Inaugural Address (Second Sunday after Epiphany; Luke 4:14-30; January 15, 2017)

Inaugural Address

Second Sunday after Epiphany
Luke 4:14-30
January 15, 2017

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

In case anyone has been living in a cave for the past couple of months I want to make it clear so that everyone knows that on Friday of this week the 45th president of the United States will be inaugurated. This is a ritual event of some importance, marking the long tradition of the peaceful handover of power that we enjoy in this country.

It is not quite a coincidence that our reading for this morning also contains an inauguration of a sort. In each of the four years of the Narrative Lectionary, after Christmas comes Epiphany and the Baptism of the Lord. On the first Sunday after all that the Lectionary moves to consider Jesus' life and ministry as found in the gospel. That's today, of course, and the reading from the early part of each gospel in which Jesus says in one way or another what it is he will be up to in his ministry. This is more or less what we expect from an inaugural address. Here it is in Luke's gospel:

Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee,

and news about him spread throughout the whole countryside. He taught in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
because the Lord has anointed me.
He has sent me to preach good news to the poor,
to proclaim release to the prisoners
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to liberate the oppressed,
and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the synagogue assistant, and sat down. Every eye in the synagogue was fixed on him. He began to explain to them, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled just as you heard it.”

Jesus went to Nazareth, where he had been raised. On the Sabbath he went to the synagogue as he normally did and stood up to read. The synagogue assistant gave him the scroll from the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

Everyone was raving about Jesus, so impressed were they by the gracious words flowing from his lips. They said, “This is Joseph’s son, isn’t it?”

Then Jesus said to them, “Undoubtedly, you will quote this saying to me: ‘Doctor, heal yourself. Do here in your hometown what we’ve heard you did in Capernaum.’” He said, “I assure you that no prophet is welcome in the prophet’s hometown. And I can assure you that there were many widows in Israel during Elijah’s time, when it didn’t rain for three and a half years and there was a great food shortage in the land. Yet Elijah was sent to none of them but only to a widow in the city of Zarephath in the region of Sidon. There were also many persons with skin diseases in Israel during the time of the prophet Elisha, but none of them were cleansed. Instead, Naaman the Syrian was cleansed.”

When they heard this, everyone in the synagogue was filled with anger. They rose up and ran him out of town. They led him to the crest of the hill on which their town had been built so that they could throw him off the cliff. But he passed through the crowd and went on his way.

L: The word of God for the people of God.

P: Thanks be to God!

Well, that inauguration didn't go quite as well as Jesus hoped, although, to be fair, it does sound as if he picked a fight. I mean, they were "impressed by his gracious words" and he had them in the palm of his hand right up until he reminded them that God was not bound by their insider status and was, if their experience was anything to go by, just as likely to be gracious to outsiders. It got ugly there for a while. The Secret Service was asleep on the job. The crowd tried to throw him off a cliff. Jesus should have quit while he was ahead.

But that, really, is a good summary of the whole gospel: Jesus comes to announce good news. Well, really, he preaches Jubilee, on which more in a moment. Jubilee and its call for restorative justice are greeted with joy and with murderous rage. But, in the end, those who seek to kill him are frustrated and Jesus is free.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, to liberate the oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Jesus might as well be blowing a shofar to announce the Year of Jubilee. In the life of God's people imagined by the Torah, there is a recognition that any society will get out of balance. Some people will amass wealth; others will slip into poverty and even destitution. Such a thing is an affront to God. So the Torah provides a remedy: Every fifty years slaves are set free; fields are returned to their owners; debts are forgiven. Jubilee is a fresh start characterized by restoration and return.

Restoration and return takes a lot of forms among us. When Carol and I were just starting out and we were too poor to afford a mechanic, I was in charge of regular auto maintenance. I had my manuals and my tools and I took it on. Regular tune-ups were a must for our little '67 VW Beetle. A tune-up is all about restoring some basic things and returning them to their optimal operating condition. I filed off any deposits on the points and reset the proper gap. I replaced the spark plugs and replaced the oil. I--and this was most important--reset the gap on the intake and exhaust valves. Reset, return, restore--these are the key words in a tune-up.

One of my jobs at home is washing the evening dishes. I've never liked washing dishes. I didn't when I was growing up. I still don't. I used to resent having to do it. Not so long ago I realized that on the average washing the evening dishes takes me seven minutes. Seven minutes and the kitchen is ready for the next day. Reset, restored, and returned so that it is ready for use the next morning.

A car engine, especially like the little air-cooled VW engine, or a kitchen are pretty simple and are pretty easy to restore and return. A human society is more complex, but ancient Israel thought it was at least worth the effort or, as some believe, it was at least worth thinking about. They recognized the need for an occasional reset, for a return to a time in Israel when, as the prophet Micah dreamed, "All [sat] underneath their own grapevines, under their own fig trees." Those who had had to sell their land to raise money to survive a crisis, got their land back during the Jubilee. Those who had been sold into slavery to raise money for a family to survive a disaster, were freed and could return to their homes. The whole economy and the culture that it supported were restored and returned.

This is an ambitious policy. We don't know for certain that this Jubilee was ever actually practiced. It would certainly have been resisted by the one percent who stood to lose the most with the forgiveness of debts. Even so, Jubilee is a bold vision.

But III Isaiah, as scholars know him, had a vision that surpassed even that daring dream. He envisioned not only a cancellation of debts, a return of alienated land, and release from slavery.He imagined the whole of creation--not just human society--restored, reset, and returned to brand new. It would not just be good news for the poor, healing for the brokenhearted, release for the captives, and liberation for the oppressed. It would even mean recovery of sight for the blind and even resurrection for the dead. This was III Isaiah's vision and it was Jesus' vision, too. This is the substance of Jesus' inaugural address.We are Jesus followers. We embrace Jesus' vision for our world. We are co-dreamers with him of God's dream. Like Jesus, though, we have our own history and context. We have been shaped by these things.

We have spent a good deal of time and no little effort thinking about these things, recognizing that our history and context have shaped our values as a congregation. We have recognized some core values and we have affirmed them not only in front of each other, but even in front of the District Superintendent. When our Charge Conference met in November we affirmed five core values. Now, that's not just us doing something. The District Superintendent represented the bishop, the Annual Conference, and the United Methodist connection. And I'll tell you, the connection wants to know if you're serious about what you said.

So I've framed a responsive reading that will give you a chance to affirm what you have said and to say if you mean it. If you’d like, won't you please stand and join with me as we read responsively?

L: The values that lie at the heart of our shared life are God’s gift to us and the gift that God calls us to give to our world. I ask you to affirm that gift and call. As a congregation you value your history and roots in the community and the United Methodist tradition:

P: We will be faithful to our heritage by celebrating our past and committing ourselves to the mission and ministry to which it calls us.

L: As a congregation you value a practical theology:

P: We commit ourselves to seeking common ground, honoring differing opinions, and insisting that theology lead us to ever-deepening love for God and our neighbors.

L: As a congregation you value meaningful worship:

P: We will worship together prepared to give our best gifts and our very selves to the God who takes us, blesses us, breaks open our lives, and gives us to the world that God’s dream for the world may be fulfilled.

L: As a congregation you value being a community made of many generations:

P: We will value each person of every age group, foster relationships among people of different generations, and recognize and celebrate the gifts for ministry of every age-level.

L: As a congregation you value being a friendly, welcoming, and supportive community of faith:

P: We will practice a hospitality that requires us to place loving and welcoming others above our own comfort and ease.

L: These are high aspirations. How will you live them out?

P: We will encourage each other to go beyond what we have been by encouraging each other to learn new ways of loving God and our neighbors, by supporting each other when our actions fall short of our hopes, and by praying for ourselves and each other that God’s dream may become reality in and through us. Amen.

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.

Catching People (3rd Sunday after the Epiphany; Luke 5:1-11; January 22, 2017)

3^rd Sunday after the Epiphany – C

Luke 5:1-11

January 22, 2017

Catching People

Rev. John Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, IA

I remember my first time in the German Alps. I was in the service and was attending a training event at the Army’s retreat center in Berchtesgaden. The valley is dominated by the mountains around it and especially by the Jenner. I was struck by the fact that while the Jenner was always recognizable, every view presented in essence a different mountain. Perspective matters. Change the perspective and you get a different view of things.

The same is true of a story like the one that we just heard. There are lots of positions that we can occupy within the story. We could stand in the position of Jesus, or Simon or one of the other fishermen, or a random person in the crowd. There is a certain pressure inside of any story to take the position of the narrator. I tend to resist any pressure that I notice. I’ve been called contrary.

Something that every reader must do—and preachers are readers before they are anything else—is to decide which of the possible positions in the story to occupy. I’ve been trying to occupy Simon’s place.

Simon was a fisherman. But he wasn’t any kind of fisherman that we’re familiar with. He wasn’t a fly fisherman, standing in his waders in the middle of a mountain stream, engaged in a battle of wits with a wary trout. He wasn’t the kind of bass fisherman that I’ve seen on those fishing channels who catch fish on their lures dipped in who-knows-what and seem to hook them faster than they can reel them in.

He wasn’t the kind of fisherman I used to be who spends all day on the water and comes home with nothing to show for it but a sunburn and stories of the one that got away.

He wasn’t like the country preacher who used to spend a good deal of his sermon-writing time sitting on a dock on the river with a fishing pole in his hand. His congregation didn’t mind if he went fishing—after all, they weren’t paying him enough to live on anyway. But they would have objected if he spent time sitting and staring off into space. So he sat and thought and mulled over stories and ideas and stared off into space, but he did it with an alibi in his hand. Sometimes he even baited the hook.

Simon wasn’t a sport fisherman. Sport fishing as we know it was invented by the British aristocracy in the eighteenth century. Simon was not a member of anybody’s aristocracy. Simon was a peasant without any land who had partnered up with James and John, Zebedee’s boys, to work the Lake of Galilee instead of the rocky soil of the Galilean countryside.

It wasn’t much of a lake. It was just a little over seven miles across and thirteen miles long. There were fish, but they weren’t free for the catching. The fish in the lakes of the Roman Empire belonged to the Empire and it was not about to give them away. The Empire delegated the right to fish to the governors and client kings, like Herod Antipas, who paid for the privilege with tribute money and goods. Herod in turn contracted with chief tax collectors who oversaw the whole apparatus for squeezing the peasant classes of every surplus they generated. Fishing families formed syndicates—Simon and the Zebedee boys were one such—who arranged with a broker for a lease in exchange for money and a percentage of the catch. They in turn sold their fish to processors who also had to acquire licenses and pay money and a percentage of the processed fish. It was quite a racket and we can say with certainty that it was not arranged for the benefit and profit of Simon and his partners. Simon and his partners were cogs in the imperial machinery for extracting wealth from its territories.¹

But the cogs didn’t have a whole lot of choice. Peasants who had lost their land had very few resources. And it seemed that every year there were more and more displaced peasants. The land itself was producing less food, so there was a great deal of pressure on other sources. The Lake of Galilee was badly over-fished. The only thing that kept it from being emptied entirely was the inefficient nature of the technology used for fishing.

Simon and James and John used casting nets. Nets like they used are still in use in some places in the world. The nets are usually circular and weighted around the edges. The fisherman holds on to one edge and throws the net so that it covers the surface of the water. The net sinks into the water and then the fisherman hauls it back into the boat (or into more shallow water) and sorts out whatever has been snared in the net. Then he repeats the process. All night long. Simon’s syndicate at least had boats to use, so they could cover more of the lake in a night’s fishing.

At dawn they would return to land, hauling the boats up on the shore. They would sell their fish—if they had caught any—pay off the tax collector, repair their nets, and perform any needed maintenance on their boats. Then at mid-day or so they would sleep to get ready for the next night’s work. It was better than starvation, but not always by much.

It had been one of those nights when the nets brought up nothing that could be eaten or sold. Simon was discouraged, hungry and exhausted. He was like that too many mornings, but there was no help for it. It was that, becoming a bandit, or the slow starvation of the day laborer. Too many more mornings like this one and those choices might start to look better.

As Simon sat mending his nets, along came a crowd. They were following and pressing in on a wandering preacher/wonder-worker. This in itself was not all that unusual. These traveling preachers broke the monotony of peasant life. People were usually willing to share what little surplus they had managed to hide from the landowners and their agents. And, if sometimes when they performed their cures sick people actually got better, so much the better. This time it was Jesus, who had come to Simon’s town Capernaum after the near-lynching in Nazareth. Jesus had stayed with Simon and had healed Simon’s mother-in-law.

Jesus was being pressed by the crowd who wanted to hear him preach. So Jesus, whom Simon recognized certainly, but may not have known all that well, commandeered his boat and the exhausted Simon with it, so that Jesus would have a place to sit and be heard by the crowd.

When he had finished, he offered payment: he told Simon to put out into deeper water and let down his nets.

I can just imagine how well this suggestion was received. Have you ever been doing something that you know how to do, that you may even have some expertise in, and have someone look over your shoulder and tell how it ought to be done? I think maybe the narrator missed the tone of Simon’s answer to Jesus. I think it sounded more like this: “Fine. Whatever. We’ve fished this stupid lake all night long. There is nothing in it. But you’re the expert. So I’ll give it one more try on the strength of your years of experience at doing my job.”

And don’t you just hate it when the amateur with the advice turns out to be right? I’m pretty sure Simon did. But he reacted as a fisherman forced to deal with a catch far larger than he was prepared for. There were so many fish that it was impossible to lift the net out of the water without breaking it, so he called his partners to help. Even so, the catch threatened to sink both boats. After a night of fruitless labor, maybe it was just all too much.

Simon’s didn’t just react to being “shown up” by a rank amateur, nor simply to the huge catch. He reacted as someone who is in the presence of something uncanny, something not just extraordinary, but supernatural. With the hair on the back of his neck raised and overwhelmed with awe, he thought only to make it stop.

Simon was little different from us in this. He believed in God. He was a good Jew, as good a Jew as he could be, given the life he lived. It is one thing to tell the stories of God’s mighty deeds in the past, to pray for a good catch and safe night as they shoved off from shore, or to pray for his family and their health. There was the world of faith, with its stories and its marvels, and there was the ordinary world in which he was a struggling fisherman trying to support himself and his family. The two worlds may border on one another, but here, this morning, the world of marvels had invaded his working world. It was too much.

“Go away from me, Master! I am a sinner.” It was a good excuse, a reasonable excuse. He was clearly in the presence of the Holy. Just what that meant, he didn’t know, but he knew it when he saw it. And he knew what he was. And there was just no way that the world of the Holy was going to fit into his world, or he into it. Like I say, it was a reasonable excuse.

But the Holy is often not very reasonable. It does not respect the boundaries we have set up for it. We construct our theories about the life we live. We construct our theories about who or what God is. And then, when we’ve got it figured out, when it makes sense and we’re comfortable with the result, the God we think we’ve defined and bounded and limited turns out to be alive and not at all bound to rules we have made. If we are, like Simon, unfortunate enough to be confronted with the living God, we are likely to find ourselves undone, unmade, dissolved.

We just want it to stop. And yet we don’t. We just want to go back to our lives. And we pray that we won’t have to do that. This is what it is like to stand before what Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum², “the tremendous mystery,” that threatens to undo us but before which we stand, fascinated, frozen in place, unable to move. Simon knew that he could not move, so he told Jesus to go, before his life was unmade. But Jesus paid no attention to him.

In spite of that it turned out that Simon was not unmade, not entirely at any rate. His former life with its struggles, its little triumphs and failures, was not entirely dissolved. He would still be a fisherman. But instead of catching fish, he would catch people.

What would that mean? He had no way of knowing; only time would tell. Simon was not given to brilliant flashes of insight. He was not given his nickname, Peter, “Rocky,” on account of his quick wit. There were some clues, though, that reflecting on his life years later he began to understand. There are realities that anyone who answers Jesus’ call to discipleship must reckon with, realities that not a one of us can avoid, try as we may.

The first is this: following Jesus means that we have to move away from the safety of the shallows near the shoreline into deep waters. Following Jesus is risky. That’s as true for us now as it was for Simon then. It’s true for individuals and it’s also true for congregations. We can be safe or we can follow Jesus, but we can’t do both.

The second reality has to do with some things that seem counter-intuitive. Simon had to let down his nets into water he was certain contained no fish at all. He could have invoked the eight words that have killed so many good ideas in the church: “We tried it once and it didn’t work.” But he didn’t. He did the counter-intuitive thing. We face the need to do some counter-intuitive things, too. Any church that seeks its own survival is doomed. A church thrives by forgetting itself and serving the world in which it is placed. A church is alive to the extent that it gives its life away.

And the third reality, and maybe the hardest to accept, is that, having given up the safety of the shallows and having embraced an invitation to a counter-intuitive act, Simon was overwhelmed by the result. Overwhelmed all the more because he knew that it wasn’t really any of his doing and he could claim no credit. These were not repeatable results and they were not a way to get rich in the fishing business.

When I go to clergy meetings and Cokesbury is there with a book display, I always go looking to see what they have. Truth to tell, I seldom buy much these days. I have vast reserves of unread books. As Jill Sanders, a colleague of mine says, “I am not so much well-read as well-bought.” As I look through the books I am often dismayed at the number of “how to” titles. How to turn around a church’s financial struggle. How to start a small group ministry. How to start a new church. How to have a successful building program.

My colleagues are struggling with real problems and they think they want a new set of techniques, some off-the-shelf program that will meet their need, or some new technology that will make this church thing “work.” Cokesbury is more than willing to sell them books with titles that seem to fit the bill, written by people who did it once somewhere and claim to have bottled just the magic elixir that the church needs. “Step right up here, folks. Let me introduce you to the latest wonder drug, a potion so powerful it will nearly raise the dead!”

But Simon already knew how to fish: technique wasn’t the issue. He knew nets and boats and he knew the lake: there is no magic answer.

There is no magic answer for us, either. Not for ourselves as individuals and the problems that we have. Not for our congregation and the challenges that we face. Not for our planet and crises it faces. No answers are to be found in new techniques or packaged programs. No, what we have is what Simon Peter had: we have the stuff already on hand, we have an over-fished lake, we have a Jesus who invites us to engage in counter-intuitive deeds, and we have a God who acts to bless us in ways we can neither prevent nor control.

“Do not be afraid,” says Jesus, “from now on you will be catching people.” And we left everything and followed him.

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.

1 K. C. Hanson, "The Galilean Fishing Economy and the Jesus Tradition," Biblical Theological Bulletin 27(1997).

2 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, trans. John W. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1950).

Let Your Servant Go in Peace (1st Sunday after Christmas / The Presentation; Luke 2:21-38; January 1, 2016)

Let Your Servant Go in Peace

1st Sunday after Christmas / The Presentation 

Luke 2:21-38 

January 1, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

Today, of course, is New Year's Day. We all know that. But we also know that it's not the beginning of the Church year. New Year's Day owes more to the ancient Romans than it does to the ancient Church. The Christian New Year happens on the first Sunday of Advent. The Church has its own day today.

In the Western tradition of which are a part today is the Festival of the Presentation. Today was picked for that because of Luke's Gospel where, at the beginning of our lesson, it says, "When eight days had passed, Jesus parents circumcised him and gave him the name Jesus." When eight days had passed after Jesus' birth--and here as in other places "when eight days had passed" means simply "a week later"--Mary and Joseph presented Jesus in the Temple and there made the offering for him as their first-born boy. They offered two pigeons as an offering.

In the Torah offerings were normally more substantial than that--a yearling calf or ram--but a provision was made for the poor who could not afford such an expensive sacrifice that they could offer two pigeons or turtledoves instead. This doesn't mean that Mary and Joseph were poor, since the exception had become the rule by the time of Jesus. It does mean, though, that our reading is giving a special emphasis to the theme of the poor.

In Mary's song, for example, in the first chapter, we have the theme this way: "[God] has pulled down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed." Simeon and Anna who figure in our reading show the Temple-centered piety that was favored by people who were known as "God's poor." Having no other way of staying alive--they were poor--they leaned entirely on God's mercy--they were God's poor.

The Gospel of Luke, like the other gospels, the New Testament, and, indeed, the entire Bible, is relentlessly political. Our reading adds to this that the politics is a class politics that notices that the poor and the rich do not have the same interests or aspirations.

So, today being the Festival of the Presentation, we hear from a part of Luke that we often neglect, since the Presentation only falls on a Sunday once every seven years or so and since we have more often observed Epiphany, which actually falls on January 6th, on the first Sunday after Christmas, and we flip over to Matthew and the magi.

Not today. Not this year. Today we have Joseph and Mary, Jesus' pious parents, whom we would have to consider, at least loosely, to be among "God's poor," doing what ought to be done for Jesus. And they are met on the Temple grounds first by Simeon--whose interaction with the holy family is described in detail--and second by Anna. Both are important.

Anna was a widow who our translation says had been married for seven years and then widowed. She was either unable or unwilling to marry again and so became a part of the community of people who lived in or very near the Temple grounds. She devoted her days to fasting and prayer. For more than sixty years--from about the age of nineteen or twenty to the age of eight-four--she lived this life of devotion.

Simeon was man who had been blessed (or cursed) with the promise that he would not die until he had seen the Christ. We may take this as a blessing, that is, that he would see the Messiah before he died. Or we may see this as a curse, that is, that he would not be allowed to die no matter how tired he became of living, until he had seen Christ. His "song" leans toward the second reading.

Simeon and Anna are both to be found among those who were "looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem [or Israel]." We hear the word redemption and we immediately think that it must have something to do with sin being forgiven or Jesus' death on the cross, but those are unlikely readings here. Redemption is, first and foremost, a social, not a religious, event. To redeem means to buy back, especially to buy back from slavery, to pay for a slave with the purpose of then setting them free. In this case what is being redeemed is Jerusalem or Israel.

How is Jerusalem in slavery? It lives under the heel of the Romans with the collaboration of the elite of Jerusalem: the high priests of the Temple and the ruling Council. What would it mean for Jerusalem to be redeemed, to be bought back and set free? It would mean ridding Jerusalem of the Romans and of the rich ruling Jewish families, too. It would mean that the powerful would be pulled down from their thrones, that the lowly would be lifted up, that the hungry would be filled with good things, and the rich would be sent away empty-handed. In a word the redemption of Jerusalem would mean justice.

I know that justice, especially political and social justice, is for some Christians, only a minor theme, if a theme at all of the good news. For better or worse, justice looms large for me as the center of God's dream and of the good news that proclaims that dream. Some grow weary of hearing about justice. I sometimes grow weary of preaching it. But, as I said to a friend of mine not too long ago, if you can find me a non-political Bible, I will gladly preach it. But I haven't found one yet. As the layers of self-help, piety, and moral advice have fallen away from the text under the scrutiny of close reading, I have found that the theme at the center of the Bible's story is the theme of social, economic, and political justice.

And justice always cuts in two directions: it favors some and disfavors others. That disfavoring of some is why some people hated Jesus and everything he stood for and, when they had the chance, they arranged for his judicial murder. But it's also why "God's poor" embraced so gladly the coming of the one who would do justice. Justice was the hope of "God's poor," the hope shared by Simeon, Anna, Mary, and the unnamed others to whom Anna spoke when she spoke about Jesus. Jesus, in ways that aren't quite named in the first two chapters, but that are spelled out in the rest of Luke, fulfills that hope for justice: "Now, master, let your servant go in peace, according to your word, because my eyes have seen your salvation. You prepared this salvation in the presence of all peoples. It's a light for revelation to the Gentiles and a glory for your people Israel."

These few words have become part of the bedtime prayers of the Church as Zachariah's Song and Mary's Song have become part of the morning and evening prayers. As each day ends, before surrendering to sleep, the Church looks back at the day and claims that in some place and at some time during that day, God's justice has been revealed, the hungry have been fed, the rich have been sent away empty-handed, the lowly have been lifted up, and the powerful have been pulled down from their thrones.

But it's also a prayer that yearns for far more than it has witnessed. Justice is done somewhere everyday. But injustice is done in far too many places and far too often. Like the prayer that Jesus taught us, it is has largely gone unanswered.

But even in the unanswering, there is movement that is taking place. Simeon says, "This boy is assigned to be the cause of the falling and rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that generates opposition so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed." I am struck these days by the variety of things that are claimed for Jesus. Or perhaps it would be better to say that I am struck by the variety of positions for which it is claimed that Jesus is the sponsor. For some Jesus is the one who defends straight, white, English-speaking cultural power from all threats: from LGBTQ folk whose loves are claimed to be neither healthy nor holy; from African Americans whose lives only count for as much as three-fifths of a white life; from Spanish-speaking masses tired of huddling in poverty from the violence we have exported to their teeming shores, and, from those who, praying to God in Arabic, discovered a world-threatening demand for justice in the words of the Quran. For others, placing themselves in the tradition of Simeon, Anna, and Jesus' mother, Jesus is the bringer of justice, the proclaimer of a peace that can only be built on justice, the one who has demonstrated once and for all just how futile all violence is by suffering its worst under Roman rule and scorning its power to silence by rising from the dead.

The strands of American Christianity are being teased apart in our day. Increasingly, there are only two choices. The next few years will provide a partial demonstration of what one choice looks like, put into action. The next few years will reveal the inner thoughts of many. And they will pierce our hearts as well.

So what do we do? Well, we can pay attention. There are people who are proclaiming, "Look! There he is!" people who preach a Jesus who has nothing at all to do with the Jesus of our morning's reading. They say that they are Christians, and that may be true. But they cannot be Jesus-followers, because their values are greed, privilege and disdain for anyone who is not like them, the very opposite of the values that Jesus both preached and lived. They claim to love Jesus so they can be free to hate their neighbors. They claim to give themselves to Jesus so they claw their way to power and wealth. Their religion is a lie. The next few years will lay that lie bare. We need to keep our eyes open and not be taken in or confused by a Jesus label.

So what do we do? We can pray. We can pray these old unanswered prayers and sing these only-partially fulfilled songs. We can pray the yearning in our hearts for the completion of what is only half-finished. We can pray the Lord's Prayer, every day, until God answers it. Just as a few weeks ago Jeremiah was told to get another scroll, and another, until the powers that be would listen to what was written on them, so we can pray until God listens and answers, until the day comes when, with more of a sense of fulfillment than Simeon had, we may sing, “Now, master, let your servant go in peace, according to your word, because my eyes have seen your salvation.”

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.

And Lived Among Us (Christmas Day; John 1:1-14; December 25, 2016)

And Lived Among Us

Christmas Day 

John 1:1-14

December 25, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

First United Methodist Church

Decorah, Iowa

This is a rare event: United Methodists worshiping on Christmas Day. Lutherans do it every year. They're used to it. We're not. We do up Christmas Eve in style: candlelight, preaching, Communion. It's all there. But when the Christmas Eve services are done, we Methodists breathe a sigh of relief, especially us Methodist preachers.

On Christmas we can sleep in a little, unless, of course, if we have young children at home. We can have Christmas at home and resemble, at least for the day, other members of the church. Having Christmases without any obligation except to be with our families is reason enough to be a Methodist instead of a Lutheran. But one in seven years (on the average) throws us a curve: Christmas falls on a Sunday. We can cancel church on account of snow or dangerous cold, but we can hardly cancel it on account of Christmas. So here we are, Methodists worshiping on Christmas.

Of course, not all of us are here. It's some folks' turn to visit the out of town relatives for Christmas, so they're gone. Others were here last evening and figure they've done their church duty for the weekend, so they're sitting this morning out. So you who are here are the people who take your religion seriously. You're the hardcore church folks.

So what does the Lectionary Committee serve up as the lesson for today? Luke and the shepherds? Matthew and the magi? No! The Prologue of John: "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." Not much of a story there. It's hard to imagine squeezing that into a children's pageant.

The Prologue of John is tough slogging. As my first New Testament professor liked to say, "The words are easy; it's the sentences that are hard." And they are. What are they doing there, anyway?

At least Matthew and Luke begin with stories. John has theology served straight: "Everything came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing came into being." My theory is that the Lectionary Committee knew that only the really dedicated Methodists were going to be in church this morning, so they figured we could handle it. But it doesn’t improve the odds of our coming back.

Well, we're here and this is our text. Let's see what we have.

Oddly, John's prologue sets out to accomplish the same task that the birth stories do in Matthew and Luke. This may surprise you, but the birth stories in those two gospels bear traces of being after-thoughts, the product of a conscious decision on the part of the writers to include them. Their source, Mark's gospel, doesn't have any birth stories, proof that it's possible to tell the gospel without them. If we took a pair scissors to Matthew and Luke, we could cut out the birth stories and you would never notice that they were missing. So why were they included?

For the ancients "the boy is the father of the man." That is, everything that a man did was foreshadowed in his childhood. Character was thought to emerge early. In the case of important men--men like kings, conquerors, and traitors--character was set even before birth. Great men were fated and the signs of that fate could be read in the things that they did and the things that happened to them when they were children. Birth and childhood stories were included in biographies to reveal the character and fate that governed a man's life. So, the birth stories in Luke and Matthew are there to introduce the main themes of Jesus' life and ministry and to tell his story in very compact form.

And that's pretty much what John is doing in his prologue: "The light came to his own people, and his own people didn't welcome him." It's a bit of an overstatement, but it introduces even before Jesus comes on the scene the theme of Jewish rejection of Jesus. As I say, it's a bit of an overstatement, well, more than a bit, because the Jews did not reject Jesus. It was more complicated than that. Some did. Some did not. Most were probably not convinced one way or another. But John's community has just broken with its own Jewish roots. It is in pain and it isn't thinking straight.

Little of this is stated straight out. It has to be read in the cracks in the text, in the things that aren't said, and in the way that things are framed. If we don't look there, we get carried away by the language of John's gospel. It's lofty and a little disconnected with real life. Of course, if real life is painful, it's no wonder John shies away from it a little.

This wasn't uncommon in the ancient world. There were whole movements of people who were trying to get as far away as possible from real life as it was lived in the material world. The material world is messy. There are things you can bump into in the material world and it hurts when you do that. There are bodies in the material world, bodies that wear out, get sick and eventually die. And in the meantime, they are awkward. I mean, how many of us really feel at home in our bodies? And bodies produce noises and smells.

In the material world, you have to work. You have to have a job. When you have a job, you always have some sort of boss. You have to do what they tell you to do, because if you don't, you'll lose your job. And then you won't have money to pay for a place to live and the car that you need to drive to your job so you can make the money you need to pay off your car loan.

In the material world, there is violence. Sometimes it's the micro-violence of snide comments and rudelooks. Sometimes it's the violence of a city under siege or Christmas shoppers mowed down by a terrorist with truck.

In the material world, there is politics. I am told that politics has no place in church, still less in church on Christmas morning. But I have found in the last few years that if by politics we mean the process of arranging power, of deciding who will have it and who won't, then politics is hard to avoid. That's especially true at Christmas. The birth stories about Jesus are some of the most political texts in a relentlessly political Bible.

So there is this messy, smelly, chaotic and painful world that we live in. And by that I don't mean that we just hang around. No, we're in it up to our eyeballs. We are involved in it. We are implicated in it. We are a part of it.

Christmas is a time when we'd like to forget all that, forget the mess at home, the decorations that never got put up, the wrapping paper and ribbons littering the floor, the unwashed dishes and unfinished Christmas cookies in the kitchen, and especially we'd to forget about how much Christmas costs. We'd like to forget the political messes in Washington and Des Moines.

We'd like to simply bask in the warm glow of Christmases past and present. We'd like to hear a story about a cute little baby, preferably one who doesn't cry or need his diaper changed.

And then we read John's prologue and we come to these words: "The Word became flesh and made his home among us." Verbum caro factum est. The Word became flesh. God's thought, God's message, God's dream became flesh. Not took on, hid within, or pretended to be. Became flesh, a part of the messy, smelly, chaotic and painful world that we live in. The very stuff we try to avoid, God is running toward.

And that, it turns out, is what Christmas is about. It's about God becoming a part of our world, subject to everything that we are subject to. Christmas is about God becoming like us. It is about God embracing and taking on the conditions of our life for our sake. In SisterParish we have an expression: "Su lucha es mi lucha. Your struggle is my struggle." It's a statement of commitment to solidarity.

At Christmas, God tells us, "Su lucha es me lucha. Your struggle is my struggle." God has committed God's self. After Christmas it's too late to take it back. That's the good news of Christmas, the good news of a Christmas that falls on a Sunday.

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.

Daybreak (Christmas Eve; Luke 2:1-20; December 24, 2016)

Daybreak

Christmas Eve
Luke 2:1-20
December 24, 2016

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

Night has fallen, but it is daybreak.

Shepherds were keeping watch in the fields above Bethlehem. It was night, but we aren't told what time of night. Was the long night still ahead of them? Or did this happen during the small hours, when the darkness seems to last forever? We aren't told, so we aren't sure just what to imagine when the darkness was shattered by the appearance of God's angel attended by God's glory. God's glory shone. It was daybreak while still in the watches of the night.

We might take this for a figure, since their nighttime was not the only absence of light. The chapter in fact began with nightfall. "In those days Caesar Augustus..." Octavian was on the imperial throne, all the while pretending that it wasn't really an emperor's throne, pretending that he was restoring the Roman Republic to its former self, making Rome great again. Rome had just gone through a difficult time. Julius had been assassinated and the Republic plunged into civil war. Octavian came to power promising the restoration of family values, the preservation of the privileges of the one percent, and the administration of peace (or at least the absence of war). As Augustus, which was a title rather than a name, he delivered on his promises.

Of course the subject peoples had to pay. They paid in taxes and they paid in the loss of freedom. Not content with making a registry of one religion or ethnic group, singled out and blamed for Rome's troubles, Augustus registered them all. He ordered everyone to their ancestral city, which, says Luke, is how Jesus, a Nazarene, had come to be born in Bethlehem in the land of Judah. Augustus could order people to go anywhere and do anything. He could do as he liked. He was Caesar.

It was nightfall in Judah, but on the hills above the town, daybreak had come. Don't be afraid, the angels said. Too late; they were already afraid and it was going to get worse before it got better.

"Look," the angel continued. "I bring good news to you--wonderful, joyous news for all people. Your savior is born today in David's city." Augustus called himself "savior," but God's angel says that the savior of all people isn't Augustus; it's a child born in the city of David the King. After the nightfall in Judea, brought to them courtesy of Augustus, comes news of daybreak, delivered by God's angel.

Night has fallen, but it is daybreak.

Today is the beginning of Hanukkah. It comes every year at about this time, but not very often does it begin on Christmas Eve. The first day of Hanukkah. began at sundown, just a little while ago. Hanukkah. is a minor Jewish festival. Only in North American is it a really big deal, I guess because Jewish parents here don't want their kids to feel like they've missed on all the fun that Christian kids have at Christmas.

Minor or not, Hanukkah. is a special commemoration. It remembers a dark time in Judah's story, a few generations before Jesus' time. After Alexander the Great died and the territory that he conquered was split up among his generals, Jews found themselves in disputed territory between two of those Greek kingdoms. One of the kings, Antiochus IV, who fancied himself a revelation of the gods and nicknamed himself "Epiphanes," declared that he must be given divine honors in every place. Jews refused, so Antiochus had the Temple defiled not only by setting up an image of himself, but by having a pig sacrificed on the altar.

Jews rose up in rebellion and won their independence. They wanted to celebrate and give thanks to God for their freedom, but the Temple was defiled. There was a process for purifying the Temple that required eight days to complete. This was the good news. The bad news was that there was no olive oil, not enough anyway to light a lamp for the eight days. A scramble found just enough to light the lamp for a single day. But, miraculously, the single day's supply of oil kept the lamps lit for eight days and the Temple was cleansed and ready for worship once again. Hanukkah remembers these events with eight days of celebration and the lighting, on successive nights, of the candles on the menorah.

In the darkness of Judah's nightfall, the light of the menorah brought daybreak.

Night has fallen, but it is daybreak.

It does seem awfully dark these days. We could really use news of daybreak. It has come before, this news, to ancient Jews and Bethlehem shepherds. Will it come again, this news?

The days are short this time of year and the nights are long. For some of us night does not bring welcomed rest, but the torment of sleeplessness, the struggle of anxious worry or remembered pain. Is there news of daybreak?

In the city of Aleppo more than a hundred thousand civilians have been caught between opposing forces. No one seems to be able to sort it all out. Are there good guys and bad guys there? I don't know. There are victims, though. The city of Aleppo has fallen, but the long night of their suffering goes on. Is there news of daybreak?

The Standing Rock Sioux have achieved a remarkable, if temporary, victory in their struggle to prevent the building of a crude oil pipeline in dangerous proximity to their sources of water. They are still keeping vigil, though, because they know that changing events may reverse their gains. In the long night of their watchfulness, is there news of daybreak?

In recent months racism has gone mainstream, fear of foreigners has become popular, suspicion of Muslims has become acceptable, and harassment of LGBTQ folks has become commonplace. It is a dangerous time for us as a people. Fear and anger beckon us to enter a nightmare, a bad dream that is all too real for the countless folks who haven't the power to protect themselves. When nightfall beckons, is there news of daybreak?

I wish I could answer those questions with an easy and confident yes, but I am at the place where any affirmative answer will not be based on the facts, but on hope that arises when all other forms of resistance have failed. So, I don't know the answer to those questions. But I do know this.

In little churches in northeast Iowa; in churches in the broken, urban centers of our own country; in churches in Syria and North Dakota; and in churches all over the world, the darkness has been shattered. Candles have been lit, pathetic weak little flickering flames. They seem a pitiful attempt to push back the darkness. One by one, they are easy to blow out, cover up, extinguish. But taken together, taken together, they are light shining in the darkness and I will say this: the darkness has not overcome it yet!

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.