Sermons, ponderings and general cud-chewing around preaching texts (nowadays most often drawn from the Narrative Lectionary) and other theological and cultural stuff I can't get out of my head and have to inflict on someone... Sorry about that.
Mark 1:1-20
1st Sunday after Christmas
December 27, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
My experience with submitting myself to someone else's reading list is that I inevitably have two questions: 1) Why in the world did they put that on the list? and 2) Why didn't they include this? Maybe that's just me.
I have the same struggle with lectionaries. After all lectionary is simply a reading list that selects and arranges Scripture lessons for the Christian year. Inevitably, some of my favorite readings are left out and some readings are included that I for one could have done without.
There is a value in submitting ourselves to a lectionary as to any reading list. It is helpful for our spiritual growth to be confronted by and to have deal with an unfamiliar or even uncomfortable reading. Like oysters we produce pearls precisely at the point of irritation. So maybe there is good news here.
It's not that I don't understand. There are only so many "Christmas texts" available. In fact, only two of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament mention Christmas at all. Matthew and Luke tell the stories of Christmas-- I won't call them comfortable exactly, but at least they are familiar. Mark and John write gospels without any mention of Jesus' birth. Half of the gospel writers found it perfectly acceptable to tell the good news without birth stories.
Not only that, if you would give me a pair of scissors, I could easily snip a little here and cut a bit there and end up with versions of Matthew and Luke without any Christmas stories and, if you did not know that they were supposed to be there, you would not be able to tell they were missing.
All of this suggests that, except for a few historical accidents, Christians might never have celebrated Christmas at all.
Having said all that it's still a little odd to come to church on the third day of Christmas and find that the lesson for day has nothing do with Jesus' birth. It's a problem built into the Narrative Lectionary folks' commitment to use one gospel in each of four years. So what we have instead of a Christmas story is a reading that begins, "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ," and immediately launches into a description of John the Baptist. He came demanding repentance, wearing camel skins, and eating wild honey and grasshoppers. That's hardly likely to evoke "visions of sugar plums," is it?
It is inevitable that Christmas, whether a day or a season, will come to an end. Some songs wish that Christmas could last all year, but that isn't how it works.
To wish that Christmas could last all year is understandable, but misses that Christmas, as a celebration of Jesus' birth is the beginning of something. Where Matthew and Luke have Christmas stories, Mark has, "The beginning of the good news." Sooner or later we will have to move beyond "the beginning" to the something else.
As usual, there is more than one way to read that phrase. We could read it as a simple introduction to the book of Mark. The ministry of John the Baptist leading to Jesus' baptism, then, is the beginning of the good news. The rest of Mark continues the good news.
Or, "The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ" is a sort of title for the book. In that case the Gospel of Mark itself is "the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ."
Since Mark was the first gospel writer and didn't have a style book to guide him, there isn't any way to decide for certain which of these choices is the right one. As so often happens when we read the Bible, it comes down to a decision we have to make as readers. Our translation, The Common English Bible, picked the first choice, but I find the second choice more interesting, so I'm going with that one. I know that's pretty arbitrary. Humor me.
If Mark's gospel is the beginning of the good news, where does the good news go from there? Mark imagines its own sequel, but doesn't tell us how or when it would be written, nor by whom.
What makes the most sense to me is that the life and message of the early Jesus community is that sequel. The Church is that sequel. We are that sequel.
Sooner or later--later, if you'd ask us-- but sooner or later the Christmas story that we tell, hear, celebrate, and sing must yield its place to the Christmas that we live. Howard Thurman said it best, or at least very well, in his poem, "The Work of Christmas":
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.1
In the next few days we'll finish our Christmas leftovers, we'll take down our trees and put away the decorations. And the work of Christmas will begin. "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ" will have its sequel in us.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.
Howard Thurman, The Mood of Christmas (Richmond, Ind: Friends United Press, 1985), 23.↩
Eve of the Nativity Luke 20:1-20 December 24, 2015
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD First United Methodist Church Decorah, Iowa
Christmas is more than a little scandalous.
There is the scandal of how Jesus was conceived. Jesus was born to a woman who was not married. The fiancé of this woman did not break off his engagement with her, even though he knew (as no one else could know) that he was not the child’s father.
But that’s not what I mean when I say that Christmas is scandalous.
There is the scandal of what Christmas has become. I guess we could have seen this coming. After all, no one knows Jesus’ birthday. Choosing a particular day to call the day of Jesus’ birth is completely arbitrary. There is simply no reason to prefer one day to another. December 25th got picked because it happened to coincide with a Roman festival called the Saturnalia. The Saturnalia had a carnival atmosphere. Normal rules were set aside or even turned upside down. Citizens and slaves alike wore the pilleus, the conical cap worn by freedmen. Masters served their servants. Gifts were exchanged. No public business could be conducted. This was just as well because much wine was consumed. People overate. For days.
Christians were not allowed to observe the Saturnalia, since it was a pagan festival. Christmas was an alternative, a sort of consolation for Christians who eyed their holidaying neighbors with envy. Of course there were religious services connected with Christmas—that’s where the “mass” is Christmas comes from. But Christmas was always a time of revelry.
So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the revelry part has always threatened to take over. And in our day Christmas has become a several-week party in which we are far too busy and eat far too much. A larger scandal is that Christmas has become the principal festival of consumer capitalism. We are told that it is the season for giving, but behind that lurks something less benign: it has become the season for reckless and unrestrained buying in the service of someone else’s profits.
But that’s not what I mean when I say that Christmas is scandalous.
At Christmas we celebrate the birth of Immanuel, God with us, which we can read in two senses. We can read Immanuel as God with us in the sense that God will be with us and bless us in what we think, undertake and do. The prophet Nathan once said to David, “Do what is in your heart, for God is with you.” This isn’t so scandalous itself, although I think it would be better for us to be with God so that we are aligned with God’s purposes and working toward God’s dream, rather than for God to be with us as a sort of pet who makes sure that we get what we want.
The second sense, though, is where things become rather strange. Immanuel means God with us in the sense that Jesus, called Immanuel, is with us as God. The Christian tradition—and what better time for tradition that Christmas Eve—says that God has taken the astounding step of entering into and becoming a part of human history.
This theme is not a new one. The ancient Greek and Roman gods and goddesses would get bored with life on Olympus. The would have some fun by putting on human form and having adventures among mortals. Of course, if you have read the stories, you already know that the gods and goddesses were the ones who had the fun. The mortals ended up pregnant, transformed into some beast and plant, or dead. Not so much fun for them.
A youth group in one of our churches went to Minneapolis to do some mission work at a downtown church. It was not just a work mission, but designed to educate our youth about living conditions in a low-income urban neighborhood. One morning a group of them were being escorted by one of the counselors on a walking tour of the neighborhood when they were stopped by a woman who lived there who loudly objected to being part of their educational experience. She didn’t want to be photographed, looked at, examined, or questioned as if she were there for their benefit. She told them to go back to their white suburbs and leave her and her neighborhood alone. The kids were shocked, but she had a point. The youth were on an adventure that was pretty safe for them and, anyway, would only last a few days at most.
There is a program in Chicago in which you can learn about homelessness. Part of the program is to experience three days and nights of life on the streets, trying to find food and shelter and trying to stay safe. I read about it in an article by a man who had gone through the program. When it came time for the hands-on part of the experience, though, he stuck his driver’s license and a credit card in one of his socks. Just in case.
He learned a great deal. But he knew, as all of us might guess, that having his “get out of jail free” cards in his shoe changed the experience greatly. You can’t really be homeless when there is a home you can go to if you take your cards out of your shoe. And the ancient gods and goddesses had a habit of “pulling rank,” of revealing what they really were at critical moments in their lives as tourists among us mortals.
The scandalous part of Christmas is that God has become Immanuel without a “get out of jail free” card. God is all in.
Sometimes we Christians imagine that Jesus was a human body with a God-consciousness inside. Sure, Jesus looked human, sounded human, acted human, but inside, looking out through Jesus eyes was God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present and immortal. When Jesus seems to be limited in his understanding, we say, “Ah, well, really Jesus already knows what’s going to happen, because Jesus is God.”
If that were the case, the God of Jesus would be little more than a Hebrew version of Zeus or Aphrodite, pretending to be human but ready and able to claim divine honors in an instant.
But that wasn’t the way it was for Jesus. In Jesus God became limited in knowledge, ignorant of many things and wrong about many others. In Jesus God had only the physical, political, and economic power of a Galilean peasant. In Jesus God was not everywhere, but instead, was confined to one person who lived in one place at one time. In Jesus God was mortal. There was no way for God in Jesus to say, “Okay, I’ve had enough of this. It’s time to be God again.” God was in Jesus in the same way that we are in us. We don’t know what is going to happen and we’ll have to deal with whatever comes next. There is no magic for us just as there is no magic for God in Jesus.
The scandalous thing about Christmas is that God who is all-knowing and all-powerful, who created and sustains the universe, became one of us. God was a human infant who shivered in the cold Galilean night, who soiled and wet his diapers, who could neither understand nor use human language, who would be hungry and lonely and scared and dirty, who would need to be fed and held and comforted and changed and bathed. When he fell down, he skinned his knees. When he got sick, his mother and father worried over him and nursed him back to health.
At Christmas we remember that God has come to us as one of us. At Christmas we remember that, in order to make us whole, God has become vulnerable, and not just vulnerable, but vulnerable to us. This is scandalous.
Another thing is scandalous. Since God has come to us in the form of a human baby, every human baby now comes to us in the form of God. Every baby. Every baby that we baptize comes to us in the form of God. Every Salvadoran and Guatemalan baby who languishes in our “processing centers” while waiting for permission to escape the violence of their homeland comes to us in the form of God. Every Syrian baby, carried in its father’s arms away from the devastation of home, comes to us in the form of God. Every American baby born into poverty comes to us in the form of God. Every baby born on the many shrinking islands in the Pacific Ocean who waits for us to do our part to halt the rising of the sea comes to us in the form of God. Every baby born into a household where there are loaded and unsecured weapons comes to us in the form of God.
When God becomes human; humans become divine. This is scandalous, but now there are no excuses, for God has become Immanuel. That is the scandalous, astounding, and joyful news this night.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
In the end and despite the reforming efforts of Kings Hezekiah and Josiah, the little Kingdom of Judah fared badly. Babylon was on the rise, having overcome Assyria, its major rival in the Tigris and Euphrates valley. It tore through the little kingdoms around Judah like a hot knife through soft butter.
The King Jehoiachin of Judah, although described as a king who “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord,” nonetheless was smart enough to know when he was beaten. When Nebuchadnezzar and the armies of Babylon showed up at the gates of Jerusalem, Jehoichin surrendered the city. Jehoiachin and his family were hauled off to Babylon as prisoners. The Temple gold was looted. Jehoiachin’s uncle (renamed as Zedekiah) was installed as the new king of Judah.
Judah was permitted some measure of independence, but it wasn’t enough for Zedekiah who, like a number of Judah’s last kings seems to have believed that Egypt would come to its rescue if it got into trouble with Babylon. When Zedekiah rebelled, it turned out that Egypt had better things to do than to get involved in a war of empires over a hilly and rocky little piece of real estate.
Babylon’s armies returned. This time after a short siege Jerusalem ran out of food and the Babylonian troops quickly overran Jerusalem. They tore down the city wall. They burned the Temple and the king’s palace. Anything of value in the Temple was taken to be melted down. Zedekiah was made to watch as his sons were killed and then he was blinded so that the last thing he saw was the death of any hope for his dynasty. Then he and large numbers of the residents of Jerusalem were herded off toward Babylon.
This should have been the end of Judah. It became plain to the people of Judah, both those taken to Babylon and to those who stayed behind that the covenant as they had known it was finished. It is hard to imagine just how painful this was for them, quite apart from the physical misery they endured. Psalm 137 attempts to capture their feelings as their world fell apart.
By the rivers of Babylon–
there we sat down
and there we wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there
we hung up our harps.
How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?
No, it not be possible to sing in their new circumstances, they sang.
Grief, dismay, and rage struggled with each other to see which would win. And when they were exhausted by the fight, they found that, if the old covenant was dead, they were not. And somehow exiled Judah and its God refused to let each other go. Yes, it was Yahweh who had sent them into exile. It was Yahweh who had brought this disaster on them. And yet, it seemed that Yahweh had also decided that, if the covenant people went into exile, Yahweh would go into exile with them.
And time passed. The exiles got over the temptation of thinking that the exile was something that would be short-term, a temporary set-back on the path to restored glory. They did the whole Kübler-Ross “Stages of Grief” thing. Some of them didn’t make it. Some just gave up and died. Others gave up, turned their backs on their own story and became Babylonians. But others took Jeremiah’s advice to go on with life–to build houses, plant gardens, get married and have children–and a thriving Jewish community grew up in Babylon that lasted for a thousand years.
Parts of the Jewish community, scribes I think, had concerned themselves with gathering every scrap of Jewish text and tradition they could find. They gathered Judah’s memories and its stories. They edited the books of the Torah and gave them their final form. They debated the meaning of the Scriptures and recorded some of their debates.
And time passed. The people who could remember the fall of Jerusalem died. And time passed. And the children of the exiles grew old and died. And more time passed. And the grandchildren of the exiles grew to adulthood. No one alive had their own memories of Jerusalem, of its Temple, or of life in the little kingdom of Judah.
And yet, Jerusalem remained unforgotten. Parents told their children and their children told
their
children. They passed their memories and their stories down from generation to generation. They sang the songs that the exiles thought could never be sung again. They told stories of grief and glory, stories of defiant hope, stories that bore “subversive memories of the future,” in Walter Brueggemann’s pregnant phrase. They told how Yahweh had listened to the cry of the people and set them free from another empire. If Yahweh had done it once, could it be out of the realm of possibility that Judah could know a new liberation?
Maybe. Maybe not. But one thing was certain: three generations of people had clung to their identity as Judeans in the midst of the aggressive culture of Babylon and its gods of consumption and production. They had hung on. They would not easily be tempted away from Yahweh. God was not done with them yet, nor were they done with God. They were prepared, I think, to go on living as God’s people in Babylon or anywhere.
And then it came, like the sunrise after a devastating storm, like spring after a long, long winter. The word of a prophet came, a prophet in Isaiah’s tradition, speaking once again in Yahweh’s name to Yahweh’s people:
Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalemand cry to her
that she has served her term,
that her penalty is paid,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand
double for all her sins.
It was like getting a check in the mail from the estate of a forgotten uncle! After so long a period of bad news that the people had become grateful for no news at all, here was genuine good news, announced in the streets:
A voice cries out:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord,
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
Then the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all people shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
This wasn’t just good news; it was the reversal of over two generations of bitter experience. The people of Judah were going home, home to the unremembered and unforgotten homes of their great grandparents. The land given to escaped slaves from Egypt, was to be given back to the returning exiles from Babylon. And they weren’t going to slink back, either. The rough terrain would be a parade ground and they would march in glory, little exiled Judah, as all the world’s peoples gazed on this wonderful thing.
And then the perspective shifted from Babylon that would send the exiles, to Jerusalem that would receive them:
Get you up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good tidings;
lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings,
lift it up, do not fear;
say to the cities of Judah,
“Here is your God!”
See, the Lord God comes with might,
and God’s arm rules;
God’s reward is with God,
and God’s recompense before God.
Yahweh will feed his flock like a shepherd;
she will gather the lambs in her arms,
and carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead the mother sheep.
The exiles had left in despair, forsaken by God, squashed by Babylon, shamed in the sight of the world’s people. Judah returns to Jerusalem in hope and joy, tenderly cared for and protected by God.
In Judah’s testimony, the exile that followed deep disobedience to God was a grief that tore their world apart, swept the ground out from under their feet, and sucked the air out of their lungs. It removed any hope that they could rely on their inner character or determination to survive and recover. They were desolate, as desolate as the roads they had walked to far Babylon. It stripped them of their protective lies and fantasies. It made optimism impossible. It should have been the end of them.
But it was not the end. When all reasonable grounds for hope had been removed, the only things they were left with were the stories that gave them the audacity to hope and the hope that was born out of their audacious story-telling. Against all expectation, their hope was answered by a new intervention of Yahweh their God. The announcement was impossible. Homecoming? How could it be? And yet, there it was, the impossible presented to them as gift and summons, just in time.
We hear this text out of time. Our temptation, since we can read the Bible in any order that we want, is to assume that we can step out of or into the story as it suits us. But that isn’t the way this story works.
We followers of Jesus are facing difficult times, difficult enough times that it is not too much of a stretch to say that we are facing a kind of exile. Those who follow Jesus find that our stories and the values that our stories carry sound increasingly strange among the tales that our world is living by. We tell stories of peace and our world beats the drums for war. We tell stories of liberation and justice and our world calls those who long to be free of injustice thugs. We tell stories of God’s tender care in the world that God made and entrusted to us and the earth cries to God to be freed from exploitation and desolation. We tell stories of contentment with plenty and the world celebrates the greedy and rapacious. We tell stories of welcome and inclusion and the world builds walls to shut out strangers.
Even the name of Jesus has grown strange. Jesus, some people would have us believe, carried an AK-47, threatened his neighbors with death if they dared think or life differently with God than he thought proper, and turned away the sick and the hungry as unworthy of his help.
Our life as Christians had gotten mixed up with other identities, but now that all that threatens to come undone. We are American Christians in a world where America carries less weight than it used to. We are white in world that is willing to call us on our privilege and unconscious racism. We are Christian consumers in a world where infinite expansion has met a finite earth. We have been in and will go through times that will test us, offering us again and again the choice between being a follower of Jesus and enjoying the privileges of our other identities. Again and again we will find that we are able to be one or the other but not both. It will be hard.
We’d like to skip the hard part. The temptation that we face when we read a passage like this morning’s from Isaiah 40 is to imagine that we can do just that. We’d like to find our way to a place where we are blessed with homecoming without having to live with exile. But, it just doesn’t work that way.
There is no way past the disruption that feels like exile. But we need to hear, with the Jerusalem exiles in Babylon, that exile is not the last word. Desolation is not the end. Death is not the ultimate reality. God has an answer to each of these that will come in due course. God’s answer to exile is homecoming. God’s answer to desolation is new life springing forth. God’s answer to death is resurrection.
Whatever we have to face in the coming years and decades, we know the God who heard the cry of the oppressed and liberated them, who answered the prayers of exiles who had given up praying. If we must go into some sort of exile, God will go with us. God will not let us go. We won’t let go of God either. Together, we’ll get through what our turn of history sends us. And one day, when we have given up hoping for it, when we’ve almost managed to make a place for ourselves in a alien world, a prophet will come and say to us:
Why do you say, O Jacob,
and speak, O Israel,
“My way is hidden from the Lord,
and my right is disregarded by my God”?
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
[T]he Creator of the ends of the earth does not faint or grow weary;
God’s understanding is unsearchable.
God gives power to the faint,
and strengthens the powerless.
Even youths will faint and be weary,
and the young will fall exhausted;
but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength,
they shall mount up with wings like eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.
I am the husband of one, the father of two, the grandfather of five, the pastor of First United Methodist Church (an in-between-ish congregation in Decorah, IA), and a card-carrying progressive. I also have a PhD in Greco-Roman religions from Syracuse University. All those identities have a fun time mixing it up!
