Text: Mark 1:14-20
We’ve heard a lot of hoopla in the last few weeks about US President Obama. I heard that they spent $150 million on the inauguration celebration, which some commentators are calling the closest thing the American republic can get to a coronation. It seems excessive in the current economic climate. But it’s not only about the economy. It’s about the survival of the American dream, about a future for America. Americans truly hope this man who represents the possibility that Americans really believe in – that any American child can become President – can find the way to lead them out of the mess their former leaders have got them into. And more than that: they hope that the greed and corruption and violence that characterize American society can be transformed into something better. President Obama appears to be an intelligent man and a man of integrity; we know he is an educated man, and from somewhere the American government still seems to get money to buy the best information and support available, so he has access to the wisdom and experience of the best advisors in the US.
Not only is Barack Obama being treated like an American king…he’s also being treated like an American saviour. Americans are looking to him to save them from the errors and the excesses of the last few years. But I suspect that the real hope is that the average American won’t have to pay the price for the errors and excesses. Certainly we know that the leaders who promoted the errors and the excesses won’t likely have to pay. And if President Obama sets up a scenario where Americans have to pay for the sins of the past, President Obama will pay. That’s the way the system works. It’s based not only on the last few years but on the whole history of America, which has always made the weak and the vulnerable pay for the good fortune of the powerful. It’s the American way. Unfortunately it’s also the way of lots of other societies, perhaps even including our own.
So in spite of the high hopes that have been expressed for the “new America”, I suspect it will be very difficult even for a man as gifted and with as large an electoral mandate as President Obama. Not because he isn’t a good man with some good plans, but because the system is rotten. A total overhaul is needed, and it’s unlikely that anyone is willing to undergo that kind of change.
So in our Gospel lesson today, we see a somewhat parallel situation in the Palestine of the first century. The system is rotten; it’s presided over by greedy and violent leaders, namely the representatives of the Roman Empire and collaborators among the Jewish people themselves. A prophet comes along, John the Baptist, who condemns the rottenness and convinces people that great changes are needed. John sets up a scenario in which he criticizes the leaders, and demands repentance of everyone, the ordinary people included. And we know what happens to John. He tells the truth to the wrong person – to King Herod himself – and he loses his head – literally. The head of John the Baptist is brought before the king on a platter, specifically to please Herod’s vicious wife, Herodias, who hates John for naming her sin.
Well, that could have been the end of it, and first-century society in Galilee and Judea would have continued in its accustomed way, where the weak and vulnerable were exploited by the rich and powerful, and nobody believed in the possibility of positive change. But that wasn’t the end of it. “Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God….” And what did Jesus command people to do? “Repent, and believe in the good news.” Jesus didn’t come with huge media hype costing 150 million dollars; he came with a “new commandment” that would change the world – confess your sins, change your ways and believe that good things will happen. That’s what America needs, that’s what Canada needs, that’s what we all need. And it’s not just talk; it’s action that reaches all the way to the bottom of our problems, roots out our sin and puts us on a path to forgiveness and holiness. Sadly, President Obama doesn’t have the power to do that; no politician has the power to do that. Only God has the power to do that.
Look at the story of Jonah and the city of Nineveh in the Old Testament reading. Jonah is sent by God to proclaim the good news to Nineveh. Jonah doesn’t even believe the message himself, but when he obeys God and gives the people the message, they repent, the calamity that God had threatened doesn’t happen, and Nineveh is saved. And in the Epistle reading, Paul gives the same message to the Christians at Corinth: recognize that it’s a crisis, obey God, change your ways and your world will change too.
So Jesus begins his ministry by recruiting a few fishermen for his assistants. They don’t seem to be the most promising prospects, but if Jesus had recruited the wealthy and powerful, his kingdom would have been a very different kingdom. He’s not looking to keep a particular party in power; he’s trying to turn the world upside-down. That’s what he succeeds in doing, and in the process he loses his life and so do a lot of other believers. This is not mere party politics; it’s major upheaval.
And that’s what Jesus does in our lives too – he turns things upside-down. That is, he turns things upside-down spiritually. He makes us look at ourselves with different eyes, decide that we need to change, and he gives us the power to change. For some people, that change is a turning away from crime or addiction; for most of us, it’s a turning away from bad habits and bad attitudes; it’s a turning toward Jesus’ way of holiness: devotion to God, denial of self, dedication to the service of others. And when enough people follow Jesus in this way – heck, when even a few people follow Jesus in this way – it changes the world around them.
Here’s a story of a saint who came alive:
Awhile back a pastor told about a wonderful saint in his congregation down in Texas. Her name was Idalia. Her grown-up children called the pastor and asked if he would stop in and visit her because they admitted that seeing her very often was just a chore. She was crotchety, she was negative – not the kind of person even her children really wanted to hang out with. So, being the good pastor that he was, he set his watch for one hour and went to put in his time with Idalia.
Idalia was 90 years old and hadn’t been to church in years. This wasn’t the first time the pastor had been to visit her, but all of a sudden as they were talking he noticed a greenhouse kind of room that went off the back of Idalia’s house. And from the living room where they were sitting, he could see in that greenhouse ivy plants with the biggest leaves he had ever seen in his life. Gigantic leaves!
He said to Idalia, “I never noticed your greenhouse before. The plants are remarkable!’
“Well, you’re always in such a rush to get out of here, you probably haven’t noticed a lot of things.”
The pastor thought that was probably true. He hadn’t really looked before. Suddenly, he had an idea. Every Sunday after services, members of his congregation delivered a small plant to the home of all the first-time visitors.
“Idalia,” he asked, “would you be willing to give us some of your beautiful ivy to share with those who visit our church for the first time?”
“No,” she answered.
“Well, what are you going to do with them? You have so many!”
“I just throw ‘em out when they die,” she said.
Well, he talked her into giving him just a few to share this one time. He decided this week that he would personally deliver these wonderful ivy plants to a few of their first-time visitors. And as he brought them around that Sunday, he told the people about Idalia and asked if they wouldn’t mind giving her a quick phone call to thank her for the exceptional ivy.
A week later at church, there was Idalia out in the narthex, all smiles. People who hadn’t seen her in years were greeting her, hugging her, welcoming her back.
Well, of course Idalia continued to grow the ivy for the first-time visitors at Colonial Hills Church. And a year and a half later, the pastor asked Idalia ifshe would give a testimony in church. She stood up in front of the congregation at 91 ½ years old and said, “I became a Christian at age 90 when someone taught me that it’s better to give than to receive.” She said “Life has got to be recycled. Everything we get has to be passed on to someone else.” Idalia had finally answered the question “So what?” for herself. She had spent her life hearing the promises of Jesus Christ…Idalia had been given the gift of a green thumb, but she never connected what she’d been given to her faith life. She had discovered at age 90 that giving – giving our whole life back to God – is what it’s all about. It is, isn’t it?
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
ORDINARY FOLKS WITH EXTRAORDINARY FAITH
Text: John 1:43-51
These are some of the first stories of conversion to Christianity. These men, Philip and Nathanael, are local residents, natives of Galilee. Philip is from Bethsaida, a town on the northeast coast of the Sea of Galilee, a fishing village - which was also Peter’s and Andrew’s home town. We might wonder why Jesus would choose these fishermen as his followers. Perhaps one reason is that they are people he is familiar with, Galileans. Another reason might be that they are ordinary working people, people with whom he can identify, since Jesus too comes from a family of tradespeople, his father Joseph being a carpenter. And they are village people, rural people. They speak his own language, they share his lifestyle, they know the hardships of poverty, just as he does. And they are also Jews, of the same religion as Jesus.
Jesus invites Philip to follow him and Philip readily agrees. And Philip immediately goes to his friend Nathanael and invites him to come and meet Jesus. Philip’s reason for inviting Nathanael is that “we have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote….” But Nathanael needs a little more convincing. The one Philip has found is Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth. Maybe Nathanael’s attitude is an example of local prejudice, something like the rivalry between Calgary and Edmonton.
So Jesus enters the conversation. When he sees Nathanael, he seems to know about his suspicious attitude. Jesus appreciates that about Nathanael; he says, “Here’s an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” In other words, here’s a person who is straightforward, without any ulterior motives - an honest, forthright person who tells it as he sees it. Nathanael wants to know how Jesus knows about him. Jesus describes the exact situation where he has seen Nathanael in the village. Nathanael’s response is immediate: “You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” And now Jesus wants to know what’s going on. “Do you say that because I told you I saw you under the fig tree? That’s nothing. I’m telling you that you will see much greater things than that - you will see heaven opened and the angels of God going back and forth between heaven and the Son of Man.” I wonder what that means? Look at the picture on the front of the bulletin - an artist’s idea of angels flying between heaven and the Son of Man, who is Jesus. It’s a little bit like animation, with cartoon characters flitting back and forth. I suppose animation is about as accurate as any other depiction. I like this picture: the bright colours, the sense of swift movement, the trumpets, the clouds, the joyful expression on the face of Jesus…and his curly hair! Do you suppose Jesus had curly hair? And the angels have straight hair! It’s very imaginative, and so it should be - Jesus is challenging Nathanael to expect great things in his new adventure of being a disciple, and for that Nathanael will need not only his natural honesty and forthrightness, but also to develop his ability to imagine beyond the immediate situation with spiritual insight.
I dare to say that even though we don’t meet Jesus as he passes by while we’re sitting under a fig tree in a Galilean village, we do meet Jesus in much the same way as Nathanael. In the Lutheran tradition, we say that we are called at the time of our baptism, and for most of us that means we are called before we even know the name of Jesus. Nevertheless, each of us is called as an individual, blessed with specific gifts, valued by Jesus for who we are and what we offer, and expected to exercise the spiritual imagination to find our way of following Jesus and serving those around us. “Spiritual imagination” is rather a complex term, but it simply means faith - being willing to believe in God whom we can’t see. And the way we exercise that faith is to do those things which we can see need to be done. We do that by imagining Jesus with us, and doing those things that by faith we see him doing.
I’m going to use excerpts from a sermon by a Christian Reformed pastor:
“Fairy tales are stories of transformation, and that’s what happened to these simple people we call the disciples. If you took the disciples and brought them al together into one room, you would never…guess by looking at them that this weak-looking pack of ordinary folks could change the world. But they did. The disciples changed the world because it was to them that the secret of the universe was first revealed.
That’s why Jesus called them in the first place. If you’re going to save the world, you’ve got to start somewhere. And if in the end you’re going to save the world through humility, gentleness, compassion and sacrifice, it makes sense to begin with a bunch of fellows who couldn’t get much more humble if they tried! The messengers fit the message. In fact, over the course of his ministry if Jesus had any significant struggles with his disciples, it was the struggle to keep them humble and ordinary-looking. Every time a couple of them started angling for power or arguing amongst themselves as to who was the greatest, Jesus slapped them back down to the street level of service. When Peter tried to wield a sword, Jesus told him to put it back in its sheath.
The disciples needed to be common, ordinary and above all humble if they were going to do Jesus any good and so change the world. Still, Jesus did need them and that’s why he called them….
Something more is going on [with Nathanael] here. Twice in this brief passage there are very clever references to a key Old Testament figure: Jacob. The first [one] crops up in the curious way that Jesus greets Nathanael. Jesus says, “Here comes a true Israelite, a man in whom there is no guile.” The Greek word for guile can also mean craftiness, trickiness, underhandedness. The most famous Biblical person who was a trickster…was Jacob himself, the crafty deceiver who was renamed Israel. That’s why some have paraphrased Jesus’ words here to say something like, “Here is an Israelite with no Jacob in him! Here is a son of Jacob who is not a chip off the old block!”
Nathanael does not have the kind of guile that characterized Jacob but rather Nathanael exhibited the straight-shooting, honest demeanor of Israel, of the new man who emerged after God knocked Jacob flat with grace. Perhaps all this is intended to point to the idea that Jesus is founding a new Israel, a brand new people. Gone are the days of craftiness and guile when people had to live by the wits to survive. A new era of innocence has dawned, a time that requires an almost child-like, naïve ability to embrace the fairy tale-like truth of Jesus. It may be another way of saying that to enter the kingdom of God, you need to be like a little child….
If you wanted to be cynical, you could say that the only reason Philip and then Nathanael were so quickly impressed by Jesus was because they were rather naïve bumpkins. There is something child-like in the way Nathanael comes to faith….But far from criticizing Nathanael’s simple faith, Jesus commends it. This is someone who is innocent enough to believe that something not just good but something of God really did come from Nazareth….We need a little holy innocence to believe that in that small band of ignorant fishermen, a cosmic treasure lay hidden. The disciples, as it turns out, are the frogs who turn into princes.
But although there is something child-like about faith - Philip’s faith, Nathanael’s faith, your faith, my faith - faith is not finally childish. Instead we hang onto our faith in the gritty realities of this very real world. In fairy tales, as surely in our present situation, dark and terrible things are present, good and evil wage horrific battle….But the child-like aspect of faith keeps hope alive because our willingness to embrace and believe the unlikely has given us a glimpse of joy. We’ve caught a glimpse of a larger world in which God is the Creator and Jesus is the true King.
Nathanael makes one other appearance in the Bible and it comes in the very last chapter of John….By the time you get to John 21, Jesus has been killed dead in plain sight of the disciples. The shrewd powers that be looked at Jesus, asked if anything good could come from Nazareth, and concluded “Nope,” and so they dispensed with him. But in the ultimate reversal of expectations, the dead one became alive again. And finally the morning dawned in John 21 when Nathanael and the others were fishing in a boat only to see some hazy figure on the distant shore, cupping his hands to his mouth and calling out, “Catch anything?”….
This Jesus now looked as if he had been to hell and back, bearing scars and looking somehow different, changed, but he was undeniably alive….He was the same man who, years before, told Nathanael that he hadn’t seen anything yet. Having now been to the cross and back, Nathanael agreed. Back on that day when he first came to faith, he had been pretty innocent all right. But in a way, despite all he’d seen, suffered, lamented and wept about, he was still innocent, still child-like enough to believe that the one he watched die was alive again, that the truth of Jesus as the living Israel was no dream. And every once in awhile, out of the corner of his eye, Nathanael was just sure he saw the flutter of angel-wings behind Jesus’ head. Blessed are the innocent and true, for they shall see God. [1] [
[1] Scott Hoezee, “The Child’s Leading”, www.calvincrc.org/sermons/2003/john1.html, pp. 2-5
These are some of the first stories of conversion to Christianity. These men, Philip and Nathanael, are local residents, natives of Galilee. Philip is from Bethsaida, a town on the northeast coast of the Sea of Galilee, a fishing village - which was also Peter’s and Andrew’s home town. We might wonder why Jesus would choose these fishermen as his followers. Perhaps one reason is that they are people he is familiar with, Galileans. Another reason might be that they are ordinary working people, people with whom he can identify, since Jesus too comes from a family of tradespeople, his father Joseph being a carpenter. And they are village people, rural people. They speak his own language, they share his lifestyle, they know the hardships of poverty, just as he does. And they are also Jews, of the same religion as Jesus.
Jesus invites Philip to follow him and Philip readily agrees. And Philip immediately goes to his friend Nathanael and invites him to come and meet Jesus. Philip’s reason for inviting Nathanael is that “we have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote….” But Nathanael needs a little more convincing. The one Philip has found is Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth. Maybe Nathanael’s attitude is an example of local prejudice, something like the rivalry between Calgary and Edmonton.
So Jesus enters the conversation. When he sees Nathanael, he seems to know about his suspicious attitude. Jesus appreciates that about Nathanael; he says, “Here’s an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” In other words, here’s a person who is straightforward, without any ulterior motives - an honest, forthright person who tells it as he sees it. Nathanael wants to know how Jesus knows about him. Jesus describes the exact situation where he has seen Nathanael in the village. Nathanael’s response is immediate: “You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” And now Jesus wants to know what’s going on. “Do you say that because I told you I saw you under the fig tree? That’s nothing. I’m telling you that you will see much greater things than that - you will see heaven opened and the angels of God going back and forth between heaven and the Son of Man.” I wonder what that means? Look at the picture on the front of the bulletin - an artist’s idea of angels flying between heaven and the Son of Man, who is Jesus. It’s a little bit like animation, with cartoon characters flitting back and forth. I suppose animation is about as accurate as any other depiction. I like this picture: the bright colours, the sense of swift movement, the trumpets, the clouds, the joyful expression on the face of Jesus…and his curly hair! Do you suppose Jesus had curly hair? And the angels have straight hair! It’s very imaginative, and so it should be - Jesus is challenging Nathanael to expect great things in his new adventure of being a disciple, and for that Nathanael will need not only his natural honesty and forthrightness, but also to develop his ability to imagine beyond the immediate situation with spiritual insight.
I dare to say that even though we don’t meet Jesus as he passes by while we’re sitting under a fig tree in a Galilean village, we do meet Jesus in much the same way as Nathanael. In the Lutheran tradition, we say that we are called at the time of our baptism, and for most of us that means we are called before we even know the name of Jesus. Nevertheless, each of us is called as an individual, blessed with specific gifts, valued by Jesus for who we are and what we offer, and expected to exercise the spiritual imagination to find our way of following Jesus and serving those around us. “Spiritual imagination” is rather a complex term, but it simply means faith - being willing to believe in God whom we can’t see. And the way we exercise that faith is to do those things which we can see need to be done. We do that by imagining Jesus with us, and doing those things that by faith we see him doing.
I’m going to use excerpts from a sermon by a Christian Reformed pastor:
“Fairy tales are stories of transformation, and that’s what happened to these simple people we call the disciples. If you took the disciples and brought them al together into one room, you would never…guess by looking at them that this weak-looking pack of ordinary folks could change the world. But they did. The disciples changed the world because it was to them that the secret of the universe was first revealed.
That’s why Jesus called them in the first place. If you’re going to save the world, you’ve got to start somewhere. And if in the end you’re going to save the world through humility, gentleness, compassion and sacrifice, it makes sense to begin with a bunch of fellows who couldn’t get much more humble if they tried! The messengers fit the message. In fact, over the course of his ministry if Jesus had any significant struggles with his disciples, it was the struggle to keep them humble and ordinary-looking. Every time a couple of them started angling for power or arguing amongst themselves as to who was the greatest, Jesus slapped them back down to the street level of service. When Peter tried to wield a sword, Jesus told him to put it back in its sheath.
The disciples needed to be common, ordinary and above all humble if they were going to do Jesus any good and so change the world. Still, Jesus did need them and that’s why he called them….
Something more is going on [with Nathanael] here. Twice in this brief passage there are very clever references to a key Old Testament figure: Jacob. The first [one] crops up in the curious way that Jesus greets Nathanael. Jesus says, “Here comes a true Israelite, a man in whom there is no guile.” The Greek word for guile can also mean craftiness, trickiness, underhandedness. The most famous Biblical person who was a trickster…was Jacob himself, the crafty deceiver who was renamed Israel. That’s why some have paraphrased Jesus’ words here to say something like, “Here is an Israelite with no Jacob in him! Here is a son of Jacob who is not a chip off the old block!”
Nathanael does not have the kind of guile that characterized Jacob but rather Nathanael exhibited the straight-shooting, honest demeanor of Israel, of the new man who emerged after God knocked Jacob flat with grace. Perhaps all this is intended to point to the idea that Jesus is founding a new Israel, a brand new people. Gone are the days of craftiness and guile when people had to live by the wits to survive. A new era of innocence has dawned, a time that requires an almost child-like, naïve ability to embrace the fairy tale-like truth of Jesus. It may be another way of saying that to enter the kingdom of God, you need to be like a little child….
If you wanted to be cynical, you could say that the only reason Philip and then Nathanael were so quickly impressed by Jesus was because they were rather naïve bumpkins. There is something child-like in the way Nathanael comes to faith….But far from criticizing Nathanael’s simple faith, Jesus commends it. This is someone who is innocent enough to believe that something not just good but something of God really did come from Nazareth….We need a little holy innocence to believe that in that small band of ignorant fishermen, a cosmic treasure lay hidden. The disciples, as it turns out, are the frogs who turn into princes.
But although there is something child-like about faith - Philip’s faith, Nathanael’s faith, your faith, my faith - faith is not finally childish. Instead we hang onto our faith in the gritty realities of this very real world. In fairy tales, as surely in our present situation, dark and terrible things are present, good and evil wage horrific battle….But the child-like aspect of faith keeps hope alive because our willingness to embrace and believe the unlikely has given us a glimpse of joy. We’ve caught a glimpse of a larger world in which God is the Creator and Jesus is the true King.
Nathanael makes one other appearance in the Bible and it comes in the very last chapter of John….By the time you get to John 21, Jesus has been killed dead in plain sight of the disciples. The shrewd powers that be looked at Jesus, asked if anything good could come from Nazareth, and concluded “Nope,” and so they dispensed with him. But in the ultimate reversal of expectations, the dead one became alive again. And finally the morning dawned in John 21 when Nathanael and the others were fishing in a boat only to see some hazy figure on the distant shore, cupping his hands to his mouth and calling out, “Catch anything?”….
This Jesus now looked as if he had been to hell and back, bearing scars and looking somehow different, changed, but he was undeniably alive….He was the same man who, years before, told Nathanael that he hadn’t seen anything yet. Having now been to the cross and back, Nathanael agreed. Back on that day when he first came to faith, he had been pretty innocent all right. But in a way, despite all he’d seen, suffered, lamented and wept about, he was still innocent, still child-like enough to believe that the one he watched die was alive again, that the truth of Jesus as the living Israel was no dream. And every once in awhile, out of the corner of his eye, Nathanael was just sure he saw the flutter of angel-wings behind Jesus’ head. Blessed are the innocent and true, for they shall see God. [1] [
[1] Scott Hoezee, “The Child’s Leading”, www.calvincrc.org/sermons/2003/john1.html, pp. 2-5
Sunday, January 4, 2009
POWER TO BECOME CHILDREN OF GOD
Text: John 1: (1-9) 10-18
We’ve just experienced the Christmas season, and in various services I’ve had the privilege of speaking to a number of people who don’t come to church at any other time of the year. Why do they come at Christmas? Because their dear old mother wants them to, or their wife or husband insists on it for the kids’ sake, or it seems like a good thing to do on Christmas Eve, when everything else is closed. There is magic in the candlelight and in the excitement in the children’s faces. And there is nostalgia in the familiar old songs; it reminds us all of Christmases in the past, when life was simpler and happier. And all these things are OK - it’s OK to please one’s mother or spouse; it’s OK to think about the children and find a little magic on Christmas Eve; it’s OK to revive fond memories of the good old days. But unfortunately, one of my strongest impressions of these occasional churchgoers is that their eyes glaze over as they sit through the service. The actual message of Christmas doesn’t mean a great deal to them.
There is far more joy in speaking to those for whom the words and the music and the meaning of Christmas have deep, personal roots. Isn’t it strange that those who have heard the Christmas message most often still find it to be the most meaningful and important? When I was a kid going to church, I got to know a lot of hymns by heart. There’s a great deal of meaning in hymns, as you will know, having sung hymns all your lives. Certain lines always stood out for me. One of them is the line that says, “I love to tell the story, for those who know it best seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest.” As a child I used to wonder why is that…that people who know the story best want more than anyone else to hear it again? Because it’s a very important story - the most important story we know. And it’s a sad thing that many people, even people who have some contact with the church, don’t value it, don’t consider it important, don’t experience its deep meaning for them.
And I conducted a wedding this past week. Weddings are not favourite events for ministers - because the understanding of marriage in our society is mostly secular, just as the focus on Christmas is mostly secular. Again, when the pastor talks about what marriage means for serious adults and for Christian believers, many of those who attend weddings sit there with glazed eyes, looking at their watches and wondering when it will be over so they can get on with the more enjoyable part of the occasion - the hugging and kissing, the laughter, the eating and drinking and celebrating. Not to put down any of this good stuff - we all need times of celebration. But we also need to hear real and serious messages of faith and commitment and love which comes from God - only from God. If there is no faith and commitment and love which comes from God, we don’t have much to celebrate.
The church is a strange place. In the last 50 years or so, the years during which we have grown up and experienced the Christian faith, there has been a popular movement to make Christianity more palatable, easier to take, easier to practice, less demanding, less intrusive on our everyday lives. The language of the church is weird - it comes from times in the past, very far in the past, and from cultures very far away. The requirements of the church - the sacraments and other religious practices - are really different from the requirements of our domestic and working lives. Those requirements expect us to believe in things we can’t see, can’t understand, can’t control. But there is still something that attracts and sometimes fascinates people. People who hardly ever come to church still want their children baptized. People who hardly ever come to church still want to be married in the church. People who hardly ever come to church still want to receive Communion. And that’s a good thing; it indicates that they retain some concept of the importance of Christian faith. Maybe they can’t put it into words, but they don’t have to. They just need to be here, to put up with the pastor’s wedding homily which describes what Christian marriage is about, to submit their child to the ritual of baptism, to put out their hands, receive, eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus Christ, to listen to the Christmas story and believe it as they believed it in childhood.
So today, on the second Sunday in the Christmas season - yes, we’re still in the Christmas season…it lasts from Christmas Eve midnight until Epiphany on January 6th - we hear again the timeless words from John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word….The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world….to all who received him…he gave power to become children of God….And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” We would all be hard-put to explain what that means. But nevertheless, having heard these words many, many times, and particularly in all the Christmas seasons of our lives, we do know what they mean. Perhaps we don’t know in our conscious minds, but we do know in our bones - in our inmost hearts, in our souls and in our spirits. The Word, who is God’s Son Jesus, touches a place within us where nothing else touches us. I think that having heard it so many times, we are better able to absorb it and respond to it. We don’t have to explain it; we just know it’s important - so important that it determines who we are and how we live. And that suggests that one of the best things we can do as parents and grandparents is to be sure that the children in our families are exposed to God’s Word - that they hear God’s Word read out loud, at home and at church, that they hear the name of God the Father, Jesus the Son and God the Holy Spirit spoken with reverence and faith, that they experience the love of Christ in the church community. This is really important. A young woman I know in another town, when she was describing what she knew about the church said that her grandmother told her, “Some of the nastiest people I ever knew were in the church.” You can imagine the influence hearing that would have on a young person, or a person of any age. To be positive, this same young person said that when she’s in this area sometime soon, she’d like to come to our church. She’s willing to give it a chance…which is more than I would have expected.
So I continue to think it’s a privilege to give the message about the love of God to those around us, even if it seems irrelevant to them. I suspect it’s not entirely irrelevant to them - just not familiar enough and important enough at this time in their lives for them to commit themselves to it. They hang around the edges of the church, wondering what it’s all about but nevertheless drawn to it. I suspect they’d really like to know what is so important about the Gospel message. How will they come to understand? By watching those of us who have made the commitment and who dare to make the Gospel the centre of our lives. We don’t need to be apologetic or embarrassed about believing this fairy tale, this story which only the pure in heart can truly believe. We don’t need to be morally perfect or theologically educated to have the right to speak of our faith: we just need to have faith.
And what does that look like? In the Ephesians reading today, we have a passionate description - more like a hymn than anything…one of those old hymns that educate our minds and hearts more than any sermon we might hear or book we might read. The writer of Ephesians says that we have received “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places”, we were “chose[n] in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before [God] in love.” We are “destined for adoption as [God’s] children.” God has bestowed upon us “his glorious grace.” Because of Jesus Christ, we have “redemption”, “forgiveness” and all the “riches of [God’s] grace.” Through God’s wisdom and insight we understand the “mystery of [God’s] will”. We have “an inheritance” so that we might “live for the praise of his glory”. In Christ we have heard “the word of truth, the gospel of [our] salvation…and were marked with the seal of the…Holy Spirit….”
Can any of us explain what all this means? I doubt it. We don’t have to. We are not asked to explain. We are simply asked to believe it. And the wonder is that, in hearing it, receiving it as God’s truth, accepting it and absorbing it, it shapes our minds and hearts and becomes the basis of who we are. One of my confirmation students a couple of years ago used to say her grandmother is the “holiest” person she knows. I have met that grandmother a few times, and she is a woman who has been a churchgoer all her life. She has absorbed the Word of God which she has heard spoken and the Spirit of Christ which she has seen and felt and that has become the texture of her life. We can be sure that that grandmother has been a deep and positive influence on her granddaughter. I can’t think of anything it would be more important to do.
We’ve just experienced the Christmas season, and in various services I’ve had the privilege of speaking to a number of people who don’t come to church at any other time of the year. Why do they come at Christmas? Because their dear old mother wants them to, or their wife or husband insists on it for the kids’ sake, or it seems like a good thing to do on Christmas Eve, when everything else is closed. There is magic in the candlelight and in the excitement in the children’s faces. And there is nostalgia in the familiar old songs; it reminds us all of Christmases in the past, when life was simpler and happier. And all these things are OK - it’s OK to please one’s mother or spouse; it’s OK to think about the children and find a little magic on Christmas Eve; it’s OK to revive fond memories of the good old days. But unfortunately, one of my strongest impressions of these occasional churchgoers is that their eyes glaze over as they sit through the service. The actual message of Christmas doesn’t mean a great deal to them.
There is far more joy in speaking to those for whom the words and the music and the meaning of Christmas have deep, personal roots. Isn’t it strange that those who have heard the Christmas message most often still find it to be the most meaningful and important? When I was a kid going to church, I got to know a lot of hymns by heart. There’s a great deal of meaning in hymns, as you will know, having sung hymns all your lives. Certain lines always stood out for me. One of them is the line that says, “I love to tell the story, for those who know it best seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest.” As a child I used to wonder why is that…that people who know the story best want more than anyone else to hear it again? Because it’s a very important story - the most important story we know. And it’s a sad thing that many people, even people who have some contact with the church, don’t value it, don’t consider it important, don’t experience its deep meaning for them.
And I conducted a wedding this past week. Weddings are not favourite events for ministers - because the understanding of marriage in our society is mostly secular, just as the focus on Christmas is mostly secular. Again, when the pastor talks about what marriage means for serious adults and for Christian believers, many of those who attend weddings sit there with glazed eyes, looking at their watches and wondering when it will be over so they can get on with the more enjoyable part of the occasion - the hugging and kissing, the laughter, the eating and drinking and celebrating. Not to put down any of this good stuff - we all need times of celebration. But we also need to hear real and serious messages of faith and commitment and love which comes from God - only from God. If there is no faith and commitment and love which comes from God, we don’t have much to celebrate.
The church is a strange place. In the last 50 years or so, the years during which we have grown up and experienced the Christian faith, there has been a popular movement to make Christianity more palatable, easier to take, easier to practice, less demanding, less intrusive on our everyday lives. The language of the church is weird - it comes from times in the past, very far in the past, and from cultures very far away. The requirements of the church - the sacraments and other religious practices - are really different from the requirements of our domestic and working lives. Those requirements expect us to believe in things we can’t see, can’t understand, can’t control. But there is still something that attracts and sometimes fascinates people. People who hardly ever come to church still want their children baptized. People who hardly ever come to church still want to be married in the church. People who hardly ever come to church still want to receive Communion. And that’s a good thing; it indicates that they retain some concept of the importance of Christian faith. Maybe they can’t put it into words, but they don’t have to. They just need to be here, to put up with the pastor’s wedding homily which describes what Christian marriage is about, to submit their child to the ritual of baptism, to put out their hands, receive, eat and drink the body and blood of Jesus Christ, to listen to the Christmas story and believe it as they believed it in childhood.
So today, on the second Sunday in the Christmas season - yes, we’re still in the Christmas season…it lasts from Christmas Eve midnight until Epiphany on January 6th - we hear again the timeless words from John’s Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word….The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world….to all who received him…he gave power to become children of God….And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” We would all be hard-put to explain what that means. But nevertheless, having heard these words many, many times, and particularly in all the Christmas seasons of our lives, we do know what they mean. Perhaps we don’t know in our conscious minds, but we do know in our bones - in our inmost hearts, in our souls and in our spirits. The Word, who is God’s Son Jesus, touches a place within us where nothing else touches us. I think that having heard it so many times, we are better able to absorb it and respond to it. We don’t have to explain it; we just know it’s important - so important that it determines who we are and how we live. And that suggests that one of the best things we can do as parents and grandparents is to be sure that the children in our families are exposed to God’s Word - that they hear God’s Word read out loud, at home and at church, that they hear the name of God the Father, Jesus the Son and God the Holy Spirit spoken with reverence and faith, that they experience the love of Christ in the church community. This is really important. A young woman I know in another town, when she was describing what she knew about the church said that her grandmother told her, “Some of the nastiest people I ever knew were in the church.” You can imagine the influence hearing that would have on a young person, or a person of any age. To be positive, this same young person said that when she’s in this area sometime soon, she’d like to come to our church. She’s willing to give it a chance…which is more than I would have expected.
So I continue to think it’s a privilege to give the message about the love of God to those around us, even if it seems irrelevant to them. I suspect it’s not entirely irrelevant to them - just not familiar enough and important enough at this time in their lives for them to commit themselves to it. They hang around the edges of the church, wondering what it’s all about but nevertheless drawn to it. I suspect they’d really like to know what is so important about the Gospel message. How will they come to understand? By watching those of us who have made the commitment and who dare to make the Gospel the centre of our lives. We don’t need to be apologetic or embarrassed about believing this fairy tale, this story which only the pure in heart can truly believe. We don’t need to be morally perfect or theologically educated to have the right to speak of our faith: we just need to have faith.
And what does that look like? In the Ephesians reading today, we have a passionate description - more like a hymn than anything…one of those old hymns that educate our minds and hearts more than any sermon we might hear or book we might read. The writer of Ephesians says that we have received “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places”, we were “chose[n] in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before [God] in love.” We are “destined for adoption as [God’s] children.” God has bestowed upon us “his glorious grace.” Because of Jesus Christ, we have “redemption”, “forgiveness” and all the “riches of [God’s] grace.” Through God’s wisdom and insight we understand the “mystery of [God’s] will”. We have “an inheritance” so that we might “live for the praise of his glory”. In Christ we have heard “the word of truth, the gospel of [our] salvation…and were marked with the seal of the…Holy Spirit….”
Can any of us explain what all this means? I doubt it. We don’t have to. We are not asked to explain. We are simply asked to believe it. And the wonder is that, in hearing it, receiving it as God’s truth, accepting it and absorbing it, it shapes our minds and hearts and becomes the basis of who we are. One of my confirmation students a couple of years ago used to say her grandmother is the “holiest” person she knows. I have met that grandmother a few times, and she is a woman who has been a churchgoer all her life. She has absorbed the Word of God which she has heard spoken and the Spirit of Christ which she has seen and felt and that has become the texture of her life. We can be sure that that grandmother has been a deep and positive influence on her granddaughter. I can’t think of anything it would be more important to do.
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