Today’s Gospel story confronts us with two questions:

• 1) How are we doing by our children? Not only our own children, if we are parents, but by the children of our church family, whether we are parents or not? After all, Jesus made that matter sound mighty important when he said, “… to such belongs the kingdom of God.”

• 2) In what ways does Jesus want us all to be like children? That sounds pretty important too, for he said, “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.”

There’s more at stake than whether or not families visit this church and say, “Here’s where we want to bring our children.” I love it when that happens. But what’s at stake is Jesus’ desire to create the beloved community of which the prophets spoke, when they said things like, “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;  and a little child shall lead them.” (Is. 11).

The true measure of a church, then, is not how high our steeples go, but how low does our attention go? Does it go all the way down to those about whom Jesus said, “Whenever you give a cup of cold water to a child in my name, it shall not go unrewarded?” The true measure of a church is not how many people God gives us to love, but how much we love each person whom God gives us. If we’re not doing right by the ones whom God has given us, especially the neediest, most vulnerable and dependent, why would he give us any more?

So for that first question–How are we doing by our children?– how do we stack up? I observe that we have some top notch Christian education workers here, who regularly go the second mile to prepare for their classes, even when their classes turn out to be two children, or one, or, some Sundays, none. People have also remarked on the ways we seek to include children and youth in the life and ministries of our church, and not just for our annual Christmas pageant. Some of us just followed the lead of our youth last night to gather and work at Feed My Starving Children. And we have a Safeguarding our Congregation policy by which we protect both our children and youth, plus their teachers and sponsors, from the risks of abuse, even from the mistaken appearance of abuse. So when someone signs up to be a youth worker or a Christian education teacher, no one should be surprised when they get that form for a police background check. Nothing personal; its just standard procedure, precisely so that it won’t be needed.

But let’s not let up. I encourage us to keep thinking of ourselves as something like a village, or an extended family. Even if we adults did not come here with children, I invite us all to think of ourselves as having some responsiblity toward all the children in this family of faith. If for example you see a child doing something here that could be dangerous or destructive, feel free to get down at their level and say something like, “I’m afraid you’re going to get hurt doing that. Where’s a better place to run?”

But the responsibility doesn’t lie with us adults alone. Kids, if you in your Christian Education class are memorizing some Bible verses or learning a song, how about reciting them or singing it for us during worship? We’d love it, and you’d be ministering to us. And youth, let me remind you of our mentoring program. We remind you of it every so often, but we don’t get many takers. What can I tell you that would help you get on board with that again?

So how are we doing by our children? Pretty good, I’d say, but there’s always room for growth. Now that first question: How are we doing by the children? was the easy part.

Here’s the hard part,: Question #2, In what ways does Jesus want his disciples to be like children? Especially since, elsewhere in the Bible, we are always told to grow up? Like in Ephesians 4, where we read, “until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ…”

Or when Paul says, in I Cor. 13: 11, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” By that he means love. So the Bible tells us to grow up and to be like children. How do we square growing up with remaining childlike? What gives?

Well, let’s consider: What are the qualities typical of children that we do well to keep? One would be trust. In our very earliest stages of life, one lesson we hopefully learn is trust. Its at the heart of everything else we must learn. We learn it if Mom and Dad are always there to feed us whenever we’re hungry, and to change our diapers, hold us close, carry us around, smile and sing and talk to us; make funny noises to engage us and draw us out into the world. Hopefully we learn that the world is an orderly, dependable, trustworthy, welcoming and loving place, at least the world that our families make at home. If we learn to trust in that time and that setting, we can learn to trust others well enough to love, in our marriages, if so called, in the church, at work, out on the streets where hopefully most people are obeying the traffic laws. And hopefully we learn to trust God, as the source of all love and trustworthiness. I think that’s one way Jesus wants us to stay childlike: trust, or faith.

No matter what our age, every stage and lesson of life forces us to choose between trust and fear. Get the lesson right in one major life event, and soon the next exam comes. If we’re parents, when it comes time to let our children go, we have to choose trust over fear, just as our children do. If we’re changing jobs or retiring, its trust versus fear again. And when the doctor asks us if our affairs are in order and recommends a hospice care center for us, its time to choose trust all over again. It doesn’t necessarily get easier every time. But it helps if we’ve had some practice.

But trust implies that we know how much we depend upon God and each other, a second lesson from childhood: embracing our interdependence. For children this sometimes poses as many problems as it does delights. Especially when we get toward adolescence and can’t wait to be as independent as possible, as soon as possible, even while the parents still provide for our basic needs. The title of a book captured that dilemma: Mom and Dad, Get Out of My Life,!!! But First, Will You Take Me and Cheryl to the Mall? Over time we hopefully grow to become more responsible and supportive to others. But we never become truly and totally independent. There are no self-made persons. So, knowing and embracing our dependence upon God and each other, and being dependable to each other, is the other side of the coin of trust, something childlike that Jesus wants his disciples to keep.

A third thing would be a sense of wonder. As we grow up, we risk getting to the point where we think we’ve seen it all. Unless we push ourselves into new experiences, we can get to where we think we know everything, and everything is ho-hum. Been there; done that; seen it all. But little children have neither the lifespan nor the temperament to act so jaded and cynical. So in second grade, when suddenly the chrysalis in the terrarium on the teacher’s desk starts to break open and a monarch butterfly starts to emerge, there’s no dignity to protect by playing it cool and saying, “Whatever; Big Deal.” There’s no keeping the children quiet; there’s no keeping them in their seats, nor any reason to.

This kind of childlike awe and wonder is what the Proverbs and the Psalms mean whenever they say, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Think holy fear, in the sense of amazement, appreciation, yes, wonder, reverence and awe. Its the difference between despising the world, or grabbing at the world, to own it and crush it, and cherishing it, protecting it, and holding it gently in the palm of your hand. That childlike sense of awe, wonder, and delight is another thing to sustain thoughout life.

A fourth childlike thing I’d recommend is play, or playfulness. Because we adults can get so drop-dead serious sometimes. Yes, I’m preaching to myself here. Of course we have serious, important responsibilities. But not everything has to be a terrible crisis, a dreaded threat to our dignity, our well-being, as though life were a zero-sum game in which no one can gain without someone else having to lose. So when disagreements, problems or complications arise, we are tempted to draw upon all the fears, disappointments and complications of our past and say, “Oh man; Here we go again; Why me?” The biggest example of that seriousness run amok is war.

Or we can say, “Well, it looks like we woke up human again today.” Anxiety is the biggest obstacle to creative thinking; nothing shuts down more options and slams shut more doors than heavy, deadly seriousness. Anxiety cannot be overcome with more anxiety. Some playfulness, humor and oddball, off-the-wall thinking can go a long way toward helping us deal creatively with many difficulties and disappointments.

That was part of the genius of the direct action campaigns of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960′s. The marchers and demonstrators knew they would likely go to jail for integrating lunch counters or refusing to move to the back of the bus. So, in their civil disobedience training, they prepared people to go to prison with an open, confident and peaceful attitude. You may even come out better for it; freer and stronger they said. Fifty years later, some of the marchers still say they had some of the best times in jail. Southern jails got full to the bursting with people who spent their time singing hymns and worshiping, telling stories, praying together, teaching and learning, making lifelong friendships and connections, sometimes even with their prison guards. Sometimes both the jailers and the inmates were sorry to part company. Because they refused to add anxiety to an anxious situation, they turned prison cells into freedom schools. That kind of openness or playfulness is also something childlike that Jesus would want us to keep.

But Paul says, “When I grew up, I put childish things away.” And that’s what I want us to remember today: the difference between being childlike and being childish. Childlike is good; childish is bad, at least according to our stage of growth.

Here’s what I mean: You ask a three-year old, Why is it that, while you’re riding in the back seat of the car at night, the moon seems to follow you? Everywhere you go, as long as you’re heading in the right direction, the moon is there moving along with you. Why? A three-year old is likely to say, “Because the moon is my friend.”

Aaaaaw. For a three-year old, that’s so sweet. Their’s is a magical universe, with themselves at the center. When they’re even younger, they are the universe. But for your average fourteen year old or a forty-year old, that kind magical, wishful, self-centered thinking is not only dumb, its dangerous. I don’t think Hitler ever outgrew it.

Or if you ask a two-year old why they should obey their parents, often they’ll say, “Cuz they’re bigger than me.” That’s a toddler’s first take on morality: might makes right. Fortunately, that doesn’t last. Its not long before you hear them saying, “But that’s not faaaair!” (That was our youngest daughter’s first complete sentence, by the way). So the childish things we have to relinquish, as we grow up in Christ, include self-centeredness, lack of self control, magical, wishful thinking, and this might-makes-right thinking, among others. There’s more, but I don’t want to start another sermon.

So, in summary, as we grow up into the fullness of Christ, into adult Christian maturity, the choice before us is either to become more childlike or more childish. Will we be childlike, in the sense of trust, interdependence, wonder, openness and playfulness, or will we be childish in the sense of the magical, wishful, self-centered thinking that so often masquerades as faith? Life has a way of forcing that question upon us, again and again, at deeper and deeper levels of the soul. But don’t worry: as the children’s hymn we sang today put it, “Neither life nor death shall ever from the Lord his children sever. Unto them his grace he showeth, and their sorrows all he knoweth.”

 There, we just heard Jesus name a terrible threat to marriage, and it has nothing to do with anything on the ballot this election year. Yes, I’m talking about the constitutional amendment up for a vote this November, the one that would prohibit same sex marriage. I mention it because some some pastors and churches are already under pressure to join the crusade for or against it. So, now that I have your attention at the start of this election year, I might as well jump into the deep end and make this commitment to you: You hopefully know my commitment, in practice and teaching, to what the Confession of Faith in a Mennonite Perspective and the Bible, as I understand it, say about marriage. But I will not use this pulpit, nor my ministry, to tell anyone how they should vote on that amendment, or even if they should vote on it, as is being done in some churches already. Nor will I make your beliefs about marriage or the amendment a litmus test of your Christian faith and discipleship. And I hope no one else does, either.

Besides, no constitutional amendment can ever neutralize the threat to marriage that Jesus has in mind. If law and constitution could help save marriage, or marriages, I would propose that we first make a constitutional amendment against low-wage working poverty, for financial strains are surely killing marriages right and left. I would also propose an amendment against pornography, for that too is harming marriages, as well as the women and children whom it exploits. But the threat that Jesus has identified is so insidious that it not only hurts marriages, it hurts, even kills, all sorts of relationships, including our relationship with God, and thus, our eternal souls.

This threat is the same one I mentioned last Sunday: hardness of heart. In verse 5, Jesus told the Pharisees: ”It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law.”Note that he was not talking to promiscuous, party-hardy. loose-living libertines. He was warning righteous, rigorous, religious people, the moral crusaders who were striving to bring the nation back to God: the Pharisees.

And that crusading tendency just might be a symptom of the problem, if it means that we’re looking for dragons and monsters, enemies and adversaries to fight and defeat outside ourselves, while ignoring the dragons and enemies inside of ourselves. That’s one sure symptom of hardness of heart: projecting onto others what we least want to see in ourselves. And it seems to be a sadly recurrent theme in history, that triumphalistic, moralistic crusaders eventually show themselves just as susceptible to the sins that they crusade against, as are the sinners against whom they crusade.

That was the case in this First Century controversy about divorce. When they tested Jesus with the question, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” they were dragging him into a long-standing debate among Jews of the time over that very question, “How easy should divorce be?” Jesus was not the only rabbi of the time to set a very high bar over and against divorce. But oddly enough, these most rigorous moral crusaders, who were trying to discredit him with this very question, were the most indulgent about divorce: to many Pharisees, a man could divorce a woman for just about anything that displeased him, as soon as she displeased him.

Not only was that terrible for marriage; it was especially terrible for women. Turning them out onto the streets was a ticket to poverty, and maybe even to prostitution as their only means of survival. But that was of no concern to these strenuous moral crusaders. They were hard of heart.

So hard of heart are they that even their way of reading the Bible was skewed. For the answer that Jesus gave them showed that their differences were over more than just divorce. He differed with them over how he read the Law of Moses. They saw every detail of the Law of Moses as an end in itself. So if Moses permitted divorce, then divorce must be okay.

Tragically and sadly, sometimes divorce is better than being bound forever to someone who abuses or betrays you. Nor am I saying that everyone with divorce in their history is guilty of hard-heartedness. We must not rush in with judgment where angels fear to tread. God knows how all marriages struggle, and how hard all couples must work at them. Whenever someone says to me, “I wonder if men and women can ever even be compatible,” I want to ask, “ What did you expect?” and “That, my friend, is precisely why God puts us together.” Couples make wedding vows for the same reason that all Christians make baptismal vows: the things required of us on our journey of discipleship, whether single or married, do not come easily nor naturally; they must be promised, not just suggested, worked at, not just taken for granted. That’s why I urge no one to give themselves intimately, in body and soul, to another person until such promises have been made and trust has been earned.

Nor do I take Jesus to mean that, after divorce, no one can ever remarry, when he says that “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her.” I wonder if he’s telling the Pharisees, “You can’t dress up adultery as divorce whenever you expel your wives, to look for a better spouse, instead of working at being a better spouse.”

Still, nobody should rush from divorce into another marriage; rupturing the one-flesh bond between man and woman, whether there’s a ring or not, is one of the most painful things ever. Time and care must be taken to address what went wrong. The burden of proof should be against divorce and remarriage. But to say that no one gets any forgiveness, or any second chances after divorce, is at odds with all the other second chances that Jesus gives for everything else.

So, when it comes to reading the law of Moses, Jesus points us to an even greater good in the Law. It’s right there in the first three chapters of Genesis, and it takes priority over the permission to divorce. “At the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female” he says,….. “therefore, they are no longer two, but one.” Its the melding of very different beings–man and woman– each one a reflection of God–into a unity of body and spirit that also reflects God, through the love, respect, dignity and care they show for one another, mutually and equally. This harmony can happen in marriage, supremely, but not just.

Even if we are not married, this is well worth reflecting upon, because we all owe our very existence to this powerful drive toward the union of genders that God has built into creation. This drive and desire is nothing less than a reflection of God’s very nature, and of God’s delight in and desire for each of us, by name. What’s more, the Bible compares our glorious destiny of redemption to a riotously joyful wedding celebration: the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, the marriage of heaven and earth. In that sense, all Christians are married, at least once. So, the tender-heartedness that Jesus advocates for marriage is a survival skill that all of us need in our spiritual journey, whether married or single.

So, lets examine the nature of our love and respect for the other gender, whether we’re married or not, as a sign, an indicator, of our love and respect for God. Its what I mean by “tenderness of heart.” Another way of putting it is with the words I most want us to remember today: they are “willingness” and “willfullness.” Those are two words that the Christian psychologist, Gerald May, uses for what the Bible calls hardness of heart and tenderness of heart. Tenderness of heart is akin to willingness, while hardness of heart he calls, willfulness. Here’s how May described the two: “Willingness implies a surrendering of one’s self-separateness, an entering into, an immersion in the deepest processes of life itself. It is a realization that one already is a part of some ultimate cosmic process and it is a commitment to participation in that process. In contrast, willfulness is the setting of oneself apart from the fundamental essence of life in an attempt to master, direct, control, or otherwise manipulate existence. More simply, willingness is saying yes to the mystery of being alive in each moment. Willfulness is saying no, or perhaps more commonly, ‘yes, but…’ But willingness and willfulness do not apply to specific things or situations. They reflect instead the underlying attitude one has toward the wonder of life itself. Willingness notices this wonder and bows in some kind of reverence to it. Willfulness forgets it, ignores it, or at its worse, actively tries to destroy it. Thus willingness can sometimes seem very active and assertive, even aggressive. And willfulness can appear in the guise of passivity.”

For a supreme example of willingness, consider Jim and Della, a young, poor, hardworking couple in O’Henry’s classic story, The Gift of the Magi. Each wants to honor and thrill the other with a Christmas gift. But being poor, they have to hock their most prized possessions to be able to buy it. Jim sells his heirloom gold pocket watch, which belonged to his father and grandfather, to buy Della a set of beautiful combs for her long, gorgeous hair. But unbeknownst to Jim, Della cuts and sells her long, gorgeous hair, to buy him a platinum chain for his heirloom gold pocket watch, that he has just sold, to buy her beautiful combs for the beautiful hair she has just cut and sold. We can laugh over the irony of each one getting a gift that the other cannot use. But O’Henry’s point is that their tender-hearted willingness to please each other, to the point of sacrificing their most prized possession for each other, is their true gift to each other.

All relationships, require the willingness to cherish, honor and protect, rather than the willfulness to grab, take and exploit; the willingness to invite and engage, to welcome and receive, rather than the willfulness to demand, impose or, should someone disappoint us, to expel; the willingness to serve and support, rather than the willfulness to control and to use; the willingness to listen and to learn, even when the truth hurts, rather than the willfulness of defensiveness and denial; the willingness to learn, grow and change, rather than the willfulness of dominating and demanding that others change.

Consider then what damage a hard-hearted willfulness can do to any relationship, especially to the intimate bond of marriage. Men and women are equally susceptible to it. But as a man I have to take some responsibility for the male versions of this willfulness against women, because they are staples of mainstream male culture, all over the world. Consider the contempt that is all too common toward women, even though we all came into the world through women. Go figure. This contempt for women and all things female is called mysoginy.

The worst examples of misogyny are physical, verbal, emotional or sexual abuse. Or when men withdraw from their wives into work, TV, sports or alcohol. Or pornography. Or the kind of crude talk about women that you often hear in locker rooms or some business board rooms. As the Pharisees show in today’s passage, there are religious ways of being willful and hard-hearted, too. In the church, whenever men interpret biblical words like “headship” and “submission” to mean domination, superiority or hierarchy over women, we’ve missed the whole biblical meaning of submission and servanthood according to Jesus.

Remember how Adam pointed to Eve that day in the Garden and said to God, “That woman, that you gave me, she offered me the fruit and I ate it.” That says to me that there has long been a deep wound of estrangement, shame, fear and distrust running through the male and female expressions of God’s nature in creation. I wonder if that wasn’t the fall: Adam blaming and rejecting of Eve, and God, in the same willful, accusing breath. Because of that wound, men are still tempted to use their unique, God-given masculine powers in willful self-assertion and dominance over women. Or failing that, in passive resistance and withdrawal from them.

The Law of Moses did not intend to heal that wound. The Law only served to bandage that wound, so we might limp along as best we can in our fallen condition. That’s the best that any law can ever do.

But as John the Beloved said at the beginning of his gospel, “Law came through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” When God administers grace and truth to us through the Holy Spirit, we’re talking about nothing less than lifelong radical spiritual healing heart surgery of the kind that God promised through the Prophet Ezekiel, when he said, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”

In other words, justice between the genders require nothing short of a radical spiritual heart surgery that would uncover and remove our hardened shell of willfulness and replace it with tender willingness, a willingness to love, cherish, honor, delight in and please God and all those whom he gives us to love, especially our spouses, if God has called us to marriage. To survive and to thrive on the journey of marriage, and indeed in any relationships, in life itself, no human law or amendment can heal us where we hurt most. We must choose, as often as necessary, to be and to stay on that journey of the transformation of the heart, from stubborn, fallen willfulness, to gracious, tender-hearted willingness. Let’s pray about that:

You are love. We love because you first loved us. But only your love is perfect, complete, unalloyed with fear. You called and welcomed each one of us by name into existence through the very love that makes us so dependent upon each other, so inter-related, with not a one of us sufficient unto ourselves. We thank you and bless you for the mystery and the majesty of such love that ties the world together. With the strength of our weak and fragmented loves, we would respond to you. Reveal and heal all that is broken, bruised or hardened within us or among us. Make tender our hearts, and willing our souls, that we would not shrink from you nor ourselves, nor any others, when you reveal how much we have yet to grow; that we would not rush to defend nor justify ourselves when it is you who so willingly justify us. Bless and strengthen all the connections and relations among us, by conforming us ever more into the image of Jesus. For he is the gracious and truthful human face of your love to us, in whose name, for whose honor and will we pray. Amen.

]]> http://www.emmanuelmennonitechurch.com/2012/01/30/jesus-and-marriage-moses-and-law/feed/ 0 http://www.emmanuelmennonitechurch.com/2012/01/30/a-mirror-to-ourselves/ http://www.emmanuelmennonitechurch.com/2012/01/30/a-mirror-to-ourselves/#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:34:37 +0000 Mathew Swora http://www.emmanuelmennonitechurch.com/?p=1376

Mt. 15: 21 Jesus left Galilee and went to the area of Tyre and Sidon. 22 A woman from Canaan lived near Tyre and Sidon. She came to him and cried out, “Lord! Son of David! Have mercy on me! A demon controls my daughter. She is suffering terribly.”  23 Jesus did not say a word. So his disciples came to him. They begged him, “Send her away. She keeps crying out after us.”  24 Jesus answered, “I was sent only to the people of Israel. They are like lost sheep.”  25 Then the woman fell to her knees in front of him. “Lord! Help me!” she said.  26 He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to their dogs.”  27 “Yes, Lord,” she said. “But even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their owners’ table.”  28 Then Jesus answered, “Woman, you have great faith! You will be given what you are asking for.” And her daughter was healed at that very moment.

This is a difficult story. Naturally, the first question that comes to mind whenever we hear it is, Why would Jesus compare anyone to “a dog?” Especially since that was a racial term used sometimes by Jews for Gentiles? Is Jesus setting the wrong example here, especially on the day before we observe Martin Luther King, Jr. day? If so, how is it that Dr. King himself could appeal to the example and teaching of Jesus for his prophetic ministry against racism and bigotry?

But don’t let that question distract us from the other question that this story poses to us, namely: In relation to Jesus, who are we most like in this story? The disciples or the Canaanite woman? If we deal with that second question first, I believe we will be better able to resolve the first one: Why Jesus would put this mother off, even implying that she and her people were “dogs?”

So, are we like the Canaanite woman or the disciples? Let’s look first at the woman, and mother. She’s not Jewish. Yet she prays to Israel’s Lord and Messiah, at least when she meets him on the roadside. Maybe you too can identify with moments when your most urgent prayers seem to have gotten the same cold shoulder that this Canaanite woman got from Jesus at first, in verse 23: “Jesus did not say a word,” times when heaven seems to have left the phone off the hook, and our prayers not only seem unanswered, we wonder if they were even heard.

Not just unheard or unanswered; actually rebuffed. Rejected. Like when Jesus said to the Canaanite woman, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” But her prayers were first rebuffed by the disciples, when they said to Jesus, “Send her away. She keeps crying out after us.” That’s why we heard today from St. Matthew’s telling of the story, even though this year I’m preaching through St. Mark’s Gospel. Because Matthew includes that detail about the disciples’ initial reaction to this desperate woman. Jesus seems to have waited for them to respond to this woman, and they did. “Send her away!” they said.

So let’s look now at the disciples. Just when this woman needs friends and advocates to intercede with her, and for her, she gets the boot. I can identify with them, too. I’m not particularly proud of it. It happens whenever someone in need shows up at an inopportune moment, a very inconvenient time, and upon seeing him, I’m thinking, “Why now?” Or, “Oh; You again.” Not anybody here, of course. But haven’t there been people in all of our lives who have stretched our patience with their persistence? People who don’t seem to understand the proper way of getting things done, which half the time is no way at all? Maybe they are people to whom we really want to say, “Why should your irresponsibility become my responsibility All of a sudden?” Or, “Again? If I help you out, am I really helping you, or am I only reinforcing some learned helplessness?” Or worse?

And whenever the answer to that last question is Yes, then sometimes we do have to say No. When we just don’t have what our neighbor needs, or when we are the one in great need, there’s no shame in that, and no shame in even saying, Can you help me? We can’t give what we don’t have. There’s only one among us who has everything that everyone needs: God, and God alone.

But that wasn’t the case with the disciples in today’s story. They had rebuffed and rejected her, when she needed friends to pray and intercede with her. If they had any justification for such attitudes, I bet it went like this: “What do you gentiles and pagans expect for worshiping idols, engaging in magic, sorcery and divination, and all around dabbling in the occult, but demonic possession? Isn’t that why you are as unclean to us as……DOGS?” Isn’t that why God gave us the Promised Land and turned your people out?

Technically, they may have a point. But…… there’s a child involved. Even if the mother did something to open the door to the dark, demonic depths, this child cannot be held responsible for it. Same as when someone comes to us looking for help, and you see that morning’s hospital discharge papers, or the prescription that needs filling, or their children in tow, and Community Emergency Services is closed until tomorrow, and the only open overnight shelter with any space is in St. Paul. So, you get the prescription, or the bus tickets, or the grocery store coupon as though you were getting it for Jesus himself.

Because, in effect, you are. Especially when it comes to children.

Naturally we don’t want to be taken advantage of. But our even greater fear should be that other occupational hazard of life: hardness of heart and indifference, to the point that we turn even Jesus away “in his most distressing disguise of the poor,” as Mother Teresa used to say.

And I think that’s why Jesus first responded to the Canaanite woman the way he did, putting her off at first. Not because he was afraid of being taken advantage of. Nor because he was a racial bigot who really thought of Gentiles as dogs. I think Jesus was teaching the disciples something about their own hard-heartedness and indifference to the woman, by holding a mirror up to them, in his own words and actions.

Some people say that this encounter, with this woman, is when Jesus first learned to see Gentiles as something other than subhuman, or “dogs.” But that doesn’t make sense. By this time in his ministry, Jesus had already demonstrated amazing care and compassion for Gentiles. He had already shown a scandalizing disregard for the customs that kept Jews and Gentiles apart from each other. He waited a moment to see if the disciples got the lesson, and obviously, they did not.

Besides, if Jesus really meant to put her down, to put her in her place at the time, as a woman and a Gentile, why didn’t she just wither and slink away at his rebuke? If Jesus is the human face of deity, and if, as the Psalm says, at God’s rebuke the mountains quake and the waters flee, how much more might a mere mortal stand up under the rebuke of him who terrified demons? The Saducees and the Pharisees did not, whenever they tried to argue with Jesus. So, where did this woman find the courage and the wit to come right back at the Messiah with this amazing comeback?

I think its because she realized pretty quickly that this was a test, that Jesus was mirroring to the disciples their own callous indifference and hardness of heart, so that they might see it in full view, in all its sordid, ugly detail. Musicians among us know what that’s like. Don’t you just hate it when you’re taking lessons and your teacher says, “Here, listen while I play back what I just heard from you?” Or if you’re in any kind of class at all, or a business meeting, and the teacher, or your boss, repeats what you just said, and then asks everyone else, “So, what do the rest of you think about that?” Don’t you just want to crawl under the nearest table?

If that’s the case, then Jesus is teaching the disciples something, by answering their prayers quite literally, in such a way as to show them what they’re really made of. That had to be embarrassing. The embarrassment of having your blind spots revealed. The embarrassment of suddenly seeing how steep the learning curve before you is, and how far you are from the end.

I can’t prove one hundred percent that that is why Jesus first said what he did to the woman. But it best explains why the woman is so emboldened to come back at Jesus. Why else does she earn Jesus’ words of praise and honor for her comeback, for her faith, unless some spur-of-the-moment conspiracy took shape between Jesus and the woman? And why else would there be such a conspiracy around the word, “dog” but to give the disciples a taste of their own medicine? If I were writing a screen play of this, I would have Jesus winking at her when he first puts her off. And she would be smiling when she comes back at him. Then the disciples would be shocked, and then cut to the heart when their indifference and hardness of heart are exposed.

And that, to me, is what this story is most about: Who are we most like? The woman with her Won’t-take-no-for-an-answer kind of faith, or the disciples with their indifference and hardness of heart? In the Bible, according to Jesus, the worst that can happen to us is indifference and hardness of heart, whether its indifference toward God or indifference toward people. That is also precisely the most common occupational hazard of Christian discipleship. For we are often like those disciples up in Tyre and Sidon, modern-day Lebanon, wanting to get away from it all, and finding that, no, we can never quite get away from it all. Its so easy to get cynical, tired out and overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude and persistence of human need.

But I don’t think that fatigue was the only reason why these disciples first put the Canaanite woman off. Between Jesus and the disciples they had what her daughter needed. It didn’t take but a moment. Their indifference and resistance were most likely born out of fear, the fear of someone so different from themselves. And the fear of losing control in this situation to someone so strong, straightforward and pushy.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had something to say about that kind of fear-based indifference. In 1963, while sitting alone in solitary confinement in a Birmingham, Alabama, prison cell, he had long hours to think about the civil rights campaign in that city. But someone smuggled into him a newspaper. In that paper he read an essay by some white clergymen, saying that they agreed with Dr. King’s aims, but they disagreed with his means, and the speed with which he wanted change to happen. “Justice and equality will happen eventually,” they said, “but not if you keep making demands, pushing the matter and upsetting the politicians, the business owners and the police. Be patient; your day will come.” They sound like the disciples, asking Jesus to just send this pushy woman away. She doesn’t know her place.

Dr. King wrote in the margins of that newspaper his brilliant response to those fellow clergymen, his Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And this is what he said about the indifference of those clergymen: “I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

As for the faith of that Won’t-take-No-for-an-answer woman, here is what Dr. King also had to say in that same Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “We must see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

Whenever people, like the Canaanite woman, create tension by their persistent claims for their share at the table of community, they also force us to ask ourselves, Who are we most like? If we see them and their needs as just another tragic interruption to what could have been a nice outing in the park, or just as another likely scam, then indifference has hardened our hearts.

But if we see them as breakthrough opportunities for the kingdom of God, then we share the great faith of the Canaanite woman, and the compassion of Jesus. Every such inconvenience and interruption is a question that heaven puts to us, asking Who are we most like? and What are we made of? Warm, loving faith, or cold, hard indifference?

  Mark 5: 21 When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. 22 Then one of the synagogue leaders, named Jairus, came, and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet. 23 He pleaded earnestly with him, “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.” 24 So Jesus went with him. A large crowd followed and pressed around him. 25 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. 26 She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. 27 When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, 28 because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” 29 Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering.  30 At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” 31 “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”  32 But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. 33 Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. 34 He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”  35 While Jesus was still speaking, some people came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader. “Your daughter is dead,” they said. “Why bother the teacher anymore?”  36 Overhearing what they said, Jesus told him, “Don’t be afraid; just believe.”  37 He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the brother of James. 38 When they came to the home of the synagogue leader, Jesus saw a commotion, with people crying and wailing loudly. 39 He went in and said to them, “Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.” 40 But they laughed at him.   After he put them all out, he took the child’s father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the child was. 41 He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum!” (which means “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”). 42 Immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished. 43 He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat.

“Here is my heart in place of his,” the mother prayed, through her tears. “…I give it in place of my son,” she cried, on her knees before God. The mother had just learned that her oldest son was missing in action in the Korean war. So, was he alive or dead? Not knowing was at least as bad as knowing the worst.

We meet this mother in the novel, And the Earth Did Not Swallow Him Up, by Tomas Rivera. Its about the difficult lives of Latino migrant farm workers in 1950′s Minnesota. But any parent, of any culture, any time, praying and wailing in any language, would identify with this mother and her prayer, for her missing son. “Better my life than his….He’s not even old enough to have done anything deserving of death….Why, I still have all his childhood toys and books and comics, even his kite here……”

And so, I suspect, were the prayers of Jairus and his wife, on behalf of their twelve year old daughter. “Spare her” maybe even, “take me instead.” If anyone’s prayers would be answered, you’d think that those of a rabbi, a scholar and a spiritual leader like himself would be, especially his prayers in the correct, biblical Hebrew. Instead, word comes to him, “Don’t bother the Nazarene; your daughter has died.” Like those of the Mexican migrant mother, the prayers of the righteous rabbi, the godly scholar, and those of the wife and mother who kept his kosher home, go unanswered, even mocked by death.

So were the prayers of the desperate woman in today’s story, until she met Jesus. Through the same years that the rabbi and his God-fearing wife had loved and lived with their beautiful daughter, this other woman had lived in pain and shame, in the shadows, untouched and untouchable, because her non-stop bleeding rendered her ritually, legally unclean. While Jairus was a very respected and visible man in his community, this woman was invisible, and avoided. While Jairus was very helpful and important to his community, the woman was considered expendable, even a threat, at least to everyone’s purity.

Two people then are driven to their knees before Jesus, one literally before him, to plead the cause of his dying daughter, the other somewhere behind him most likely, so as to remain invisible, just to touch the hem of his cloak. They come from very different places in society, but they end up in the very same place, at practically the very same moment: bent to the ground in desperation, literally floored by their crying need, in the presence of Jesus. There at the feet of Jesus do we see so clearly the human condition, whoever we are, whatever our status, our background, our citizenship or our education.

Because both of these stories came to a head at the same time, same place, same person, the Word invites us to ponder at least three things that the woman, the scholar and synagogue ruler, and his daughter have in common, as do we. They are:

1. The ground where we kneel at the feet of Jesus is level, whoever we are, whatever our background or our status. Something will drive us all to the ground there, if it has not already, at the very least, the common human denominator of death and dying. There we will find that no one has any advantage over another. We all share a solidarity of life and death, of weakness and need, whatever our language, race or nationality.

2. The grace of Jesus is also equal for all the desperate and despairing at his feet, whoever we are, whatever our background or our status. For there, both Jairus and the un-named, unclean woman received words and a touch of healing and hope from Jesus. It does not matter to Jesus that one is ritually clean, while the other is not. Nor does it matter that one is a scholar, learned in the scriptures and traditions, while the other, most likely, is not. His heart, and his healing power, go out to both, equally.

3. The word of Jesus is the same for all the desperate and despairing who fall to their knees at his feet. To all he says, “Go in peace; your faith has saved you,” even, and eventually, as to the little girl, “Arise.” That last word we shall even hear personally, as did the young girl in today’s story. For as Jesus told his disciples in John 5: 25 “Very truly I tell you, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live.” When Mark gave us the very words of Jesus, in Aramaic, the words that brought life back to that little girl, he was inviting all of us to imagine ourselves hearing the same word of Jesus, in our most desperate and despairing condition of death. Just substitute your own name before the word, “Arise.”

If we would follow Jesus, then we must also have the assurance of the same three things: first, that we are all of us in the same boat, in the same desperate straits before death, loss and suffering, that neither race, class, status nor smarts will make the ground of human need any higher or lower for anyone before the feet of Jesus. Secondly, we must be convinced that the grace of Jesus is equal for all persons at his feet, whoever they are, wherever they come from; and thirdly, we too must have the assurance that even if our prayers for healing and help are not all answered in this life, they will be when he says to all who died with faith in him, “Arise.” For its only a matter of time before we hear the same voice calling our names.

But in this year’s preaching theme of “Come, Follow Me,” we’re not only looking at who and what Jesus is for us, but what Jesus would teach us. For all the things he did were not only loving, miraculous and meaningful signs of the kingdom now come; they were also teaching moments for the very people who would carry on his ministry in the world: us. If we would follow in Jesus’ steps, then we too must have the same curiosity, compassion and care that he showed when that woman touched his robe, namely, that there be for us no invisible, expendable people.

As for being invisible: it always amazes me that, with so many people crowded around Jesus, no one could answer his very simple question, “Who touched me?” How did that woman so nearly get away with that?

But if you’ve ever read the Cold War spy novels of John LeCarre, you find that there is a science, an art, of making oneself nearly invisible, or at least, unobtrusive, un-noticeable, easily overlooked or quickly forgotten. Its not just a trick of professional espionage; we all learn how to hide ourselves, or parts of ourselves, whenever we are uncomfortable or ashamed.

As for being expendable, sacrifice-able: there’s something about most human societies that requires scapegoats, villains and victims, people to reject, on whom to project the things we most want to hide about ourselves. Having enemies and alleged inferiors also gives people a sense of unity and identity, however false and fleeting. For the people around Jesus, the people to fear would have been people like that ritually, technically unclean woman.

Being invisible and expendable often go together. People who find themselves the scapegoats, villains and victims of a group, a school or a society, often learn how to blend in, to avoid being seen, at least not in the wrong places, and to deflect attention away from themselves. This very neighborhood is full of invisible people who are trying to stay that way, because of addictions, debt, disability, mental health issues, criminal records or immigration status. And there is a corresponding effort on the part of society to keep them out of sight. Its an open secret that when a social service agency wants to set up a group home in other parts of Minneapolis, those neighborhood associations band together and say, “Not in our backyard, you don’t; Go to the Phillips Neighborhood, the Central Neighborhood, or to North Minneapolis; what will one more service agency, group home or treatment center matter in those neighborhoods?”

So now it doesn’t surprise me as much that this woman could get up to Jesus, touch him, and nearly get away without being seen, even in a crowd. Through her twelve years of illness and ritual uncleanness, invisibility was probably a learned art, on the level of LeCarre’s greatest spies. And her neighbors had likely learned how not to see her, too.

But to Jesus, no one is invisible, nor expendable. To the sacrificial Lamb of God, there are no scapegoats or rejects. Nor does he fear our infirmities or uncleanness. Jesus came expressly into our world of shadows to seek all who suffer from them. And to seek the weak, hidden and rejected parts inside all of us, to find and illuminate everyone and everything that he finds in the shadows with healing love. In every such encounter you see Jesus acting on the faith that the goodness and holiness of God overcomes the uncleanness and impurity in the world, and not vice versa. So when he got the woman in today’s story to confess her action, Jesus did not condemn her for violating the letter of the purity law. Instead, he commended her faith and her courage in front of everyone.

The lesson for the disciple of Jesus is clear: everybody counts; no one is to be invisible, expendable, scapegoated or rejected. For the one perfect sacrifice necessary has already been made once and for all everybody’s cleansing and healing: Jesus himself, the Lamb of God.

But in this time of economic uncertainty, and in an election year, its open season in the hunt for enemies and scapegoats. The newest scapegoat du jour is the immigrant, especially the undocumented, Spanish-speaking immigrant. Yes, I know there are legitimate questions and disagreements around matters of law, borders and policies. But we mustn’t forget that we’re talking about people, and their children. And the scapegoating fever has gotten to the point where many who are here with documents are being judged and treated as though they were not.

And now someone has tapped us on our shoulder, and is asking us not for pity but for partnership, not for hand-outs but for friendship, companionship on the road to full citizenship in this country, and in the kingdom of heaven. And for some tasks, English will suffice. This is our chance to demonstrate before the world a human society that needs no villains, victims nor scapegoats to stay united. Its called the Church of Jesus Christ. This is our chance to demonstrate the faith of Jesus Christ: that the goodness of God overcomes all things, even fear, divisions and death. For the ground at his feet is level for all who come to Jesus seeking healing, help and hope. That’s good news for everybody.

]]> http://www.emmanuelmennonitechurch.com/2012/01/13/a-world-with-no-scapegoats-no-invisible-people/feed/ 0 http://www.emmanuelmennonitechurch.com/2011/12/27/for-the-lowly-and-the-contrite-a-story-for-christmas-day/ http://www.emmanuelmennonitechurch.com/2011/12/27/for-the-lowly-and-the-contrite-a-story-for-christmas-day/#comments Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:58:32 +0000 Mathew Swora http://www.emmanuelmennonitechurch.com/?p=1348 (Note) Annas was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the high priest who presided over the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, and was himself then still a figure of importance. Some have conjectured that, when the shepherds were out watching their flocks on the night of the Savior’s birth, in the vicinity of Bethlehem, the animals in their care may well have been those destined for sale and sacrifice in the temple of Zion. How to prove that beyond a shadow of a doubt I don’t know. But from the mere possibility of that arose in my imagination the following story:

It was very rarely that the old shepherd, Jacob, ever saw a horse among these remote hills of Judea, so far from the roads. The usual four-legged animals about him—of which there were many—were sheep, goats and cattle, destined for sale in Zion’s Temple precincts, and for sacrificial slaughter on the altars of God.

Even more rarely did the horse ever carry a rider who was seeking him and his companions, Zacharias, Isaac and Benjamin, as this rider seemed to be doing. Their sense of mystery gave way to dread as the rider approached.

“Its young Annas,” Benjamin said ruefully.

“Barely twenty years old,” said Zacharias, “and he thinks he is God’s gift to Zion.”

“The self-appointed enforcer of the family honor, being groomed for high priest some day,” said Jacob.

“Thinks he’s royalty ’cause he comes from a priestly family,” said Isaac.

“He is royalty,” Jacob replied. “Or at least his family is the closest thing we have to royalty.”

“Don’t let King Herod hear you talkin’ like that,” said Benjamin. “Out here, even the rocks have ears.”

“Whatever you call him, this young man coming our way is our boss’ son.”

“Shall we tell him about what we seen the other night?” Isaac asked Jacob. “At some point, we gotta tell’em about the angels and the child.”

“Hold on and let me get a feel for it,” Jacob replied. “Now quiet down, everyone, a’fore he gets close enough to hear us.”

The young Annas drew near the group of four shepherds, at work around a fire, cooking food and cleaning a goat skin. From atop his horse Annas looked down upon them with an air of authority and disdain, though any one of the shepherds was at least twice his age.

“Welcome, sir. Can we offer you some bread and stew from our fire?” Jacob asked Annas.

A look of derision crossed the young man’s face. “Its probably unclean,” Annas said, “like the whole of lot of you, I suspect.”

Never a word of greeting, blessing nor respect from this boy, thought Jacob, not even for his elders.

“I’ve come to find out what you were doing the other night, that you would effectively abandon the animals,” he added.

Jacob did not want to lie to a future high priest. But priestly family or no, something about this man and his well-connected family made him seem untrustworthy. Jacob resolved to dole out only the bits and piece of truth he could safely part with, waiting to see if Annas should prove worthy of more.

“We all took turns watching the sheep, my lord. Not a one was left unguarded.”

“All of you? And throughall of the night?” the young man asked, ready to pounce on any inconsistency.

“No, not all of us, and not through all the night,” Jacob replied. “We often give each other breaks, especially when its as cold as it’s been lately.” That much was true.

“Just what is the minimum number of guards you usually keep over our livestock?”

Jacob hesitated a moment, and then replied, “It depends on where they’re pasturing, Sir, and how many livestock there are, and whether or not any should be kept near town.”

“But we’re between high holy feasts, aren’t we?” Annas sneered. “So there’s no need to keep many in the corrals near town, is there?”

“That’s right,” Jacob said, sighing.

“So now I want to know, old man, why I’ve been told that, even though everything on four hooves was out in the pastures three nights ago, there was only one shepherd with them around sunrise?” This also was true.

“Who told you that?” Jacob asked, although he knew the answer. It was as they had long suspected: the young boy who brought provisions to them was also a snitch.

“What does it matter who told me that?” Annas asked, with a rising tone of anger. “I want to know why you left everything in the care of just one shepherd before sunrise?”

Jacob thought to himself: With God’s angels all around, you don’t worry as much about wild beasts and thieves. But Jacob began to sense that this aspiring future priest would be the last man you’d tell about seeing angels and the baby.

So Jacob asked instead: “Are any animals missing, sir?”

“That’s for you to tell me, old man! And if there are, you will pay. But first, I want to know why they were effectively abandoned, when bandits or bears or jackals could have shown up and taken the whole lot.”

“Have any been seen around here of late, sir?”

“Stop trying to distract me! I’m the one asking questions. So: Why were all the animals left in the care of just one shepherd ? How would one man fight off beasts or brigands? And where did the rest of you go?”

“To Bethlehem, Sir. Its the closest town to the pasture where we were. And its well within reach of the flocks should anything happen.”

“Is that common practice among you, going into the nearest town at night?” Annas asked.

“No, sir.”

“So, the other night–” Annas began saying.

Jacob interrupted him to say, “That night were different, Sir. It won’t never happen again.” That much was truer than Annas could know.

“It had better not. If Bethlehem provides such distraction, do we have to order you never to pasture the flocks in that area again?”

Jacob liked the direction the conversation was suddenly taking, away from the reason for which four shepherds had left one in charge. Nor did Annas need to know that the one who had been found alone with the animals at sunrise had also taken a turn seeing and contemplating the wonder in Bethlehem that night, while others took his turn with the flocks.

“It would make the local shepherds happy if we never grazed there again, Sir. They don’t like the competition for the best land around.”

“Let them try to stop us,” Annas said, with a smirk. “But I’m still curious as to what might bring you into Bethlehem. Do we not provide you with enough to eat and drink?”

Jacob knew he had better not answer that one any more truthfully than he had to. “Sometimes we just get a hankering for the warmth of someone else’s company, you know?”

“So you just went to visit someone.”

“We was invited!” Benjamin interjected.

“Invited by whom?” Annas asked.

“By angels!”

“Uhhhh—the people we seen were so nice,” Jacob added, “and it were so cold, anyone would call’em angels.”

“You were cold,” Annas said, contemptuously. “Even around your customary campfire. You must be getting older than I thought. But you should be glad that I can better tolerate weakness of the flesh than I can weakness of the spirit. Do you catch my drift, old man?”

Jacob did not.

“Do I have to explain myself? All right. Our overlords, the Romans, fear the Hebrew spirit more than they fear the Hebrew sword. Our reputation for rebellion and resistance, that’s what I mean by ‘weakness of the spirit.’ There has even been a subversive song going around these past nine months, sung by women, about how God is about to bring down the mighty from their thrones and raise on high the humble and the poor. We’ve traced it all the way back to Galilee. Perhaps you’ve heard it?”

“All we hear ’round here,” Zacharias said, “is sheep.”

“Ba-a-a-ah” Benjamin added, for comic relief. No one laughed.

“Well, when even illiterate women are singing the most subversive words of the Psalms and the Prophets, you can understand why Caesar and King Herod would be asking us questions, don’t you?”

Jacob nodded in agreement.

“And do you know where the expected Deliverer, this supposed Son of David they sing about, is to be born?”

To keep from incriminating himself, Jacob shrugged his shoulders and said, “You are the scholar of the scrolls, and not this illiterate shepherd.”

“Bethlehem, old man. Bethlehem, where everyone seems to have gone the other night, without proper authorization.”

Jacob mimicked a look of surprise.

“What’s more,”Annas added, “We’ve just received visitors from Persia.”

“But Sir, we’re at war with Persia. Everybody knows that.”

“Yes,” said Annas. “But these men came armed only with expensive gifts, saying that they were looking for this ‘Son of David,’ the newborn ‘King of the Jews.’ Do you know anything about them and their visit?”

At that moment Jacob knew he must steer the conversation away from all the other amazing things he had seen that week.

“I won’t lie, Sir. In this open country, we see a lot of things. A caravan from the East would be hard to miss. But that don’t mean we trouble ourselves with such things.”

Annas continued: “Sooner or later, old man, they’re going to come back this way, looking for this supposed Son of David. Herod is sending them this direction, so they can fill him in on what’s happening. But honestly, why the Son of David would waste time in that wretched little wide spot in the road, among the likes of you unlettered and unclean louts, is beyond me. We Saducees don’t even believe in a coming ‘Son of David.’”

At this insult, Jacob felt a warm flush of shame and anger rising to his ears. More resignation before the likes of young Annas would strangle his soul, he knew. He would take the shame out on himself or someone else if he didn’t stand up to this provocation.

“Sir,” Jacob said, “with all due respect, I may be, as you say, unlearned and even unclean. Because of that, half the time we can’t even take part in the very sacrifices and ceremonies that we make possible. We may not even know which way to read a scroll. But at night, whenever we gaze at the stars, they also tell us something about the Almighty, just like your scrolls do. Its just like seeing and hearing angels sing about the glory of God and peace on earth. In a way, you can even say that we have seen and heard such things.

“Now, I have attended a few synagogue services over the years, and while I can’t read, at least I can remember some of what I hear. And one time I remember hearing the rabbi read from the Psalms of David, that God makes his dwelling place with the lowly and the contrite. Well, sir, did you ever see a more lowly bunch than us weather-beaten old buzzards?”

Benjamin interjected: “Why, some of us are even contrite! Or at least we should be.” Some nervous laughter ensued.

“So,” Jacob continued saying, “if the Most High dwells with the lowly and the contrite, don’t you think that a hole-in-the-wall like Bethlehem would be the first place to come lookin’ for the Son of David, when he does show up?”

As Jacob spoke, he saw a look of contempt grow on young Annas’ face.

“You dare to lecture me on the scrolls and the faith of Israel? Anyway, it wasn’t even David who said that, it was Isaiah. I’ll even quote it for you: “For this is what the high and exalted One says— he who lives forever, whose name is holy: ‘I live in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite.’”

“As you say, Sir.” Jacob restrained himself from asking, “So, how many of the contrite and lowly do you meet around Herod’s palace?” But that would not be a very contrite and lowly thing to say.

“It will be a cold day in summer before I ask the likes of you to interpret the scrolls,” Annas said, leaning back and pulling on the horse’s reins.

Suddenly, the horse leapt and bolted forward, throwing Annas onto his back, in a cloud of dust. A ripple of nervous laughter swept through the group of shepherds. So much for his plan to intimidate the shepherds from horseback.

But Jacob did not laugh. He felt pity instead for a man who felt the need to distance himself from others, and above others. He remembered something his father had once said, that “no one is to be pitied more than someone with no pity.”

As Annas got back up onto his feet, wiping the dust from his clothes, one shepherd stepped forward to wipe the dust from his back of his cape.

“Don’t touch me!” Annas cried. “I have priestly duties tonight.”

Jacob remembered something else that his father had once told him beside a campfire one night, long ago. “Son, whenever you feel bad about being poor and despised, like us shepherds often are, just remember that deep down inside, everybody feels little and lowly, too. Somewhere inside everyone is a little child who feels lost, alone and little, whether he’s a king or a street sweeper. Its just that some people can hide that from themselves and from the rest of us, while others just can’t. But before the Most High and Almighty, we’re all the same lost and lonely little children, like the newborn lambs in the fields around us. And the ones what get carried home on the Almighty’s shoulders are them what recognize how little they are, and who cry out for help. So its no shame whenever you feel the need of a shepherd to protect you and carry you around in his arms. Blest are you.”

Here before him, in the arrogant and self-satisfied person of young Annas, was one of God’s little lost lambs, Jacob suddenly knew. Too bad that Annas didn’t know it. They could have been friends, or like uncle and nephew, had they shared this knowledge about themselves. They could also have shared the joy of that night, and that birth, in Bethlehem.

With Benjamin holding the horse’s reins, Annas climbed back into the saddle. Before riding off, he said, “Remember: keep your eyes open for anything strange, and be sure to tell me about it. Strange things are afoot, so no more leaving the high priest’s livestock to less than four or five guards. Remember, you’re responsible for any losses.”

As they watched him ride back to Jerusalem, Zacharias spat onto the ground and said, “We’re responsible for any losses, eh? Why, on what they pay us, we couldn’t even buy one of these animals that we’re protectin’ once the likes of him sells them in the city.”

“Good thing you didn’t tell him what all we seen the other night,” said Isaac. “Somehow, I don’t think he’d take it right. We can’t trust him with such news; he’d feel threatened by it. For a wee little baby, that boy’s turning out to be mighty dangerous and troublesome. Still, it don’t seem right that we get to see angels and meet the Messiah, and he don’t.”

“That’s cuz he don’t know how much he needs to,” Jacob replied. “What’s more, if’n he wants to see God, he ain’t lookin’ low enough. There’s all the difference in the world ‘tween lookin’ down, and lookin’ low. Low is where you’re gonna see angels an’ such, which ain’t the same as lookin’ down yer nose at the world.”

“Ya mean, ‘lookin’ down’ on the likes of us?”said Zacharias.

“Yeah, the lowly and the contrite!’” added Isaac.

“There’s a lowly and contrite part inside all of us,” Jacob answered, “even him. And that’s what the baby, and them angels, come for.”

Jacob couldn’t resist adding: “Whoever it was what said it.”

The End

So, a man walks up to a vending machine, puts in 5 quarters, pushes the button for a Diet Coke, and a sign comes on that says, “Thank you for your selection. Your Diet Coke is now being ordered from a bottling plant in Brazil, and is about to be mixed, bottled and shipped; please come back to claim your selection in seven days.” Would you come back for it next week? I would probably push the coin return button and move on to the next vending machine.

If anyone ever had the patience for that kind of thing, it is quickly disappearing in the digital age, under the influence of computer technology. If it takes more than a nanosecond between when I press a key and something happens on the computer screen, I confess to getting rather huffy. We’re growing so accustomed to ever shorter times between our actions and their rewards and results that I’m glad I don’t own a real boomerang. Should I throw it, by the time it comes back, I’m afraid I’ll have lost patience for its return, have forgotten that I it was coming, and gone on to other things, like texting or going out for a latte. Ow!

By contrast, a Malian proverb says, “A patient person can draw feathers from an egg.” Of all the classic Christian virtues, patience may be the one most in danger of disappearing today. By patience I mean more than a willingness to wait, like children waiting to open their presents on Christmas morning, though it is that. That’s the human perspective on patience. But I’m talking about learning to live, love, labor and pray on God’s sense of time. For as the Bible says, “A thousand years to him are as one day.”

By patience I also mean our willingness to see something through all of life’s inevitable delays, frustrations and complications, and to do so peacefully, lovingly and wisely, and for as long as it takes. For come they will. As another Malian proverb puts it, “Whenever you prepare to go fishing, prepare also to get wet.” Only God can say, “Let there be” anything, and it happens. For the rest of us, life can be like wrestling with jello, trying to finish something and get somewhere with the messy, wiggly realities of life that won’t stay put, take their own sweet time, and are constantly shifting their shapes on us.

Getting to our goals in life is often like trying to drive a car even while we are changing the oil, checking the tires and tightening the belts. Or like a game of Whack-a-Mole, in which every action on our part provokes a complication to pop up by surprise somewhere else. Over time, experience may reduce the number of surprises, but not the complications, so that getting from point A to point B in life can be like a sailboat tacking back and forth against the wind.

If that’s not enough, the various roles we play in life, such as parent, child, spouse, worker, servant and leader, can have their own built-in conflicts, so that sometimes we can only excel at one role at the expense of another. So we prioritize our successes, our failures and our muddling through. And there’s nothing for it but to persist graciously, with humor and humility. For the alternatives are either to give up, or to leave a lot of wreckage in our relationships through impatience, domination and exasperation. A truly patient person understands that how we do anything is at least as important as what we do. Better to do some things slowly, thoughtfully and peacefully, with a lot of love, than to do them quickly, efficiently and destructively, with anxiety and anger.

God, by contrast, can snap his fingers, if he had them, and everything would instantly be according to his will, such is his almighty power. But then we’d either be left out in the cold, or we’d have to be robots and automatons. Instead, God has chosen to work within the messy, crazy and confusing human condition, to accomplish his purposes on our behalf, in spite of our confusion and resistance, or even through our confusion and resistance. Exhibit A of that is God’s choice to take on flesh and dwell among us, the Incarnation of God in the human flesh of Jesus, which we celebrate every Advent and Christmas Season. I think there’s greater power and wonder in that wise, peaceful and respectful way of working in the world, than there would be if God just manipulated everyone and everything like puppets.

But not only does that involve time, it can involve loss and suffering, physical suffering, yes, but also the suffering of mental and emotional perplexity, as we live with surprises, ambiguity and anxiety, with mystery and frustration. Persisting through all these thingsin love, peace and hope, more often than not, to the end, is what I mean by patience. John the Baptist is the supreme biblical poster child for patience through frustration and suffering.

I think he would be surprised to hear me say that, though. Because on one hand God showed him that history was about to turn on its hinge, in his very lifetime, in the person of Jesus the Messiah, right there before him, in the water of baptism. He did not have to wait for that. So, John can be forgiven for practically handing out tickets to God’s victory banquet at the end of the age, next week at the latest.

And yet for most of the ministry of Jesus, John was in prison. For the other part of Jesus’ ministry, John was dead. To his own surprise, I think, John never got to see the fulfillment of all that he announced. In that sense, John is no different from the vast majority of Jesus’ disciples, throughout all time and places who ever yet pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” and who die without ever having seen that prayer being completely answered. But still we keep on praying.

How’s that for patience? You know, its getting harder all the time in this culture to focus on something for five minutes. How about if the result and the reward of our efforts don’t come in the next five hours? Or the next five years? How about five decades? How about longer than our own lifetimes? Have we the patience, make that, the courage, to devote ourselves to something that could take more lifetimes than we can count? To make our tiny contribution to something that is infinitely greater than any of us, and our part in it? For that is the true measure of biblical patience: consecrating ourselves to a labor of love that outlasts any one of us, but which is only a blink of an eye for a timeless God.

We could either get disappointed and frustrated by not getting to see all the fruits of our faith, hope and love in our lifetimes, or we could celebrate that we get to do something. Like a pastor friend of mine, who had on his desk a plaque that said, “I will not let the big things I cannot do keep me from doing the little things that I can.” We can also rejoice in that we have been enlisted into the winning side of history, and that with a cast of millions, even billions of awesome people—saints in the making–in a star-studded extravaganza so big and glorious that no single generation, no single century even, can contain the wonderful drama. Its called “the kingdom of God.”

The cast includes stars like Archbishop Oscar Romero, of El Salvador, dead now some thirty years, perhaps the best-known Christian martyr since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, a modern John the Baptist figure. Romero might have remained an unremarkable and eminently forgettable parish priest in El Salvador, had he not been appointed a bishop.

He might have remained an unremarkable and eminently forgettable bishop had he not been appointed, in 1977, archbishop. He might also have remained an unremarkable and eminently forgettable archbishop had not something happened that affected him greatly: the murder of his close friend, Father Rutilio Grande, by death squads linked to the military, the police and the large estate owners. Father Grande’s crime: educating and organizing landless laborers into self-reliance groups, to help lift themselves out of poverty, debt and dependence. In such work you can hear an echo of John the Baptist telling police and soldiers not to extort money from the defenseless, and the tax collectors not to collect more money than what is due.

Before Father Grande’s death, Archbishop Romero pretty much steered away from saying anything about the sin at the source of so many sins in El Salvador at the time: the egregious disparity of wealth and political power between the tiny minority of Salvadorenos who owned the land, the police, the army and the government, and the vast majority who lived at the mercy of this tiny minority, who ate or worked or even lived only when and where and if the top one percent of the country said so. In my contacts with people in the Occupy Wall Street movement, I hear their concerns that we might become that same kind of country, if trends continue. Knowing human nature, I share their concern.

Whenever the weakest of the weak and the most powerful of the powerful came to his confession booth, Father Romero, or Bishop Romero, or Archbishop Romero could talk with them pastorally about the sins of weakness, like alcohol abuse or adultery. But about the sins of power, like sending out death squads to kill uppity peasants, or confiscating what little land the landless peasants had left, those weren’t even on Romero’s radar screen as sins. That was just politics, the way society kept order against the forces of chaos, or the godless Communists.

Until his friend, Father Rutilio, was ambushed and killed. Then Romero began to see and to understand the sins of power, as well as the sins of weakness. Then Romero went all John the Baptist and began telling the military, the police and their patrons that, if they considered themselves Christians, they could no longer torture nor “disappear” people. He began telling the landholders that they owed more to their laborers than just enough beans and rice to keep them working another day. He began to tell his fellow Salvadorenos that if they considered themselves Christian, then they should treat each other in Christlike ways. And he began to paint for them verbal pictures of what a truly Christian El Salvador would look like. It looked like the peaceful kingdom of the Hebrew prophets. It looked like Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

And for that, Archbishop Romero, like John the Baptist, was assassinated, shot down in church while he celebrated Mass in 1981. But I don’t think Romero was surprised. For he knew that the labor in which he was involved, helping rich and poor Salvadorenos grow into the likeness of Christ, was a labor of love and faith that would take longer than one life. Because the pain, trauma and terror that had brought El Salvador to a point where a bishop could be killed even while celebrating Mass had taken years, even centuries, to form, at least ever since the Spanish Conquistadors had conquered the Indians of Central America.

In fact, Romero told us how long this labor toward a more Christian El Salvador might take in a poem he wrote, entitled, “Prophets of a Future Not Our Own.” It goes like this:

“It helps now and then to step back and take a long view.
The Kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is beyond our vision.

We accomplish in our lifetime only a fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is another way of
saying that the kingdom always lies beyond us.

No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith. No confession
brings perfection, no pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives include everything.

This is what we are about. We plant the seeds that one
day will grow. We water the seeds already planted
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects far beyond our capabilities.

We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of
liberation in realizing this.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning,
a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s
grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the
difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders, ministers, not
messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own.”

To which I add: Like John the Baptist. That’s what biblical patience is about. Can we work and pray patiently for the Kingdom of God, all our lives, until the day we no longer need patience, and you can disregard everything I just said about it?

Advent: the Lord has come; the Lord is coming. Maranatha; Come soon, Lord Jesus. In the meantime, give us John the Baptist and Oscar Romero kind of patience.

Mark 1: 1 The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, 2 as it is written in Isaiah the prophet:   “I will send my messenger ahead of you,  who will prepare your way”— 3 “a voice of one calling in the wilderness,‘Prepare the way for the Lord,  make straight paths for him.’” 4 And so John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. 5 The whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River. 6 John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. 7 And this was his message: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. 8 I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

When we go home today, or to a restaurant, and chew on roast sermon, I hope that it will be clear to everyone what it was about: reviving the lost art of confession. People then may ask, “But what does confession have to do with Advent and Christmas? That sounds so gloomy and serious. I’m all ready for sheep and shepherds and wise men, Mary and a manger. So, why are we muddling about with the likes of cranky old John the Baptist and his ministry of baptism, and of hearing people’s confessions?

Now the early church saw no disconnect between Advent and the confession of sin. After all, when the tradition of Advent began some time into the 7th Century AD, it was actually a Penitential Season, a time of self-examination, spiritual house-cleaning, even fasting and confession of sins. One might think that we saved that stuff up all year for Lent. But Advent was also originally a season for soul-searching, while we’ve made it a time for frenzied shopping and office parties. Our spiritual ancestors looked not for bargains during Advent, but for renewal; they didn’t prepare Christmas gift lists as much as they may have prepared lists of things they had done that they wished they had not done, and of things they needed to do to set things right.

To celebrate the Lord’s coming, they understood that we must also prepare the way of the Lord, as Isaiah and later, John the Baptist, said, to “make straight his paths.” For John, that meant repentance and confession of sins, in advance of baptism.

Now John saw much that was wrong with society and the powers-that-be, and he said so. His dress and his diet tell me that he was a conscientious objector to the usual way of getting food and clothing, they were so corrupt and oppressive. Better to wear camel’s hair than the latest fashion in tunics; better to eat bugs and wild honey than to shop at the Imperial Market, if you care about truth and justice.

But if we would straighten out the world, we must never forget to examine ourselves. To address the sins of society without also addressing the sins of the heart and the home is like trying to perform heart surgery with a tattoo pen: we can draw all the pretty pictures we like on the outside, but that only gives us the comforting illusion that anything has changed on the inside, where it all starts. The kingdom of God comes on dual tracks: the transformation of the human heart along with the transformation of human relationships, in the home, the neighborhood, the nation and the world. One does not move far without the other. John called for both.

The 19^th Century English author, G.K. Chesterton once overheard someone say about a Roman Catholic priest, “His pie-in-the-sky idealism about heaven and mercy and all that is quite comforting, but what would he know about the real world?” How absurd, thought Chesterton, to think that a man who hears hundreds of confessions a week would know nothing about the real world! So Chesterton wrote crime mystery novels about a fictional Father Brown. When he’s not doing his priestly duties, Father Brown is solving crimes in 19^h Century London, drawing upon knowledge of the human heart gained in the confessional booth. No, he never rats on the people who confess their sins to him. He just knows, from years of hearing confessions, the motives, the secrets, and the strategies of the human heart for cooking up crimes, justifying them, and then covering their tracks.

I think of Father Brown whenever I imagine John the Baptist at the riverside, also hearing hundreds of confessions, maybe each day. For all the insight that John gained, it must also have been draining and distressing to dredge the depths of human guilt, over and over again. And yet there’s no record of John ever having said, “Hey you, over there with the purple Disneyworld towel—outta the water! I told you during confession, there’s no baptism after your kind of sin.”

No, John’s harshest words were for the powerful and pious people who felt no need for confession and a clean slate. Whatever terrible things John heard by Jordan’s banks, it was the smug and self-satisfied who came out to force his confession, whom he called, “a brood of vipers.” For they were entrapped in the most subtle and yet binding sin of all: pride.

So who wants to get or send a Christmas card with John the Baptist on it this year? Yet John is an indispensable part of the Advent Season. Because he reminds us to “prepare the way of the Lord…to make straight his paths.” And key parts of preparing God’s way and straightening his path are self-examination, and if necessary, confession of sin.

You see this not only on the Jordan River, in AD 30. Confession of sin is key to every movement and moment of spiritual renewal. For example, the practice of altar calls, to come forward to receive Jesus, began during America’s Second Great Awakening, a revival during the 1830′s. What often pricked people in the heart and drew them to the altar in tears during that revival were alcohol abuse and slavery, and their part in it, whether by having slaves, or by their silence about it. If you came to the altar a slave owner, you knew you’d better not leave it one for long. And when you gave the revivalist your name as a new convert, that was partly for pastoral follow-up. It was also to enlist you in the abolitionist cause.

I saw this effect in the most stunning way some 20-plus years ago, when I was part of a support and recovery group. We were in it as part of our treatment, some for drug and alcohol abuse, myself for clinical depression. I hope its safe for me to say that. If not, too late now.

One man in this group had scared us with his size and his attitude until someone asked him, “So, what are you protecting under that gruff exterior?” Then he began to cry and melt before us, as he confessed to domestic violence. He looked at his hand with shock and horror as he said, “I raised this against God’s gift to me, my wife.” Only by naming it did he finally understood the depth and depravity of what he had done.

The most surprising thing about this confession was what came afterward: not what he expected, nor what he deserved, but what he received, the love and support of the rest of us in that group, and an awakening to the love of God for himself. I saw another woman reach out to touch his arm and say, “Thank you; that took courage; we love you.” He went from being a cold, dark presence among us, to being a beloved big brother. None of that would have happened without his confession.

So, what do we want most for Christmas? Last week, when she led worship, Sarah Kahle shared some powerful words about Advent being the time in which we allow ourselves to experience our longing for God, instead of subverting and diverting that longing into frenzied busy-ness, over-consumption or endless entertainment. That means naming and dethroning anything that we have allowed to take God’s place.

Believing as we do in the priesthood of all believers, we do not obligate ourselves to go confess our sins to a professional clergyman in a confessional booth for there to be forgiveness. We can confess directly to God and know we are forgiven. But I can also see the value of some sort of confession of sin to others, even if only because of how easily we can fool ourselves. If, for example, we are constantly confessing and repenting to God of the same particular sin, we may have a problem that requires some help. And this problem, whatever it is, could be getting bigger and more powerful than ourselves, because of the added element of denial and secrecy.

For over time secrecy creates a strange internal world of crazy-making contradictions, in which on one hand we convince ourselves that our entrapping, enslaving sin is not so bad, its okay, no big deal, everybody does it, even while, on the other hand, we feel increasingly bad and shameful about ourselves, because of our powerlessness over whatever it is that binds us. Oddly enough, both the shame and the denial add fuel to the problem, supercharging the temptation into entrapment.

Take away the secrecy, and our enslaving tendencies and temptations lose at least half their power over us. In the daylight of confession, the monsters of denial and shame shrink to become children who just need some love. Through confession we may come to admit that our problem is worse than we thought. But we’ll also find that we ourselves are not bad, as we feared. We’re just human. And only real humans can heal and grow, not the false selves we wish to project and protect.

But its not just the confession of our own sins that can set us free. I find sometimes that people also keep terrible, burdensome secrets of sins that have been committed against them. Perhaps we feel shame for having been powerless to prevent them and protect ourselves. Or we may fear that people will think less of us for having been a victim, and not always in control. Even if we’re not at fault, secrecy can have the same debilitating, enslaving effect as if we were. Most slights and sins against us can easily be forgiven. But with certain kinds of abuse, exposing and naming the sins done against us is necessary to our healing, growth and liberation.

Ironically, we can only be healed and grow through a love that does not need to heal or grow us in order to love us more. And yet whenever such unconditional love touches the real wounds and infections of a soul sick with shame and secrecy, it can have no other effect but to heal and change us. That’s why we must choose the time, place and person for our confession carefully. Don’t confess indiscriminately, to the first person you see on the street, or even in the church. Don’t post it on Facebook either.

Nor do we here insist that people confess their sins before everyone in the church, unless they have hurt or somehow involved everybody. We need the unconditional love of wise, compassionate and yet principled people who can keep confidentiality. The point is not to be an open book to everybody. That can do more harm than good. The point is that every part of ourselves be an open book to somebody, so that there are no dark corners of the house of the soul in which bad things might grow and fester.

For the sake of honesty, transparency, accountability and freedom from secrecy, denial and shame, we have pastors who hopefully fit the bill. And we have each other. Perhaps a deacon, a mentor, a prayer partner, a small group, our spouse, a parent, or a counselor can help by hearing a needed confession. If for some reason I’m not the person to talk with, I can make referrals. Speaking personally, I have a spiritual director, and other friends and occasional counselors with whom I can unburden myself and confess when its not appropriate in the home or the church.

Yes, we can take all things directly and personally to God. But sometimes we need the ears and the heart of a fellow human being through which to connect with God. God has gifted the church so that through us he might bind our wounds and help us grow. He seems to be in no hurry to do such work without us.

The point, again, is that all of ourselves be an open book to someone. For in the end, nothing will remain hidden, neither from the sight of God nor from the sight of mortals. The Day of the Lord’s next Advent is also called “the day on which all secrets shall be revealed,” or the day on which “we shall know as we are known.”

The thought of such exposure and illumination could either be scary, or comforting. If its scary, remember that the God who knows us better than we know ourselves also loves us better than we could ever love ourselves. His will for us is also our greatest want: not to be blasted away with the fiery heat of judgment, nor withered away the chill of indifference, but to be brought back to life by the healing warmth of redeeming love, to be set free of the burdens of shame and secrecy. And such is his will.

Its not a question of if all secrets will be revealed, but whether the secret to be revealed about ourselves is a heroic story about what we overcame, or a tragedy about what overcame us. The difference between the two is repentance and confession. If what we want most for Christmas is God and a deeper, more liberating and transforming relationship with God, then we must dump everything that hinders us, weighs us down, and which stands in the way of that, beginning with any secrets. Don’t be surprised, nor ashamed, if we could use a little help with that from time to time. As did the people whom John baptized.

And so it is the season of Advent, the First Sunday even. As we read this passage at the Sermon Roundtable Breakfast last Tuesday, someone asked, “So is Advent about celebrating that the Lord has come, or that the Lord shall come?” The answer?

Yes. The Lord has come; the Lord shall come. Happy Advent, past and future!

But you wouldn’t know that from all the department store Nativity scenes or the Christmas cards we get. We get and send beautiful Christmas cards with sweet, peaceful manger scenes by famous painters like Bruegels or Rembrandt, and I love them all. But never have I seen a Christmas card with Michelangelo’s painting of The Last Judgment. We’re all into the mangers and wise men, sheep and shepherds of Christ’s first Advent. But when it comes to separating the sheep from the goats at the his Second Advent, that one doesn’t get its own holiday shopping sprees.

And yet Advent is about both: Christ has come, and Christ shall come again. Some people were ready for his first Advent: some were not. Christ wants his disciples to be ready for his second Advent, and for what comes before then. And that’s what makes today’s gospel text both fruitful and difficult. Just what does come next? These words of Jesus are about events that happened already, long ago, and they are about events that are yet to happen. Knowing which words are about the future, and which are about the past though, is not easy.

Thirty years ago I was much more certain about how to interpret Mark 13. As a young, new Christian, reading such books about Bible prophecy as The Late Great Planet Earth, I understood this passage to be entirely about the impending return of Christ, the end of the world as we know it, and the beginning of the new one. According to such books, it should be any day now, now that Arab countries have attacked Israel. That was in 1973. Oh, the European Union just got another member nation: that makes 10, like the 10 horns of the beast in Revelation. Well, that was eight or nine member countries ago. Oh, and now the Russians have invaded Afghanistan. They must be Gog and Magog in Ezekiel’s prophecies. That was 1980. And now they’re gone from there.

What gives?

Over time the meaning of this passage has opened up for me in some ways that make it both more powerful for me, and more complex every time I read it. I still believe that Jesus says much here about the direction of time and history, and how a disciple of Jesus should always stand ready for his return, and the final curtain call of history. I still believe that God has the last word in time and history, and that his final word is Jesus.

But I also believe that, when Jesus spoke the words we heard today, Jesus had something more immediate in mind, something more current to that year than the Arab oil embargo of 1973, or whether or not the magnetic bars on our debit cards are the mark of the beast. I get more sure, every time I reread this passage, that he was mostly talking about something that would and did happen in the lifetimes of his disciples and his audience, for he said, “this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened,” in verse 30.

That verse in particular has always made me scratch my head: “this generation shall not pass away until these things have happened.” Hmm. Yet the people of that generation who heard Jesus say those words are long dead, and we’re still trying to figure out when these events would come to pass. But now I’m following the lead of the most convincing Bible scholar I’ve read of late, Bishop N.T. Wright, an Anglican bishop from the United Kingdom. Bishop Wright says that most of this passage is about something that did indeed transpire in the time of that very generation which heard these very words: the Roman siege and sacking of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and the utter destruction of the Jewish temple. After all, Jesus’ words today come on the heels of his warning to his disciples, that soon not one stone of this big beautiful temple you are admiring will be left atop another. It happened, just as he said, forty years later.

Twenty centuries later, we do still fit into this passage. We are the angels. That’s right, the angels in verse 27, who “will gather the elect gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.” Because “angel” in the Bible just means “messenger.” Sometimes its clear from the context that we’re talking heavenly messengers; sometimes, the messenger is human. So, I’m sticking my neck out to join the small but growing minority of Bible interpretors who say that we, the church, are the messengers in verse 27 whom God is sending to gather his elect from all over the world, by means of the gospel. As Jesus says, the messengers go forth after the destruction of Jerusalem, and of the Temple, for that tragic event cut the church loose from its apron strings to Zion and the Temple. It released us to go out to the four corners of Creation with the gospel to gather the elect, as we are doing even now. But who knew that it would take us angels over 2,000 years and counting?

Again, Jesus is not answering the question, Will he return on May 22 or October 16, 2011, according to the Family Radio Network, or Will the world end in 2012 when the Mayan calendar ends? More likely, that calendar just starts over.

Jesus has just said that the Temple is doomed. Once the shocked disciples pull their jaws up off the ground, they ask him, When will this happen? Its not quite the “Awesome Deeds” they were expecting.

But that’s the question Jesus is answering in today’s Bible passage: How much longer will this temple stand? Not long, Jesus said. When you see the sun and the moon darken, the stars falling from the sky, you’ll know its destruction is at hand. But in the language of the biblical prophets, sun, moon and stars are symbols of all the grand and glorious things and kings and powers and institutions that people depend upon, as though they were the sun, moon and stars. What you thought were permanent, unshakable institutions of Jewish life and society, Jesus is saying, shall darken and fall on the day when the Romans batter down the gates of Zion and torch the temple, as they did just 40 years later. And Jesus could see it coming, because he is the Son of God, yes. But I also think that anyone with his values and vision could see that Rome and Jerusalem were on a terrible collision course toward war, hurtling toward each other like trains down the parallel tracks of repression and rebellion.

Or we could say that they were sleep-walking toward the precipice of war.

Because we humans are vulnerable to spiritual sleeping sickness. The world and its fears, fashions and illusions have numbing, sleep-inducing effects on the soul—morally and spiritually speaking. That’s what Christian, the pilgrim in John Bunyan’s 16^th Century classic, Pilgrim’s Progress, discovered on his way to the Celestial City. One warm, sunny afternoon, as he ascended a long hill, he chose to rest a moment in the shade. But rest turned to a nap, which turned to a long, deep sleep. He awoke just before sunset, in a country where, as the darkness approached, brigands and wild beasts were seeking their prey. He jumped up in a panic, berating himself for having slept so long, and set off again toward the Palace Beautiful, to find shelter for the night. Soon, he realized that he had lost his guidebook, and could only go so far without it. So he had to search all the way back, in the growing gloom, to where he had napped, before he found it. His relief gave way to fear as he said, “I have trod the same road three times which I should have trod but once! How far might I have been by now upon my way…Oh sinful sleep! For your sake, I must walk without the sun,” while the beasts of the darkness prowled about, drawing near.

John Bunyan, a spiritual master, was telling us by this story to never ever underestimate the capacity of the human spirit for sloth, sleep, denial, deadness, numbness and dreamy, fuzzy, wishful, magical thinking. Like when people in First Century Palestine denied and ignored the looming threat of war, even while they stoked the fires of war. Or the ways that so many Americans in the 1980′s drank and drugged and disco-danced ourselves into denial of the danger of nuclear war even while we stockpiled new generations of nuclear weapons.

We can so easily sleep, deluding ourselves into thinking that with the right techniques and technology, with enough money and know-how, we can abuse nature, exploit and scapegoat people, engage in violence, spend or accumulate money that only exists in theory, engage in pornography and risky sexual behavior, but this time without the logical consequences applying to us.

Prosperity, affluence, privilege and power can numb and deaden us to the hunger and suffering of the poor and the needy. And poverty, hunger and oppression can numb and deaden their victims to the grace of God, the goodness of life and “the better angels of our nature.” The sheer busy-ness, distractions and enticements of the world can drown out the call to seek God, and to seek God’s elect across the world and around the corner.

Left to ourselves, we become spiritually and morally like people sitting with their legs crossed, that have fallen asleep and gone numb, to the point of paralysis. Stretch them out and there’s a briefly painful experience as life and strength return to those limbs with the free flow of blood restored. Then the paralysis and pain give way to life, to possibilities and powers of movement.

So it is with every experience of repentance and spiritual awakening: they are briefly painful, but restorative of life. The gospel, that Christ has come, and that Christ shall come again, has such a reviving effect, forcing us to examine our values and our actions, to repent of things we have done and time we have wasted in worldly torpor, to awaken in soul and spirit, thus turning our paralysis into power and practice. Advent is a yearly reminder that into our world of darkness, denial and deadness, a light has dawned, the Morning Star that is Christ, as the prophet Micah called him,”The Sun of Righteousness, risen with healing in rays.”

The main thing Jesus is telling us in this passage is not to fall asleep at the wheel of our mission, but to stay alert and awake. “Do not let [the returning Master] find you sleeping.” Jesus said. If you wish to carry home something today from these words of Jesus, don’t waste time wondering and worrying about the day and hour of Christ’s return. Don’t give the likes of Family Radio network the time of day should they say, “Recalculating!–He’s coming next May 21.” I would hope that we were awake and ready for his return today. I’m hoping it is today.

And that’s the main point of Jesus’ words to his disciples then and today, in verse 36: Watch! Stay awake; or Stay alert! Whether we’re staying alert to the movements of history, like the then-impending war with Rome, or the changes coming upon us today, through climate change, immigration and globalization. Wake up to the needs of the poor and those without gospel hope. Wake up to the movements of God in our souls, and to the impending return of Jesus. Wake up! And stay awake!

The Christian life is an awakening to wakefulness. The Christian life is about learning to stay awake and alert while the world is distracted and asleep, staying alert to the movement of God in our lives and our times. That’s why my spiritual director often asks me, “What do you perceive God doing in your life right now?” He doesn’t let me off the hook with, “I don’t know.” Think of Sunday worship and our daily prayers and Bible study as our wake-up routine. The call to worship is our wake-up call. The Word of God is our alarm, awakening us to Awesome Deeds of God that we otherwise would not expect.

Christ has come; Christ is coming. Is either Advent good news or bad news? It depends upon if we wish to Wake up! And stay awake.

I hope its okay to tell jokes about pastors, because I shall. And I’m taking my permission from Jesus, who told in today’s Gospel passage, a joke about a soon-to-be pastor, Simon Peter.

So, a man dies and appears before St. Peter, who’s staffing his booth in front of the Pearly Gates. Peter says, “Welcome to heaven. Here’s the keys to your shiny new Lincoln Town Car car. Its parked right over there, waiting for you. Or didn’t you know that everyone here gets a car that reflects their state of grace and godliness before they died?”

“Wow,” said the new entrant to heaven. “Mother Teresa must be riding around in a stretch limo.”

“She gets a shiny spankin’ new one every day,” said Peter.

“And what about our pastor, who died a few years back?

“You’ll see him in a stretch limo, too,” Peter replied.

“He always struck me as a very godly man,” the new arrival observed.

“Actually,” St. Peter said, “the church janitor lets him chauffeur him around, whenever he gets tired of pedaling his tricycle.”

If you’ve ever wondered why so many such jokes and stories and even songs put St. Peter at a booth before the Pearly Gates with a checklist, letting people into heaven, or not, look to today’s Gospel passage and to Jesus’ words, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven.” Much of church tradition has taken that to mean that Peter would be responsible to let people into heaven or not upon their deaths. Or at least to tell people whether or not they were being let into heaven. In many stained glass windows in many churches you’ll even see Peter depicted as carrying keys, the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

But such responsibility or authority to decide our eternal fate goes beyond the scope of these words, and has no other biblical support. Christ Jesus is the cornerstone of God’s living temple, the church. What’s more, I would think that Peter now has more interesting things to do than to interview people at the Pearly Gates. Like worship that is truly out of this world.

My intention today is not to bash and trash the world’s largest Christian denomination, my Roman Catholic friends, who base their hierarchy and the pope’s office on the keys given to St. Peter. With them, we agree on the importance of the church. Jesus says he has come to establish “the church.” This is even the very first Bible passage in which we encounter the word, “church.” That’s very important. Therefore, so are we.

But what’s at stake in today’s passage is whether or not disciples of Jesus understand and embrace the amazing thing that Jesus has promised all of his disciples with these “keys of the kingdom,” and whether we take responsibility for them, or whether we leave the joy of discipleship up to hierarchies and institutions. Protestants and Mennonites have ways of doing that.

You may have noticed that I carry in my pocket a gonzo big key ring with lots of keys. All these keys make me look important. But sometimes I run across keys on this ring that I don’t know what they’re for. Yet I hesitate to throw them out because I’m afraid that I’ll find out what they’re for after I throw them away.

Spiritually speaking, a lot of Christians are walking around today with keys in their pockets that they either don’t know are there, or they have forgotten what they are for. Yet, as I hope to show, these keys unlock the door to heaven’s true riches: salvation, security, dignity,unity, authority, power and responsibility for ministry for all disciples of Jesus. That means that what we are doing, when we renew our membership covenant vows this morning, is not only right, it is revolutionary.

So, what are the keys to the kingdom and what do they open for us? To understand that, we have to go back a step and understand what Jesus meant when he also said to Simon Peter, “You are Peter”—that is, Rocky, or The Rock–”and upon this rock I shall build my church.”

Again, medieval Roman church tradition understood that to mean that Jesus would build the hierarchy and the institutional structure of the church upon one man alone: Peter, as though Peter were the rock on which Jesus would build his church. After all, he was the first person to make this confession of faith: “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” You have to admit, that’s a pretty bold and gutsy thing to say, especially in view of all the Romans and other Gentiles in Caesarea Phillippi, and their idols and temples. That confession makes Simon Peter the first Christian, the first building block of Jesus’ new human temple.

But our Anabaptist ancestors understood the rock upon which Jesus would build his church in a way that was less about institutions and more about relationships. So they saw the keys that Jesus would confer to the kingdom, as gifts to all disciples. Because they caught the joke that Jesus told. For Jesus replied to Peter’s confession of faith with a joke, a pun: “You are Peter- The Rock-and on this rock I will build my church.”

Now, the whole point of a pun is to use one word to hit two meanings, like the one about the lion whose pride did him in….(pause). Or a pun may use two words back-to-back that sound alike, to get at two very different meanings. That’s what Jesus did with Peter, the rock, and with the rock on which he would build his church. Those actual words sound alike, but they are not identical. Without giving us a lengthy, pointless grammar lesson, suffice it to say that the Rock on which Jesus will build his church is a slightly different word from Simon’s new name. So that second rock, not Peter but the rock on which Jesus will build his church, must be something else in this passage that Jesus has just mentioned. One might be the revelation that could only have come from God, that the long-awaited Messiah is Jesus. “Blessed are you,” Jesus says, “For only my Father in heaven could have revealed this to you.” The other is the confession that Peter has made, that the long-awaited, long-promised Messiah is Jesus. Either the rock on which Jesus will build his church is the divine revelation of who Jesus is, or it is Peter’s confession of that revelation.

Or its both, because the revelation and the confession are two sides of the same coin. Or rock. Peter could not have confessed Jesus as Messiah had God the Father not revealed it to him. And God the Father would not have revealed it to him had he not intended for Peter to confess it before Christ and mortals, friends and foes some day.

And it had to be a divine revelation. Because such a Messiah, such a Son of God as Jesus, was not on many people’s mental radar screens. One could tell that just by all the shrines, temples and idols around them in Cesarea Philippi.

“This is your Christ? the religious leadership of First Century Jerusalem wondered. “The ‘son of Mary‘, born under questionable circumstances in Nazareth? Of Galilee? The friend of sinners, who touches the unclean, or who lets them touch him, who violates our interpretation of the Sabbath and who treads all over the distinctions between ourselves and the Gentiles? And who won’t lift a hand against our enemies, let alone defend himself? Is that your Messiah?” To them, such a Christ was not only foolishness, he was dangerous to the survival of the nation.

“This is your Son of God?” the Roman overlords marveled. “The One who rides into Jerusalem unarmed, on…. a donkey? Whose army is but a mob of poor people among whom we could find only two weapons when he was arrested, and who all fled like cowards? This is your Son of God? We’ll stick with Tiberias Caesar as our “Son of God,” thank you.

Whatever way you cut it, Peter’s confession had to come from God’s revelation. That revelation, and Peter’s confession, are two sides of the same stone, the one on which Jesus is building his church.

And that’s the way that Protestants and Anabaptists have long interpreted Jesus’ words, to say: “You– flighty, impulsive, shaky, well-intentioned but unreliable Simon–I now call The Rock, because of my Father’s revelation to you, and because of your courageous confession of it. Upon the rock of God’s revelation to you, and upon the rock of your confession before friends and foes, I shall build my new living temple of flesh and blood that I shall call “the church.”

As a result of that revelation and that confession, Simon the Rock gets not a booth at the Pearly Gates, nor the keys to a stretch limo, but the keys to the kingdom of God. Historic Anabaptist faith says that anyone who shares the faith of Peter, and can confess it with Peter, should be able to hear those keys jingling in his or her pockets, too. But that still leaves the question begging: What are the keys to the kingdom? In other words, what do they open?

As observant, Bible-knowing Jews, the disciples would have understood “keys” in the Bible to be symbols of authority, power and responsibility. Same with the world. Legally speaking, no keys to any treasure within his dominion could be withheld from Tiberias Caesar, should he demand them. But an even more awesome authority, power and responsibility Jesus is giving to the likes of some ordinary fishermen, a former tax collector, and by extension, to us! Jesus says to these twelve ordinary people: “Whatever you bind on earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will have been loosed in heaven.” “Will have been bound” and “will have been loosed” are the best translation of those words. In other words, we have power and authority to represent and to carry out the counsels and the actions of God in heaven. Whatever heaven has bound or loosed, that we bind and loose too.

Sometimes we read this passage the other way around, to mean that we have power to make decisions in ways that heaven is obligated to recognize and enforce. So, if we all discern that this church needs purple pew cushions, heaven has to cough up the money for it. But that’s putting it backwards. This passage does not give us license to dictate policy to heaven; Jesus empowers and commands us to announce to the world the actions and policies of heaven.

We, then, the church of Jesus Christ, are founded upon the divine revelation and the good confession of who Jesus is, so that we might discern, recognize, announce and enact before the world what heaven has bound and loosed through Jesus and the Gospel. Jesus has engaged us as heaven’s representatives, as heaven’s spokespersons. And the primary way that we bind and loose people and things is by confessing that Jesus is the Christ, whether by word or by deed, as did Peter, the Rock. That very revelation, and that very confession, are the foundation of all else that the gospel and the church offer to the world. Again: the primary way we act as spokespersons for heaven, and therefore bind and loose what heaven has bound and loosed, is by confessing the revelation that Jesus is the Christ; that the Christ is Jesus, whether through word or deed.

As someone pointed out last Tuesday at our sermon roundtable breakfast, Peter used his keys to bind and loose when he confessed Jesus before thousands of people on that first Pentecost after Jesus’ resurrection, and three thousand people were released from their sins, when they too embraced the same revelation, and made that same confession, as did Peter.

So what difference does that make? I can only ask that question because, unfortunately, today, because of centuries of civil religion, because of the ways in which the church has acted as chaplains and cheerleaders for empires and inquisitions, the confession that Jesus is the Christ does not always strike us as the amazing, astounding, earth-shaking, game-changing, counter-intuitive revelation that is nothing less than a binding and loosing of cosmic significance, the First Century version of the Big Bang. Either that, or it is sheer foolishness to be ignored or even rejected and repressed.

Let’s not fool ourselves. The confession of Peter, that the Messiah is Jesus of Nazareth, can be just as odd and striking and costly today as it was in First Century Cesarea Philippi. We too must confess Christ in the midst of many shrines and temples to many different idols and ideologies. That makes us, the church, a revelation-based, confession-driven counter-culture. Everything we do must tie back in with this striking and strange revelation. And it must further our courageous and costly confession of it.

Remember that, because we so easily succumb to mission drift. There are so many crying needs and wants that we can address, our own and those of the world, that it is easy and tempting to become a market-focused, desire-driven church, running after all the things that would make us popular, appreciated and understood. Addressing some of the crying needs would showcase our confession, that the Messiah is Jesus. Like loving and serving the poor, immigrants and refugees. Like standing up against war, like our members who did alternative service during the years of the draft. But don’t expect such things to make us popular and appreciated. And we must beware of any other activities that would distract us from God’s revelation and Peter’s confession.

Our keys to the kingdom of heaven are our power and authority to say and display our confession of the revelation, that Jesus is God’s Messiah. When we use these keys, they unlock treasures for witness and work that include the fruits of the Holy Spirit in Galatians 5, like “love, joy, peace, patience, mercy, gentleness, humility,” and more. And the gifts of the Spirit, like faith, administration, service, prophecy, among others. As Paul told the Roman church, “The kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit (Rom. 14:17).”

In a world tired of words, swamped with slogans that people increasingly distrust, there are still ways that we can confess the amazing revelation, that the Messiah is Jesus, and to do so with power to bind and to loose. In our membership covenant we commit ourselves to ways of living and loving each other that also amount to a testimony as bold, gutsy and costly as the one Peter made with his mouth. The kinds of things that we promise to God and to each other today, like mutual aid, mutual counsel and mutual accountability, those are also among the treasures that our keys to the kingdom of heaven unlock.

I have a word I wish to give to Mark-Peter as a gift on this day of his licensing. Actually, two words. You all can listen too and do with those words what you like, because they’re really for all Christians, not just pastors. These are not words that Mark-Peter and the rest of us don’t know already. We have seen Mark-Peter put them into practice, regularly. So, I’m effectively preaching to the converted.

I simply offer these two words by way of reminder, because I need that same reminder over and over again. And if anyone here ever gets the impression that I have forgotten these two words, then I urge you to remind me of them, too.

After all, that’s what pastors and preachers basically do: we are professional reminders. Every week from the pulpit, or in Christian Education, or in every commission meeting or counseling session, what we’re effectively doing is reminding people of the promises of God to us, and of the call of God on us. For that we can only be so original. As Mark-Peter reminded us this summer in his sermon series from Ecclesiastes, “There’s nothing new under the sun.”

But we need those reminders because the basic human condition is that of forgetfulness. So often we are like the employee at the shipping department of the crystalware factory who wanted to get through preparing boxes of glassware and crystalware to mail in a hurry. So to save time, he would not stop to put fresh ink in his stamp pad, he just kept stamping the boxes harder and harder, until he was really banging away on the boxes, quite hard. The stamp said, “Fragile.”

Gee. You think he might have forgotten something?

Mark, the writer of today’s Gospel passage, wants us to remember these two words so much that he gave them to us in Jesus’ original Aramaic language. Or did we think that Mark just wanted to show off his command of another language? No. He does that several times in his gospel, and each time we find that these are very important words worth meditating upon. Because these are either words of Jesus that we have heard in the depths of our hearts and spirits, or they are words of Jesus that we shall hear, or both. Like when Jesus says to the little girl who had just died, “Talitha, Koum,” or “Little girl, Arise.” Aren’t we also expecting to hear Jesus call each of us to rise from the dead some day? And in a way, have we not already heard those words and arisen, at least from the waters of baptism to newness of life? So, every time Mark gives us Jesus’ original words in his actual Aramaic, that’s a red flag that says, Stop! Think about this! This word is also for you; believe it, receive it and think about it a while. Then do something about it.

And so it is with today’s Aramaic lesson: “Ephphatha,” or “Be Opened.” I’m offering us today those two words, “Be Opened.” I thought about offering them in the active sense, “Open Up,” and so the title of the message. But then it struck me that “Open Up” puts all the onus on us. “Be Opened,” however, is both a command and a blessing, like every Word of God. And it shows how much God is responsible for our ears and our mouth being open, as are we.

So, “Be Opened,” ears, to hear the word of the Lord. “Be Opened,” mouth, to speak that which came from the mouth of the Lord, that which you heard and which he placed in your mouth. As Psalm 40 puts it, “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire but my ears you have opened… I proclaim your saving acts in the great assembly; I do not seal my lips, LORD,  as you know…..I speak of your faithfulness and your saving help.”

Again, from many experiences with Mark-Peter, we can attest that he has shared the word of the Lord, because he has heard the word of the Lord. We can attest that Jesus has touched the ears of his heart, so that in the depths of his spirit there must have echoed the words, “Be Opened,” because the words that come out of his mouth sound an awful lot like Jesus. Therefore, he has come to this point of licensing toward ordination because this congregation has experienced his gifting for ministry, and can attest to it.

For example, some of our youth and young adults, including our own daughter, Emily, have had formative spiritual and ministry experiences under his mentoring at Urban Ventures. So that when this place in this community opened up as a possibility for us three years ago, it was a natural fit; we already had a fruitful partnership with Urban Ventures. He has also served on some of our commissions with valuable impact. And then there was his ministry during my sabbatical this summer, which received high marks in our latest Pastor-Congregation Relations Review. While I was out on sabbatical, I listened to his sermons over our website this summer for my own spiritual nurture. I’ve also seen how Mark-Peter relates to students, staff and clients at Cristo Rey High School and the Urban Hub, how whenever he smiles at them, greets, confers with, or even teases them, something of Jesus shines through.

So, here again is the phrase that I offer Mark-Peter, and all of us, really, by way of reminder, not of enlightenment or rebuke: “Be Opened,” or even “Stay Opened.” In other words, do whatever you can to stay in that place of open-ness, with Jesus, so that he can touch the ears of our hearts or spirits and open them, so that we can hear the Word of the Lord. And resort, whenever you can, to that “place apart from the crowd” where Jesus can touch your ears and your tongue, spiritually speaking, and put the word from his mouth into your own. For all Christians, but especially those in ministry, this is our most important task: going apart with Jesus to get our ears opened and have him put his word into our mouth.

But Oh, how easy it is to lose that living touch with Jesus and get ground down into ruts and rhythms where we just go through the motions, while forgetting the purpose, like that man stamping “fragile” on the boxes of crystal and glass ware. Sometimes I think it can happen especially to people in ministry. The devil is more likely to say to us, “Keep busy,” than he is to say, “Slack off.” Because we care about doing right by people. And because we can so easily confuse busyness with fruitfulness. Then we are drifting back into the condition in which Jesus finds everyone: deaf to his word, and therefore mute, even for all our chatter, even for all our religious chatter.

There’s nothing for it but to go with Jesus, away from the crowd as we read in verse 33, where he can again touch the ears of our hearts, where he can again put something from his mouth into ours, his word. So, this week, I carried with me, on a small notecard, the word, “Ephatha,” “Be Opened,” with which to begin my prayers and my journaling. I prayed it through the week, so that Jesus might open my ears and put something of his word into my mouth. Frankly, the heavens did not open, nor did a voice thunder from the sky with some new and game-changing revelation. But for me, one fruitful result of our hearing Jesus and testifying to his work, over the long haul, is this event, this morning, a confirmation of the ways in which God has gifted his church with people and their spiritual gifts.

So, everyone, including me and Mark-Peter, take time apart with Jesus to listen for the word of the Lord for you. Don’t worry, it won’t be something at odds with that which God has already spoken through Jesus, the prophets and the written word. Instead, it will be about the unique way in which the Word becomes flesh in you, in ways that are true to who God is, true to whom God is making you to be. And in ways to which the church can attest and confirm. As we are doing for Mark-Peter this morning, and his calling to ministry. Be open, as you have been already, to hear the word of the Lord for you, and to speak it, whether by word or by deed or both.
I’ll close with a prayer of openness by a monk and missionary from the 19^th Century, Father Charles de Foucauld. I’ve carried it around in my pocket this week, too. Would you pray with me the words that he prayed? “Father, I abandon myself into your hands; do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you: I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me, and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my soul; I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands, without reserve, and with boundless confidence, for you are my Father. Amen.