No Time for Regrets (Matthew 3:1-17; 2nd Sunday after Epiphany; January 18, 2015)

No Time for Regrets

Text: Matthew 3:1-17
Liturgical Day: 2nd Sunday after Epiphany
Date: January 18, 2015

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

I'm pretty sure that most of us didn't notice something that happened last week during Tessa's baptism. I didn't really notice it myself, so I can hardly blame any of you. After all, Tessa was adorable and she seemed thrilled to meet all of us. And I have to say that I've never had a baby react in quite the way she did to the baptism itself. Let's just say it's not that part of my job you have to pay me to do.

During all of that her parents made some pretty serious promises on her behalf. I wonder if you noticed that these are promises that all of you who are baptized have made or had made for you and that you reaffirmed them last Sunday. "Do you, as Christ's body, the church, reaffirm both your rejection of sin and your commitment to Christ?" I asked. You answered, "We do." Well, I assume that you did. Most of you did. Or maybe it was just a few who were really loud.

You reaffirmed three questions that, in one form or another, have been asked of candidates for baptism for a very long time. They lay out the expectations that we have of each other in the Church. We confess Jesus Christ as our Savior, lean with all our weight on Christ's grace, and promise to serve him as Lord together with the whole Church that Christ has opened up for everyone. We don't set up barriers to membership in the Church. We don't just wear the name Christian, we promise to live as Christ has told us. We confess Jesus as our Savior, rather than trusting in our cleverness or hard work or money or anything else, even our own faith.

And before that we promised to enter into a lifetime struggle against "evil, injustice, and oppression," recognizing that these things aren't always so obvious, and may come in attractive forms, forms like comfort, privilege, and security.

But first of all, we affirmed the promise to "renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness, reject the evil powers of this world, and repent of your sins." There's a lot there, in language that most of us are not used to using. What are the "spiritual forces of wickedness"? What connection to they have with "the evil powers of this world"? Those are good questions, and I'll get around to talking about some answers, but not today.

Today in our lesson we have the story of Jesus' testing in the desert and his first sermon which was, as told by Matthew, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." He called those who came to listen to him to repent, or, as the Common English Bible has it, to change their hearts and lives.

It's that word "repent" that has had me fascinated this week. It's a little word, just six letters in English, but it comes loaded. It has a harsh sound to it, a fire and brimstone sound, a hellfire and damnation sound. It's not a word that sits easily with us. We squirm before we even learn what we're supposed to repent of, so sure are we that it's going to be uncomfortable. It's not what we want in a church, otherwise we'd be at a church where the word is more common.

I have a fair idea of what we want. I ask visitors. Sometimes it's awkward to talk to visitors. I usually hesitate. I never say something like, "I'm glad you're visiting with us today." Well, not again. With my memory for faces, I have had the awful experience of someone answering, "I'm not a visitor. I've been a member here for forty years." Yikes. There aren't many pleasant places that conversation can go from there.

Instead, when I see someone I don't recognize, I usually say, "I'm sorry, but I don't recognize you," which is the simple truth.

With those who turn out to be visitors I often follow-up with this question. "What brings you to us this morning?" They usually say something like, "Well, we've lived in Decorah for a few days/weeks/months/years and we're looking for a church. We want to find some place where we'll be comfortable."

I understand. I'm uncomfortable being uncomfortable. I'm more comfortable when I'm comfortable. Comfort is a big deal with me. I like a comfortable chair, comfortable clothes, comfort food and, yes, a comfortable church. So I understand.

When visitors tell me that they're looking for a church where they'll be comfortable, I really hope that we'll be that church, that people, that place. I'd like to think that people would be comfortable here. I know it isn't always the case, but I want it to be. After all, for me and, I suspect for most of you, too, the heart of hospitality is making a guest feel comfortable. I want to be a good host.

But then I read a story in the Bible like the one we just heard and it becomes clear to me that Jesus was not all that interested in making folks feel comfortable. "Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near," is what Jesus preaches. Well, at least that's better than John who calls his congregation "children of snakes." But it's clear that neither of these men had the advantage of the latest evangelism techniques coming out Nashville. They just don't know what they're doing.

We laugh because we're caught between our need to be comfortable and their rather stern demand for repentance. We laugh to relieve our anxiety. Which is a good thing, because we certainly have enough of that.

It's that word: repent. We have images of what it is, images of sinners kneeling in the front of the church weeping---out loud---for their sins. We're not really very emotional people. Well, that's not strictly accurate. We save our emotions for what is important: college football. The rest of the time we like to keep our emotional reserve. "Gee, honey," we say to our spouses, "I love you so much, sometimes it's all I can do to keep from telling you." Our image of repentance just doesn't go with who we are.

But repentance doesn't really have that much to do with emotions. The Greek word that repentance translates is metanoia and that simply means, "change of mind," understanding that it doesn't mean simply to change one's opinions, but a fundamental change of the way that we think. It's big; it's just not necessarily emotional.

Carol and I once had kids sometimes had struggles with our kids over their bedtimes. By sometimes I mean every night at bedtime. They would stall and invent reasons to avoid the inevitable and I would get annoyed and say something like, "No more! Go to bed! Now!" And one or the other would say, "Sorry," in a tone that meant that they were anything but. So I gave them both the gift of this recording in their heads that comes out whenever they're dealing with their own children. I would say, "I am not interested in your sorrow. What I am interested in is change!" It turned out, of course, that just because I was interested in change did not mean that change would be forthcoming. But I think this is pretty close to the heart of what repentance means. It has little to do with sorrow and everything to do with change.

One of things that bugs me about what liberals do--especially liberals in the church--is their evident desire to feel badly about this or that particular piece of "evil, injustice, and oppression" in the world. At its worst feeling badly about bad things is little more than a desire to reassure ourselves that we are good people who are capable of feeling badly about bad things, and letting that reassurance become a substitute for actually doing anything to change those things. No, repentance is not about feeling sorry; it's not about observing a moment of guilt; it's about change.

And Jesus suggests as much. Why change? Why repent? Why change our hearts and lives? Because "the kingdom of heaven has come near" or, as our translation put it, "Here comes the kingdom of heaven!" This thing about the kingdom "coming near" is difficult to translate. The verb means "to come near, approach." The verb is in the perfect tense, so, it should be translated, "has come near" or "has approached." But where, exactly is it? It hasn't arrived exactly. Presumably, it's close. It's not here, but it has come near.

Wherever, exactly, the kingdom of heaven is, its nearness has changed our situation. We can no longer act as if our world were the only real thing. God's dream is also a real thing. The reality of God's dream is pressing in on our world. A changed situation calls for a change of mind, a change in how we look at the world, a change in how we act in it. Sorrow may come with that, but it doesn't have to.

We know, for example, that earth's climate, the one we depend on to be able to live here, is threatened by rising levels of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases. We know that eighty percent of the known fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground. The unknown reserves need to stay unknown. We know that at our current rate, far from leaving our reserves in the ground, we are going to blow through them in just a few decades.

Now, we can feel badly about that. We can regret the choices that we have made. We can feel guilty about our choice of comfort over a better legacy for our children and grandchildren. We can do all of that, but what is really needed is change. The world we are creating is on a collision course with God's dream. It is time to repent.

We live in a much smaller world than our grandparents did. Muslims to them were as often as not called Mohammedans and were little more than characters in Arabian Nights or the nameless hordes in movie epics like the 1935 film "The Crusades," that depicted the Third Crusade pitting Richard I against the Kurdish commander Saladin, played by the well-known Kurdish actor Ian Keith. The clash of civilizations, setting a civilized West against a barbaric East, has been a narrative line in European history, since the Greek historian Herodotus wrote The Histories as propaganda to support Greece in the Greco-Persian Wars.

This story of a civilized West threatened by irrational hordes from the East is twenty-five hundred years old and still going strong. It not only got Greece through the Greco-Persian Wars, and sent Europe to the Crusades, but it gave its support to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Still, with all the bloodshed and suffering that this story has caused, it enjoys enormous popularity today. We are afraid of Muslims, even though we don't know any, and associate terrorism with Islam even though, before 9/11, the deadliest terrorist in this country was Timothy McVeigh, home-grown, a Christian, and an US Army veteran.

This story is the true blasphemy that reduces our neighbors who bear the image of God to ugly, racist cartoons. Our world is on a collision course with God's dream. It is time to repent.

I've drawn here on rather large canvasses, but I don't need to. A wife's promise to quit drinking or a husband's to quit having affairs may be accompanied by heartfelt tears and deep emotions, but what counts in the end is changed behavior. It's even true of the New Year's Resolutions, most of which are now history; they are a matter of making changes, usually small ones that we stick to and build on.

But whether it's overeating or an overheating world, repentance is nothing more nor less than change. The call to change is uncomfortable enough to hear. It's even more uncomfortable to heed. We can leave regret out of it. There is no time, Jesus says. "The kingdom of heaven as come near."

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Agents of a New Age (Matthew 3:1-17; Baptism of the Lord; January 11, 2015)

Agents of a New Age

Matthew 3:1-17
Baptism of the Lord
January 11, 2015

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

It's a happy occasion today, not simply because we gather to worship, which is a pretty good thing all by itself.  It's a happy occasion today because a little later in the service we will welcome Tessa into the company of God's people.  We have been doing this in the Christian tradition for a while now.  A hundred generations of parents have brought their children to the baptismal font.

I can't know what they experienced, what went through their heads, as their pastor asked them the questions that I will ask in a few minutes.  I can hardly imagine the mixture of hopes and fears that filled their hearts as they approached, answered, and watched.

I know that, before we do this thing, we would do well to stop to ask ourselves just what we think we're doing.  Heaven knows, she has no idea.  We at least should have one.

For some folks that fact that she has no idea presents a problem right there.  For some, baptizing her is scandalous, since she has neither choice nor understanding.

I confess I’m not particularly scandalized.  It's not as if this were the only decision her parents are making for her--for her in both senses of the word: on her behalf and for her sake.  I've heard people say, "Well, we're going to wait until she's old enough to decide for herself." As if being a part of a faith tradition were like going to the grocery store and picking out a breakfast cereal.

Speaking of which, we would never say, "Well, you know, she doesn't really know what kind of food she likes, so we're going to wait until she's old enough to know before we give her any."  We would never say, "There are three thousand different languages around the world.  It would deprive him of his right to choose if we taught him one just because we picked it out."  We wouldn't say, "Oh, names are very personal.  We're not going to give him one until he can pick out his own."

In fact, we make choices for our children about important things all the time without asking their permission.  We'd be lousy parents if we didn't.

Of course, there is the other part of the objection to baptizing babies, namely, their lack of understanding.  But the older I live, the less sense that objection makes to me.  I've been baptized for over sixty-two years and I still don't understand it.  If I have to wait until I can understand it, just when will I be baptized?

Baptism in this way is no different from other promises we make. Whenever I stand in front of a couple and have them repeat the wedding promises, I always think, "Those poor kids; they have no idea of what they are promising!" They don't, but they will.  And when they do, I hope they'll have enough support so that the audacity of those promises will carry them through.

A military enlistment oath is like that, too.  There is a promise to defend the Constitution of our nation and to obey one's superiors.  But no one can know in advance what that oath will require of them, nor how they will respond.

By the way, the enlistment oath brings us to what we're doing today, because the word for an enlistment oath in Latin was sacramentum.  The sacramentum in ancient Rome was a big deal.  At first and still during Jesus' time, only citizens could enlist.  The term of enlistment was ten years.  Training was rigorous and service was often grueling.  This army travelled mostly on its feet and carried most of what it needed on its backs.  They marched fifteen to twenty miles a day. 

An enlistment between 70 and 190 of the Common Era, the period known as the Roman Peace, may have been relatively easy.  Before or after that, however, a ten-year enlistment would have meant lonely, dangerous service fighting barbarians or an even more dangerous civil war fighting other legions.  When a legionary enlisted, it was a commitment to an uncertain future.

The Christian sacramentum—the three-part rite of baptism, the laying on hands, and communion—is also a commitment to an uncertain life.  Sometimes it has been relatively easy to be a Christian, to discharge one's sacramentum faithfully.  Sometimes it has been very hard.  Those of us who are over fifty or so have lived in one of the easier times.  We grew up with vestiges of Christian commitments in our common life.  It still made sense to speak in public about the common good.  It was still a time when, in Adrienne Rich's words, "to feel with a human stranger" had not yet been "declared obsolete."[1]

Tessa's enlistment, I believe, will be very much more difficult than ours has been so far.  This is not because of some plot by liberals to persecute Christians, either, though there are liberals who are amazingly illiberal when it comes to matters of faith.  There is for instance no war on Christmas.  In fact, Christmas has been at war with Christianity and with Jesus' message for well over a hundred and fifty years now.  Christmas has been doing just fine.  Nor is it because our public school teachers can't lead students in a prayer.  It's because our public values and our public commitments are increasingly un-Christian.  We treat the poor with contempt. We let the robber barons of Wall Street write the rules.  We criminalize the homeless. We live by the sword. We abuse the earth, our fellow creature.  We silence any criticism of a system that demands our souls in exchange for its goods.

Tessa will grow up in this world.  In one of the Septembers before she starts kindergarten the arctic ice cap will disappear, ushering us into a world in which no human being has ever lived. 

In her cohort, the children who were born in 2014, there is no racial majority.  At about the time she comes of age, the nation as a whole will no longer have a racial majority. She will grow up in a world in which a wealthy few grow ever wealthier and ever more distant from the poor who grow ever more desperate. 

These changes will call on Christians to make unpopular commitments, to choose the welfare of the earth rather than the system that is destroying it,to embrace a broader vision of the human community rather than a system that grants her privilege, and to side with the poor rather than a system that is destroying the common good for the private gain of a few.

We are placing a great burden on Tessa's tiny shoulders at a time when her world is still full of delights and wonders.  But this is the burden that all of us carry, whether we know it or not, all of us who bear name of Christ and his mark.  And the world, in spite of all the damage it has and is sustaining, is even yet full of wonders and delights. 

So the most important question for me is not, Should we baptize Tessa?  The most important question is this: What does Tessa need from us in order to carry out the promises of her sacramentum? What resources will she need to make a space in her life and in this world—and sometimes at great personal cost—for the Reign of God to emerge? 

Here is what I think she'll need, she and all of our young Christians, and even we ourselves:

She will need a community that laughs and weeps together, that is also able to talk openly about deep matters and to make deep commitments to embracing what can be embraced in our world, to changing what cannot be embraced, and to resisting what can be neither accepted nor changed.Only as part of such a supportive community will she gain the strength she will need to keep the promises of her sacramentum. 

She'll need to know the biblical stories.  Against the false and shallow stories of neo-liberal capitalism and of public and private violence there are the stories of our tradition.  These are the stories that will give shape to Tessa's life: the story of a God who hears the cries of suffering, who knows the pain of creation, and is present to rescue and to save; the story of the prophet who denounces those who abuse their power by seizing the living of the poor; the story of the peasant woman who sheltered the Reign of God in her arms, nursed him through fevered nights, and engendered in him an unquenchable passion for justice.  In these and hundreds of other stories, she will find the examples she will need. 

Of course, for her to learn the stories, her parents will need to know the stories, and her grandparents, and her Sunday School teachers, and all of us in the community of God's people.

She will need the rich liturgical legacy of the church's tradition.  In a world in which everything and everyone has been flattened into a commodity, she will need constant access to mystery, to spaces and times when there is more than meets the eye, when the world's schemes of buying and selling look as shabby and shopworn as they really are, when ordinary things like water and bread and wine become transfigured vessels of God's presence in our world.  Otherwise, how will she know that she herself is just such a vessel, as are all of us, as are all of God's creatures?

Tessa will need a church that takes its mission seriously.  Tessa will need a church that tells the tradition's stories and tends the tradition's mysteries.  She will need an earthy church in which old stories and new mysteries take root, grow, and yield their fruit.

A long time ago,at a time when I needed him most, my favorite author was a priest named Henri Nouwen.Nouwen once wrote, “There are many people who would become good and wise and holy for our sakes if we asked them to.”

At the baptismal font we promise to become good and wise and holy for Tessa’s sake.  That is what God is asking of us.  That is what Tessa is asking.  That is our sacramentum.

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.

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[1] .Adrienne Rich, "To the Days," Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 31.

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (Matthew 2:13-23; Epiphany Sunday; January 4, 2014)

Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

Matthew 2:13-23
Epiphany Sunday
January 4, 2014

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

Today we celebrate Epiphany and bring the Christmas season to a close.  It isn't actually Epiphany today; it's only the eleventh day of Christmas, but it would be a tough sell to try to have a service on Tuesday, especially if we tried to claim that it was even more important than Christmas Eve.  In both the Eastern and Western traditions of Christianity it is in fact more important, but don't try to convince us of that.

We associate Epiphany with the visit of the Magi.  If you were here last Sunday, you might recall that we talked about the Magi then.  Today, for this important festival—and we can call it a feast since we are in fact gathering at the Table—we have the rest of the story that our tradition has called "the slaughter of the innocents"  that gave rise to a holy day that is called “The Feast of Holy Innocents.”

But the text is an odd choice for a festival that celebrates the revealing of God's character in Jesus of Nazareth.  We'd rather not talk about dead babies any time of the year, but especially not just after Christmas with its mystifying sentimentality around childhood. 

To be fair to the reading, though, Matthew doesn't draw any lines here between the appearance of the star, the arrival of the Magi, and Herod's violent and vicious reaction.  It seems that for Matthew all of this has something important to say about God and about God's ways with us and with the world.  So, reluctantly maybe, we'll draw a little closer and dare to take a peak into the story as Matthew tells it. 

To begin with, let me tell you that historians at least do not believe that these events actually happened.  Rome allowed its client kings to get away with a great deal as long as the taxes were paid.  And, to be sure, children have always been victims.  Herod's Judea was no exception.  Neither is our own time.  But this massacre was the sort of thing that the people just would not have taken.  There would have been disturbances in the cities, and riots in the streets.  News would have come to Caesar.  A legion or two of troops would have to have been sent to put down the unrest.  That was expensive and, if there was anything that the Romans hated more than not getting their taxes, it was spending money on military actions because some client king behaved badly and couldn't keep the peace.  An event like this massacre would have been remembered and recorded in the annals.  It would have come down in history.  Outside of Matthew's story, it didn't.

So if it isn’t history in the strict sense of the word, what is it? Well, I’d say its closest parallel in our world would be the political cartoon in which there are no characters, only caricatures, and reality is distorted just enough so that we can begin to see what it really looks like. Like a political cartoon, this story is a fiction that tells the truth.

So what was the truth Matthew is telling in this story?  To answer that, we have to zoom out a little to see the pattern of the early chapters of his gospel.  When we do, we see that this story is set into another story, one well-known to Matthew's readers: the story of Israel's origins as a captive people brought out of Egypt to the land of promise.  The story begins with Joseph.  Joseph is a dreamer whose dreams are messages from God.  Joseph in Genesis is also a dreamer whose dreams come from God.  In his birth and early childhood, Jesus repeats the story of the Israelites.  Jesus goes from Palestine to Egypt and comes back.  The visit of the magi who recognize that there is something precious and worthy of respect in Israel and who bring tribute echoes a theme that runs through the Old Testament.  A ruler tries to destroy Jesus just as a ruler tried to destroy Moses.  In both cases, this took the form of a mass murder.

What does Matthew want to say with all this?  Well, at least this: In Jesus as in the Israelites of old God has acted to create a new people.  Along the way, God has had to overcome the resistance of the powers that be in order to redeem and rescue.  Herod's fury at being deceived by the magi (that parallels Pharaoh's fury at being outwitted by the midwives) and the violence he unleashes is as much a part of this story as the Star of Bethlehem and the gold, frankincense and myrrh.

But that still leaves us with a problem.  This is literary rather than literal violence, but it's still violence.  It is still a story about a ruler's willingness to act violently in order to safeguard his power.  Herod (in the story) may rationalize his choice to kill the male infants of Judea as needed for the security of the state, but the reality is, it is his own power that he protecting.  It's a feature of the story and we're stuck with it.

It’s a feature of our world, too, let’s face it.  If it weren’t, we wouldn’t be so reluctant to face Matthew’s story.  It points, as political cartoons often do, at things we would rather not know about.

I could give you cases that are, sadly, countless, from the unintended but nonetheless calculated deaths of children who are killed in our drone warfare program to the sixteen hundred children who die of neglect or abuse at the hands of their parents or other care-givers each year.  After I had written a pretty good sermon that focused on these, I remembered something else.

Very early last Sunday morning, a seventeen-year-old young woman named Leelah Alcorn was struck by a tractor-trailer rig on Interstate 71 about four miles from her home in a small town near Cleveland, Ohio.  This would have been tragic enough, but she had left a note appeared on Tumblr (a social media site) after her death.  It was clearly a suicide note.

Others of her posts tell a fuller story.  Leelah was a transgendered woman.  That means that she had (and had always had) an awareness of herself as a girl and then a woman, but she was born in a male body.  She agonized for years over the disconnect between her sense of herself and the body she was trapped in.  When at fourteen she discovered that there is a name for her experience, she in her words, “cried of happiness.”

To her parents, understandably, she was Joshua, their son.  When Leelah came to her mother with her discovery, her Christian parents’ response was to send her to a series of “transgender conversion therapists.”  Their goal was to fashion her into a straight man, to match her body’s physical form.

After three years of this, the pain and anger were too much to bear.  In her suicide note she wrote that her death needed to be counted among the suicides of transgendered people, that people need to look hard at that and then they need to fix society. “Please,” was the last word she left us.[1]

Leelah is to be counted among the Holy Innocents.

Her parents are mourning her.  Her mother said, “[W]e told him that we loved him unconditionally. We loved him no matter what. I loved my son. People need to know that I loved him. He was a good kid, a good boy."  I know that they are grieving Leelah’s death, but I beg to point out that the child they are mourning never was except in their imaginations.  They never knew their daughter.  Leelah’s death is doubly tragic for them.

Before I say more about this, let me put on my pastor hat and say this to children and youth and their parents: If you are struggling with who you are or whom you love, if you have found that you are a girl living in a boy’s body, or a boy living in an girl’s body, or a boy who falls in love with boys, or a girl who falls in love with girls, or someone who falls in love with both boys and girls, there is nothing wrong with you.  If you come to me, you will not get the reception that Leelah got from her parents or her pastor.  If you are so discouraged or angry or tired or sad that you can’t imagine living any longer and you are thinking about taking your own life, come to me or a parent or a teacher or counselor or someone who can help.  It can be better and it will be if we can work on it together.

Putting my preacher hat back on: Epiphany celebrates the light that allowed the magi to find their way to the child Jesus.  Epiphany is a light that shines on ordinary things and lets us see them as the extraordinary things they really are maybe for the first time.  What if Herod had had the epiphany?  What if he had heard the magi’s words and decided to keep his promise to pay homage to the child Jesus, or better yet, what if he had gone with them?

What if Leelah’s parents had had an epiphany and saw Leelah as she was and as the woman she was becoming?  What if we had an epiphany and saw the people in our lives as the extraordinary people they actually are, rather than as we wish they were?  It would be something!  It would be worth telling stories and singing songs about!  It would be an Epiphany worth celebrating!

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.

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[1] Deidre Fulton, “Transgender Youth’s Tragic Suicide Galvanizes Movement.” Cited 4 January 2015.