don’t give in to despair.”
To Jesus (in this story at least), having faith isn't necessarily about having all the right answers, all the right faith statements, or never having doubts. To Jesus, it’s about the willingness to follow him even when our faith and our courage doesn’t look so perfect without falling into hopelessness.
It’s possible that the Jesus of this story may lead us into some very strange and perhaps even unsettling places, indeed. In the story, Jesus was ready to lead them right into the middle of Gentile country under the cover of darkness in a rickety old boat...and the sky wasn’t exactly looking too friendly either.
We don’t have the same hangups with Gentiles that Jesus’ followers had back then. At least, I would hope not. We are them! However, I wonder what crossing that proverbial sea into uncertain territory with uncertain kinds of people would look like for us today.
Would it look like skeptics and atheists? Would it look like transgender and gender non-binary teenagers? Would it look like the Muslim family who lives in the apartment complex down the road? Would the other side of the sea look like that other side of town where the homeless woman lives? The side of town we don’t ordinarily have to cross? If Jesus would be willing to cross a sea precariously in the middle of the night in a rickety old boat to sit in the company of Gentiles, do you think he would be willing to sit in her company, too? Maybe the better question is “Would we?”
Maybe, in the end, that’s what faith really looks like to the author of Mark. Maybe the Jesus of this story was not just interested in crossing literal seas like the sea of Galilee. Maybe the Jesus of this story was even more interested in crossing over boundaries and into different ways of being community in the world. Ways that didn’t always make sense according to the social norms of their day and maybe in ways that don’t always make sense in ours either.
However, the profession of our faith is that the Kingdom of God rarely does make sense. Maybe that’s not the point. Maybe it’s not our job to make sense of the Kingdom of God in all of its messiness and all of its loveliness. Maybe our job is simply to follow where Jesus leads with faithfulness, great awe, and maybe even a little fear from time to time. The Gospels proclaimed that even the wind and the sea obeyed Jesus. Perhaps, on a good day, we can, too.
May it be so. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.
John 15:1-8 Rev. Marc van Bulck Oxford Presbyterian Church
”I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches.
“Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.
Jesus’ parables like this one about vines and vineyards are not always easy for me to preach about. I don’t really know the first thing about gardening. You could throw a rock and hit somebody who knows more about vineyards than I do, but this week I learned something about vineyards that I never knew before.
Earlier this week, a friend of mine had described a recent trip of hers to Paris where she had visited an authentic French vineyard. The owner of the vineyard told her that in order to really understand the image of a vineyard, you first have to spend a lot of time with one. One of the first things you learn working on a vineyard, he said, is that they have a very unique relationship with soil.
If the vineyard is planted in perfect, fertile soil, ironically, it won’t quite grow correctly. Vines planted in fertile soil will only produce leaves. In order to compel a vine to produce fruit, the branch must be pruned to the point of near death. It is the fear of death which leads the plant to desire to reproduce itself and therefore begin to produce grapes.
Vines that are planted in rocky soil will flourish much more. There is something about the struggle that is integral to the vineyard building its strength. We see other examples of this in nature, too. When a caterpillar cocoons itself inside of its chrysalis, its body has to literally dissolve into almost a kind of goo before being able to transform into a butterfly. And even then, the butterfly must undergo the physical struggle of breaking free of the chrysalis, itself, in order to build up the necessary strength to survive in nature.
I’ve been thinking about that image this week as I’ve been thinking about this passage from John’s Gospel. In John’s record of the Gospel these are some of the very last words that Jesus will offer to his disciples. The very next stop after this farewell discourse is the garden where Judas would betray him and where Jesus would be arrested before being taken to the shadow of the cross.
I wonder if, on some level, Jesus must have known (perhaps better than most) that the story of his followers and, by extension, the Church Universal was on a kind of threshold. The disciples would be scattered and afraid. Their leader would be crucified, and in many ways this entire Jesus movement was about to be virtually dissolved (almost to the point of death) before the moment of truth of what would happen next. If this is the sort of soil in which the seeds of Jesus’ Church are about to be planted, then the road ahead is a rocky one, indeed.
Yet Jesus knows that it is in exactly this rocky soil that the seeds of the very vineyard of God are being sown. So, Jesus offers these words: “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches.”
I don’t know if Jesus’ disciples fully grasped the magnitude of what Jesus was telling them. Seven chapters later after the resurrected Christ is made known to the disciples, they turn and look at each other and say, “Now what?” For the second time now, the group has been pruned to the point where it barely appears recognizable. At a loss for what they are supposed to do next, they find themselves reverting back to what they know: fishing (John 21).
Jesus appears to them a second time and essentially tells them again (in not so many words) “Abide with me. Don’t just tell my story. Don’t just remember my story. Go, and live like you believe it.” And it is from that pruning, from that moment of truth, from the choice that those disciples made in that moment that our tradition proclaims that the fruit of the Church first began to bloom.
I don’t know about you, but having grown up my entire life with the privilege of being able to worship in beautiful sanctuaries like ours, it’s easy for me to forget how traumatic, how vulnerable, and how very close to death the story of our early predecessors in the faith was in so many ways and at so many moments. Even Jesus’ death on the cross probably looked and felt like the end of everything Jesus stood for to those who were there at the time who didn’t have the benefit of two thousand years of hindsight that we enjoy today.
I want to make it very clear that I do not believe that God desires for us to suffer, causes our suffering, or takes any pleasure in the pain of our lives. I do not believe that God took any pleasure hearing Jesus cry out from the cross anymore than I believe Jesus took any pleasure in the struggles and hardships of his closest friends.
Yet, I do believe that Jesus knew and recognized that life would be hard. That ministry is and would be hard. Jesus knew that the soil will not always be easy, fertile, or ideal. Life will be rocky, dangerous, and difficult because, for better or for worse, that is simply the way that life is.
Yet even in that rocky soil, the vineyard of God nevertheless persists to grow. Jesus’ parting words to his disciples are that even in the midst of the rocky soil of our lives, God abides with us. Even in the midst of brokenness, God cultivates the vineyard like a good gardener, and with God’s help, the fruit of the Kingdom can still bloom.
This image of the God’s vineyard is an ancient one and has deep roots in our faith. Centuries before Jesus delivered this speech, the author of Genesis wrote, “the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east” (2:8). The prophet Isaiah proclaimed the image of the great gardener and this great vineyard, and appropriately on Choir Appreciation Sunday did so in song. In chapter 5, Isaiah cries out, “Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard” (Isaiah 5:1). When Isaiah beholds the great vineyard of his creator, he bows down in praise and adoration in that most ancient of ways when words fail him: through music and through song.
This morning we worship through music and song, and in doing so, we continue this ancient tradition that dates back to the prophet Isaiah. We acknowledge that for so many of us, life has not always been perfect. Many of us have known seasons of our lives when the soil has felt jagged and filled with pain.
This week I was reminded of the authentic, prophetic, and vulnerable Lenten devotion that Kent shared about the rocky soil he has known in his own journey. A journey that has known joy, heartbreak, pain, and even loss. Yet even in the depths of the vulnerability of his own story (like the prophet Isaiah before him) Kent lifted his voice in song and crying out to his creator asked, “How can I keep from singing?”
This morning we celebrate the gift of our choir and the gift of the leadership we have in Kent and Lynn. We give thanks for the beautiful, soaring music that they bring to our worship service every Sunday. Perhaps on a deeper level, when we do this, we are also lifting up the gift of song in gratitude and praise to God. The God who tends the garden of our lives both in seasons of joy and in also in seasons of our pain. A God who abides with us as we seek to abide with God, and our worship proclaims, “How can we keep from singing?”
“Abide in me as I abide in you….If you abide in me, and my words abide in you...my Father is glorified.”
May it be so in this day and in every age. Now and forever. Amen.
Mark 8:31-38 Rev. Marc van Bulck Oxford Presbyterian Church
Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
Last Sunday, as we began our season of Lent together, Pastor Lawrence spoke about his love of jazz and how much that musical art form has spoken to him throughout his life. One of the art forms that has spoken to me throughout my life is theater. Recently, I had the chance to watch a film of a piece of theater that is streaming on Hulu. It is called In & Of Itself by Derek DelGaudio, a one-man show that ran for 72 weeks Off Broadway in 2019 directed by Frank Oz.
The show is an exploration of identity and how we understand the many layers of who we are. Before the start of the show, audience members would gather in the lobby and were asked to select a card hanging off the wall that said the words, “I AM…” followed by a label.
“I am...a parent.”
“I am...a widow.”
“I am...a dental hygienist.”
“I am...a leader.”
“I am...an addict.”
“I am...a good samaritan.”
And so on and so on…
Over the course of the show, these labels we choose for ourselves play a role in the theater that the audience is about to participate in. Of course, if you show up to the theater early, you can choose from any one of thousands of labels that suit you. If you show up late...well, you may find that there are only a handful left. You may find that (depending on your circumstances) the people around you have already chosen a label for you (in a sense).
The show is a moving and empowering exploration of identity and the role that labels have on our lives, on our stories, and on the ways that we see ourselves. Do these labels reflect the truth about who we are, or are they a mask (or perhaps in some cases a mask that the world has chosen for us in its own way)? Among many other things, In & Of Itself invites us to ask the questions, “Who do we say that we are? Who do others say that we are?” These are powerful and important questions that are fundamental to the ways that we understand our identity and our calling in the world.
They are also exactly the questions that Jesus poses to his disciples in Mark’s record of the Gospel. Four verses prior to where our reading picks up, Jesus asks his followers, “Who do people say that I am?”
“John the Baptist,” some of them say, “others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”
“Who do you say that I am?” Jesus asks. Peter answers, “You are the Messiah” (8:27-29). Silence. Jesus says nothing and then sternly orders them not to talk about this. Some scholars have pointed out that in Mark’s Gospel Jesus comes across as a bit secretive about the whole “fully divine” part of “fully human and fully divine.” However, a few verses later, he seems a little less secretive about a somewhat different label: “the Son of Man.”
According to verse 27, Jesus and his followers are having this whole conversation in Caesarea Philippi, a town named for both Caesar and Herod Philip. It’s a town that is dedicated (in name and purpose) to kings, rulers, and people in imperial power. When Peter calls Jesus “messiah,” messiah is a royal term. It literally means “the anointed one.”
People like Caesar and Herod were exactly the kind of people who typically got anointed back then. Kings got anointed. King David was anointed long ago and was given a title like that. Cyrus the Persian who liberated the Jews from Babylon was referred to as “messiah.” Until then, a word like “messiah” would have probably reminded people of...well, people like Herod. When Peter says, “You’re like that!” Jesus tells everyone to quit talking like that and then offers them a better way to explain all of this a few verses later.
“The Son of Man,” Jesus says, “must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” This makes Peter very confused and very concerned. Messiahs don’t do that, Peter thinks. They don’t get rejected and killed. Suffering servants like Isaiah might do stuff like that, but not messiahs. Rulers and kings rode in on a horse, killed all the bad guys, and rode off into the sunset in victory. Jesus must be mistaken. So, Peter pulls him aside to try to straighten this out.
Of course, Jesus doesn’t need to have anything straightened out. He was already offered all of that ruler stuff when he was tempted by Satan out in the wilderness back in chapter 1, and he doesn’t need to rehash all of that again. Jesus knows what he’s here to do, and he knows what he’s not He even invokes Satan’s name when putting Peter in his place.
“Look,” Jesus says, “if your idea of a messiah is someone who’s going to come in and overthrow everybody like Herod or Caesar, then you’re all in for a big disappointment. If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me, but that’s the way it is. That’s the way it’s going to be.”
Over the past several weeks, the youth group here at Oxford Presbyterian Church has been studying the book, Worldchanging 101, by David LaMotte. Several of the chapters in LaMotte’s book examine (among many other historical events) the life and witness of Rosa Parks. When Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955 the bus driver came back and said, “Miss Parks, you’re going to have to move, or I’m going to have you arrested,” and her precise response to the bus driver was “You may do that.” Those were the four words that she spoke.
Many people who learn Rosa Parks’ story don’t know that she was the secretary for the NAACP for twelve years in Montgomery before she was arrested. Many people don't know that she had trained at the Highlander Center in nonviolent activism and in voter registration just a few months before she was arrested. She was a trained nonviolent activist with a long history of doing this work.
Many people also don’t know that Rosa Parks lost quite a lot as a result of this work including (among other things) her job for many years. We often glorify her, but we also often diminish the very real cost of speaking those four words, “You may do that,” and she was ready for that when the moment arrived.
Jesus uses words like “Deny yourself.” When we talk about denying ourselves today, we often think of that as not doing the things that we want to do. In Jesus’ day (in the Greco-Roman world), the “self” was understood as being tied to your community, your group, and the well-being of things like your family, your job, your clients, your neighbors. The things in your life that make up who you are. Your life. Your self. They are many of the things that someone like Rosa Parks would have been in danger of losing by saying words like “You may do that.”
There’s a lot built into those four words. She gave him permission. She held her dignity. She wasn’t taking orders. She said, “Look, you have decisions to make, and those decisions have consequences. I have decisions to make, and my decisions have consequences. This is what I’m choosing. Now it’s your turn.” It was a reversal. She didn’t play into the script of “You’re in charge because you’re the white guy, and you have all the power.”
What many people also don’t know is that Jesus wasn’t the first person to say, “Take up your cross” either. Jesus was actually quoting activists in his own culture who came before him, too. Jesus’ primary focus in Mark’s Gospel is the kingdom of God. What did Rome do to people who proclaimed other kingdoms? They crucified them, and what did Rome do to humiliate them? They made them carry their own cross to the place of their execution often publicly and on main roads where everyone could see them.
When Jesus (and people like him) said, “Pick up your cross” it wasn’t some violent battle cry like “Remember the Alamo!” or “Give me liberty, or give me death!” In some ways, this was Jesus’ way of looking at the Roman guard and saying, “You may do that. You have decisions to make, and those decisions have consequences. I have decisions to make, and my decisions have consequences. This is what I’m choosing. Now it’s your turn, but I’m not going to play into your script just because you’re the guard, and you have all the power. That is not the kind of messiah that I am going to be. That is not my identity. That is not the card that I’m going to choose off of the proverbial wall. This is who I am, and these are the decisions that I am going to make. Now it’s your turn.”
In the Church, Lent is the season when we ask ourselves what kind of decisions we are going to make. What kind of people of faith are we going to be? What kind of church are we going to be? They are questions that our faith asks us again and again throughout our whole lives. They are the questions that our faith asks us as a church from generation to generation. They are the questions that our faith asks us every morning when we wake up. “What are the decisions that we will make as followers of this Jesus?”
Choices like the ones Jesus and Rosa Parks made may appear small in the moment, but they are monumental. They are choices about our very identity and who we are. They are choices about our very self and what that will look like. For Jesus and Rosa Parks, these choices were simply too important to let other people define or set the terms for (based on what they thought they ought to look like instead). The stakes were too high. For them, their self was defined by the Kingdom of God and its witness and its work here on earth.
Lent is a season when our faith asks us, “What decisions will you make? What label will you choose from off the proverbial wall as a person of faith and as a follower of this man named Jesus?”
Now it’s your turn. May it be so. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.
Mark 1:21-28 Rev. Marc van Bulck Oxford Presbyterian Church
They went to Capernaum; and when the sabbath came, he entered the synagogue and taught. They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes. Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee.
A number of years ago, my friend and colleague, the Rev. Collin Adams taught an Adult Christian Education class called “The Scary Side of Christianity.” In the very first class, Collin pointed out that Presbyterians don’t often talk about demons (or “unclean spirits”) even though they do pop up in Scripture from time to time. I suspect that one of the reasons is because whenever you talk about demons, the devil, or any of that stuff, it inevitably becomes a conversation about whether these things even exist.
-“Was the man in this story literally possessed by an unclean spirit? Are demons real? Are they supernatural and active and alive in the world today?”
-“Are ‘unclean spirits’ in the Bible perhaps euphemisms for something else? Maybe something closer to what we might understand today as mental illness?”
-“Is the story meant to be seen as symbolic? A metaphor for a larger spiritual conversation that we are meant to be having as people of faith in the Church and in the world?”
Passages in Scripture like this one are not always the easiest to preach but not because I find them particularly scary. I don’t. However, while questions like these are very good, very reasonable, and very important, I do think they ultimately miss the point of what stories like this one are really about.
To put it another way, these may be the questions that we find ourselves asking, but the passage spends exactly zero verses trying to answer any of them. Whereas nearly half of the verses in this passage go out of their way to point out all these strange little details in the background, which means that we probably ought to be paying attention to them, too.
Pastors Robb McCoy and Eric Fistler describe a demon as “anything that has power of a human that is not of God. Much like enemies in the Psalms do not have to be read as soldiers, demons do not have to be read as spiritual beings. A demon is anything that has power that is not of God.” I don’t know if this is necessarily a perfect definition, but it did get me thinking about that word, “power,” and how important power is in this story (and not always necessarily the supernatural kind).
Throughout Mark’s Gospel, the religious leadership is consistently described as being opposed to and disapproving of what Jesus is up to. And why? Back in Jesus’ day, so-called healers would show up around town all the time. Most of the time, the authorities would just roll their eyes and ignore them. "Whatever. They're just a bunch of weirdos." But when Jesus does it, suddenly it’s "Well, hold on now! We got rules about this sort of thing!” It just sort of begs the question. Why weren't we holding town meetings for those other guys? What makes Jesus so special?
The reason is because Jesus threatens their power. In this passage alone, Mark includes no fewer than two references to Jesus’ audience starting to think that this Jesus guy might be giving them a run for their money. “A new teaching,” verse 27 says, “with authority!” Verse 22: “He taught...as...having authority...not as the scribes.” It almost sounds like throwing salt in the wound, doesn’t it? No wonder some feathers got ruffled.
There are many different kinds of power in this story. Jesus commands authority of the unclean spirit, but the bigger picture here is that he may also be starting to command authority over the religious leadership. At least the public opinion seems to think so. If you’re a religious leader who’s become accustomed to holding that kind of authority around town, that’s a big problem. People who hold power in the world are usually not wild about the idea of losing it.
Let’s be really clear. When the crowd says that Jesus spoke with authority, they mean it. When Jesus rebukes the unclean spirit, he doesn’t say things like “Well, let’s hear the demon out” or “There are two sides to every story” or “Maybe we need to listen to what he has to say with an open mind.” Jesus says, “Be silent!” When the unclean spirit sees Jesus, it asks, “Have you come to destroy us?” and Jesus doesn’t exactly rush to say no. He says, “Get out.”
By the time the story is over, the demon isn’t the only one who is silenced either. Verse 27 says, “They were all amazed” when they saw this. In Greek, the word is thambeó (θαμβέω). It suggests awe, reverence, and maybe even a little fear. When Jesus commands, “Be silent,” it almost reminds me of a word that we as Presbyterians use with some regularity: “renounce.” As in "Do you renounce evil and its power in the world?"
It is one of the questions that we ask when we receive new members into the congregation or confirmation students. It’s the question that we ask new elders, deacons, and ministers. It is asked at the moment of our baptism. Do you renounce evil? If confronted by it, would you command it to be silent? Would you be willing to shut it down? Or would we, like Jesus’ disciples, feel overcome with fear? The Presbyterian answer, of course, is “We do, and we will,” but I wonder what this really looks like in our day-to-day lives?
Back in 2018 before I received the call to serve as your Associate Pastor, I was still quietly interviewing with other churches, and occasionally I would exchange stories and experiences of these interviews with a friend and colleague of mine who was also quietly doing the same. During one such story, this friend of mine shared with me that he had just finished a “first interview” with a church over the phone. As first conversations go, it had all gone pleasantly enough until one topic in particular arose.
“Pastor John,” they said (we’ll call him John), “we here at Such-and-Such Presbyterian Church hold certain values about the interpretation of Scripture. Tradition is very important to us, and we believe that some churches have bucked tradition a little too much when it comes to people in alternative lifestyles or in same-sex relationships.
“Now certainly all are welcome to worship and to repent of their sin,” they said, “but we not only assume but expect that our staff will uphold our values about who may or may not be welcome in leadership. May we assume that you are in accord with those values?”
“No,” John replied.
The phone was silent for a moment or two. “Do you mean,” the moderator followed up after clearing his throat, “that you believe that this is a very nuanced and difficult conversation and that we should be patient with those who do not share our church’s values?”
“No,” John replied.
“Do you mean that perhaps while you disagree with their behavior, we can find other ways to welcome them with a spirit of faithfulness?”
“No,” he said, “I mean that I am not in accord with the values that you hold. I unapologetically and unambiguously support LGTBQIA+ equality in every facet of human life including the Church. That’s a value where I am not willing to bend. If that’s going to be a dealbreaker, then God be with you. We can go our separate ways in peace, but you deserve to know the truth. The answer is no.”
The search committee on the other line was stunned. They had never heard a candidate speak to them with that kind of frankness before. “Well, thank you for your time, Reverend,” they said, “if we feel so moved, we’ll be sure to reach out and follow-up.” But John knew the truth. There wasn’t going to be a follow-up.
As John told me this story, I told him that I admired his bravery, and I certainly feel the same way about being a welcoming and inclusive church. However, I couldn’t help but ask. “Do you think you were maybe a little harsh though?“ I asked, “I mean, I agree with you, but you’re not going to get that job. I think you probably burned that bridge. Do you think you could have maybe found a nicer, churchier way to say that?”
John smiled. “No,” he said, “the answer was no, and you’re right. I’m probably not going to get that job, but you and I both know that relationship was never going to be right for us in the first place.” He was right.
This week, I remembered that story as I thought about what it means to renounce something, and I realized that it’s really quite simple. To renounce something simply means that the answer is no. John did not believe that the church that he interviewed with was evil. They weren’t. They were not demonic, and they were not bad people. They simply understood Scripture and faithfulness differently than he did. However, John also knew that in order for him to follow what he believed in his conscience to be faithful, the answer for him had to be no, and he had to be definitive.
I suspect we’ve all experienced moments like this in our lives. I suspect we’ve also experienced moments where there was a time and a place to have a discussion. To weigh both sides or consider the pro’s and con’s, but that’s not what the word, “renounce,” means. “Renounce” refers to those moments in life when, after searching our heart and searching our conscience, we know there is no ambiguity. Not really. The answer is no.
I will confess that questions and conversations like this one are not always easy for me. There are moments when we as people of faith need to be able to summon the courage to say what needs to be said and to not give in to what Pastor Lawrence described last Sunday as “a failure of nerve.”
And yet, as I’m sure many of us have also probably learned from experience, there are just as many times when (if we’re not careful) simply “shutting it down” can inadvertently do more harm than good. In this passage, “shutting it down” is exactly what Jesus does when confronted by the face of evil. Yet only one chapter later in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus will gather for dinner at Levi’s house in the company of sinners and tax collectors, to which the scribes and the Pharisees respond with a collective “Huh?” (2:15-17) Perhaps there is a time and a place for both, and the wisdom to know the difference is the wisdom is the wisdom and the grace that we see embodied in the person of Jesus.
In the meantime, however, this story in Mark asks us to sit in this space for a while. Do we, as people of faith, have the capacity to renounce that which is wrong? If the moment came, would we have the courage to say that the answer is no? Can you think of a time when you have done that? What does that need to look like in your life? If you can’t think of an example, why might that be? What sort of questions does that raise?
I’m not sure that it’s always necessarily the voices we hear in others. Sometimes the voices that are the most unclean are the voices that we hear in our own hearts. The voices that tell us that our lives, our identities, or our bodies are shameful or ugly or the voices that sometimes tempt us to feel that way towards our neighbor. The voices of greed, prejudice, resentment, or even the hunger for violence.
The next time we are asked, “Do you turn from those ways and renounce them?” and we say, “We do,” maybe the first place that we need to start is by looking at our own reflection in the mirror. When the author of Mark’s Gospel wrote this story down, I wonder if they remembered the words of the fifty-first Psalm. “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me” (51:10).
The story in Mark’s Gospel challenges us to ask some pretty difficult questions and pushes us to think about some pretty difficult things. We are not a society that is always good at saying, “No.” When Jesus’ followers saw him do it, the Gospel tells us that they were amazed. Freaked out. Maybe even a little scared. Maybe we are, too, sometimes. Perhaps finding the courage to say, “No,” is not always easy for us either.
However, following Jesus isn’t always so easy. Sometimes it means following him into the difficult questions and conversations about life and faithfulness that don’t always have easy answers. To let ourselves be pushed and challenged by those questions for a moment while hoping that (in doing so) we may be drawn closer to the One who truly renounced evil. Perhaps we can also find just a little bit more of that courage and that grace that we see in Jesus in our own lives. Until that day comes, the Gospel is not settled with us, and Jesus is not finished with us yet.
May it be so. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.
Luke 2:22-40 Rev. Marc van Bulck Oxford Presbyterian Church
When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord (as it is written in the law of the Lord, “Every firstborn male shall be designated as holy to the Lord”), and they offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, “a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.”
Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon; this man was righteous and devout, looking forward to the consolation of Israel, and the Holy Spirit rested on him. It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he had seen the Lord’s Messiah. Guided by the Spirit, Simeon came into the temple; and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him what was customary under the law, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God, saying, “Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.”
And the child’s father and mother were amazed at what was being said about him. Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.”
There was also a prophet, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband seven years after her marriage, then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshiped there with fasting and prayer night and day.
At that moment she came, and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem. When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.
This morning is the last Sunday of 2020. Can you believe that? This is the last Sunday of 2020. Good riddance. It’s the Sunday after Christmas. The presents have been unwrapped. Perhaps some of your decorations have started to come down. Perhaps some of them are still up. I don’t know about you, but these few days right after Christmas (and just before the start of the New Year) are when I finally allow myself to take a deep breath after all the action.
In some ways, our Scripture reading from Luke’s record of the Gospel reminds me a bit of these “Sunday after Christmas” feelings. Luke picks up just the story of the Nativity, and it feels like the story stops here for a moment to take a bit of a breather after an exciting night of shepherds and angels in the sky.
After Jesus is born, Mary and Joseph take him to be circumcised and presented at the temple (as was the custom). This creates a bit of an interlude in the story and gives us a break in the action. However, it also does something else that I think is very important. It reminds us of Jesus' Jewishness. Luke goes out of his way to remind us that Mary and Joseph were deeply devout in their faith, and they desired to raise Jesus the same way.
There are so many interesting little details in Luke’s account here as Jesus being presented at the temple. We have yet another story of a female prophet in the Bible (of which, I believe there are five in the Hebrew Bible and now Anna). However, this year I noticed one interesting detail in particular. Mary and Joseph offer a sacrifice at Jesus’ presentation at the temple: two turtle doves.
This of course reminds us of the words from the Christmas carol, “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” This morning is one of the twelve days of Christmas. We’re in the middle of those twelve days now, although technically today is the third day of Christmas, which is “three French hens” (but you get the idea).
The book of Leviticus points out that most families would bring a goat, or a sheep, or a lamb or something to a custom like this (5:6; 12:8; 14:10-20), but Mary and Joseph were too poor to afford a goat or a lamb. So, they bring turtle doves instead. It’s a small detail, but it reminds us of just how humble Jesus, Mary, and Joseph’s origins were: that the story of the Nativity is ultimately the story of a family living in poverty. The Bible is filled with stories of people living on the margins. We still see some glimpses of the pageantry that we often look for and recognize when we celebrate Jesus’ birth, but we also see reminders in the story of the reality of life.
When I was a kid, I would often hop into the car with my dad on the day after Christmas to ride into town and run errands. The presents had been opened. The leftovers from Christmas dinner had been put back into the fridge. The Christmas lights were still hanging on the tree and the mantle, and Dad and I would need to pop down to the store to pick up this, that, or the other while everyone might be enjoying an afternoon snooze.
As we rode into town from Bishopville, I would always take a moment to look out at the trees and at nature around us. As beautiful as our Christmas decorations were, there was something equally spiritual about simply gazing out at the woods, the trees, and the forest. Years later, I couldn’t help but be reminded of that feeling when I first read the words that would become the Christmas Prayer that I have read on Christmas Eve every year since I became a minister:
A song from the heavens and the earth: where...the exultation of the fields, and the joy of the trees are already raised in a chorus of glad rejoicing, the music of creation, which exalts the glory of your name.
However, there was something else I would also see when making that drive into town with my dad. We would also drive past the neighborhoods that were very, very different from the one that we lived in. Neighborhoods perhaps not so different from ones like Mary Mary and Joseph might have lived in. Perhaps not so different from the fields where that manger might have been found so many years ago that served as a humble shelter for a newborn child miles away from the warmth and comfort of surroundings like the ones I had grown up accustomed to.
The story of Jesus' family is the story of people on the margins. It reminds us that the mission of this child has a trajectory, and for those of us who follow this child, so does ours.
This story also represents a trajectory for Simeon, too. We mentioned prophets like Anna and characters like Simeon who show up in this story. According to Verse 26, Simeon had been told by the Holy Spirit that he would not see death before he saw the Messiah. Since this promise has been fulfilled, Simeon can now die peacefully in the knowledge that his faithfulness to a life of service to God has not been in vain, which then leads to another promise.
For all the pageantry of this story, Simeon also offers Mary a foreboding warning. A foreshadowing of things to come: “This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel...” he says, “...the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul, too.”
These words are haunting. For those of us who know how the story ends, we know what they mean. We know that this child’s life will not always be shepherds and angels forever nor will the lives of those who follow him. This is a child who will be willing to venture beyond the comfort of the lights and the carols, into the realities of life, and in the fullness of time even into the shadow of the cross, itself. And yet - we also know that even the shadow of the cross does not have the final word, and God’s promise is not finished yet.
Simeon knows as he stands here with this family that his story is just one thread in the larger tapestry. Each of these stories (and our stories, too) are ultimately just threads in a larger tapestry. This is the last Sunday of 2020, and this has been a very, very hard year in a lot of different ways. Perhaps you have found yourself struggling at times to find comfort in the lights and carols. Perhaps you have known grief. Perhaps you have even known loss that has pierced your own soul. Maybe your story has been a little bit like this interlude: filled with moments of joy but also intermingled with the realities of life.
However, on this last Sunday of 2020, we also remember that 2020 is not the end of the story either. It is just one more thread in the larger tapestry, and that great tapestry is still being woven until the day when God’s promise to all of creation is fulfilled. When the fields exult, the trees break forth in song, and the music of all creation gives glory to God.
The tapestry of creation is filled with threads of both joy and pain, and this child that is presented to all the cosmos has known all of it in the life of a human person who celebrated our joy, who wept for our pain, who lived our life, and died our death. This is the witness of the incarnation. God is with us in the fullness of the human experience. God is with us just as God was with shepherds celebrating in the fields and just as God was with God’s own son on the cross. Emmanuel. God with us.
Let us also remember that, as hard as 2020 has been, the mission of the Church continues. On this Sunday after Christmas, let us remember that Christ is always pointed in the direction of persons living on the margins in neighborhoods that look like ours and in neighborhoods that don’t. As long as there are people like that in our world, the Gospel will never truly be settled with us. For this is the child for whom the heavens and the earth lift up their song, for whom the fields of the earth exult, for whom the trees lift up their chorus of glad rejoicing, and for whom the music of creation sings.
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace towards those whom God favors.
Ephesians 1: 15-23 Rev. Marc van Bulck Oxford Presbyterian Church
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I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, and for this reason I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers. I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.
God put this power to work in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the age to come. And he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
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This year, the first full lesson of our confirmation class curriculum was a lesson entitled, “Not the Boss of Me.” It was a lesson on one of the most central and foundational tenets of the Presbyterian faith (so it’s appropriate that we would learn about it towards the beginning of our class): the Sovereignty of God. Or, to put it another way, the authority that God has over our lives.
Our Presbyterian Book of Order opens with the words, “God, alone, is Lord of the conscience.” Our confirmation curriculum had another pretty simple way of saying it. To quote the old Bob Dylan song, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody. Yes, you're gonna have to serve somebody. It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody.”
This morning is what we call the Reign of Christ or Christ the King Sunday on our liturgical Church calendar. It’s not one of those church holidays that gets the kind of attention that Christmas or Easter do, but it’s a pretty important turning point in our liturgical calendar just before we enter into the season of Advent. It is a Sunday that reminds us that, at the end of the day, each of us has gotta serve somebody and challenges us to really think about what that means for our very real day-to-day lives.
I was thinking a little bit about what this really means this past week. A few Sundays ago, the Rev. Dr. Ed McLeod told the story of a young essayist he had recently read who had suggested that some children of Baby Boomers who would be Gen X’ers, millennials, and perhaps Gen Z’ers are not drawn to the Church because they watched their parents spend so much time at church but were not really changed by it. They watched their parents spend so much time at the church but showed very little evidence in their actual living that it made much difference.
They spent a lot of time at church but still clung tightly to racist points of view. They spent a lot of time at church, but they still seemed pretty unconcerned about the least of these. They spent a lot of time at church, but they still voted their own self-interests. They spent a lot of time at church but still thought that torture was okay. They spent a lot of time at church but still seemed relatively unconcerned about the environment. They spent a lot of time at church, but since the world was pretty much already tilted in their favor, they were largely unconcerned about the cries for justice and dignity - cries that would have gotten Jesus’ attention.
This essayist suggested that these Gen X’ers, these millennials, these Gen Z’ers wanted to see in us what Christ wanted to see in us: that there is some evidence that our worship life spills over into our real life as opposed to “coming to worship because that’s what nice people in the South do on Sundays,”in his words (or in our case, the midwest), “managing to...leave it behind at noon on Sunday.”
Years ago, when I was serving as the Director of Youth Ministries at a church in Florida, I got into a disagreement with one of the adult leaders over a particularly controversial discussion topic that we were considering for youth group (I don’t remember exactly what it was). While she felt that the youth would probably be fine with it, the topic (in her view) might raise the eyebrows of some of the more generous donors in our congregation, and she suggested that I should consider yielding to the larger political forces at play in and around the congregation when it came to this sort of thing.
In my hubris perhaps, I responded that we are called to be in this world but not of this world (as we say). “That’s a little naive, Marc,” she said, “those are nice words, but you can’t really live your life like that.” I didn’t have the heart to tell her in the moment that they weren’t my words. They were Jesus’ words in John 15.
You may be a preacher with your spiritual pride
You may be a city councilman taking bribes on the side...
But you're gonna have to serve somebody
It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody...
Maybe part of what makes Christ the King Sunday so difficult or the kind of Sunday that we might just as well gloss over is that it raises a lot of very complicated questions for us as people of faith. Questions that, admittedly, don’t always have easy answers for us. It’s a Sunday that doesn’t exactly let us off the hook but holds us to that ancient call: “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.”
Our Scripture reading this morning from the letter to the Ephesians plays with this image of Christ’s king-dom (the kingdom of God). However, the author of Ephesians reminds us that Christ's kingdom doesn’t always look the way we expect a kingdom to look. Verse 18 describes “the hope to which [Christ] has called you...the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints.”
There’s a little bit of irony in the author’s voice as he writes this. Perhaps a touch of sly sarcasm because of course the riches of Jesus’ inheritance that the author of Ephesians is talking about are not riches like silver and gold. They are the riches of the soul when the hungry are fed, when the thirsty have been given water, when the naked have been clothed, and when the most vulnerable people in the neighborhood have been cared for.
When Epheisans talks about the saints, it is not talking about pious, enlightened sculptures in a cathedral somewhere. The saints of Jesus’s kingdom are the wretched and the poor. The sinners and the outcasts. Christ the King is peculiar. When the world sees them as trespassers, Christ the King sees them as neighbors. When the world sees them as sinners, Christ the King sees them as the company he keeps. If we are going to say that Jesus Christ is king, then this is the kind of kingdom that Christ’s kingdom looks like.
Years ago at a different previous church I had served at, I knew a woman who had visited our congregation a few times. We’ll call her Audrey. After a few visits from Audrey, one or two of the folks from church had commented to me that upon coming within close proximity of Audrey, it seemed apparent to them that she had not showered in several days.
Audrey appeared to be living with some mental health concerns, and once or twice whispers could be heard about her appearance in the sanctuary after worship – sometimes even within earshot of Audrey, herself. One afternoon I saw Audrey sleeping in her car just outside in the church parking lot. I was just about to pick up the phone and dial the number for a social services worker when I noticed Bud, one of the members of our congregation, pulling into the parking lot in his Ford pickup truck. There was a gas tank sitting in the tailgate. Bud got out of the car. “You look like you’re having some car trouble.” He smiled like a friendly neighbor.
Audrey hurriedly began to spin elaborate story after elaborate story explaining how she had gotten into this situation in the first place and how if circumstances had been just slightly different, she would not have been in need of any assistance. As Bud quietly filled her gas tank, he did not roll his eyes or argue with her. In fact, he didn’t say much. He listened and said, “Well, let’s just get you fixed up here.”
As Bud helped get Audrey’s car going again, he laughed with her, and they shared stories about their kids. As Audrey’s engine finally rumbled to life, Bud offered Audrey a hug and said, “You take care,” as her car rolled quietly out of the church parking lot.
Bud was not a social services person. He didn’t have any special training in dealing with people who live with mental health concerns. He’s not a pastor. He didn't go to seminary. He simply treated Audrey like a human being rather than a trespasser, which I imagine probably pretty few people in Audrey’s life do. He treated Audrey like a friend and a neighbor. When I walked out into the parking lot and asked Bud about it, he just shrugged. “Just seems like what Jesus would do,” he said, “that’s why we’re here.” I went back into my office and wept.
You might like to eat caviar, you might like to eat bread
You may be sleeping on the floor, sleeping in a king-sized bed
But you're gonna have to serve somebody
It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody...
The first chapter of the letter to the Ephesians reads, “God put this power to work in Christ... far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named...he has put all things under his feet and has made him the head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”
When I think about the words of that young essayist, hungering to see some evidence of our faith spilling over into our very real life, I think about Bud. In that moment, I saw Bud’s faith breaking through into his very real life. I could see a glimpse of who the king over his heart really looked like in that moment. In that moment, Bud taught me what it means to serve somebody.
At the end of the day, what the Reign of Christ, or Christ the King Sunday, or words like “the sovereignty of God” really mean are that, at some point, each of us is gonna have to serve somebody. It may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but we’re gonna have to serve somebody.
This morning is New Member Sunday, and of course that’s looking a little bit different than New Member Sunday has ever looked before. Earlier this morning over Zoom, members of our session asked our new members the following questions from our Presbyterian Book of Order: “Trusting in the gracious mercy of God, do you turn from the ways of sin and renounce evil and its power in the world? Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Lord and Savior trusting in his grace and love? Will you be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his Word and showing his love?”
What these questions really mean at the end of the day is “Who are you going to serve?” The truth of the matter is that these are not just questions for new members on New Member Sunday. They are questions for each and every one of us every single day of our lives. When each and every one of us wakes up in the morning, we are called to make a decision. You gotta serve somebody, so who’s it going to be?
On Christ the King Sunday, on every Sunday, and indeed on every day of our lives, may all honor and glory be given to One who is truly worthy to be Lord of all creation. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.
Matthew 22:1-14 Rev. Marc van Bulck Oxford Presbyterian Church
Once more Jesus spoke to them in parables, saying: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. Again he sent other slaves, saying, ‘Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.’ But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his slaves, mistreated them, and killed them.
The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. Then he said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.’ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.
“But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?’ And he was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ For many are called, but few are chosen.”
A few months ago, a friend of mine introduced me to a play known as The Play That Goes Wrong which ran at the Apollo Theater in London back in 2012 and then later in the U.S. An outrageous slapstick comedy, the play begins as a fictitious production of a whodunnit murder mystery entitled “The Murder at Haversham Manor” put on by a local (and presumably amateur) theater company. Before too long the play, well...goes wrong. Actors forget their lines. Set pieces fall over. Characters have to be dragged offstage after being accidentally knocked unconscious. It just descends into comic mayhem.
The show has spawned several spin-off productions: Peter Pan Goes Wrong, A Christmas Carol Goes Wrong, and a TV show, The Goes Wrong Show. The show was hailed by audiences and critics as a laugh riot and also probably every theater person’s worst nightmare. What if everything that could possibly go wrong onstage went wrong?
I suspect that the scenario I’ve just described probably feels a bit very similar to the way many preachers feel when reading this parable from Scripture. Jesus’ parable of the wedding banquet is actually the third in a series of parables. Matthew’s Gospel picks up after the events of Palm Sunday during the final days of Jesus’ life. Jesus is stirring up trouble in the Temple, and he finds himself once again under interrogation from the Pharisees and the religious leaders. “By what authority are you doing these things,” they demand to know, “and who gave you this authority?” (21:23)
So, Jesus tells them a parable. A parable where everything goes wrong, and it’s a real doozy. “The kingdom of God is like this,” he says. A king throws a wedding banquet for his son, and first of all no one shows up. Right off the bat, we’re off to a pretty rocky start.
So the king tries sending out a second invite. “Hey, did you not hear how great this party is going to be?” he says, “We’ve got a big banquet dinner. We’ve got the fatted calf. We’ve slaughtered the oxen. We’ve got everything you could possibly want at a big party back in 30 C.E. or so.” The royal subjects respond with a resounding “Meh.” The NRSV actually says that some of them were even making fun of him...and went so far as to actually murder the king’s slaves for sending them invitations!
“I’m sorry. Murder, did you say?” Hey, I didn’t write this parable. I just report it.
If you think everything has gone wrong, buckle your seat belts because this is when things go from bad to worse. “Okay,” the king says, “that’s it. You people don’t want to come to my party? Fine!” The king has the villagers executed for murdering his slaves effectively going to war with his own subjects.
I guess you could say the party is probably cancelled right? Well, you guessed wrong. The king announces that his party is still on (as if this parable hadn’t already gone off the rails enough already). The king sends his slaves back out into the main streets to invite more people. Back in Biblical times, the “main streets” were located just near the edges of the outer limits of the territory. The king has sent his slaves out to the very edges of the kingdom (the very edges of society) to bring in whoever they can find. Good people. Bad people. Questionable characters. Doesn’t matter. Just bring everybody in. Pretty soon the wedding hall is filled with people. Huzzah!
Well, this at least sounds pretty good, right? All are welcome at the wedding banquet, good and bad alike! That is, until one of the guests shows up without a wedding robe (and why on earth wouldn’t he? He was just pulled in off the street!). This apparently sends the king completely over the edge. “Friend,” he says, “how did you get in here without wearing the proper clothes?!” He has the slaves bind the man up hand and foot and throw him out into the outer darkness. With friends like that, who needs enemies, right?
Jesus smiles and says, “The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God!” and I can only imagine leaves the Pharisees wondering what in the world they had just listened to. Maybe we are, too. It’s hard to make heads or tails of a parable like this one. Everything that could possibly go wrong in a parable seems to go wrong in this one.
Throughout the ages, preachers, scholars, and theologians have puzzled over this parable and what in the world Jesus might have possibly meant by it during the last days of his life as he was making his way closer to the cross. Scholars have pointed out that many of Matthew’s first readers would have likely remembered Rome’s invasion of Jerusalem in 70 C.E. and the destruction of the temple. Many of those first readers of this Gospel believed that this was God’s way of punishing Israel for rejecting the Messiah (perhaps not unlike how the proverbial “ungrateful subjects” in this story rejected the invitation of their king).
As a result, throughout history this passage and others like it have been interpreted, used, and weaponized by the Christian church as ammunition to justify anti-Semitism, Biblical supercessionism, and violence towards our brothers and sisters in the Jewish community for the so-called “sake of the Gospel.”
Let me just get something out of the way right off the bat. This kind of response to the Gospel is horribly anti-Semitic. If our reading of Scripture emboldens us to act out in violence towards our brothers and sisters in our community, then our faith is misguided, tone-deaf, and wrong. Especially given the fact that the narrator of this parable (Jesus) is just about as devout a Jew as you’re ever going to find and who (in this same Gospel just give chapters later!) will tell his followers to put down their weapons even in the face of his enemies and even in the face of his own death (26:52).
Secondly, I think it’s important to remember who Jesus is talking to here. Jesus is talking to the Pharisees. He is being questioned and interrogated specifically by those who hold status and power in society. Jesus responds with this completely off-the-rails parable. I mean, the tone of this parable is just so over-the-top. It almost feels like something out of a Quentin Tarantino movie...or something out of The Play That Goes Wrong! It almost feels like a comedy! Like Theater of the Absurd. So, my question is what does it tell us that Jesus is telling this parable to the Pharisees? There’s a lot that we could say about these guys. Being hilarious stand-up comedians was probably not one of them.
I think it’s very telling that Jesus opens the story the way that he does. Jesus doesn’t exactly say, “God is like this crazy king.” Jesus says, “The Kingdom of God is like this whole crazy story. The Kingdom of God is like Theater of the Absurd. A comedy where everything goes wrong. A kingdom where everything you think you know to be true on earth (where the powerful and the elite are lifted up, and the poor are cast out and punished) is turned upside down. Everything is turned completely on its head.”
As for our friend at the end here who is cast out into the outer darkness, take a look at what Jesus actually says about that part of the story. Jesus doesn’t say he was kicked out because his clothes weren’t fancy enough. Jesus says he was kicked out for showing up without a wedding robe. That’s a very specific detail.
Remember, (according to Jesus) this is a party. A wedding robe back then was something you wore to be festive. To celebrate. A wedding robe was what you wore when you were ready to get out on the dance floor and boogie, and this is the dance where Jesus is being welcomed as the bridegroom. The symbolism here seems to be that this particular guest was invited to get up, get his boogie on, and celebrate, and his response was “Nah. I’m good.”
As I read this parable, this whole story almost started to remind me of “The Safety Dance.” Have you ever heard that song? “The Safety Dance” was a new-wave pop song by the group, Men Without Hats. It came out back in 1982 after the lead singer was famously kicked out of a nightclub for not dancing the way that everybody else in the club was dancing.
“We can dance if you want to,” the song goes:
“...we can leave your friends behind
‘cause your friends don’t dance, and if they don’t dance,
Well they’re no friends of mine.
We can act if we want to. If we don't, nobody will.
You can act real rude and totally removed, and I can act like an imbecile.”
Almost sounds a little bit like our parable, doesn’t it? In the post-punk world of the 1980’s “The Safety Dance,” was written as an anthem for the weirdos. An anthem for those who didn’t dance the same proverbial dance as everybody else.
“We can dance. We can dance. Everything is out of control.”
Jesus tells a parable that is out of control to a group of people in power who have done everything that they can to consolidate control. Jesus says that the Kingdom of heaven (the real kingdom of heaven) is not about the dominion of the powerful or gate-keepers who have status. It’s a great big party. It’s the dance floor for the weirdos and the oppressed. The vulnerable and the poor. The great banquet table that turns everything upside down. A kingdom that acts like it comes from out of this world and leaves this one far behind.
I wonder if that’s what Jesus hoped his church would look like as he sat there in the temple during those last days of his life. An anthem for the outcast and for sinners. A community that sings the anthem of the ones who don’t live on Main Street. For those who are just outside the outer limits: invisible and unnoticed. I wonder if Jesus imagined a Church that would dance for the most vulnerable people in the neighborhood because (as Matthew seems to say) “if your friends don't dance, then they're no friends of mine.” If we are no friend to the most vulnerable people in the neighborhood, then how can we possibly be a friend to someone like Jesus because that's exactly who Jesus has invited to the party?
I wonder if that’s what Jesus hoped his Church might look like. I suppose the answer to that question is entirely up to us. I hope that we can be the Church that’s not afraid to get out on the dance floor of this strange story. To sing the anthem of the Kingdom of God that turns society upside down for the sake of the outcast and more deeply than that, for the sake of the Gospel. If that’s the kind of Church that we can be, then who knows? Maybe this parable didn’t go quite so wrong after all…
May it be so. To God be the glory now and forever. Amen.
Exodus 3:1-15 Rev. Marc van Bulck Oxford Presbyterian Church
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
Then the Lord said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.”
But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” He said, “I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” But Moses said to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” He said further, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’“ God also said to Moses, “Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘The Lord, the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you’: This is my name forever, and this my title for all generations.
That’s the big question, isn’t it? At the heart of every major religion and at the heart of every spiritual person, that’s the question. Who is God? What is God? When we say, “God,” what exactly are we talking about? Who or what do we imagine? My friend, David LaMotte, who is a folk singer and peacemaking activist once described “the whole enterprise of religion” (as he called it) as:
“...at its heart a poetic enterprise...the whole idea is to try to evoke something without capturing it because you can’t capture it. We’re trying to talk about a mystery that we don’t understand. How do you talk about something you don’t understand? The only language that you can use effectively for that I think is the language of poetry. Poetry isn’t about what you’re saying. It’s about what you can see through what’s being said.”
The great poet, novelist, and essayist, H.G. Wells tried to put language to that mystery in his book, First and Last Things: A Confession of Faith and Rule of Life. “At times,” he writes, “in the silence of the night and in rare lonely moments, I come upon a sort of communion of myself and something great that is not myself.” The great mystery at the heart of all being. The mother of all questions.
It’s exactly the question that Moses dares to broach in the presence of the divine in our Scripture reading from the book of Exodus that Lee just read for us this morning. If the book of Exodus represents the central narrative of the Hebrew Bible (what we would call the Old Testament), this is the moment when Moses cuts right to the chase. When I think about God speaking to Moses in the form of the burning bush, it’s hard not for me to imagine Moses as one of the great figures of the Biblical story. Charlton Heston played him in the movie. Val Kilmer played his voice in the animated film, “The Prince of Egypt.”
However, Moses’ call story reminds us that he was really no one special in the beginning. As verse one picks up here, Moses has really been brought down in life. After having been raised as an Egyptian prince, Moses is cast out after murdering an Egyptian whom Moses believed was treating a Hebrew harshly. Now he has moved into his father-in-law’s basement who has basically said, “Well, we don’t really have anything for you to do. I guess you can tend the sheep or something.”
The Bible is not exactly going out of its way here to convince us that (at this point) there’s anything particularly special about this guy. He’s sort of stuck at the way station of life. A nobody in the middle of nowhere, no less ordinary than you or me. And then from out of nowhere Moses comes upon a communion of himself and something great that is not himself. And it changes everything.
“There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed...when the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’”
God tells Moses to remove the sandals from his feet. This is not a dream. This is not a vision. This is an experience that Moses is having in the real world, and his feet must feel the ground around him. Holiness has shown up in the middle of Moses’ very real day-to-day life. As we have been pondering what it means to be the church in the midst of a global pandemic when many of us cannot gather together in buildings like this or in ways that we might like, this image that holiness can show up anywhere resonated deeply with me this week.
Eric Fistler and Robb McCoy, two pastors of congregational and Methodist churches respectively host a podcast called “Pulpit Fiction.” They write of this image:
“God is clothed by the fire, but is not the fire. God’s presence is obscured by the created world, but God is intimately involved in the midst of that world. The holy ground was made holy by God’s presence. God is not limited by sites, shrines, temples. God has access to anywhere, and when God is there it is holy.”
It makes me wonder about the ways that you have seen holiness show up in your own day-to-day life and on the ground we all walk on during these strange days. When God tells Moses about this great journey of faith that God has in mind for God’s people, Moses goes for the elephant in the room. “Well, who are you?” Moses asks, “These people are going to want to know who you are. If we’re going to go through with this, these people are going to want to know some concrete answers about who you are,” and God gives Moses the famous answer, “I will be who I will be” or as the pew Bible translates it, “I AM WHO I AM.”
Now the book of Exodus does not necessarily say this, but when I read this story, there does seem to be this bit of unspoken tension between God and Moses. I imagine (if I were in Moses’ shoes), I would have said, “That does not help! What kind of answer is that? Can you just give me a straight answer? Cut it out!” But this is the only answer we get. “I am who I am, and I’m going to be who I’m going to be. You don’t get to know the fullness of the mystery. That is not knowledge for mortals to ultimately understand.”
However, perhaps there is some clue in the Biblical Hebrew. The translation of “I AM WHO I AM,” or “I will be who I will be,” or “I will cause to be what I will cause to be” has puzzled preachers and theologians ever since it was first written. This week, however, I read something that Terry Fretheim, professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary wrote in his commentary on the book of Exodus that made me think. “[‘I will be who I will be’]” he writes, “seems to be the best option, in essence: ‘I will be God for you.’”
Something about that line really moved me this week. “I will be God for you.” I just imagined Moses hearing this ancient voice: “You may never fully understand the mystery, but I will be what you need me to be. I will be God for you.”
I don’t know if that’s exactly what Professor Fretheim meant, but regardless that language stayed with me. It reminds that as mysterious and enigmatic as God is, God nevertheless chooses to make God’s self known. The God of Scripture is not just some abstract, disembodied deity who passively floats above it all and doesn’t get involved. This is a God of relationship. This is a God of covenant. This is a God who is actively at work seeking to enact God’s faithfulness, God’s justice, and God’s mercy in the world and who actively pursues human relationships and communities to do it.
When God tells Moses his purpose in life (that he’s essentially going to be...well...Moses!) Moses turns the question back on himself. “Who am I? Do you have any idea who I am? I’m not some great liberator of enslaved people. I’m just a guy living in my father-in-law’s basement. I’m not some great Biblical hero. Who am I to be anybody?”
God’s answer to Moses, in essence, is “You are mine.” The pew Bible translates, “I will be with you...and it is I who sent you.” God’s response to Moses is essentially, “This ground isn’t holy because there’s anything special about it. This ground is holy because I showed up here, and you heard my voice. You’re not special because of where you’re from, or who you are, or who you’re not. Your life has purpose because you are mine. Because I claimed you and sent you. Who are you? You are who I have called to go forth and be sent. That’s who you are.”
In a way, Moses’ story is all of our story. If the editors of the Bible had asked me to come up with a title for this particular chapter of Moses’ story (and as it just so happens they didn’t), I think the title that I would have chosen would have been “I Will Be…”
It’s a question that God answers about God’s self, but it is also the question that Moses must answer about his own self. “Who will I be?” I wonder if it is also the question that all of us must answer. Who will we be? Who will you be as a person? Who will we be as a congregation of Oxford Presbyterian Church? Who will we be as a denomination? Who will you be as a family? Who will you be as a student? As a child of the living God whom God has created and made in God’s own image. God has claimed you and sent you out into the world. Into this world. So, who will you be?
This past week a friend and colleague of mine posted an anonymous quote on social media: “Dear Church,” it says, “Forget better livestreams. Feed the hungry. Care for the sick. Be kind to strangers. Love your neighbors. Remember the prisoner. Stand up for the marginalized. Rise for the broken. [God] waits for us there.” Because that’s who God is. When the question is asked of each of us, “Who will you be?” what will our answer be?
All glory and praise to the great I AM now and forevermore. Amen.