A Place to Begin to Heal (Second Sunday after Epiphany; John 2:13-25; January 21, 2018)

A Place to Begin to Heal

Second Sunday after Epiphany
John 2:13-25
January 21, 2018

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

John's Gospel spends a lot of time in Jerusalem. Luke gets there three times: once at Jesus' birth, once when he was twelve, and then as an adult for the last few days of his ministry. Mark and Matthew only tell of one visit: for Jesus' last days. John, on the other had, even though it begins the story part of the story with Jesus as an adult, has Jesus in Jerusalem four times as an adult: here during Passover, in chapter five during an unnamed festival, in chapter ten during Hannukah, and once again during Passover beginning in chapter ten.

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke--together called the Synoptic gospels because they can be "viewed together"--Jesus goes to Jerusalem in order to beard the lion in its own den. Jerusalem is the center of everything that Jesus is opposing and he conducts his ministry there to highlight the stark differences between the version of God's dream that he preaches and what he views as its theological perversion of it in the center of political and religious power. In other words he goes to Jerusalem to pick a fight.

Not so much in John. Oh, there is conflict, but the stories lack the feel of deliberate confrontation with the powers that be. You will certainly feel free to disagree with me, but the conflict that occurs seems to me to be more spontaneous on Jesus' part, as if Jesus went to the Temple for other reasons and then found what was happening too egregious not to confront. His objection to what he saw is that the practice of exchanging currency and selling animals for offerings should not be happening within the Temple complex at all, since that mixes business and religion.

So Jesus started overturning the tables and booths. He scattered the coins. He made a whip of ropes and used it to drive out the merchants and the sheep and cattle. Imagine the scene with tables upset, cattle and sheep running around trying to get away, the merchants yelling, and, at the center of it all, a half-mad peasant from Galilee yelling about God and whirling a whip. I mean, it's one thing to express an opinion, but it should be done in a way that doesn't disrupt commerce or inconvenience people just trying to go about their business. Jesus should have arranged for this protest in advance. The authorities would have provided a "free speech zone" far enough removed from the Temple so that things could continue without the chaos that Jesus brought.

My colleagues have been wrestling this week with whether Jesus was angry. Some of them have been saying that the text doesn't actually say he was angry and somehow they cannot believe it of Jesus unless the story actually says so. I don't think there is any question. Of course he was angry. How else would the disciples have put what happened with the bit from Psalm 96 that says, "...passion for your house consumes me"? If not anger, then which passion would this have been?

Representatives of the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce demanded to see his permit for this public outburst. They wanted to see "a miraculous sign." Had they heard about his water-to-wine trick? His answer wasn't very reasonable: "Destroy this temple and in three days I'll raise it up."

They replied, "What are you talking about? It took forty-six years to build this temple and you say you can put it up in three days?"

The story concludes, "many people believed in his name," that is, they trusted Jesus, but Jesus did not trust them.

If my theory is correct, if John was written for a traumatized community, then trust is a really big issue.

Like me, you were horrified when you heard the news that thirteen siblings, ranging in age from two to twenty-nine years, had been imprisoned by their parents, tortured, shackled, and starved for at least eight years. The Turpin children were rescued when their seventeen year old sister climbed out of a window at dawn and managed to call police from a deactivated cell phone. The siblings are getting medical and psychological care.

Although the parents have been charged with multiple felonies, the investigation is really only just beginning. I try to put myself in the place of one of the children, but what I know of their experiences far exceeds anything I have been through or witnessed. One thing that I can say for certain is this, though: every one of these survivors will struggle with the question of who they can trust. As they struggle with that question, they will also confront the question of who they are and what their story is.

The two people who were supposed to have kept them safe from outside threats were themselves the greatest threat to their welfare. The two people who were supposed to have nurtured them to become competent human beings capable of loving and being loved deliberately withheld even physical nourishment. The two people who were responsible for helping them frame a strong story about the value of their lives instead told them, at least in their actions and almost certainly in their words, that they did not deserve even to be alive.

These siblings were dependent, even more than most children are, on their parents. And their parents were monsters who treated their dogs better than their children.

Some of them have before now never even met a trustworthy adult. For others it is a distant memory. How will they learn to trust anyone or anything?

Some of them, I am certain, have never heard a compliment. How will they learn to tell--and believe--a story about themselves as people who deserve not only to be alive, but to be loved?

Was John's community feeling the same way? Parents, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, and perhaps grown children had been willing to sever their family ties simply because they were followers of Jesus. The authorities of the Jewish synagogue were willing to throw them out, cutting them off from the connection to the Jewish community, a connection that kept them safe from persecution by the Empire. Who could they trust? Having been sold out by the people who were closest to them, was there anyone?

So, right after John gives his community an invitation to a party, he takes them to Jerusalem, the symbolic heart of their heritage and where real power in the Jewish community resides. And there he reminds them that Jesus has the authority that the establishment had claimed. The temple was corrupted. The leadership was ignorant. Jesus understood, though. And he understood that complete trust was simply not possible outside of the group of Jesus' followers. He knew that he could not trust himself to them, even if they seemed to trust themselves to him.

In John's writings in general, there are clear boundaries between the inside and the outside of the community. In John's gospel there is no "Whoever isn't against us is for us." (Mk 9:40) Jesus doesn't trust those who are outside the community. The community doesn't have to, either.

You might agree with me that this isn't a very good place to end up. Hunkered down behind some imaginary or real wall, looking suspiciously outward to those who don't belong, is hardly a healthy way to live. But it's understandable, of course, especially given the community's recent experience.

So maybe that's not such a bad place to begin. The Turpin siblings are being treated by a carefully selected treatment team that is limited in number. The children will interact with only a few people at first. That can't be a place to stay for ever, but it is a good place to start.

It’s a better place to begin than being thrust into the wider world. We know that while most people will be kind, some--out of malice or ignorance--will undermine any remaining trust they might have that the universe is a good-enough place to live. Before their introduction into the wider world they need a chance to decide that there at least a few trustworthy people in the universe. They are getting that now. They have a long way to go. They may never see the world in the ways that you and I take for granted. But their life will get better.

John's community needs this space for healing as well. Jesus, whose spirit lives in their midst, knows their need and stands as a guardian over them. They do not have to trust the rest of the world, at least for now. For now, they can allow themselves to be cared for by Jesus who has the authority to do so. They should not stay there forever, but we are only in the second chapter of John. It's early days and neither their journey nor ours is complete.

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.

He Always Had Some Mighty Fine Wine (Second Sunday after Epiphany; John 2:1-11; January 14, 2018)

He Always Had Some Mighty Fine Wine

Second Sunday after Epiphany
John 2:1-11
January 14, 2018

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

So, it's party time.

It tells us something that in John's gospel when it gets down to talking about the ministry of Jesus, about what Jesus does, it begins with a party. "This was the first miraculous sign," it says. So this isn't an accident. The author does it on purpose. He means to begin with a party.

And, more particularly, he means to begin with a story about a party that centers on wine. There is a lot that the author does not care about like about whose wedding it was. It doesn't matter, apparently. It was held in Galilee in a place called Cana. Jesus' mother was there. And Jesus and his disciples were also invited. The wedding feast was under way when they ran out of wine. What a catastrophe! Can you imagine? How mortified the hosts--the parents of the groom--must have been.

At occasions like a wedding feast, the responsibility of the host was to provide more than enough so that their guests could drink and eat their fill for several days! Not only that, they needed to do it casually, as if it were no big deal. Hospitality was not only the act of providing for the needs of guests: it was a performance. To appear to be anxious about how much people were drinking or eating was bad form. The reward for doing it right was honor in the community.The punishment otherwise was shame.

Of course, there were corners that could be cut. We are told as much by the headwaiter: "Everyone serves the good wine first. They bring out the second-rate wine only when the guests are drinking freely." This is the extension of a well-known fact that has been around since somebody decided not to throw away a barrel of spoiled grapes but to drink the juice instead. One fellow turned to the other and said with slurred speech, "You know the more of this I drink, the better it tastes!"

How would the guests know if Gallo wine-in-a-box had been subsituted after the 2013 Flowers Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir had been consumed? They wouldn't! Well, except for the headwaiter who had to stay sober.

But to run out of wine altogether? Clearly, the hosts had gambled that their guests wouldn't drink as much as they did and they lost. They would keep losing, too, as whispers followed them around the town, "Did you hear what happened at the wedding? They ran out of wine!" "No!" "Yes!" Oh, the shame.

It was a disaster. Or it would have been had it not been for Mary. She noticed there was a crisis. Maybe she was in the kitchen when the news that they were on their last bottle was delivered. She went to Jesus, "They ran out of wine." She let the statement hang in the air. Jesus picked up on it. "Ma, what do you want me to do about it? How is that my problem?" "Oh, be a mensch," Mary replied. "Would it kill you?" She knew her son well enough to know that he would do what was needed, so she warned the servants, "My son, the messiah, is going to ask you to do something. No matter how crazy it sounds, just do it!"

There were six stone jars nearby, each of which held from twenty to thirty gallons. They are said to be for the "cleansing ritual." But the cleansing ritual was for the bride, so the jars should be at the bride's home, while the wedding party is at the groom's home. I’m a little confused. Maybe he married the girl next door? I don’t know. But not ultimately it’s very important to the story, except that the jars were available.

Jesus told the servants to fill the jars full up with water. The servants did that. And then came the crazy thing that Jesus asked them to do: to take some of the water to the headwaiter for him to sample and approve for serving to the guests. And, of course, we know what came next. The water had become wine and not just wine, but wine superior to what had been served so far.

Let's see: six jars, each holding twenty to thirty gallons, filled to the brim and turned to wine adds up to somewhere between 120 and 180 gallons of wine. That's a lot of wine. How many preachers in our historically dry denomination have I watched twist themselves into pretzels trying to avoid that conclusion?

“Well, you, see it wasn't really wine because Jesus wouldn't serve actual wine to already-inebriated guests, would he?”

“Well, the text doesn't say that the guests actually drank the wine, only that the headwaiter tasted it.”

Or they'll take another approach and declare that the story needs to be read as an allegory. Along the lines of "well, the wine is a metaphor for joy. And the wedding feast is a metaphor for the end of time. So the story means to tell us that the joy of those who are at the Messiah's wedding feast will be even greater than the joy that the world gives." Clever, huh?

As Sayre Greenfield, a scholar who has worked with allegory in Greco-Roman culture, has argued, allegory happens when a text (in the case this story about a lot of wine at a wedding) becomes intolerable but cannot be gotten rid of. For many of my colleagues, the story of Jesus making so much wine for guests who have, in the words of the story, been "drinking freely" is simply unacceptable. But they can't cut it out of the Bible. So they turn the text into a text that isn't about what it is about.¹

You know how I feel about that doing that. Let's read this story about Jesus marvelously supplying a lot of wine for a wedding party as if it were a story about Jesus marvelously supplying a lot of wine for a wedding party. The problem here isn't the story; it's us, I'm afraid. We United Methodists have a strange relationship with alcohol. We got mixed up with the Temperance movement along the way. And that happened honestly enough. Alcohol was bound up with social problems at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many men were working very long hours in miserable conditions. They were paid on Fridays in cash. Too many of them sought some temporary release in drinking. After a night at the local bar, they would come home drunk, having spent far too much of their wages on drink. Too many of them took out their shame and anger on their wives and children with physical violence. The women of the Women's Christian Temperance Union blamed domestic violence, marital rape, and poverty on the drinking. "Lips that touch wine will never touch mine," they said.

We came to regard alcohol as a moral evil in itself. We became a dry tradition. That's not all bad. One of the ways that we can use this tradition is to make and keep our official church events alcohol-free. Just to name one result, we avoid putting a recovering alcoholic in a difficult position. Recovering alcoholics are confronted with enough difficult situations. We don't want to add to their struggles. This is why, for example, we don't serve wine at Communion.

But we are learning that, while the details may be quite different from one addiction to another, almost anything and almost any activity can be at the center of addiction: alcohol, pain-killers, exercise, work, sex, sugar, all sorts of things. The fact that something is abused does not--by itself--mean that it can't be used, that--used properly--it isn't a gift from God.

In the early days of our movement that is how we approached alcohol. John Wesley was very critical of his government because it deliberately kept the price of gin very low to encourage its use by the working class. It was a form of social control and it was damaging working class families among whom he did most of his work. On the other hand he advocated drinking a half-pint of dark ale a day. He believed that it aided digestion and helped one relax.

The Bible taken as a whole also has a mixed message. On the one hand we can read that Noah got into trouble with wine.² Wine and beer can lead its drinkers astray.³ We are warned not to hang out with those "who get drunk on wine" as well as those "who eat too much meat" (which probably includes most of us).⁴ Paul warns the Ephesians not to "get drunk on wine."⁵

On the other hand "Timothy" is told to stop drinking water only and add "a little wine" to his diet to help with his "stomach problems."⁶ "Choice wines well refined" are part of the picture of the life of a restored Judah that Isaiah offers.⁷ Jeremiah seconds the motion.⁸ The Psalmist praises God for the splendor of creation that sustains human life: "[Y]ou make plants for human farming in order to get food from the ground, and wine, which cheers people’s hearts, along with oil, which makes the face shine, and bread, which sustains the human heart."⁹

Wine, and a lot of it, was an integral part of weddings and other celebrations in Jesus' day. It could be misused, but its use was expected and anticipated with a certain eagerness. John's readers would have found the presence of wine at the wedding unremarkable. So what would they have noticed?

Let's remember that John's community had suffered the terrible trauma of separation from the Jewish synagogue, a split that broke up friendships and even the bonds of family, a split that left them emotionally and spiritually unmoored.

So what is the first story that the gospel gives them, the first story of a "miraculous sign that Jesus did"? It is a story about a week-long party with food and wine, wine that starts pretty good and gets even better. The host is happy, the guests are well-feasted, the headwaiter is impressed, and the groom and his bride (who, remember, begins her life with her husband by leaving her own family behind) and well-celebrated.

What I think that John's gospel is saying to his community in pain is simply this: "Even in the midst of your anguish, remember who and whose you are. This is cause for celebration. Jesus is in your midst. He will insure that you have everything you need, not only for your comfort, but even for your joy."

For the author of John at the core of the good news is joy.

How easy it is to forget that when the world looks dark, the future looks grim, and the light I can see consists of little candles bravely flickering in a storm. How easy it is to forget that when justice looks like it's in full retreat, when hate speech is in fashion, and when peace seems like a dream we knew we had moments before waking but cannot now remember.

It's hard to remember when the weather is cold and we're down one boiler and the replacement didn't come in when we hoped it would.

It's hard to remember when the cancer is back that the heart of the gospel is joy. It's hard to remember when new and unexplained symptoms appear.

The heart of the gospel is joy. Joy comes with hope and hope has nothing to do with optimism or pessimism. Joy is not because if we just look on the bright side, everything will turn out fine. Joy is not because if we think positive thoughts, do what the doctors tells us, and get enough people to pray for us hard enough and long enough, the cancer will go away never to return. Joy is not because "if we can see it, we can be it." Joy is not because we can imagine a better universe if the facts of the one we live in don't suit us.

Joy is because--when we decide to party, when we break out the wine (metaphorical or otherwise)--Jesus is sitting in a corner, enjoying our joy and willing to do whatever is needed to keep our joy well-supplied.It’s party time.

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 Sayre N. Greenfield, The Ends of Allegory (University of Delaware Press, 1998).

2 Gen 9:20ff

3 Prov 20:1

4 Prov 23:20

5 Eph 5:18

6 1 Tim 5:23

7 Isa 25:5-7.

8 Jer 31:12

9 Ps 104:14-15

Who Is He? Who Am I? Who Are You? (Epiphany/Baptism of Jesus; John 1:35-51; January 7, 2018)

Who Is He? Who Am I? Who Are You?

Epiphany/Baptism of Jesus
John 1:35-51
January 7, 2018

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

In this morning's reading did you catch all the statements that had to do with identity?

Jesus walks past John and John says, "Look! The Lamb of God!"

Two disciples come to Jesus and call him Rabbi (that is, teacher. Actually, it means my teacher, but teacher is close enough).

Andrew goes to Peter and tells him that he has found Messiah (that is, Christ, that is, "the anointed"). When Andrew drags Peter to Jesus, Jesus says, "You are Simon, son of John. You will be called Cephas (that is, Peter, that is, well, the closest equivalent would be Rocky)."

Philip goes to Nathaniel and tells him that he has found "the one Moses wrote about." He is Jesus, Joseph's son, from Nazareth (which means Calmar). Nathaniel asks, "Can anything good come from Calmar?"

Jesus calls Nathaniel "...a genuine Israelite in whom there is no deceit."

Nathaniel calls Jesus God's Son and "the King of Israel."

Then Jesus refers to "the Human One." Is he talking about himself or someone else: the text does not say.

Over and over, this reading is concerned with the answer to the question "Who?" Who is Jesus? Who is Peter? Who is Nathaniel?

This theme has already been raised. From the very beginning of John's gospel we are directed to questions of identity. In some way "the Word" has come to us in Jesus who is also the "light." John is not the light, but comes "to testify concerning the light."

The Jewish leaders from Jerusalem question John closely about who he is:

--Who are you?
--I'm not the Christ
--Are you Elijah?
--I'm not.
--Are you the Prophet?
--No.
--Who are you then?
--I'm a voice.

The text isn't really terribly interested at this point in what Jesus is doing or even in what he saying. The question of identity overshadows everything else. Perhaps later the focus will shift, but for now it's on the "who?" question: Who is John? Who is Jesus? Who are his disciples?

Do you remember that, not long ago--two weeks, I think--I promised that I would offer what I am calling a "traumatic reading" of John's gospel because I am persuaded that (1) it was written for a community that had experienced a deep and on-going trauma. That's my first assumption. My second assumption is that (2) it is meaningful to speak of traumatized communities as well as traumatized individuals. For example, it is meaningful to say that our whole country experienced an injury on September 11, 2001. Third, (3) communities that go through trauma experience the same collection of symptoms that traumatized individuals experience. Finally, (4) John's gospel must be read through a perspective that foregrounds the human experience of trauma. It can be read from other points of view, but without taking trauma into consideration, John cannot be adequately understood. These will be my working assumptions for preaching the sixteen or so lessons from John between now and Easter.

One advantage that a traumatic reading of John gives us is that we know a good deal about trauma. We suspect that trauma tends to show similar traits whenever and wherever it happens. This means that we can use our current knowledge of trauma to better understand this writing that comes to us from "long ago in a galaxy far, far away."

One of the things that we know about trauma, especially if it's caused by deep and repetitive injury, is that traumatized people struggle to have a strong identity. For example, children who have been abused have a hard time knowing how they feel and what they want. They often base their feelings on the person abusing them. Families with abused children become fused together. And the children especially are con-fused about their own feelings. When I was a child I never knew how I felt in the morning until I got to the breakfast table with the rest of my family.

John's community had been traumatized by its split with the rest of the Jewish community. They have become followers of Jesus. This was enough of a deviation from the norms of their community that they found themselves on the outside looking in, accused of betraying their Jewish identity. They were hurt and angry. Like many folks who have been through something like that, they rejected their rejection while at the same time wondering deep down whether their accusers weren't right after all.

They had based their identity on their belonging to the Jewish community, valuing its values and following its norms. The relationships that they had formed--some of them relationships of a lifetime of membership--became the mirrors they needed to truly understand who they were, the context in which they forged their identities, and the foundation of their ability to make choices with integrity.

In losing those connections, they found themselves adrift and vulnerable to any huckster who might come along. In the letters of John we find that they did make a habit of following first one teacher and then another, as if they were looking for someone to fuse with, so they would know what they were feeling and thinking again. (This is how demagogues, abusive personalities who hook peoples' fears and hurts and use them to gain power, are able to do what they do.) It wasn't a healthy way to deal with the trauma, but it was easy and it's what they did.

Even as early as this chapter John offers the hint of a different strategy for knowing who they are. They can know who they are by knowing that they are Jesus-followers. And they can know what that means by knowing who this Jesus is that they are following. And they know who this Jesus is by understanding the cosmic context. They are children of light because they live their lives according to the light that is seen in Jesus who in turn is the light of the world which in turn is another metaphor for the Word through which God has created (and continues to create) the universe.

The president of the synagogue may have rejected the members of John's community, the rest of the synagogue may have done the same. Long-time friends and even members of their own families may have rejected them. It hurt. It was painful. It left them confused and flailing for a way forward.

But the truth, John suggests, is that none of this matters. The reality is that John's people are joined to a cosmic purpose, a story that is unfolding out of the heart of God. This is who they are. This is their identity. This, if they will allow it, can be the ground out of which they can act with integrity.

Christianity is not, finally, a set of beliefs. It is an identity that is grounded, not in what we believe nor even in what we do, but in who God is and what God is doing. What we believe and do grows out of that, not the other way around.

So how do we put our hands on that identity? How do we place ourselves, where do we stand to have that integrity? I suspect that John may have more to say about that, but in the meantime, I can make a couple of educated guesses.

First, I think we can rule out basing our identity and identity on the room we use when we gather to worship. A place space is made holy by the fact that the people of God are gathered there, not the other way around.

Second, we have these actions that have been with us from the very beginning, from early enough in our movement that they are alluded to more than once in John's gospel. At the font we are baptized. We do confess our faith and make our commitment public, but we are joined to the body of the followers of Jesus by this action that we share with all who have been or ever will be Jesus' followers. At the table we eat a meal. Okay, it's not a meal that fills us up exactly, not like a Christmas feast, anyway. But there is bread to eat and the fruit of the vine to drink. This is the meal that Jesus' followers have eaten together since the very beginning. When we eat this meal we eat with every one of them. At the font, at the table we are joined to the cosmic purposes of God at work in Jesus the light of the world.

That is who I am. That is who you are. That is who we are.

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.

God's Dream Is Born (Christmas Eve; Luke 2:1-20; December 24, 2017)

God's Dream Is Born

Christmas Eve
Luke 2:1-20
December 24, 2017

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

This is an old story, this story we have heard, the one that Luke includes in his gospel. It's an old story, and a familiar one, but I confess that I have seen something new in it this year as I have been preparing for this evening's worship.

Luke's story begins in Rome where Caesar Augustus is busy doing emperor stuff. He needs to know how much money he can raise for the legions, the navies, and the monuments he hopes to build--propaganda in stone and the military strength to add muscle to words. He needs to know how many tax-payers there are in Rome's empire. So, the story tells us, Caesar ordered a census. You know this part: everyone was required to go to the city where they were born. Joseph and his fianceé Mary went "up" to Bethlehem. Joseph was descended from David the King and was born in the same town where David was born and raised.

Mary was pregnant, pregnant enough to make travel difficult, pregnant enough that she gave birth in Bethlehem. She and Joseph tried to find accomodations, but inn's guest room was completely filled with travelors. The story tells us that they then found shelter in the stable and, when Mary had given birth, they used a feed trough as a rough crib for Jesus. What isn't clear from the story is just how they got to the stable. Did the innkeeper offer them a place there? The guestroom was crowded and Mary would have some privacy in the stable. This may well have been a kind gesture on the innkeeper's part.

The other possibility is that, having found no place for themselves in the guestroom of the inn, they helped themselves to the stable. It was quiet and certainly no smellier than a room crowded wall-to-wall with people who had spent the day sweating as they travelled. They did the same thing as a homeless couple might in one of our cities today: they found a warm place and hoped not to be disturbed during the night.

Either way we read the story it is clear that Caesar is the sort of person who is both willing and able to order people around without a thought for the inconvenience or even danger it would cause to others. And Joseph and Mary were two of those others who, when the emperor told them to go, had no choice; they went. So far there is no news at all here, let alone good news. Powerful people push powerless people around. There is nothing new about that.

But at this point, the story turns. There are shepherds outside of town who have bedded down with their sheep for the night. Shepherds were never terribly well thought of in the ancient world. When shepherds came through, villagers would make sure that anything of value or use was secure and that their daughters were indoors. Everyone recognized that shepherds did important work. It's just that everyone wanted that work done somewhere else. "Not in my back yard" is nothing new.

But it was to shepherds, rather than to anyone important or rich or powerful, that the news of Jesus' birth was announced. By heavenly messengers, no less! The news came with glory and terror. "Don't be afraid," the angel said. And, as usual in the Bible when someone says "don't be afraid" it's already too late. The angel told the shepherds the good news and then suddenly in the skies there were legion upon legion of angels all singing God's praises.(Do you think there were as many angels in the heavenly host as there were soldiers in Caesar's legions?)

When the angels had gone and the Judean countryside was itself again, the shepherds decided to go to Bethlehem and see the marvelous thing they had been told about. So they did that and they found Mary and Joseph, and Jesus lying in the feed trough. They told the couple what they had experienced. There was general amazement. Mary we are told tucked all these things away in her memory to mull them over later. Then the shepherds left and the stable was a stable once more instead of the throne room of the king. Mary and Joseph were a couple tired from travel and, Mary especially, tired from the labor of childbirth. And Jesus was just another Jewish child with a hero's name, a baby like all other babies with a loud noise at one end and no responsibility at the other.

So the story tells the powerful, the privileged, and the prosperous of the world that when God's dream came into the world, it didn't come to the emperor's palace in Rome, it didn't come to the Roman Senate or to the city assemblies of Corinth or Antioch, and it didn't come to the business offices of the empire's bankers. From Caesar down through the imperial bureaucracy, through the houses of the nobility, through their flatterers, through the chains of command in the navy and army, no one whose opinion mattered, no one who could make things happen, no one who could hire done what they wanted, not a one of them knew anything at all about Jesus' birth.

In the good news about Jesus, power is thwarted, privilege is set aside, prosperity is penniless. In Mary's words, "God has pulled the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly. God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed." This is the political economy of the good news.

You have some notion of where I am coming from, perhaps an even better notion than I do on most days. Like Luke I believe that the birth of Jesus heralds an end to every economic system and every political process that does not lift up the lowly, that does not feed the hungry. No wonder, then, that Jesus is born in a stable behind an inn, instead of in some Senator's house, attended by midwives and servants. Where else would he be born? No wonder, then, that the news of his birth would come to shepherds first of all, instead of to Caesar in Rome. Who else could have gotten the first notice?

Were these the things that Mary thought about after the shepherds left and it was just her and Joseph and a sleeping baby, and the donkeys? I don't know. I do know that a week and a chapter later, they take the baby to the Temple to receive the physical mark of entry into the covenant people. An old prophet Simeon who had been promised that he would live to see Messiah, or perhaps it was a curse that he would not be allowed to die until he saw Messiah. It isn't clear to me which it is. I do know he is grateful enough when he sees Jesus and knows that he can die happily. "Now, master, let your servant go in peace according to your word," Simeon says, "because my eyes have seen your salvation."

Wait. What? "My eyes have seen (past perfect) your salvation." What salvation? He has only seen Jesus and a new-born Jesus at that. So what is the salvation that he has seen?

And so it occurs to me that I have missed the good news of this text. Like Simeon and Anna and all the people who were hanging in the courtyard of the Temple when Jesus was circumcized, all those people who were, in the words of the text, "looking forward to the redemption of Jerusalem," I look for the justice and peace that I believe lie at the heart of God's dream for us and for our world. I look to see a steadily increasing justice and a steadily advancing peace and I just don't see it. You watch the news. Do you see it? If the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, it bends more slowly than I can detect. Sometimes God's dream seems to be a little closer; sometimes it seems further away. But God's dream isn't emerging into our world in any steady way.

In spite of the fact that Caesar's opinion doesn't matter, I've been coming at this from his perspective. Caesar sees the world from a global perspective. He wants to know how many taxpayers there are. He wants to know how much money he can raise. He wants to know if the borders are secure. He wants to know how many bushels of wheat will be harvested this year and whether that will be enough to feed Rome. He wants to know what the Scythians are up to. He wants to know if the pirates in the Aegean Sea are contained.

He doesn't want to know how life is for a pregnant peasant woman from Nazareth nor how it will be for her newborn baby. He's too focused on the big stuff to care about the small stuff. But it is precisely in the small stuff that God is at work.

Some I'm wondering what I've been missing and especially if hope is so hard to come by because I've been looking in the wrong places for it.

Like a lot of people, I worry about global warming and the climate change that comes with it. I believe the climatologists when they say that it is largely caused by human activity. I look at what needs to be done and how little will there is on the part of our political or financial leaders to do anything about it and it's hard to find my way to any sort of hope.

But good news is going to happen in the small things. For instance, I saw an eagle this morning. She wasn't doing anything special, flying in circles, soaring off the hot air from a house whose occupants had the heat turned up too high. She was just doing her eagle thing like it was nothing extraordinary. But it was extraordinary because she wasn't supposed to exist. Eagles were supposed to become extinct.

I remember when Rachel Carson first told us that a particular pesticide was working its way up the food chain from bugs to fish to eagles and how, unless we stopped using DDT, there would come a day when there would be no eagles. But getting rid of DDT wasn't possible, the makers of DDT told us. But, in spite of their doomsaying, DDT was outlawed. And then, after several years, the eagle population began to recover, slowly at first, and then more rapidly. And here they are in a time and place where they were never supposed to be.

I get discouraged about the struggle against racism in our country. By any measure too many much violence has been suffered by too many black folks at the hands of too many police departments who seem to be immune to accountability. Beginning a couple of summers ago there have been marches and protests in a number cities. Black people have organized. Letters have been written. But nothing much seems to have changed. And when things do change here is a deep backlash as racism finds new energy and new ways of expressing itself. It's hard to find hope.

But then I see the picture of Ieshia Evans. She was part of a march in Baton Rouge, a city with a particularly ugly record. Ieshia is a young black woman who was snapped by Jonathan Bachman while facing down a line of advancing riot police. They are armored like robocops. Two officers have stepped in front of the line and are just about to arrest her. She is wearing a summer dress and stands calmly, erect, and proud. I don't know what she was feeling on the inside, but her face and posture show no fear. She offers no defense or resistance, but she is determined not to yield.

The actions of the police that day were designed to make people want to get out of the way, to force them off the street, to break up a protest. They would make me scared. I don't think I would have stepped in front of them. I don't know how Ieshia did it. But there she is, quietly insisting that her presence be noticed.

I sat with a seventy year old man in an oncology unit. He was going through his third round of radiation and chemotherapy for prostate cancer. The second round had been awful. It had been painful and debilitating. He had volunteered for yet another round
and I asked him why. And he told me that for himself, he would have been content to let things take their course, but he said his wife wasn't ready for him to die and he hoped to give her more time to be prepared. I said, You must love your wife deeply. His eyes filled with tears. Mine, too. We sat for a moment in the God-filled quiet. I was conscious of being in the presence of a love that death could not and would not conquer.

These are the small places--the stable, the poisoned wilderness, the angry streets, the cancer ward--where no one thinks to look. And certainly not if we're looking to see if that moral arc is bending yet. But they are precisely where God is at work, confounding the power and privilege of the world. No wonder then that Simeon can look at an infant in his mother's arms and call it God's salvation. No wonder then that the shepherds can come and see an ordinary baby, swaddled and lying in re-purposed feed trough, and go away rejoicing. No wonder that we come back this night every year to peer into the cradle, to hear an old story, to light candles, and to go away knowing somewhere in our hearts that we have seen the world change.

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.

God's Dream in the Flesh (Fourth Sunday of Advent; John 1:1-18; December 24, 2017)

God's Dream in the Flesh

Fourth Sunday of Advent
John 1:1-18
December 24, 2017

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

Carol and I are in an uncomfortable position this Fourth Sunday of Advent. We know that we will be leaving Decorah in just a little over six months. We know roughly where we'll be going. We know half a dozen people there already, which was certainly more than we knew when we moved here. Carol will be able to keep her present job with the Iowa City VA hospital, which blows my mind a little.

But there is a disconcerting lack of detail about our future. Where, exactly, will we live? We don't know. This absence of specific knowledge is upsetting, troubling. It isn't homelessness. We are privileged people who, while we have no guarantee, are more than likely to find ourselves comfortable enough. It is dislocation. It is launching from one shore without being able to see the other side. It is walking along a path in the woods at night with a flashlight, unable to see our destination.

I don't make too much of this. Anyone who has faced a major turning point in their lives, anyone who has uprooted themselves and their family to relocate, has gone through a similar process.

This experience of dislocation touches on the experiences of the community for whom the Gospel of John was written. Maybe that is part of the reason why it is so popular. I have been clear that John is not my favorite gospel. But it is the featured gospel in the Narrative Lectionary this year and will be the Sunday morning reading through the second Sunday of Easter! Preaching eighteen Sunday sermons from John will be for me an extended exercise in empathetic reading.

I have had to do this sort of thing before. I preached my way through readings from Paul one Lent and came to the place where I can say that, while I don't always agree with him, I think I understand what he was trying to do, and I respect and appreciate him and sometimes even like him. That's not a bad outcome for any relationship. That's my goal for John and me. Stay tuned, folks. Prayers would be in order.

What I have come to so far is this: John's gospel was written for a wounded community. It was a mostly Jewish community that had been forced to leave the Jewish synagogue because of their commitment to Jesus. The conflict that led to this divorce was bitter and destructive. When a community comes to the place where a disagreement is handled by expelling part of itself, the wounds are deep, painful, and lasting. Trauma of that kind doesn't simply go away. Even when it is healed, it leaves scars behind.

In John we have an effort on behalf of part of this traumatized community to make sense of its wounds and to move toward healing. Sometimes those efforts are successful and other times not so much. As we use what I am calling a "traumatic reading" of John, we will trace those wounds—John's attempt to apply a healing touch—and even see some of the results.

But today our attention is drawn to the first part of John, often called the prologue. Readers are always struck by these verses. They are an odd way to begin a gospel, at least to judge by our other examples. You can launch right into the story, like Mark does. Or you can frame the story with a story about the birth of Jesus, a story that contains all the themes of the gospel, as both Matthew and Luke do with their different stories. But John begins in the beginning with a capital "B."

"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God." You just can't get any more cosmic in scope than that. The perspective of this story-teller is so far above the earth, the dwelling place of human beings, that it can hardly be seen from there. "The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness doesn't put it out." The mood is serene; nothing can disturb it. The troubles that humans face are insignificant. Whatever powers face God and God's Word are trivial in their opposition.

This story begins as a story of a God who is further above it all than the stars in last night’s sky. The prelude of John's song is poetry of exquisite abstraction, far from the bodiliness of human history.

Wounded people often abstract their experience; it's one of the ways we have of bearing the unbearable. If we don't notice it when we do it ourselves, we can certainly detect it readily enough when others do it. A reporter sticks a microphone in the face of a refugee from a wildfire, their house together with all their belongings reduced to a few still-smoldering sticks in the background. They have suffered a terrible wound and, when asked, they do not reply in the first person. The reporter asks, "What are you going to do now?" They don't answer, "I don't know. My home is gone. We escaped with the clothes on our backs, but we have lost everything else." Instead, they retreat into the second person, "You know, when something like this happens to you, you don't really know what to do next. When you lose everything, all of your belongings, all of your memories, it's just hard to know what to do."

Wounded people often cope with their wounds by getting as far away as possible from them. If they can be spoken of as someone else's, that's some distance, not a great deal, but some. In John's prologue, his wounded community takes flight into abstraction, to God and "Word," as far away from their bodies where the wounds are, where the pain is, as they can get. And it works, kind of, a little, for a while.

It works right up until verse 14: "The Word became flesh and pitched its tent among us." The serenity of the earlier verses is set aside. God will not sit in untouchability; God becomes body, our bodies, the place where we hurt and where we bear our injuries: in our backs that spasm when we are carrying too much, in our guts that burn when we can no longer stomach our lives, in our hands and feet that twitch nervously with the anxiety that we have taken on, in our compromised immune systems, in the damage done by the poisons we breathe, drink, and eat, and most of all by the hostility we have experienced and harbored. The Word dives into our flesh into the deep end of all the damaged humanity we have decided it is okay to carry around. The Word swims deep down into our world until it touches the jagged edges of the wounds we have been hiding from each other and from ourselves. And begins to heal them.

This, says John to his wounded community, is what God is up to. This is what the Word is about in John's dislocated, rejected, ejected, isolated community. They try to meet God in the heavens, far above and far away from their hurt, only to find that God has already met them in their deepest pain. So that those who have lost friends, whose mothers and fathers have disowned them, whose cousins and nieces and nephews will not look them in the face, discover that they are God's children. No one can ever say they are not loved; no one can ever say they do not belong; no one can ever say to them that they are not at home Ever again. They are beloved. They belong. They are home forever more.

And that is John’s message to us this Fourth Sunday of Advent not because we have found God, wherever we were looking, but because God has found us wherever we were hiding: We are beloved. We belong. We are home, now and forever. 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.

Feet to the Fire (1st Sunday of Advent; Daniel 3:1, 8-30; December 3, 2017)

Feet to the Fire

1st Sunday of Advent
Daniel 3:1, 8-30
December 3, 2017

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

While the book of Daniel is set during the exile, it was written quite a bit later and in a time that we don't know much about. But we'll have to if we are to understand what the book of Daniel is trying to do, how the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego works, and why we should care about it all, especially on "Stewardship Sunday."

The story starts with Alexander the Great. Alexander was an almost-Greek who hailed from Macedon. Macedonians were esteemed by the Greeks in the same way that proper Bostonians esteem those they might call rednecks. Alexander loved and envied Greek culture in the way that only an outsider can. When his father King Phillip II of Macedon died and left him king, he set about not only to unite Greece (by conquering it) but also to unite the Greek and Persian cultures by bringing the good news of Greek-ness to them along with his conquering army.

In just ten years, Alexander conquered the countries that are now called Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Cleveland, Pakistan, and part of India. And then he died.

Quite inconsiderately, he failed to name a successor, so his family members and generals sat down and worked out a peacefully negotiated a power-sharing arrangement that lasted for centuries. No, of course they didn't. Everyone grabbed what they could and for the next twenty years or so fought each other to hold on to what they had. Eventually, Alexander's empire became four kingdoms under four of his former generals: Greece and Macedonia under Cassander; Parts of present-day Turkey under Lysimachus; Egypt and Palestine under Ptolemy; and, Iran, Iraq, Syria, and parts of Central Asia under Seleucis. By the way,
Seleucis was the first European to discover that, while it is possible to conquer Afghanistan, it is not possible to hold it. It's the mountains, you see.

Now the Jewish people had been living in the semi-independent Persian province of Yehud, roughly where the kingdom of Judah had been. After Alexander, the province of Yehud fell under the control of the Ptolemies of Egypt. The Ptolemies followed the Persian policy of letting the Jews govern their own affairs as long as they paid their taxes.

All was relatively well for the Jews until an ambitious and successful king of the Seleucid kingdom rose and among other things conquered Jerusalem and the surrounding countryside. Their king—whose name was Antiochus IV—was determined to unite his kingdom by imposing Greek cultural and religious practices everywhere, including Jerusalem. Antiochus modestly called himself "Epiphanes (God made manifest)" and believed himself to be divinely appointed to make Greeks out of Jews. He built a gymnasium in Jerusalem. The gymnasium was where men could engage in physical training and sports. The word comes from the Greek word, gymnos, which means "naked" because Greeks admired human bodies and athletes trained and competed naked. This did not sit well with many of the Jews.

When Antiochus set up a statue of Zeus in the Temple, forced Jews to place their offerings at the feet of a statue of himself, and required that Jewish men undergo surgery to reverse their circumcision, Judea erupted in rebellion. A man named Judas quickly emerged as the leader in a guerrilla war. Judas was amazingly successful and was nicknamed "The Hammer" or "Maccabeus" as it appears in Handel's oratorio Judas Maccabeus.

Judas liberated most of Jerusalem, including the Temple, which he reconsecrated. Perhaps you know the story. There was only enough oil to light the Lamp of Presence for one day, but miraculously, the oil lasted for the entire eight days needed to complete the process. This miracle has been remembered by Jews ever since in the festival of Hanukkah. A Jewish kingdom was founded that retained its independence for the next century, until the Romans took over.

But all this good news came later. The Book of Daniel was written before Judas' successes. It was written in the time when things looked really bad for the Jews. Judas had only a few hundred fighters. Antiochus had some seventy thousand soldiers who were well-quipped and even boasted a regiment of elephants. How in the world would Judah succeed against such odds when even God had seemed to turn the other way? Worse yet, many Jews saw no real problem with taking on a few Greek customs. Much that Greek culture had to offer was well worth considering. And besides, of what use were ancient rituals and absurd rules in the face of such military, economic, and cultural strength?

For Jews who were committed to the values of the ancient covenant, Jews whose allegiance was firmly given to the God of that covenant, Jews who were prepared to be strange and odd in order to embody God's dream in the world these were very dark days.

What do people do when the days are dark and they cannot imagine a way forward? If they are Methodists, I suppose they form commissions and task forces and they invite the input of paid consultants who come with ideas that are neither new nor particularly brilliant but which are re-packaged and labeled with a new set of jargon. But that isn't what Jews under Antiochus did. To find their way forward, they looked back. They looked for another time when days were dark and the news was dire. They looked back to the exile to the stories of a few faithful young men who held out for Jewishness against the mightiest empire they had ever seen, far more powerful than the Seleucid kingdom could ever dream to be.

They looked back to the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Maybe the story got a few "improvements" as they retold it for a new situation, maybe not. As it comes to us, it bears remarkable and certainly not accidental resemblances to their own story some four hundred years later.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were strange, we are told earlier in the book. The meat they were offered had been offered to idols, so they weren't about to eat it. The wine was suspect. So they insisted on living on water and vegetables. In spite of this unhealthy diet, they thrived, which might have been a sign for them, an assurance that if they held fast to their Jewishness, things would work out.

But then came the real test. Some people who resented and hated the Jews proposed that the king set up an idol that must be worshiped at set times and that whoever refused would be thrown into a holocaust, a furnace that would consume anything put in it. Well, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego politely but firmly refused. They were seized and the furnace was superheated, even to the point of burning up the guards who threw the three into it. And yet, they were unharmed. The king saw them and another whom he described as a "messenger," that is, an angel walking around and having a great old time as if they were in a sauna instead of a blast furnace.

The king called them out. Not only weren't they burned, they didn't even smell scorched. The king, while not converted exactly, was mightily impressed and decreed that no one should bad mouth the God of the Jews. Not only had their Jewishness not caused them harm, even though they were pretty scared at times, in the end they did very well indeed.

And this was the point of the story for the readers of Daniel. Even in a time when the value of Jewishness was being questioned by their own people, in a time when it was dangerous to be a Jew, especially a committed and practicing Jew, in a time when it was tempting to go into hiding or simply conform, God would still watch over them as God had watched over Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They would be delivered from harm. The covenant promises were not broken, nor was the God of the covenant dead. The dream lived on.

That, I think, is pretty good use of an old story, refashioned and reshaped for a new day as it may have been. So this is the time for asking, "So what? What does that have to do with us?" But I suspect you might already have a hint of an answer to that question.

In case you haven't noticed these are not the brightest of days and I'm not referring to the shortening days, although they certainly aren't helping. Never that we can remember have we been more divided politically, socially, and financially. The gap between the rich and the poor has grown into a chasm, almost a "great gulf fixed." Some of us might be able to ignore all that as mere "politics," but there are deep chasms among Christian folks, too. There are two different versions of Christianity out there. One is powerful, intolerant, and fully domesticated. The other hasn't exactly found its voice yet, but is expressed by folks like Rev. William Barber when he says, "I’m worried by the way faith is cynically used by some to serve hate, fear, racism and greed." He anchors a new vision--which is really God's ancient dream--in a moral rather than political foundation. He says, "There are certain things that are not left, right, but they are the center of authentic moral values—like love, like justice, like mercy, like caring for the least of these."¹

In the course of history there are points at which when there is a parting of the ways, a crisis of identity, that brings with it the necessity to decide who we are. Much of the time we can muddle along taking a piece from here and piece from there, mixing it together, and calling it good enough. But this isn't one of those times. Young people believe that the Christian church is judgmental and intolerant, that it rejects science and the use of reason, and that it serves the interests of the political right. That is a very broad-brush conclusion, but it is largely correct. The religion of Jesus the agitator, the speaker of truth to power, the bringer of good news to the poor, is not at all popular even, or rather especially, among those who claim the loudest to be his supporters.

This is one of those times when it is not possible to be a private follower of Jesus. Like those long ago who would not bring their offerings to a Temple in which the god Zeus was displayed and who would not allow the signs of their Jewishness to be erased, and like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego long before them who would not worship an object made by human hands in place of the living God, we are called to acts of affirmation and refusal, to public acts of solidarity with those whom God loves, and to equally public rejection of all the allegiances that call on us to break faith and deny who we are called to be.

And this has everything to do with stewardship. (You were waiting for that, weren't you? Or had you forgotten?) It has everything to do with stewardship because stewardship is everything that we do after we realize that God loves us and after we have said yes to that love, however hesitantly. To be loved by God is to know that our identity is anchored in that love. For our identity to be rooted in God's love is to be committed to extend that love by every means at our disposal. I'm not talking here about convincing other people that our way of being God's people is right and theirs is wrong. I'm talking about loving the people whom God loves in the way that God loves them. That's a far stretch, I know, but we don't have to be able to do it fully to do it a little and then a little more. Stewardship understood in this way is all about growing in generosity: generosity with our time, generosity with our presence, generosity with our thought and prayer, and, certainly, our generosity with our money and other material resources. These are the things that God has to work with, they are the way in which we can become a part of the work that God is doing, they are the raw materials of God's dream.

That is why I have no reluctance to invite you to give, to give boldly, to give unstintingly. It's not the only way we respond to God's love at work in us and in the world, but it is certainly one of the most important ways that we become the people that God wants us to be for our own sake, that God needs us to be for the sake of the world, and that God dreams for us to be for the sake of God's dream.

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 Dani McClain, “The Rev. William Barber Is Bringing MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign Back to Life,” The Nation, May 19, 2017, https://www.thenation.com/article/rev-william-barber-is-bringing-mlks-poor-peoples-campaign-back-to-life/.