Blessed Are …

Sunday, January 30th, 2005
Epiphany 4
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Matthew 5:1-12

1When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. 2Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying: 3 ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 4‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. 5‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. 6‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. 7‘Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. 8‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. 9‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. 10‘Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 11‘Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. 12Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Blending hope and blessing to sooth the aches and pains of those who are, by most worldly standards, the ones least likely to succeed: the poor in spirit, mourners, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, those who are persecuted for Christ’s sake. The beatitudes. They are the quintessential preaching points of the Christian faith.

There is, as always, a danger with a passage of scripture becoming too familiar to us. We tend to overlook things we wouldn’t otherwise. To begin with, there’s the unspoken question of the converse of the list – what happens to those who ARE rich in spirit, those who … rejoice, those would seem to be qualities that would be desirable, would they not? In a sense, the first two beatitudes are directed to people for whom we would all have some measure of compassion. The next group, though, would be less an object of compassion and perhaps more a cause for distress: the assertive, to not say aggressive, those who DO NOT hunger and thirst for righteousness, who see no need to get to know their softer side, as it were, those who are ruthless, those whose hearts are full of impure motives? It would seem to be self-evident that they would not be so blessed. So we can pack that point up and move on, can’t we? We can, unless we find ourselves counted among the second group rather than the first.

Where do we stand? Truth be told, none of us are permanently on one side or the other of these qualities. Human nature is changeable, and we sometimes find ourselves being rich in spirit and at other times poor, merciful and ruthless, meek and aggressive, hungering for righteousness one day and indifferent the next.

Jesus knew that. He knew who he was talking to, both then and now. That is what makes this Sermon on the Mount so dynamic. It moves with the time it is in. Regardless of when and where it is read, it applies. It speaks to the eternal nature of the word of God.

So do we leave it at that? At being a listing of those who are blessed, draw what comfort and strength we can from that, and move on? Or is there another way to read this, to apply this, to incorporate this into how we live out our faith?

Can we read the beatitudes as challenges? Can we reread the beatitudes as Jesus telling us how we should be, how we should act, how we should live? There’s a phrase you may have heard Leslie or me use at some point – “don’t should on yourself.” The resemblance to the … less than properly worded alternative is intentional. The parallel thought is assumed. There’s a point at which we hear that in Jesus’ words throughout the gospels. It’s the reason the word ‘sermon’ has acquired something of a negative connotation. In today’s popular culture, we tend to shy away from accountability. There’s an almost-immediate reaction against anyone telling us we should or should not be doing something. ‘Don’t tell me what to do!’ is a phrase we would all at some point resoundingly affirm, regardless of who we heard it from.

Here’s where we get into the issue that is at the heart of the Christian faith: authority. You may have heard it referred to as the counterpoint of serving God and Mammon, or in contemporary language, being selfish versus being selfless. What it boils down to is this: if we as Christians claim Jesus Christ as Lord of our lives, that word, LORD has to mean something. Among other things, it means being subject, being accountable, being submissive to what the Lord requires of us. The passage from Micah is beautiful both in form and function:

“What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8)

We’d like to leave it at that, and in many ways we can, even as a Gospel people, reading the Old Testament through the lens of Easter, there is completeness in the Micah text that sums it up for us. That’s what we like about bumper stickers, isn’t it?

What Jesus is doing is fleshing that out. He gets into specifics. He fills in the blanks. He answers the question: What does that mean?

We would rather live in generalities, as a people, leaving the specifics to each individual. In fact, that is a hallmark of Baptist theology – we call it Soul Competency. Each individual has the capacity to sense, discern and respond to the movement of God in their lives through the Holy Spirit. The corollary to that tenet is that there is a … need … a requirement to know the source as well as possible in order to be able to do that discerning, that sensing … that … following … so we put a lot of emphasis on scripture. We believe Jesus did too. He was constantly quoting scripture – to his disciples, to the crowds that gathered, to the religious leaders of the time, and interpreting it for them in the way it should have been from the beginning. There’s that word again – SHOULD.

So we need to get over being told what to do. Not because we should accept anyone telling us what to do, but because of WHO is telling us. If we believe that Jesus is who he said he is, then we need to listen to what he is telling us. Who BETTER to do so?

The tricky part is, how do we distinguish the message from the messenger? I could step up to this pulpit with an agenda, a preset list of issues to discuss and present and might be capable of presenting the message in such a way as to convince you that the way I see it is what Jesus was saying. In some ways, that’s my job in preaching. As Pastor I am charged with the responsibility to care for the spiritual wellbeing of the congregation as a whole and as individuals. And I will confess to you that I am aware that I interpret the Gospel in a certain way by nature – in other words, I’m drawing from the Gospel what I see through the lens of MY life and experience. But I want it to be clear that if and when I present that … view, that version, as it were, it is an exercise in self-awareness. What I would hope is that it would not be, as it says in the blurb in the announcement about the messages being online, taken as dictation, but rather as the beginning of a conversation. That is a responsibility that I do not believe I am called to - to interpret FOR you, to delineate, to define for you what the Gospel means. That is a responsibility that we each carry as Children of God. It is in the conversation that we are opened to thoughts we might not have had, to ideas we might not have considered, to views we could not have held, had we not been in community, and in that context, had we not been sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit.

That is the reason for our congregational benediction – the part about “May God take your minds and think through them, may God take your lips and speak through them” is not JUST about being God’s presence in the world, but it is about being in dialogue within this family of faith. To not be afraid to risk something big, how we see, how we believe, how we live, and present it to our brothers and sisters for something good – a deeper understanding, an ‘aha!’ moment, an epiphany of ‘I never thought of it like that before’.

So, blessed are those who search and hunger for righteousness, who can be poor or rich in Spirit, who mourn and rejoice, who are meek and not so meek, who are reviled for HIS sake, who gather here. We are blessed, but we are called. We are challenged to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters, to lay them down for our Lord, to seek – to live – the way to the truth and the life. We are one and the same. And we are called to more, we are challenged to more, by our Lord Jesus Christ.

Let’s pray.

Shifting Alliance

Sunday, January 16th, 2005
Epiphany 2
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
John 1:29-42

29 The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! 30This is he of whom I said, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” 31I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.’ 32And John testified, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. 33I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” 34And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.’ 35The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, 36and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’ 37 The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. 38When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, ‘What are you looking for?’ They said to him, ‘Rabbi’ (which translated means Teacher), ‘where are you staying?’ 39He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. 40One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. 41He first found his brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (which is translated Anointed). 42He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, ‘You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas’ (which is translated Peter).

Josh and Sam have been friends since college. They went through Law school together, and both became quickly disenchanted with the corporate law jobs they landed out of school. They made a promise to each other that if one of them ever came across ‘the real thing’ he would go find the other, and they would both fall in behind the one they found. There was a recklessness in the promise, a ‘damn the torpedoes’ sense of abandon. They would know. They just knew it.

Then one day, it happens. Sam is sitting in a meeting between his Law firm partners and their corporate client, a multinational shipping firm, discussing the details of how to avoid being penalized for operating unsafe tankers in order to maximize profits, when Josh shows up at the door. It’s a glass door. Sam glances over and sees Josh, and the look on Josh’s face is enough to tell Sam all he needs to know. He tries to excuse himself politely, but is pressed by his boss to stay. He looks at Josh again, and this time, he doesn’t ask permission. He stands up and takes a step towards the door, towards Josh, and simply says ‘I have to do this’, and walks out.

If you are a fan of ‘The West Wing’, I don’t need to fill in the blanks. If you are not, Josh Lyman and Sam Seaborn became the Deputy Chief of Staff and Deputy Communications Director, respectively, in the White House of the fictitious Josiah Bartlett administration.

The story and characters may be fictitious, the dynamics and truths of the human condition they speak to are not.

What does it mean to take a step of faith?

How big does that step have to be in order to qualify AS a step of faith?

A few weeks ago in our Wednesday night study in the book of Mark, we read about the young man who ran up to Jesus and fell to his knees and asked him what he needed to do to be saved. The other Gospels have made the man better known as the rich young ruler. Mark doesn’t present him that way.

The earliest and shortest Gospel presents him simply as a young man with an earnest desire to find what it was that was missing in his life. Though the presentation of the event is slightly different in Mark, Jesus ends up giving the man the same answer we have in the other Gospels: “go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me." (19:21b)

Even though there is a conclusion to the scene, in the man going away grieving, because he had many possessions, the story doesn’t end there. Mark doesn’t tell us what happened with the rest of that man’s life.

Did he in fact take the step of faith that Jesus told him he needed to, and sell all he had and donate the proceeds to the poor? DID he come back after that and become a follower of Jesus?

Those hanging endings are not uncommon to find in the Gospels. I believe they are intentional. They allow us an opportunity to turn the questions raised on ourselves. What would *I* have done in that situation? How would *I* have responded? That’s part of what brings the scriptures to life.

In today’s text, we are treated to a story with something of an ending … it doesn’t leave us hanging in the same way as Jesus’ encounter with the rich young man.

Here we have John the Baptist, the biggest name in wilderness –wandering prophetic voices of the day in first century Palestine, doing what HE does best – calling. This time, he is recognizing Jesus for who HE is – the Lamb of God. The baptism has already taken place. We went over that last Sunday. John has already protested that Jesus should be the one baptizing HIM, and Jesus politely refutes him and they proceed with the original plan. As we read last week, when Jesus came up out of the water, the Spirit of God descended on him like a dove, and he heard a voice from heaven speak, saying, “this is my son, the beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” I wonder what it was like for John, to one day have crowds coming to him to be baptized by the hundreds, and then to be face to face with the messiah, who turns out to be his cousin.

I’ve got several cousins … one works in the telecom industry, another is a narcotics police officer, and another is a Pastor, another runs his own business, and another works for a large agricultural supply firm. I’ve got others, but I’m not close enough to them to know what they do … I love them all, and they are all Godly men, as far as I know, but if one of them walked through that door and I realized that in that walking in they were the Messiah, it would take a dove from heaven and the voice of God to convince me that it was true.

I have to wonder what it was like for John. It is interesting that the narrative in John doesn’t include the actual baptism of Jesus, for that we had to go to Matthew’s gospel last week, but it seems to weave its way around the event, speaking more to the importance and the meaning of it rather than dwell on the particulars of it … and picks up right after … the next day, in fact, which is where the text begins for today.

It says something about the nature of John the Baptist to have him still carrying out his duties, as it were, even after the Messiah has been revealed to him. He still has followers, disciples, as it were, who were following him around. The first paragraph covers two days’ time, and have in them two encounters between Jesus and John the Baptist.

Jesus says nothing in either of them.

John does all the talking. Rather, all the declaring, the proclaiming. Testifying is the term used in the text. John testifies “I saw the Spirit descending” … there is a willingness to … direct those who are listening to him towards him whom HE has been looking for and proclaiming all HIS life, even to his seeming detriment.

He (John) has a couple of his own disciples with him on the second day. When he sees Jesus that time, he doesn’t seem to hesitate, but tells them “you know who I’ve been talking about all this time? THAT’S THE GUY! THAT’S HIM!!!” I can almost see him pushing the two disciples away from himself toward Jesus after he’s gone past, and can you picture the looks on the faces of the two men as they hesitantly take those first steps towards Jesus? Their body language that says ‘but, John, we’ve gotten used to following YOU around … you really want us to go follow … him???”

Isn’t it the case that one’s importance is determined by the size of one’s following, by one’s popularity? You certainly wouldn’t want to lose followers, much less encourage them to leave, would you?

Again, that was John. He knew what he was here for.

HIS alliance didn’t shift, but because it didn’t, his disciples’ alliance HAD to. All along, he was the one preparing the way – the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘make straight the way of the Lord’.

His disciples, though hesitant, did take that step of faith … from following John, to following Jesus. When Jesus noticed they were following him, his question was ‘What are you looking for?’ It’s a question with several layers of meaning, and one that he continues to ask US here today. Their answer is a foreshadowing of the next three years. They think in concrete terms: do you have a place to stay? The question behind the question is, of course, less interested in where Jesus is resting his head and more interested in where THEY may rest theirs … ‘if we follow you, will WE have a place to stay?’

It seems we can never entirely loose ourselves of the routine concerns of daily life. Will we have a roof over our heads? Will we have food on our table? Will we have clothes on our backs?

They are all valid concerns, but ones that we must, nonetheless, place in their proper place.

Any time I begin in on this subject, I feel entirely inadequate. I live in a beautiful house, have more than enough clothes, food, and other provisions to make me one of the richest people on earth – I don’t mean in strictly financial terms – but in comparison to the rest of the world population, I am wealthy beyond measure.

What we are speaking of this morning is alliance – allegiance, if you will – submission - to whom or to what are we giving our lives? Do we fill our days in pursuit of wealth? Jesus has a word for us in the story of the rich young ruler. Do we fill our time seeking position? Jesus has a word for us in his response to the request his disciples made to sit at his right and left hand in Glory. Do we seek wisdom? The Psalmist tells us the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord. Do we seek our fulfillment in work? The parable of the rich farmer who dies with full granaries gives us an idea of where God is calling us.

God calls us to action, but not if in the acting we lose sight of who we are acting for. God calls us to be rich, but rich in spirit, in love, and in grace. God calls us to seek our position – but God also tells us that the greatest of these will be the least – to be servant of all. God calls us to be wise – to be in love with him – and all else will follow. God calls us to be about his work, and that work can and is radically different from what the world would consider work.

For us here this morning at Jerusalem Baptist Church: where is our allegiance? Whom are we submitted to? Are we trying to steer our own path? Are we here simply as a formality, because we’ve always been here at this hour on Sunday mornings, and it would be unseemly to not show up? Are we here because at some point in our past we felt God stir in our hearts, but that stirring has long since quieted, and we continue to come, hoping that something will happen, that someone will say something that will stir us again?

We can hold an alliance to tradition, to formality, to continuing to do things the way they’ve always been done, and lose sight of the one who needs to hold our ultimate loyalty.

So the question this morning is a hanging one; an open ended question, and we each must answer it for ourselves, and go from there. The rest of our lives have yet to be written.

Who or what holds your ultimate allegiance, and does it need to shift?

Let’s pray.

I Have …

Sunday, January 9th, 2005
(Third after Christmas)
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Matthew 3:13-17; Isaiah 42:1-9

Matthew 3:13-17

13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. 14John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ 15But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then he consented. 16And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’

Isaiah 42:1-9

1 Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. 2He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; 3a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. 4He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching. 5 Thus says God, the LORD, who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it, who gives breath to the people upon it and spirit to those who walk in it: 6I am the LORD, I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you; I have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, 7to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness. 8I am the LORD, that is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to idols. 9See, the former things have come to pass, and new
things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.

We’re still at the beginning of the year, in relation to the calendar. So it seems entirely appropriate to be reading of the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. The event marked by his Baptism in the Jordan River. Most often it is quoted in the context of a service which includes a Baptism or two. My friend Jay Voorhees is doing just that this morning at Antioch United Methodist church in Nashville. He’s drawing the parallels between how we approach Baptism and how the Jewish faith celebrates Yom Kippur; as a dedication of the upcoming year to God. Again, an entirely appropriate and meaningful parallel. There are some differences in how Methodists and Baptists approach the act of Baptism, but one thing that he noted made me sit up and think.

What we read in the text is that after Jesus came up out of the water, “the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the spirit of God descending like a dove.” As Baptists, we traditionally emphasize the fact that following Christ in the waters of Baptism is a sign of obedience.

It is.

We should “so seek to follow Christ ourselves” that that would be a step we can take willingly and joyfully, an act that reminds us of the death, burial, and resurrection not only of Christ, but of ourselves – to our old life, and of being reborn in the newness of life in Christ. Our focus is on the responsive nature of our action. In other words, we do it in response to what God has done in our lives. But let’s try this morning to look at it from another angle.

Baptism is a powerful thing. To be honest with you, when I first met Father Duffy, the priest at St. Timothy’s over in Tappahannock, I was surprised. In the course of our conversation, he mentioned a man who was attending church there and wanted to join the parish. This man had apparently been a member here at some point in the past, and Father Duffy wanted to confirm if the man had been baptized here. His reason was simple. The Catholic Church does not re-baptize anyone if they’ve already been baptized in another Christian tradition.

What surprised me about that was that there really is more going on in the act of baptism than simply an obedient response on the part of the person being baptized. It is somewhat foreign to me, this idea that there’s more going on … I’m not always comfortable with anything that smacks of mysticism, but I have come to the realization that in order to embrace faith, there is a mystic element to the practice of faith that MUST be present in order for us to allow for the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives, in our hearts, and in our work. Consider for a moment that the act is not just one of obedience, but that it is also a signal, a marker to us that God is at work in our lives from then on – and usually BEFORE the – on.

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings tells the story of an angel that is blown down to earth by a violent rainstorm, while on an errand from God. A peasant couple, Pelayo and Elisenda, find him. They are shocked when they find him, but they never falter, or question his existence. In THAT sense, they take the fact that they came across a heavenly being on their walk through the country completely in stride. “Before the arrival of the angel, they are a simple, poor family with a dying son. Once the angel is captured, the son recovers and the family uses the angel for financial gain. Marquez shows us true human nature. An incredible being falls to the Earth and the humans use it to make a fast buck.” [1]

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian author, uses the hallmark of his style of writing – what has come to be regarded as a genre unto itself – ‘Magical Realism’, throughout the story.

"Magical realism expands the categories of the real so as to encompass myth, magic and other extraordinary phenomena in Nature or experience which European realism excluded"[2]

I’m not proposing we should adopt a form of literature to provide the guideline for how we should live our lives, but we could take a hint from it.

If we hold God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ, and the presence of the Holy Spirit in the world today to be central and true to our faith, then we can live every day with a Magical realism that far surpasses any literary attempt to put it into words.

I was looking through a promotional brochure last night for a young adult conference, and the tag line was ‘blur the line between faith and life’.

I’m thinking there should be no line – blurry or otherwise – between faith and life. I can understand what the promoter was trying to say, but I’m not so sure we should allow for any distinction between how ‘faith’ operates in our lives and how we live our regular, day-to-day lives. It gives the impression that we can appropriately separate the two.

We can of course. It’s easy if you miss the point. The question is, is that something you WANT to do, or something that just happened without your realizing it?

If our example is Jesus, and he is, then there was no compartmentalization going on in his life and faith. For him, to breath was to be in communion with God. To confront the Pharisees and Sadducees, and to heal the lepers and the paralytics were all just as much acts of worship as they were events that found their way in to the run-of-the-mill daily occurrences in the lives of the people of Galilee and Judea. He didn’t save the good stuff for Sundays.

Let’s jump to the Isaiah passage. It picks up where the passage in Matthew lets off. In it, God continues to extol the virtues and acts of the Messiah. (Read).

Notice the shift from the second person (he will bring forth justice, he will not cry, he will not break …), to the first person (I have called you, I have taken you, I have given you …).

In those few sentences we see the whole movement of the Gospel: from the distant to the immediate, from impersonal, to the personal. From the other, unknowable God, to the God who walked among us. From the vengeful, angry, jealous God, to the God who would invite us each to gather around the table and join him in the feast, and walk with him in relationship, in love, and in discipleship.

And so we come to the table, at the invitation of the most high God.

Let’s pray.


[1] Gabriel García Márquez, eds. Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, p 204.
[2] Ibid, p 45

Setting Sights

Sunday, January 2nd. 2005
(Second after Christmas, Epiphany)
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton
Matthew 2:1-12

A foreword:

For almost the last two weeks I have been ‘perking’ today’s message. For the last week, I have, in a parallel way, been catching what I could of the developments related to the Earthquake and Tsunamis that hit Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India and the other countries around the Indian Ocean.

Last night, as I sat down to put on paper the message related to the text for today, it hit me that, just as I expected Father Win Lewis, the rector of Old Donation Episcopal Church in Virginia Beach, to say something that would lend meaning to the events of September 11th, 2001, when I went to the prayer vigil that evening, I wondered if you would expect the same of me this morning, in light of what we have heard and seen of the unfolding tragedy and unimaginable suffering of those who have lost everything – EVERYTHING and are trying to survive after … having survived the initial disaster.

If your question is “why?”, all I can do is refer you to Paul’s letter to the church at Rome, chapter 8, beginning around verse 19, but especially verse 22, where he speaks of ‘creation groaning in labor pains until now …’ and entreat you to each find a way to do something -- however small, through whatever agency. I read some statistics last night – there are approximately 189 million working adults in the United States today. If each of us gave $100.00 towards relief efforts, we would be sending about 18 Billion (with a B) dollars to help with relief and reconstruction efforts. Another way to approach it is this: there are about 169,000 congregations that make up the top ten denominations in the United States. What if each of those congregations was to give $500 toward Asian relief? We would be able to give 84.5 million dollars toward these efforts. (thanks Jay for the stats)

The one thing we CAN do immediately is to continue to lift up our brothers and sisters, those who have lost so much, as well as those who are on the front lines of providing relief, in prayer. So let’s do that right now. Please bow with me:

God of Compassion, with you and all the world family, we weep and mourn. Comfort all who are alone or afraid, who wail in loud lamentation. Let us be your heart reaching out to those who grieve. Let us be your hands working to assist those who still live. For you are the God who stands with the least and the lost. Come by here, Lord. Come by Sri Lanka, and India, and Indonesia. Come by all the places that need your comforting and healing presence. Amen.

1In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, 2asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’ 3When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; 4and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. 5They told him, ‘In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet: 6“And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.”’ 7Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. 8Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, ‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.’
9 When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. 11On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

What’s he doing? Doesn’t he know it’s AFTER Christmas? That’s part of the Christmas story!

Yes, I DO know it is after Christmas, and yes, the passage IS part of the Christmas story, but today is ALSO the Sunday before the celebration of the Epiphany, which falls on January 6th, the day marks the traditional arrival of the three wise men to the place where Jesus was with his family, before the flight to Egypt, on the 12th day after Christmas (hence the song). Bear with me; let’s see where this takes us.

I always got in trouble with the backstroke. For the longest time, I wasn’t able to figure out that, in order to move in a straight line, and in the absence of floater lines on either side of the travel lane, the best way to get from one side of the pool to the other involved fixing your position on a spot or an object at the end of the pool you just dove off of, and keeping your body in line with IT, in order to make your way down the length of the pool to the other side. Part of the problem with THAT was the fact that, after a certain distance, my nearsightedness made it hard for me to distinguish smaller objects on which I might have focused. It didn’t take me long to figure out that, when doing the breast stroke or the crawl, the best way to keep within your lane was to watch the nice, WIDE stripe so generously provided for you on the bottom of the pool.

Santiago summers are hot. Dry and Hot. Hotter than summers outside Santiago, mainly due to the amount of pavement that is absorbing, retaining, and reflecting the sun and heat back up at you. Since there is little to no rain in summer, and Santiago is in a bowl – surrounded by mountains – it’s your basic frying pan. The main objective in summer is to get out of the city as often and for as long as possible.

I enjoyed staying in Santiago. The pace slowed down, since so much of the population spent the summer outside the city, and there was still stuff to do. My favorite activity by far, though, was swimming. We lived just a few blocks from the community pool, just enough of a walk to work up a sweat while you walked there and long enough to dry off as you walked back. Often, we would head out early enough to get there before they actually opened the pool for the day, and ended up waiting for them to finish pouring in the chlorine and impatiently waiting for the minutes to tick by before the chemicals had sufficiently diluted themselves before we could dive in. We STILL wound up with stinging, red-rimmed eyes and itchy noses, and green hair, but it was a small price to pay for the sheer joy of diving into the deep end of the pool and opening your eyes underwater, looking across the expanse of the pool and seeing the other side, with sunlight dappling the sides and bottom of the pool. It created a magical quiet place to which I readily escaped, weightlessly floating until i couldn't hold my breath any longer.

We know the story. We’ve heard it, or most of it, as far back as we can remember. Mary and an angel, Joseph and an angel, shepherds and a whole bunch of angels … then Herod comes into the picture and three wise men from the east do too. Being foreigners, they check in at the desk, so to speak, when they get to the area, and let the local King know why they are there. The local King, along with ‘all of Jerusalem’ – in an interesting parallel to a similar response at the end of Jesus’ earthly ministry – is frightened. As usual, they are frightened of what they don’t understand and cannot control. How unusual is that? But let’s focus on the last 4 verses: (read)

8Then he (Herod) sent them to Bethlehem, saying, ‘Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.’ 9 When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. 10When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. 11On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. 12And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

The celebration of epiphany is the celebration of the giving of the gifts. Again, the song ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ makes that aspect of the celebration apparent. On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me…

It is interesting to me that we also use the term to signal a moment – an event - a transformative second when we have a glorious unveiling – a dazzling moment of clarity when an idea hits us, or when we suddenly realize something that afterwards seems obvious, or a given, where before we seemed to be muddling along in a thick soup, unaware of anything remotely as apparent as that would soon come to be.

In any case, we have the wise men, who apparently spent a good portion of their time observing the heavens, at least enough to note the coming of the star of Bethlehem, and even more importantly, to recognize its significance. They realized the importance of the event. Scripture doesn’t go into a lot of detail about HOW they did that, but in their response to the coming of the star, they demonstrated that on some level, they understood the coming of the star, and the coming of the Christ child as an epiphany in world history.

So they set off, and set their sights on the star, and made their way to Judea. They were briefly sidetracked by Herod, but then were able to get back on track and make their way, still, following the star, until it brought them to the place where they were “overwhelmed with joy.” Can we identify a place or a time in our lives when WE were ‘overwhelmed with Joy’?

It seems like such a trivial question in the face of the incredible suffering we’ve witnessed since last Sunday, and yet, that’s the starting point. If we are going to respond to tragedy, it will come out of our response to the unmerited grace of God in touching OUR lives, in changing US, in having been rescued, and welcomed, and comforted and surrounded by the presence of God through the family of God. We have an opportunity to gift the sorrowing world with the presence of God in a way that we seldom do.

We can get bogged down in the smallness of our contribution. I used to get so frustrated, after having concentrated so hard on making my arms go to the same place with each stroke, but having kept my face facing directly up, I had no point of reference by which to gauge where I was headed, and I always ended up disoriented, hitting the side of the pool with my left arm, or worse, with my head. Once I learned the importance of maintaining that point of reference, getting from one end of the pool to the other became a matter of time, and not direction. Keeping an eye on where I was coming from helped me get to where I was going.

We have no choice about diving into 2005. That has already happened. What we DO have a choice about, of course, is … what course we will set for ourselves as we move through the year. Will we be focusing on where we’re coming from, or where we’re going? Or is it possible to hold both within us, letting the one inform the other – helping us maintain our bearings, and set our sights on the prize that is before us?

Let’s pray.