Immediately...they followed (Matthew 4:12-23)

3rd Sunday after Epiphany - A
Matthew 4:12-23
January 23, 2011

Immediately...they followed

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

This is story that is familiar to the point of being a cliché. Maybe it was our Sunday School days and the songs we sang about being “fishers of men.” (This was in the days before we gained some appreciation for the power of gendered language, and rightly so.)

I remember that it was certainly expected that I, like Simon, Andrew, James and John, would want to engage in this “fishing for people.” At first I was looking for something literal and wondered what size hook and what sort of bait I was supposed to use. Later when I learned that my teachers had not meant this literally, I still wondered what it meant. If it meant finding people and bringing them into the church, I didn’t see a lot of that.

And in fact there hasn’t been a lot of that. The United Methodist Church and its forerunners have relied on birthrates to grow and sustain the church. We haven’t made any converts in significant numbers since the mid-1880’s. Birthrates aren’t what they used to be, either. I suspect that people would look askance if I were to answer the question, “How can we get more members?” by saying, “Have more children!” But that, in fact, is how we’ve been doing it for the last one hundred and twenty-five years.

We’ve come to assume that this story is about what my Sunday School teachers and the preachers I’ve heard during my lifetime have said it is about: getting more church members. But that is not what sticks out for me when I read it. What sticks out for me is some funny stuff going on with time.

A story gives us signals about time. When a story begins, “once upon a time in a far away kingdom,” or more recently, “a long time ago in a galaxy far away,” we know that we are being invited into an imaginary time. Strange things can happen in that time, things we don’t expect to happen in ordinary life. When we hear the words, “and they all lived happily ever after,” we know for a certainty that this story is set in that imaginary time. We also know that the story’s end brings us back into regular time, the sort of time you can put on a time line. These words confine dragons and castles, heroes and princesses, within that imaginary time.

Matthew sets us up for his playing with time by the way he quotes Isaiah. The words he quotes are:
Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
on the road by the sea,
across the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles—
the people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death
light has dawned."

This is, more or less, Isaiah 9:1-2. Now Isaiah wrote this to announce the end of Assyrian rule and a renewal of the kingdom of Judah. Although he has something historical in mind, his language is vibrant enough that he tends to slip into the world of poetry and metaphor. As Isaiah’s words were treasured and pondered through the centuries these and others like them were thought to refer to the judgment of God on the nations and the good things that would happen to Judah when history was over. Now, of course, we’re playing with time. If history is made of stuff that happens in time, can it have an “after”? Is there an “after” outside of history?

What Matthew does with this text is to say that when Jesus found a place to stay in Capernaum beside the Sea of Galilee, “light dawned on those who sat in the shadows of death.” An event that supposedly belonged to the “after” of history became in event in history. Confused? Well, in the words of the prophet of Mammon, “But wait, there’s more!”

Jesus begins to preach in the district of Galilee. Here is his message: “Repent [that is, reorient your life] for the kingdom [or empire] of the heavens [an indirect way of referring to God] has come near.”

“Has come near.” Now there is an odd phrase. The original word means “to approach or come near.” That’s not so hard. What puzzles is that the verb is in the perfect tense.

The perfect tense describes actions that are complete, done, finished.
—Have you done your reading assignment?
—I read the assignment.

That sounds like the assignment is done, but there is still some wiggle room. Let’s say the student in question had done some of the reading, but not all of it. Then it would still be true to say:
—I read the assignment.

The past tense by itself is not quite enough to answer the question without leaving some doubt. For that we need the perfect tense:
—I have read the assignment.

There. That’s a clear statement with no wiggle room. Of course, it may still be false, but that’s another matter.

So, here we have an event, an action in the perfect tense. “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” So it has approached. That should be a completed action. But the action itself is not clear. “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” So, is it here, has it arrived? The statement doesn’t say that exactly. Okay, so is it not here? No, the statement doesn’t say that, either. So is the kingdom of heaven here or not? Yes. Frustrated? “But wait, there’s even more!”

Jesus walks along the lake shore and sees two fishermen, Simon and Andrew casting their nets into the water. And Jesus says to them, “Follow me and I will make you fishers of people.” And Simon and Andrew left their nets immediately and followed Jesus.

A little further along the shore, the three of them met Zebedee and his sons James and John. They were sitting in their boat mending their nets, something that needed to be done on a daily basis. Jesus summoned James and John who immediately left their boat and their father and followed Jesus.

Now, we know that Simon had a household to support, or at very least a mother-in-law. We know that James and John were part of the family business and that Zebedee would eventually need them for his support. We don’t know what all of Andrew’s obligations might have been, but as part of Simon’s extended family, he owed something to him. We don’t know either if this is the first time that these four had seen Jesus. Maybe they had met before. Maybe they had known each other for a long time. What we do know for certain is that they would not have been prepared for Jesus’ summons to them. And yet, they not only didn’t have to think it over or consult with their relations, but they respond immediately. Their decision took no time at all; there was no time between hearing Jesus’ summons and following him. Again, with the time thing! This time we have events in the ordinary world and in ordinary time that are affected by decisions that are made outside of time.

So where are we now? We have Isaiah’s poetic world that lies in the future after the future made present as Jesus signs a lease in Capernaum. We have the kingdom of heaven, God’s empire, which is both present and not present in such a way as to demand that we reorient our lives. Finally, we have fisherfolk deciding to become Jesus’ disciples and making the decision immediately, that is, in a way that is outside of time.

Well, now, how are we going to make sense of this? There are probably other ways, but here is one way. The world that we live in, the one where the ordinary stuff in our lives, is not as secure or stable as we usually think it is. Our world is porous and leaky. There are holes in it, cracks that let in something else. In Matthew, Jesus calls that something else “the kingdom of heaven.” It’s real, too, but the problem is that we have only the words from the ordinary world to describe this something else and the words don’t really fit. So we have to talk about the kingdom of heaven in metaphors and poetry instead. Every time we try to say something about it in plain ordinary language, we end up speaking against ourselves, one word crossing the next. Again, that our speech should become a series of crosses shouldn’t be too surprising.

We live in this world and cannot change that. But that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is that “something else” keeps leaking into our world. And the most important things that happen to us and the most important things that we do are things that happen because of those “something else” leaks.

We decide to leave our nets and the family business to follow Jesus, just because he asks us to. A life-altering decision and it takes no time at all. When Simon, Andrew, James and John did it that even changed our lives. That’s because our world is leaky right around Jesus and something else leaks in.

A little water is poured on our foreheads and a few words are spoken. We don’t even remember them because we were too young to remember anything. But our lives were changed forever. That’s because our world is leaky right around the baptismal font and something else leaks in.
So the journey with Jesus begins with hearing a voice that resonates with “something else.” It goes on from there, Matthew tells us, to those who were suffering from “every disease and every sickness.” Now we are no longer surprised that this should be so, for it is through the broken places in our ordinary world that something else leaks in and God speaks. And this, in turn, is why Jesus wants us to stay close to the sick, to the hungry and thirsty, to prisoners and strangers. It is through the broken places of our reality that the reality of the kingdom of heaven comes pouring into our world.

Our world is leaky. “Something else” is leaking in. May it leak on us!

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

Mission Creep (Isaiah 49:1-7)

2nd Sunday after Epiphany - A
Isaiah 49:1-7
January 16, 2011

Mission Creep

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

“I will give you as a light to the nations” is the great promise given in our reading this morning to the people of Judah.

Light is a theme that runs through the Bible. “Let there be light,” God said in the third verse of the Bible. Just four words—two in Hebrew—and the great story begins. In the very last chapter of Revelation, we are told that those who live in the New Jerusalem will have no need for the sun or a lamp, for there will be no more night and God will be their light.¹ From light to light the story goes.

Light is a good thing. Who hasn’t gotten up in the middle of the night and tripped over a toy left on the floor or stumbled into a piece of furniture? In my experience, in any collision between my toes and furniture it’s never my toes that win. Did you know that for forty dollars you can buy a pair of slippers with built-in lights that turn on whenever you put your weight on them?² It’s true. It’s the most useful ridiculous idea I’ve run across in a long while. A little light in the darkness might can be a good thing.

But light isn’t always a good thing. Too much light can leave us as blind as no light at all. Light casts shadows which means that security lights may leave us less safe than the uniform darkness they replace. Stray waste light dims the night sky and deprives us of the experience of awe. Light in the shorter wavelengths increases our risk of cancer. Concentrated light in a single wavelength can be so powerful that it strips the electrons from an atom, turning solid matter into stray ions. Lasers using this ability can serve as a surgeon’s scalpel, performing delicate operations. Lasers using this ability are being studied and developed as weapons. Light can be lethal.

So we are warned as we take up this text, that light might be good or not. It very much depends on the context.

“I will give you as a light to the nations.” Is there anything more dangerous than someone who is convinced that they know the one thing that everyone needs to know and that it is their mission to make sure that everyone knows it whether they want to or not? Is there anything worse than someone who knows what is good for someone else, especially if they are powerful enough to impose it?

This is the trap into which empires fall, even when they believe that they are doing good things for the peoples whom they encounter. This is one source of my mixed feelings about the deployment of the 322^nd Engineering Company.³ We sent them off this week, although I believe that there is still one more parade to go, a little later today. On the one hand I have nothing but respect for the 160 men and women from 19 states who make up this unit. They face their 400 day deployment with dignity and determination that their courage will not fail. They have given up their homes for a time, their families and communities. They are traveling far away where they will face real danger. And they do this because we have asked them to do it. I have been a soldier and I understand from my own experience some of what they are facing. Other things they are facing are outside of my experience. I have nothing but respect for them and for their families.

While deployed in Afghanistan their mission will include building roads and houses. These should be good things, at least that’s what I imagine. But I am also aware of how easily we deceive ourselves into believing that what we intend to do is being done for the benefit of others. I do not know what the historians will say about us. I do know that historians have not been kind to earlier empires.

The Roman governor of Britannia in the early 80s CE was a man named Agricola, a competent general and administrator. The plan was to bring the benefits of Roman rule to the Celtic tribes of Britain. But in the year 82 Agricola faced a rebellion led by a Celt named Calgacus. Agricola may have thought that he represented civilization and peace, but Calgacus saw things differently. Before their two armies clashed somewhere in Scotland, Calgacus observed of the Romans: “To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”⁴

These are hard words. Harder still, when we realize that they were recorded by Agricola’s own son, the historian Tacitus. I hope that we fare better in our historians’ hands, but I fear that we may not.

It makes a difference who is reading the the prophet Isaiah. When a powerful empire decides that it is being given “as a light to the nations,” this more often than not comes as very bad news indeed to said nations, who face an adversary out do them good whether they like it or not.

But this is not where the first hearers and readers of this passage were. They were not citizens of the world’s greatest military power. Instead, they were the members of a tiny exiled religious and ethnic community.

They were the children and grandchildren of the elite of what had been the little kingdom of Judah. Their parents and grandparents had been sent into exile when the Babylonian army showed up outside the walls of Jerusalem on a mission to bring civilization to Judah. The Babylonians, too, created a desert and called it peace.

The elite of the defeated Jerusalemites were permitted to live in exile in Babylon, along with the elites of various other defeated peoples. The Babylonian strategy was to make Babylonians out of them and it almost worked. Babylon was rich and cultured. Babylonians were sophisticated and compared to them even the elite of Jerusalem felt like country bumpkins. If the power of a nation was the measure of the power of its gods, then the gods of the Babylonians were powerful indeed. The covenant with Yahweh seemed unreal and the promises of the covenant broken.

It was in that context that the prophet we call deutero-Isaiah worked. We call him that because we don’t know his name and it seems unlikely that he was the same person as the prophet known as Isaiah of Jerusalem who seems to have been responsible for the first part of the book of Isaiah. Deutero-Isaiah had his work cut out for him, trying to keep up the morale of the exiled community. Even keeping them together seemed impossible, let alone gathering them up and taking them home to Jerusalem. Deutero-Isaiah was tired-out, worn-out, and burned-out.

I picture the conversation that he had with God. “All my work has been for nothing,” he said, “but that’s okay. It’s just you and me, God. All I need is you.”

God has little respect for that sort of self-pity. “You have a notion of your mission that is entirely too small,” God answered. “It isn’t just about Judah. Your mission is a world-wide one.”

There is, it seems, something in Judah—or maybe it’s just in deutero-Isaiah. There is something that the world needs. There is a light there, a good light, one that illuminates the darkness—like slippers with headlights. The world that despises exiled Judah will see that light and respond to it with joy and gladness. Judah—or maybe it’s just deutero-Isaiah—bears the burdensome delight of chosenness. Its existence is not in doubt. But it does not exist for its own sake, but for the sake of the nations.

What then is that light? What is the gift for the world that God’s people bear? It’s not mentioned directly in this passage, but it runs like the center stripe of the highway that leads toward home through the whole book of Isaiah. Judah itself has not always taken this gift very seriously. In fact, it has been a bone of contention between Judah and God:

Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates; they have become a burden to me, I am weary of bearing them. When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.⁵

Religiously, there is nothing to complain about. The churches are full. Worship is beautiful. The people pray. But there is something that God desires more than worship: justice for the oppressed, the orphan and the widow, for those in other words who have no access to justice because they can’t afford it.

Those who are able to afford it have bought up all the land, prompting a real estate boom that leaves no room for those who cannot afford it. But the boom is a bubble:

Ah, you who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but you, and you are left to live alone in the midst of the land! The LORD of hosts has sworn in my hearing: Surely many houses shall be desolate, large and beautiful houses, without inhabitant.⁶

Those who can buy access to the legislative process have arranged things for their own profit at the expense of those who cannot afford this access:

Ah, you who make iniquitous decrees, who write oppressive statutes, to turn aside the needy from justice and to rob the poor of my people of their right, that widows may be your spoil, and that you may make the orphans your prey!⁷

Judah neglected the gift that made it unique. It did this to its own devastation. Justice, not thick walls of stone, was the fence that protected Jerusalem. Having forsaken justice Judah was wide open to the predations of Babylon. Destruction and exile were the inevitable result.

But they were not the end of the story. The God who appeared to be powerless before the gods of Babylon is in fact the author, not the victim, of exile. Exile is not the end. The justice which eluded Judah before the exile will be enthroned in its midst, embodied in the figure of Yahweh’s servant:

Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching.⁸

The delightful burden of God’s people is justice. This is not the justice that puts criminals in prisons. God knows we have too many of those already and they are filled to overflowing. This is not the justice of a set of rules by which the game must be played. The rules of “the game” were written to further expose the vulnerable and to protect the powerful. This is the justice that lifts up the lowly, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, protects the stranger, and speaks on behalf of the voiceless. This is the justice that makes life human and humane. This is the justice that is neighborliness written in capital letters, the justice that renders us neighbors to our family and friends, neighbors to the stranger among us, neighbors to the life that shares the planet with us, and neighbors even to our enemies. This is the justice for the sake of which God says to us, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

1Rev. 22:6.

2BrightFeet lighted slippers, http://www.comforthouse.com/slippers.html.

3“Ask Mr. Answer Person: ‘Where are the members of the 322nd Engineering Battalion from?’” Decorahnews.com, http://www.decorahnews.com/news-stories/2011/01/8752.html (January 14, 2011).

4Tacitus De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae, 30: Auferre trucidare rapere falsis nominibus imperium, atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

5Isaiah 1:14-17.

6Isaiah 5:8-9.

7Isaiah 10:1-2.

8Isaiah 42:1-4.

We're All Wet: The Ministry of the Baptized (Matthew 3:13-17)

Baptism of Christ - A
Matthew 3:13-17
January 9, 2010

We're All Wet: The Ministry of the Baptized

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

There are times when preachers, even those who think of themselves as biblical preachers—as I do, will choose to preach without a specific text in mind. When I do that—and I don’t do it often—I hope that what I say is deeply informed by the broad sweep of Scripture. The occasion is usually some event that has happened in the world or in the life of the congregation. Then I hope for your indulgence as I claim the privilege of speaking from my heart and head.

Today is one of those times and it is occasioned by the church year that celebrates this Sunday as a festival commemorating Jesus’ baptism by John and by the crossroads that our relationship has reached. As Jesus is baptized in the Jordan I cannot help but be reminded of the baptism that we all share with him and the way that our baptism locates us in the world.

Let me begin by telling a story, Complaining about a pet peeve of mine, and sharing an observation. First the story: A young man who was an Episcopalian who worked among other things as a hospital volunteer. While he had no particular training, he had discovered that he had a gift for listening that allowed people to feel safe enough to talk about their fears and anxieties, their hopes and dreams, as they were experiencing the health crisis that had brought them to the hospital. It might have been an accident, an illness or a condition that needed to be treated with surgery. People felt safe enough to unburden themselves.

It wasn’t just in the course of his hospital volunteer work that people did this. He could hardly ride a bus or stand in a line at the grocery store without people telling him a story, often a painful one. He recognized that this was (or at least could be) a ministry. He made an appointment to see his bishop—easier for Episcopalians than for us because their bishops have much smaller administrative areas than ours. He told his bishop his story and then said that he wanted to be ordained.

The bishop was silent for a moment and then asked, “Why do you want to be ordained?”

The young man answered, “So that I will have the authority to carry out my ministry.”

The bishop smiled and said, “You already have all the authority you need to carry out your ministry: You are baptized!”

That’s the story. Here’s my pet peeve: When I meet new colleagues one of the subjects that comes up is our careers. It’s the same sort of thing that happens among any colleagues. I don’t mind that, although mine is quite a bit more complicated than the average story. What I mind is the way the question is framed. They ask me, “How long have you been in ‘the ministry’?” What they mean of course is, “How long have you been in ordained ministry?” or “parish ministry?” But that’s not what they say. They say, “How long have you been in ‘the ministry’?” So I tell them, “I’ve been in the ministry since November 30, 1952.” Invariably, they look at me curiously and I can see them running the numbers in their heads and they aren’t making any sense. I let them struggle for a bit and then I say (as if I didn’t already know), “Oh! You meant how long have I been ordained! I thought you were asking when I was baptized.”

Now, if I were to press them, they would acknowledge that, yes, all baptized persons have a ministry so it isn’t really technically correct to talk about ministry as if it were the special prerogative of the ordained. I know they were asked about this in the questions they prepared for their ordination. They know this in their heads. But their speech betrays that this way of thinking is not a habit of their hearts.

I assert that to speak of ministry as if it belonged to the ordained is an act of arrogance. And it annoys me. What annoys my colleagues, of course, is my turning their attempt at polite conversation into a theological trial with them as the accused. Well, there it is.

Now for the observation: In our bulletins we list who does what. I’ve noticed that it includes these words after “the ministers”: the congregation led by John M. Caldwell. It’s there every week. I don’t know how that custom began. I know that I didn’t start it; it was already firmly established when I got here.

The story raises the question about the authority to do ministry. The bishop in the story testifies to that authority in the sacrament of baptism, a sacrament shared in common by all laity, deacons, elders and bishops. There is of course a counter-testimony in the story, the conviction of the young man that “real” ministry isn’t quite authorized by baptism; that for “real” ministry you need an ordination. If the story continued we might discover that he had changed his mind, but, as it is, the question is unresolved.

My peeve has to do with my colleagues who casually and unthinkingly empower themselves at the expense of the baptized. Of course the history of the orders of ministry as we have them shows that their growth had a great deal to do with the formal leadership of the church distrusting the laity, so I’m implicated in my own complaint which may help explain why I am so peevish about it.

The observation of our own practice around naming ministers raises the question, Do we mean it? Do we really mean that all of you are ministers and I am your leader?

Now I suspect that the answer to that question is both yes and no. How often do you speak of me as “our minister” rather than “the one who leads us in ministry”? I know that, my pet peeve not withstanding, I don’t often speak of you as “the ministers” of First UMC. I generally introduce myself as the pastor of this congregation, not “the leader of the ministers.” These habits of speech are telling, I’m afraid. They suggest that we don’t really believe what we are professing.

There is, of course, nothing wrong about professing what we don’t yet fully believe. We are allowed to make our profession something we have to live toward, to strive for. But in our habits of speech we can see the gap between where we say we want to be and where we are right now.

On the other hand, I see some evidence that we do believe and practice this profession in important ways.

In the last six months I’ve been watching and listening. I’ve had a question in the back of my mind: “Who is First UMC and what makes it tick?” I’ve been collecting observations along the way about things that might hold an answer to my question. I notice, for example, where our building is. It’s right across the street from the courthouse. I notice that a lot of the leaders of our community are members here. I notice that a lot of our folks are the workers behind the scenes who make things happen in Decorah. I notice that there are a number of ministries and programs in our church. There is a solid music program. Good things are happening in children’s ministries. I’d like to think that we’re doing pretty well in the worship and preaching department. There is a strong United Methodist Women chapter here. None of these are unusual in themselves, although it’s dismaying how few congregations manage to do them. Then there are some really interesting and unusual things happening: Puppets of Praise, Sister Parish, and the Community Thanksgiving Dinner, to name three.

I have heard some folks wonder about our ministries and especially about what ties them together. They are worried that there doesn’t seem to be any unified direction to our life and ministry. I’ve wondered about that, too. I’ve tried to discern what common theme holds these ministries together, especially the last three I named. On one level there doesn’t seem to be any common theme.

But on further reflection it occurs to me that what holds Puppets of Praise, Sister Parish and the Community Thanksgiving Dinner together is that at the center of each of them is a small group of people—or maybe only one person—passionately committed to this ministry and willing to devote the time and effort needed to make sure that it is done well. What ties them together is that in each case First UMC has given the core group permission to be passionate and some modest resources to use: meeting space for planning meetings, accounting support for managing finances, secretarial support, or a place to hold an event. Very little money is given from First UMC to these programs. What these ministries have in common is that they exemplify the ministry of the baptized. What makes them work is that we trust the baptized to be in ministry on our behalf.

When I put these programs together with what I’ve noticed about the community involvement of our people, here is what I see: First UMC has been functioning in part to provide the baptized with the equipment they need in order to engage in ministry in the congregation and in the community. The largest part of these ministries are informal. They are carried out by people who care about the life we are creating for each other in Decorah and who are willing, as Christ’s disciples, to be engaged in the often difficult work of making things happen. Some ministries are formal ministries in the church that help prepare the baptized for their ministries. Some ministries are formal ministries through the church in which the baptized are carrying out the ministries to which they have been called and to which they are passionately committed.

We haven’t been very clear about it, but here is what I think we are all about: we are a congregation that calls people to Christian discipleship, authorizes and equips them for ministry through baptism and programs of Christian formation, and sends them into the various communities beyond our doors to transform those communities so that they more closely reflect God’s dream for human life. Or to put it more succinctly: First UMC makes disciples of Christ for the transformation of the world with a special emphasis on Decorah.

Of course, just because we have been doing this doesn’t mean that everything is okay and we can simply go on as we have been doing. I believe that we entering a period of history in which we will need to be very clear about who we are and what our core mission is. This can and will involve difficult even painful decisions. But, if I’m right about the common threads that bind our life and ministry together, we don’t have to be afraid of encouraging each other’s dreams and passions. Quite the contrary! If I understand the way that God tends to work I would have to say that it is far more likely that God is speaking to me through you than it is that God is speaking to you through me.

I was baptized on November 30, 1952. Since then, as one of the baptized, I have been in ministry. At first it was mostly a ministry of Loud Noises. Some say I’m still doing that.They may be right.

I don’t remember my baptism. At least not first hand. I have been told about it. I don’t remember it first hand but I can remember it by commemorating it. That happened for me in major ways at my confirmation and later at my ordinations as a deacon and then as an elder of the Church. It happens in a little way each time I approach the table. I am grateful, though, for the festival of the Baptism of Christ because it gives me a chance to remember my baptism in a way that reminds me of who I am and who I am called to be in the world. I invite you to join me in a reaffirmation of baptismal promises, so that, together, we may remember who and whose we are and reclaim the authority that we need to be in ministry as disciples of Jesus.

©2010, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.

A Light in the Darkness (Isaiah 60:1-6)

Epiphany Sunday - A
Isaiah 60:1-6
January 2, 2011

A Light in the Darkness

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

It’s been a week since Christmas. And some of you are experiencing a well-known syndrome: a young person yearned loudly and lobbied repeatedly for the latest toy, doll, gadget, or game. Parents or someone in the family braved cold weather, long lines, pushy fellow customers and not-so-bargain prices to buy the thing. On Christmas morning said young person was ecstatic. By now, however, interest has waned. We are wondering what all the dramatics were about. The gift failed to live up to its hype.

In spite of years of our own experience and of watching each other, we still seem to fall for the same story line time after time. We just can’t leave behind the hope that if only we could have that toy, doll, gadget, game, car, house, job, or spouse, our lives would finally be completed, fulfilled and meaningful.

No, as I think about it more carefully, I begin to suspect that the dream of fulfillment, completion and meaning has less to do with the thing being bought than it has to do with the mere act of buying. It doesn’t matter much what is being bought. Advertisers seldom advertise the product; they advertise an experience. Folgers, for example, the coffee brand of the J.M. Smucker Company, hasn’t advertised coffee for years: they advertise family reunions.

My experience suggests that most of our actions as consumers have to do with the buying and selling of hopes, dreams, and yearnings that, as often as not have little to do with the actual products we end up with. Is it any wonder that we find our experience as consumers unsatisfying? Is it any wonder that our kids find the toys we bought less interesting than the boxes that they came in?

Dreams, it turns out, are tricky. Dreams exert a powerful pull on us; they resource our imaginations; they are the foundations of many of our plans. Dreams can carry us through some very hard times and give us strength to face each new day of struggle.

Not many dreams, though, can stand being turned into reality. Something gets lost in the translation. The people of Judah were finding this out the hard way when the words of our Hebrew Bible lesson were first spoken.

We have a hard time reading the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament. Our books are usually written by one person in what is basically a single point in history. Different times have different moods and they face different questions and issues. We can tell the difference between something written in the sixties and something written yesterday.

But the Bible was written over a very long period of time. Many of its books took centuries to reach the form that we have now. Isaiah is one of those books. Isaiah and much of the Hebrew Bible gained its final shape in the years after the Babylonian exile. In the early part of the sixth century BC (that is the high 500s), the Kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonian Empire, Jerusalem was captured and partly destroyed, and the leadership of the people were taken to Babylon and not allowed to return to their home.

During the time of exile they were sustained by their dream of returning to their home. The dream became bigger than life. It wouldn’t be a simple matter of things going back to the way they had been. God had been the final author of their exile and God would have to be the one who brought them home. When God did this it would be part of a package that would transform the world into an almost recognizably good place for them to live.

But we know how that goes. Some of Barack Obama’s supporters believed that his election and inauguration would mean the beginning of a very different and very much better national history. They—well, let’s be honest: I—hoped for a new spirit, certainly in the White House, but also in the capital and across the nation. I voted for a dream. What I got was a president who had to deal with politics on the ground in the real world. Whether Obama has done this well or not is probably a matter for the historians, although I have my own opinion. Doubtless you have yours. We could have some fun arguing about it, if you’d like, but my point is that my own disillusionment runs parallel to the experience of returning exiles in the late sixth century BC.

A regime change in Babylon brought the Persians—or Iranians, if you’d like—to power. Their emperor, Cyrus the Great, announced a change in policy that allowed the Judean exiles to go home. They were beside themselves with joy. Well, some of them were. These got themselves ready and they went back to Jerusalem. Others decided to stay in Babylon where there continued to be a thriving Jewish community for several centuries.

The ones who returned to Jerusalem experienced a major letdown. A new day did not dawn just because God had brought them home. The desert was not covered with flowers, just the brush and scrub that grows in deserted places. No roads magically appeared to lead them home, just the same dusty, rocky paths their great grandparents had walked on their way into exile. Jerusalem was a mess. It was what real estate agents call a fixer-upper. The walls of Jerusalem were toppled in several places. The Temple was burned to the ground. The gates of the city were gone. The public utilities had fallen into disrepair. And the locals—descendants of the Judeans who had remained behind—wanted nothing to do with them.

Reality intruded into what had been a very nice dream. The dream was lovely, gratifying. In the dream, life was easy and fulfilling. But in reality there were stones to hew and haul to fix the walls. There was a temple to rebuild. There were sewers to repair. Life was hard. Much of the dream was at best unfulfilled, at worst unfulfillable. This was not a preaching context that I would envy.

And yet, in many ways, it is the one that I have. We are disillusioned. Science and technology have not delivered on the promises they made in my youth. Where’s all the leisure time we were supposed to have? Where’s the abundant cheap energy? And most important of all, where’s my jetpack? We are disillusioned consumers and yet we don’t know what else to be.
Our leaders can’t seem to have the important conversations that they need to have about pressing matters. Instead they maneuver for political advantage, but when they get it they can’t seem to get anything done. We are disillusioned citizens.

Our centers of higher education are driven by monetary concerns. There are even for-profit institutions where education is a means to the end of making money. Universities and colleges offer more and more fields of study but increasingly only one major: upward mobility. We are disillusioned learners and teachers.

We have taken apart major powerful institutions in our world for the sake of individual rights and freedoms. Churches, unions, neighborhoods, bowling leagues—all have suffered real reverses. And now we find ourselves exposed to powerful corporations that use international borders as a way to avoid accountability to anyone at all. We are disillusioned individualists.

Perhaps most of all, we are disillusioned dreamers. After so many times that a dream has been used to front a scam, we distrust dreams altogether. And truth to tell, there are parts of today’s reading that prompt me to put my hand on my wallet. I am suspicious of the prophet’s promise that the wealth of that gentiles would come to Jerusalem. It sounds like a revenge fantasy, as if justice could be gained merely by turning victims into oppressors and oppressors into victims. It seems shallow to me. Nor am I particularly attracted to the notion that we would be inundated with caravans of camels. Camels spit. They are not nice animals.

But even so there is a remainder that seems to me to be a dream worth holding onto. It’s this image of light in darkness. Darkness will cover the nations, we are told. But into that darkness God will shine. There’s hope there, isn’t there? There are depths of darkness in our world today, but no matter how deep, God’s light shines deeper still.

But we who have been called to be God’s people, don’t just sit and soak up the sunshine. The prophet goes further than that. The prophet tells us that God’s light will shine and we will be radiant. God’s light shines in the darkness and we become God’s lights. We’re going to hear that over and over again in the next few weeks. Light is a motif that runs through the readings between now and Lent. We’ll have a chance to explore light metaphors.

But for now, let me share what I find striking here. God’s light shines in darkness and we become radiant. What strikes me is that our becoming radiant is how God’s light shines in the darkness. This is how God illuminates dark places: God makes us radiant. We can’t look for God’s light to come breaking in. God’s light isn’t over there; it isn’t somewhere else. It’s right here among us, in the light that we radiate as we do the same thing that the prophet’s community did. We try to figure out how to live in faithful obedience to God’s covenant. We try some things. Sometimes we succeed. More often we fail. When we fail we get back up and try to figure out how to do it a little differently and then we try again.

We disillusioned consumers know that while we need some things to live, we just can’t find fulfillment in buying stuff. We can try to figure out what that means and how to live differently.
We disillusioned citizens know that real solutions to real problems are going to be found in the conversations that we have with people whom we value more than we value winning arguments. Civil conversation is a nearly lost art form, but we can relearn it here.

We disillusioned learners and teachers can relearn the lost art of asking questions about deeper meanings and larger purposes rather than how to be good functionaries in systems that produce a great deal of wealth for a disturbingly few people.

We disillusioned individualists can relearn the art of community, the value of a commons, the strength of congregation. We can relearn working for a commonwealth in which I know that there is no real well-being for me that doesn’t involve well-being for all.

We disillusioned dreamers can discover that the light of God will shine first into the darkness of our own disillusioned hearts. And then we will dare to dream again. When we do that, we will find that we are not alone. Others hunger for these things, too. They will come if their hunger for a good dream can be fed here. We may even find ourselves asking, “Where did all these camels come from?”

©2011, John M. Caldwell. Permission is given by the author to reproduce and distribute the unaltered text of this sermon provided this notice is reproduced in full and provided that this sermon shall not be offered for sale, nor included in any collection or publication that is offered for sale, without the express written permission of the author.