Exposed and Naked: We are Unsafe

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Introduction

We are not in control; this bothers us. Further, we are not safe, to others or to ourselves; this angers us. To be out of control is one thing, but to be wildly unsafe, too? Offensive. So, we do whatever we can to create an atmosphere around us that feels safe, that causes us to feel okay, like everything is fine. But it’s not; nothing is fine. As politicians and pundits spin narratives and weave tales causing our attention to be diverted from the real problems plaguing our land and location, we hide behind our own mythologies and cover ourselves up with our various blankets of ignorance. The heavier the blanket, the safer we feel; the taller the myth, the more secure we think we are. We vacillate between having to know increasingly more (the more we know the more we can control) and not wanting to know anything and sticking our heads in the sand (if we can just not know we will regain some sense of safety and maybe even comfort). But this drive to cover up and hide from that which causes us to feel unsafe means that our community with others breaks down: as we hide from and deny the disasters swirling and twirling around us, we—ourselves—become our biggest problem not just to ourselves but especially to our neighbors, the ones fighting for their right to live in this world, the ones most visibly threatened by nationalism and extremism.

So, our lack of control wedded to our being and feeling unsafe makes us feel hopeless. In a world where it feels that World War III is always one strike away, where unstable and erratic egos leave more death in their wake than life, where one’s power and privilege are more valuable than the life of the least of us, our sensations of feeling unsafe surge. Surely, if they are coming for my neighbor…then am I next? In this surging feeling of unsafety, our hypervigilance turns to hyperarousal, and we lash out at anyone and anything. Humans need to feel safe; it’s the fundamental level of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The divides and divisions caused by viewer driven news rooms that plague our communities get worse because we must view everyone else as a threat and patch-work some modicum amount of safety no matter how tattered that sense of safety is. But this makes us exceptionally unstable creatures and no mythology (no matter how it glitters and sparkles in the light) will cause use to feel and thus to be safe (to ourselves and to others). We are always just one moment away from complete break-down. We are nuclear weapons charged and ready to go off at any moment. Our lack of control bothers us; our unsafety angers us.

Is there any help for such as these?

Exodus 17:1-7

Moses[ii] begins by telling us of a journey and of a problem, From the wilderness of Sin the whole congregation of the Israelites journeyed by stages, as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink (v1). Being without water is no small issue. Rephidim is the last stop before entering the terrain of Sinai.[iii] Thus, being without water here—about to travel through the terrain of mountains and sand dunes in a climate that is demanding being of high elevation and often cold—is life threatening. In normal circumstances a person can survive 3-5 days without water, add in exertion, a challenging climate, and tough terrain, and that number falls.

The Israelites have every right to be disturbed by this, as Moses tells us, The people quarreled with Moses, and said, “Give us water to drink,” (v 2a). Humans without water (assuming they did not have much water to begin with as they embarked on their journey) become easily angered as dehydration sets in; thus, quarreling makes sense as a characteristic of dehydration and the fruit of the fear that is setting in. They feel unsafe and thus they are becoming unsafe to themselves and others. However, Moses appears to be rather unphased by the dire situation. His reply? “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you test the Lord?” (v2b). Not the most pastoral response.

So, the people ramp up their complaints against Moses, and it’s understandable. With no foreseeable way to get water, and with a leader who seems to consider their needs to be mere “quarreling” and disobedience to God, the Israelites escalate—which happens when fear and anger are not addressed but exacerbated. As the Israelites feel the impending doom of their being unsafe, they respond from that place of fear and anger and the situation gets worse. As Moses, tells us, But the people thirsted there for water; and the people complained against Moses and said, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?” (v 3). If Moses doesn’t act now, he’ll be facing a full-on uprising and rightly so. Can we blame the Israelites for their reply of desperation?

Here, Moses senses just how serious the problem is and does what any good leader of God’s people should do (even if a moment delayed): call on God to help. Our text tells us, So Moses cried out to the Lord, “What shall I do with this people? They are almost ready to stone me,” (v4). The narrative doesn’t really give a glimpse of how bad the situation is until Moses mentions to God that the people “are almost ready to stone me.” The community—the people and its divine appointed leader, Moses—are in a tenuous situation. Death threatens to rear his head, anger and fear are the emotional monarchs, and the situation is far from safe; it’s perilous. So, in this moment, Moses throws himself at God’s feet in desperation; he’s failing to deescalate.

Thankfully, God does step in and instructs Moses to cause water to flow,

“Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink. Moses did so, in the sight of the elders of Israel. He called [Rephidim[iv]] Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled and tested the Lord, saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?” (vv5-7)

Seems God does not have a problem providing God’s people with water to drink; what if anyone had just asked God? Moses accuses the people of testing God; it seems to me that Moses is the being tested. The people did demand to see that God is present by invoking quarrels with Moses because they were thirsty;[v] thus why Rephidim is then called “Massa and Meribah”, being wordplays on quarreling and trying from v2.[vi] However, the people are also asking a deeper question of Moses: Are you with us? Do you see us? We are about to die of thirst, and do you care? Ignoring and dismissing the needs of the people is not the right way of faithful leadership; it is the slipperiest of slopes to the people devising not only their own solutions and building their case for disbelieving God.[vii] God’s chosen leader must represent God to the people and the people to God; Moses failed this test in this moment. Moses could have heard their cry (the voice of an unsafe situation from people who are scared and angry) and have asked God to help him and them. But now Moses’s leadership is being questioned and doubted. Notice that there are elders to be selected to go with Moses to witness[viii] the striking of the limestone rock that causes the water trapped within to flow;[ix] God is aware that the people need to see (and know) that not only is God with them but God is with Moses thus Moses must be with them. These witnesses will be testament to the reality that both God and Moses are with the Israelites, through thick and thin, in good and bad, when things flow with milk and honey and when water seems scarce.

Conclusion

The Israelites are caught in their fear and anger because the situation they find themselves in is precarious: they are unsafe and they become unsafe to themselves and to others. Fear and anger are born here and cause stones to be lifted to make one’s point known; fear and anger when things are unsafe do not know any limits and boundaries, the rational and reasonable components of the human intellect and mind are bound and gagged. The human being, whether ancient Israelite or post-postmodern person, cannot overcome, on their own without intervention, their anger and fear born from feeling and being unsafe. Trapped in unsafety, the human being will resort to their primal instincts and fight, like any trapped animal would.

As it was for the Israelites, so it is for us.

Lent commands us into a state of being exposed and naked, into an honesty that will peel back our facades and remove our masks, bringing us to a very naked state that will feel like complete and total death. We are brought to our most dreaded confession: we are not in control, and we are unsafe creatures, afraid and angry. But it’s out of this death, this confession, out of this naked and vulnerable place, where God’s word liberates us out of death and into life by God’s love. This word that brings this divine life to dead creatures, God preaches through God’s son, Jesus the Christ; it is this incarnate word that becomes the source of our sure ground when we are at our most unsafe, most exposed, and most naked. It is the very source of our new life, new love, and new liberation. God is coming to clothe God’s own in the righteous garments of divine love, life, and liberation so they can become creatures who have new eyes and ears to see and hear the pain around them, bringing love where there is indifference, life where there is death, and liberation where there is captivity.

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] Using Moses as the traditional author because it is both easier and makes for more interesting story telling

[iii] Jeffrey H. Tigay, “Exodus,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 142. “Rephidim, the last station before Sinai…and, to judge from v.6, near Sinai.”

[iv] Tigay, “Exodus,” 142. “The place, Rephidim, not Horeb.”

[v] Tigay, “Exodus,” 142. “Try. i.e. to test, demanding proof that God was present among them and controlling the events.”

[vi] Tigay, “Exodus,” 142. “Massah and Meribah, meaning ‘The Place of Testing and Quarreling.’ These names, playing on the verbs ‘quarrel’ and ‘try’ used in v.2, became by words for Israel’s lack of trust in God.”

[vii] LW 11:55 “For to tempt in the hearts is something else than tempting in words. The children of Israel in the wilderness always doubted that they had been led out by the hand of the Lord indeed, they did not believe it…They came to this unbelief because they argued form a human point of view: ‘If the Lord were with us, and if we had been led out by the hand of the Lord, would we be bothered with hunger and thirst in this way? Would we thus lack everything? If the Lord had done it, we would undoubtedly have everything we want, and we would be in a land flowing with milk and honey, as He promised us. But no, since everything is opposite, it is not true that the lord has led us out, but you have done it.”

[viii] Tigay, “Exodus,” 142. “Moses is to take some of the elders, perhaps as witnesses, and set out for Horeb (Sinai), ‘the mountain of God’ 3.1), to obtain water.”

[ix] Tigay, “Exodus,” 142. “Strike the rock: In the Sinai there are limestone rocks from which small amounts of water drip, and a blow to their soft surface can expose a porous inner layer contained water. A similar but enigmatic episode, with differences suggesting that its an oral variant of this one, appears in Nu. 20.2-13…”

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Faith Fuels Audacity (sermon for St. Luke’s)

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Introduction

When I was first Christian, I had this (mis)understanding that faith would be this thing that added flavor to my regular day in and day out, that I’d be even more fine with life (whatever it was before I had faith). Fatih returned me to my life and just made me more easy going about it all. It was embedded in the evangelical culture that surrounded me, texts, discussions with peers over coffee, and littered throughout the youth material I was exposed to while helping to lead youth group. Faith wasn’t about changing anything around me, it was about changing my attitude and posture towards the things around me. Essentially, “having faith” was synonymous with “actively choosing” to be always happy even when things turned toward not-so-happy. I had to be always happy and always clappy. To be anything short was a lack of faith. Faith had nothing to do with activity of justice in the world.

But that’s a very wrong idea of faith. It’s wrong for wo reasons: 1. faith is dynamic and not static; and 2. Faith has nothing to do with choice but with trust that seems to be born from the void. In no way, shape, or form does faith return you to the status quo in which it encountered you. Faith isn’t an affirmation of your current experiences. To have faith means to encounter God and to encounter God necessarily means to be moved from something old and dead into something new and alive. And this faith isn’t something we do but something that is done to us; thus, when we encounter God and hear our names called by this God in God’s incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, faith comes to us from the outside and finds home in our hearts and minds by the power of the Holy Spirit, much like mercy, grace, and forgiveness do.

This is the point of Lent (or one of the points of Lent). Lent is a moment in liturgical time that asks us to come to the end of ourselves and find ourselves flung upon God and God’s mercy and grace. Lent, week by week, pries one finger at a time off the rope we are clinging to justify ourselves and make ourselves important in our own eyes (and the eyes of others) until the couple of fingers that are left cannot hold our weight, and we are forced to let go and fall into the void we are terrified to fall into. But in that darkness lives not a leviathan eager to consume us, but God ready to catch us and consecrate us into a new life on new ground participating in the mission of God by faith in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Genesis 12:1-4a

“The Lord said to Abram, ‘Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’”

Chapter 12 in Genesis follows a colorful series of events: A loving God’s creation of everything from nothing, from the biggest to the smallest and everything in between (Gen 1), the establishment that community—with all of its similarities and diversities—is the best representation of God’s being in the world (Gen 2), fierce cherubim and seraphim blocking off all access and reentrance to the Garden of Eden after the rather fateful “applegate” and subsequent curses (Gen 3), the first murder (Gen 4), various human civilizations being established (Gen 5), the appearance of the Nehphilim (the byproduct of the Sons of God knowing the Daughters of Humanity) (Gen 6:1-6), a massive and destructive flood (Gen 6:7-8:22), a rainbow of divine promise (Gen 9), and the Tower of Babel (Gen 11). It’s here, at this point in the story, where God (once again) begins anew, moving from a general approach to a specific approach: God will call one person, not for any other reason than God’s love for the whole world.[ii] Promise eclipses condemnation; salvation triumphs over judgment.[iii]

God’s promises and blessing to Abram suggests a reversal of the curses uttered just chapters earlier.[iv] These blessings and promises highlight that Abram has done nothing to receive them; they come as a “bolt from the blue.”[v] The idea that God cannot be with God’s beloved as a result of the fall back in Genesis 3 is rendered myth. God calls Abram and blesses him; where Adam, Eve, and the serpent leave behind paradise, Abram is invited into it: paradise is union with God. Herein is the foundation for the claim that the curses are being reversed: by God’s love, Abram will be a great nation (many children, one of whom will be the Messiah, the promised child of Genesis 3) and this nation will be a blessing to the rest of the world.[vi],[vii]

So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him.

In this moment of hearing the divine summons, Abram goes from a childless old man to the parent of many; here Abram becomes a new person, a new being by the Word of God summoning him to God’s self and thus into new life.[viii] And not a new self for his own sake. In hearing of the divine summons, Abram is ushered into a new life for others.[ix] This other-orientated characteristic of his new life will become part of his new identity in God and with God as he becomes a conduit for God to bless other nations.[x] And in our context, the overflow of blessing and promise has already started: as Abram responds to God and finds his new life in God, Lot goes with him into this new thing.[xi]

Abram’s encounter with God in the event of faith sent him on the way; it moved him from his old life defined by his old patterns and actions into a new life defined by new patterns and actions. God’s promise and good word called him out of and moved him from the ways of the kingdom of humanity into new life defined by the reign of God.[xii] Through no work of his own or deservedness, Abram is called out of death into life, [xiii] and receives all righteousness by faith[xiv] alone (sola fides).[xv] The bareness that once defined Abram’s (and Sarai’s) life—a bareness that symbolized not only a lack of promise[xvi] but a lack of lively living and the absence of hope—is now replaced with faith clinging to the promise of God resulting in the active fruit born of faith trusting in God’s action toward Abram and Sarai.[xvii] And it is this faith on the move with the God who seeks after the beloved that will provoke God’s glory to be hallowed by the neighbor who is so loved[xviii] by those who, like Abram and Sarai, live and act by faith and participate in God’s mission of justice[xix] and the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation.[xx]

Conclusion

Faith is not a return to or affirmation of what was; it can’t be because it is born of God and not of humanity. (Humanity prefers the known and old; God is always on the move, doing something new.) When we acquire faith, we acquire all of God and that means (definitively) we acquire something new, something different, something (even at times) strange from what we have known. Faith is not our own work that brings us up into the light where everything becomes clear and discernable. Faith is the work of God summoning us down into the dark, into the void, into the depths of trust. Faith renders us fools and stumbling blocks to those who dominate by the wisdom and reason of the kingdom of humanity. Faith beckons us (always) into something new…not a new God but a new encounter with God that moves us and provokes us to new life that is bedazzled by the new fruit of the reign of God. Faith moved Abram into being a blessing to the nations (and not only for his own). Thus, while the one who receives faith is passive in the reception, they do not stay passive; they become active because faith does not know stillness and idleness and is eager to work itself out in loving deeds for the neighbor’s well-being (being blessed) and to the glory of God (God being blessed by the neighbor).

To have faith isn’t always about having confidence and certainty about events and situations in the world. Even if by faith we can be certain of God’s disposition and posture toward us, we cannot be certain that things of the world will go our way or the way we want. (And often they won’t.) What faith does do, though, is give us the daring energy and praxis in the world to call forth and pull into the kingdom of humanity the reign of God—whenever and wherever it is needed and demanded. It fuels the audacity of our participation in the mission of God which is the bringing forth of divine justice in the world. Faith is the bedrock and foundation of our active pursuit of love where there is indifference, of liberation where there is captivity, and life where there is death.

(Portions of the middle were edited versions from this sermon: https://laurenrelarkin.com/2023/03/05/nothing-seems-to-satisfy-craving-identity/)

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] Levenson, “Genesis” The Jewish Study Bible: Featuring the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation. Eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler. Oxford: OUP, 2004. 30.    “The universalism that marked Gen. chs 1-11 having now failed, the Lord begins anew, singling out one Mesopotamian—in no way distinguished from his peers as yet—and promising to make of him a great nation, not numbered in the seventy nations of ch. 10.”

[iii] Miguel A. De La Torre, Genesis, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible. Eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2011), 142. “This biblical passage….bridges the story of human rebellion with the story of human promise, the story of God’s judgment with the story of God’s salvation.”

[iv] Levenson, “Genesis” The Jewish Study Bible, 30. “What the Lord promises Abram (his name is changed to ‘Abraham’ only in ch 17)—land, numerous offspring, and blessing—constitutes to an extent a reversal of some of the curses on Adam and Eve—exile, pain in childbirth, and uncooperative soil…”

[v] Levenson, “Genesis” The Jewish Study Bible, 30. “The twin themes of land and progeny inform the rest of the Torah. In Gen. ch 12, these extraordinary promises come like a bolt from the blue, an act of God’s grace alone; no indication has been given as to why or even whether Abram merits them.”

[vi] LW 2 (Luther’s Works Vol 2 “Lectures on Genesis Chapters 6-14” Ed. Jaroslav Pelikan. Saint Louis, MO: Concordia, 1960.) 246. “…Moses reminds his people that they were chosen by the Lord, not because they had deserved this but because the Lord had loved them and was keeping the oath that had been given to their fathers? In this passage we see that the beginnings are in agreement with the end. For what is Abraham except a man who nears God when He calls him, that is, a merely passive person and merely the material on which divine mercy acts?”

[vii] De la Torre, Genesis, 145-146. “Because Abram obeys, God promises to make him (not Sarai) a great nation, blessing him and making his name so famous that future generations will use it as a blessing. Unlike those who solely rely on their own abilities, set out to make a name for themselves (Babel), and fail (1:4), Abram discovers that obedience to God is what makes on famous.”

[viii] LW 2 247. “Thus, as I said above, Abraham is merely the material that the Divine Majesty seizes through the Word and forms into a new human being and into a patriarch, And so this rule is universally true, that of himself man is nothing, is capable of nothing, and has nothing except sin, death, and damnation; but through His mercy Almighty God brings it about that he is something and is freed from sin, death…”

[ix] De La Torre, Genesis, 142. “Even though God chooses one people, the promise made to God’s chosen exhibits caring for all of humanity, for they too can partake in the blessing. The God of Abram is not limited to this one family, this one clan, this one tribe. Abram’s God is the God through which all nations can find a blessing because Abram’s God is the God of all nations.”

[x] LW 2 258-259. “Here is presented the amazing promise that this people will not only be increased among itself and be blessed materially and spiritually, but that the blessing will also overflow to the neighboring nations and peoples. This happened to the Pharaoh in Egypt.”

[xi] LW 2 275. “Behold God’s marvelous counsel! The promise pertained to Abraham only, not to Lot. Nevertheless, God attaches Lot, like a proselyte, to Abraham as his companion and moves his heart so that he wants to go into exile with his uncle rather than remain in his native country among the idolaters. This is because the promise given to Abraham be blessed with his descendants, it him others would become partakers of the blessing, even though the promise did not properly pertain to them.”

[xii] De la Torre, Genesis, 145. “The call of Abram becomes the call of all who choose to follow God. All who are to follow the Divine must leave their old life behind and follow toward a new creation.”

[xiii] De la Torre, Genesis, 145. “Abram’s hand was on the plow, and he did not look back. He obeyed and left, breaking with tradition and the past. There were no preconditions before God called or chose Abram. Unlike Noah, we are not told that God chose Abram because he was righteous or just. Indeed, as Abram’s life unfolds, we discover a very flawed man. Nevertheless, God chose him.”

[xiv] LW 2:267. “Therefore faith is an active, difficult, and powerful thing. If we want to consider what it really is, it is something that is done to us rather than something that we do; for it changes the heart and mind. And while reason is wont to concern itself with the things that are present, faith apprehends the things that are not present and, contrary to reason, regards them as being present.”

[xv] De la Torre, Genesis, 145. “Abram did not need to first change his life or become more acceptable to God before being chosen. All he did to make himself worthy of God was obey. Abram’s obedience becomes the foundation of faith.”

[xvi] De la Torre, Genesis, 143. Ref. Walter Brueggemann “…[Sarai’s] barrenness symbolizes a people without promise.”

[xvii] De la Torre, Genesis, 143-144. “As Bruegemann states, barrenness is the way of human history, an effective metaphor for hopelessness; but in the arena of barrenness, God’s life-giving action takes place.”

[xviii] De la Torre, Genesis, 146. “God’s purpose for the world will rely on this one man and his descendants, a difficult task since he and Sarai are advanced in years and she is barren. Any hope of fulfilling the promise will only be attributed to a miracle from God.”

[xix] De la Torre, Genesis, 147. “If God is a God of justice, then all who are committed to justice are a blessing to the one who God chooses to exemplify justice, even if at times they fall short. Only when we practice justice can we call Abram our spiritual father and be grafted onto the vine.”

[xx] De la Torre, Genesis, 146-147. “We bless Abram, and God, by doing what God requires of us. And what does God requires or us? He requires us to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God (Mic. 6:8). Justice cannot take place on an individual basis. Community is needed if justice is to occur, if loving mercy is to happen. Hence the call of God for Abram to be an example of God’s justice requires the establishment of a people, of a nation; thus Abram must have descendants.”

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Exposed and Naked: We are Fragile

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Introduction

We are not in control; this bothers us. Further, we are not unassailable; and this terrifies us. To be out of control is one thing, but to be fragile, too? Unacceptable. So, we do whatever we can to build up our fortresses to protect our vulnerable, fleshy existence. We build silos for storing our resources from cash to crops to armaments hoping to fend of both physical and existential threats. We fortify our homes with surveillance systems geared to satisfy the energy of our hyper vigilance always looking for a threat certain that our neighbor is that threat. Our walls and fences get taller and thicker; both the literal ones built around our properties and the metaphorical ones built around our hearts. We are closing down and in; we are pulling back and away. Our lack of control bothers us; our fragility terrifies us.

Looking around at our world, our lack of control wedded to our fragility makes us feel helpless (like sitting ducks). A few people control all the things and none of them really care about you and me; rather, they care about their power, prestige, and position. Being trapped in such a situation—hijacked and held captive by unregulated egos and tempers—provokes our fear responses—flight, fight, freeze, and fawn; we’ll do whatever we need to keep our fragile bodies and existences protected. The sad thing is that we’re buying—hook, line, and sinker—the myth that our neighbor is our biggest threat and not the kids holding all the toys and starting all the fights in the playground. So, in a meager attempt to have some control and to feel less fragile, we turn our attention to our neighbor, look at them with suspicion, and build our walls and silos, and install our surveillance systems. Our lack of control bothers us; our fragility terrifies us.

Is there any hope for such as these?

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7

The two creation stories opening the book of Genesis are not connected stories; Genesis 2 isn’t a further extrapolation of Genesis 1. Rather, Genesis 2 stands alone as its own story. Why are they coupled in such a way? Because Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 ask two very specific yet different questions. Genesis 1 asks the big existential question: how did all of this—motions about self—come into being? And, who is behind it all? The answer Genesis 1 provides is that God is the prime mover here; out of nothing God causes all of creation and the cosmos to spin into being from the biggest things to the smallest of things, from the deepest of things to the loftiest of things, from the leftiest of things to the rightiest of things. And if God took so much care to bring into existence these extremes of creation, then humanity—who finds herself right smack dab in the middle—is both the apple of God’s eye and (one of) the main characters on the stage.

Now, Genesis 2 asks a more particular and personal existential question: why am I here? And, why is that person over there here, too? The answer Genesis 2 provides is that community is essential to this particular God’s way of working in the world. And not only community generally speaking—if this were the case, then clearly God could have stopped short of creating humanity for God in God’s self is a community of triunity—but specifically this God created community in the shape and form of humanity who reflects the divine image into the world through all its beautiful variants and differences, amid various interpretations and representations and identifications, caught between crazy similarities and radical diversities. So, where Genesis 1 is impersonal, Genesis 2 gets personal.

So, in the portion of Genesis 2 read this morning, after God has made all the flora and fauna, God takes the man, Adam, and brings him to the threshold of the garden of Eden so that he will have a task: to “till and keep it”—in other words, to have loving dominion and care for it. Before Adam is released to work, God gives him a command (for Adam’s benefit, of course). What’s that command? “‘You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die,’” (Gn 2:16b-17). At this point, it is just Adam and God. Eve isn’t there yet.

So, Genesis 2 goes on to tell of the story of Eve’s, the woman’s, creation. Adam is lonely; God notices. God makes all the animals to parade by—thus causing Adam’s loneliness only to grow; each time Adam provides a name for each animal, Adam is declaring, “No, this one will not alleviate my loneliness.” Then God intervenes. Adam is put into a death like sleep, and out of this death like sleep God creates woman as (a type of) salvation.[ii] Adam makes his bold announcement, “YES!”! And all is well.

Or is it?

This is where Genesis 3 comes into picture. It answers that little “happily ever after” moment with, “No, everything isn’t fine; it’s painful, it hurts, people feel lost, have guilt, and are unsafe.” Mostly though, Genesis 3 contends with our fragile state, the exposure and nakedness of being fragile human beings in a world where we have no control. The serpent (not a snake) enters the scene and penetrates this vulnerable and fragile moment by addressing Eve and inquiring about the law—the one God gave to Adam back in Genesis 2. The serpent asks Eve, “‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’” (Gn 3:1b). Eve’s response? Sharp and quick; she knew exactly what she was talking about, “‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die,”’” (Gn 3: 2b-3).

Did you catch the difference between her answer and the command God gave Adam?

She added something: nor shall you touch it. I have to ask, where did she get this part from? The only way she was taught the law was by Adam. Therefore, we could say that Adam embellished the commandment not only forsaking eating but also even touching the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. The first error lies not with Eve being backed into this impossible question by the serpent,[iii] but way back when Adam was delivering the law to Eve. Considering that Adam is with her and remains silent when she misspeaks, can indicate that he saw nothing wrong with what she said. Sin had already found an entrance in the mistaught law; the humans are exposed in their (intellectual and spiritual) fragility.

But if that’s not enough, after a few more cunning words from the serpent, Eve sees that the fruit is good to eat and thus she eats first and Adam second. What happens? “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves,” (Gn 3:7). And herein lies the second error. The serpent appears to be unearthing the real reason why God is forbidding access to the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: jealousy.[iv] In this way, the serpent was (easily) able to put animosity between the humans and their creator (at first just spiritually and intellectually and then physically). The humans take the bait and eat; in this moment they acquire the very thing they thought they wanted: knowledge of good and evil.[v] Their first act with such awareness? They are exposed unto themselves and their nakedness receives the judgment: evil. They are ashamed of their vulnerable and fragile state and move to hide it, and from each other especially; two bodies now at perpetual war with the other. Animosity begins to breed in the realization that bodies can be different and thus scary, something to be afraid of. The neighbor becomes the threat. So, they hide; they hide not only from each other, they hide from God (Gn 3:8), and if these two then we can say they hid from their own selves, too. God’s curses, which are to come, don’t really create anything too new at this point; rather, God just leaves them to their plight and predicament because they’ve already cursed themselves by taking the knowledge and judgment of good and evil into their own hands. And this they got wrong from the start; sadly, they will continue to get it wrong…

Conclusion

God’s people are trapped and held captive to their inability to determine what is truly good and what is truly evil. Yet, God knows just how vulnerable and susceptible they are and none of that knowledge dissuades God from God’s covenant. But first the people must come to terms with their own situation and status before God: for they are not in control, they are exposed, they are naked, and they are fragile. If they continue forward without acknowledging who and what they are before God, they will continue to participate in and perpetuate the rampant injustices of the kingdom of humanity, forsaking the justice of the reign of God and being harbingers of death and not life, of indifference and not love, of captivity and not liberation.

As it was for Adam and Eve, so it is for us.

Lent commands us into a state of being exposed and naked, into an honesty that will peel back our facades and remove our masks, bringing us to a very naked state that will feel like a complete and total death. We are brought to our most dreaded confession: we are not in control, and we are fragile creatures, scared and angry. But it’s out of this death, this confession, out of this naked and vulnerable place, where God’s word liberates us out of death and into life by God’s love. This word that brings this divine life to dead creatures, God preaches through God’s son, Jesus the Christ; it is this incarnate word that becomes the source of our security when we are our most fragile, most exposed, and most naked. It is the very source of our new life, new love, and new liberation. God is coming to clothe God’s own in the righteous garments of divine love, life, and liberation so they can become creatures who have new eyes and ears to see and hear the pain around them, bringing love where there is indifference, life where there is death, and liberation where there is captivity.

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] Jackopierce song, “Woman as Salvation”

[iii] Jon D. Levenson, “Genesis,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 16. “His question is tricky and does not admit of a yes-or-no answer. The woman, who has never heard the commandment directly (2.16-17), paraphrases it closely. Why she adds the prohibition on touching the fruit is unclear.”

[iv] Levenson, “Genesis,” 17. “The serpent impugns God’s motives , attributing the command to jealousy. Whereas in the first creation account huma beings are God-like creatures exercising dominion…here their ambition to be like God or like divine beings is the root of their expulsion from Eden.”

[v] Levenson, “Genesis,” 17. “As the serpent had predicted (v.5), their eyes are opened, and they have enhanced knowledge (v.7).”

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Exposed and Naked: We are Not in Control

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Introduction

Today is about being reminded of death—death in general and death in specific. Ash Wednesday is our sacred and religious memento mori (remember to die); Ash Wednesday brings to the fore the very thing we push back: the reality that all life streams toward death even for those of us who feel very far above and beyond death’s long, cold, bony reach. with the application of ashes on our vulnerable skin, we not only hear with our ears but see with our eyes and feel with our senses the command to remember that we will die. Dying is part of our life in this world where death is not only around us in fits and spurts, but is very much a part of our life cycle.

But it seems that lately we are held hostage by death. We are powerless to the death caused by human beings who have long forgotten that power must be wielded rightly and mercy is more potent than fear. Through the barrage and onslaught of headlines streaming in from around the globe, the national ones decorating our minds like billboards on a highway, and the local ones hitting too close to home, we are made very aware of how much death seems to accompany global and national leaders who are curved in on themselves consumed with their own ego. And even if we turned off televisions, radios, computers, podcasts, and phones, we would not be able to escape the approach and encroach of death. Over the past few months, death has taken loved ones from us (both family and friend) and if not death, then death’s best friends, fear and rage, have stolen people from us in their own way. And if that wasn’t enough, our own bodies remind us about the cool shadow of death lurking closer; whether through the onset of age or by our own hands, things fall apart, breakdown, and come to naught. We are held captive by death; we do not have access to the keys to this prison we are in.

Thus, we are brought to the only confession we have, we are not in control. We are hurt, we are guilty, we are lost, we are fragile, and we are unsafe. Is there any hope for such as these?

Psalm 103:8-14

Yes, there is hope for such as we. Our psalmist writes,

Abba God is full of compassion and mercy,
slow to anger and of great kindness.

Our Psalm is a hymn celebrating God’s steadfast posture towards God’s people and is a commentary on portions of Exodus and Isaiah.[ii] Specifically in our short portion, verse 8, just quoted, is asking the reader to remember Ex. 33:13, “Now, If I have truly gained Your favor, pray let me know Your ways, that I may know You and continue in Your favor.” And if they are to remember Exodus 33, then 32 and 34 must be recalled, too. Exodus 33 marks Moses’s pleading on behalf of the people before and to God in the Tent of Meeting. Why is Moses pleading on behalf of the people? In Exodus 32 he broke the tablets upon his return from communing with God on the mountain when he saw the people worshiping the golden calf that Aaron crafted. Thus, in Ex. 33, Moses is eager to plead to God for God to relent of God’s anger. So, Moses goes to God in the Tent of Meeting carrying the sin of Israel and wondering what God will do with the people whom God has called “stiffnecked.” (33:5). In Exodus 33:13, Moses wants to know God’s own way in dealing with the sin of his people;[iii] how does God deal with the fault and guilt, the hurt and being lost, the fragility and unsafety of God’s people? Reference to Exodus 34 gives us the answer: God does not abandon Moses nor the people; God is present. This God who is present is a God who is compassionate and forgiving, steadfast and patient, “The Lord passed before him and proclaimed: ‘The Lord! The Lord! A God compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in kindness and faithfulness, extending kindness to the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin…” (34:6-7a). God does not abandon God’s people. God is faithful to the covenant even when God’s people are not; God is magnanimous and just even when the people are not.[iv] Our psalmist is intentional here in v. 8 (and v.7) in calling to mind the God of Israel who is faithful and just while the people are unfaithful and unjust.

Thus, why the psalmist can go on, singing the praises of God further elaborating on God’s character and posture towards God’s people:[v]

Abba God will not always accuse us,
nor will Abba God keep anger for ever.
Abba God has not dealt with us according to our sins,
nor rewarded us according to our wickedness.
For as the heavens are high above the earth,
so is God’s mercy great upon those who fear God.
As far as the east is from the west,
so far has Abba God removed our sins from us.
As a parent cares for their children,
so does the Abba God care for those who fear God.

Both Exodus 34:7b ff and Isaiah 57:16 (hinted at by Psalm 103:9) are in view here. In the second part of Ex 34:7 God promises that God will visit the punishments of the iniquities of the people on their children and grandchildren, etc. But Moses intervenes in 34:8-9, “‘If I have gained Your favor, O Lord, pray, let the Lord go in our midst, even though this is a stiffnecked people. Pardon our iniquity and our sin, and take us for Your own!’” And Isaiah 57:16 reads,

“For I will not always contend,
I will not be angry forever:
Nay, I who make spirits flag,
Also create the breath of life.”

Moses’s plea from Exodus 34 is met in Isaiah’s prophecy and promise that divine anger and displeasure have a time limit; even in spite of the way the people have acted—insatiable for debauchery and injustice—God will be unselfish and just.[vi] And as the prophet speaks from God’s own pathos toward and for God’s people, these words are as good as done. God’s words are like rain watering parched soil, turning it from a place of death into a source of life, just like God’s own being and breath.[vii] Under and with and by God’s Word, the people will come alive again and will be liberated from death and injustice, from their self-imposed notions of being in control, from their hurt, guilt, lostness, fragility, and unsafety; they will participate with God in God’s mission of the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation. God will condescend and transcend God’s self to bring God’s ways to the people so that their ways reflect their divine genetic inheritance (like parent, like child).[viii] Where they used to bring injustice they will bring justice, where they were self-consumed they will be consumed by divine passion for their neighbor, God’s beloved.

The psalmist concludes,

For Abba God themself knows whereof we are made;
Abba God remembers that we are but dust.

God knows God’s people. God does not hold them to a standard that is beyond their fleshiness, their fragility, their creatureliness but, rather, holds them to be such creatures who are fragile and fleshy, those who must hold each other gently and kindly as God does.[ix] According to the psalmist, God knows not only where we are and what we are but of what we are made. This is surely good news and every reason to have hope that God is for God’s people (even when things look bleak) and is coming for them to liberate them to life by God’s love.

Conclusion

Thus, even as God’s people are trapped and held captive in their sin, iniquity, and transgressions, God knows just how vulnerable and susceptible they are and none of that knowledge dissuades God from God’s covenant. But first the people must come to terms with their own situation and status before God: for they are not in control, they are hurt, they are guilty, they are lost, they are fragile, and they are unsafe. If they continue forward without acknowledging who and what they are before God, they will continue to participate in and perpetuate the rampant injustices of the kingdom of humanity, forsaking the justice of the reign of God and being harbingers of death and not life, of indifference and not love, of captivity and not liberation.

As it was for the Israelites, so it is for us.

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of our determined and slow descent into the tomb of Good Friday. This movement from Ash Wednesday to Good Friday is the season of Lent, and it demands an honesty and exposure that will peel back our facades and remove our masks, bringing us to a very naked state that will feel like a complete and total death. We are brought to our most dreaded confession: we are not in control; we are hurt, we are guilty, we are lost, we are fragile, and we are unsafe. But it’s out of this death, this confession, out of this naked and vulnerable place, where God’s word will liberate us out of death into life by God’s love. And not back into your old life, but caused to be new creatures who have new eyes and ears to see and hear the pain around them, brining love where there is indifference, life where there is death, and liberation where there is captivity.

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] Adele Berlin and marc Zvi Brettler, “Psalm 103,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 1396. “A hymn of praise for God’s nature (divine attributes) and for His acts on behalf of Israel; it contains quotations from and allusions to Exodus and Isaiah.”

[iii] Jeffrey H. Tigay, “Exodus,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 187-188. “Your ways in dealing with humankind, meaning…the principles by which you deal with human sin. God had said that the angel would be unforgiving…What is God’s own way?…What is Your way, considering that Israel is Your own people?”

[iv] Tigay, “Exodus,” 189. “God grants both of Moses’ requests, passing His presence before him …and proclaiming His ways (33.13). The name Lord [YHVH], that is the attributes it represents. These attributes include both magnanimity (vv. 6-7a) and justice (v. 7b…)…extending Himself to those in covenant with Him…”

[v] Berlin and Brettler, “Psalm 103,” 1396. “Interpreting or elaborating on the meaning and current application of Exod. 34.6, quoted in v. 8.”

[vi] Benjamin D. Sommer, “Isaiah,” The Jewish Study Bible Jewish Publication Society Tanakh Translation, eds. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford: OUP, 2004), 794. “The second complaint: parties instead of piety. Appropriately, the people whose appetite is insatiable will feed the insatiable appetite of Sheol, the underworld…”

[vii] Sommer, “Isaiah,” 895. “Deutero-Isaiah pics up the metaphor of water … in a new way to emphasize a favorite theme: God’s promises and the prophesies God issued through the prophets never fail to come true…The metaphor is significant: God sends rain, which inevitably falls to the ground; then it is absorbed by soil and nourishes vegetation. Humans in turn harvest the vegetation and transform it into food. Similarly, God’s word is sure to have series of effects, the most important of which are indirect and involve human input.”

[viii] Berlin and Brettler, “Psalm 103,” 1396. “The relationship between God and his worshippers is here portrayed as that between a father and a son…The compassionate father also figures in Jer. 31.20.”

[ix] Berlin and Brettler, “Psalm 103,” 1396. “The creaturely and ephemeral status of humanity…and the permanence of God’s covenant with those who fear Him.”

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Being Divine Salt and Light

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Matthew 5:13-20

After promising his disciples that they will be persecuted, Jesus immediately adds,

You, you are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses savor, by what will it be made salty? It is yet worth nothing if not to be tread down under people after being thrown out. You, you are the light of the cosmos. A city situated on a hill is not able to be hidden. No one kindles a lamp and places it under a basket but upon the lampstand, and it shines for all who are in the house. In this way, let your light your light shine before humanity… (vv13-16a).

Keeping in mind that Jesus hasn’t had a week off between his last statement and this one like we have, these verses are a corresponding instructional[ii] product of his promise to the disciples that they will be persecuted and the other blessed statements. The disciples are expected to participate and continue the work of Christ, which is both salt and light in the world. Thus, the disciples will also be light and salt in the world because they will—by faith and the presence of the (coming) Holy Spirit—continue God’s work revealed/made tangible in Christ.[iii] Because of their identity with Christ, because of their faith in him, because of their union with God through the Holy Spirit, the disciples won’t be able to be anything else but salt and light in the world…just like the prophets before them—caught up in the divine pathos. So it happens with those God calls to be disciples (prophets).[iv] Jesus exhorts the disciples: go and be lights, go and be salt; btdubs, you haven’t a choice in the matter (you are salt and you are a light hanging form a lampstand for all to see, not by your own doing but by God’s). And this will bring both wanted and unwanted attention, thus the previous statement about being persecuted.

Thus, the negative statements in these verses are not so much a curse (e.g. be salt or else!), but a practical statement of an either/or situation: salt salts or it doesn’t, when it doesn’t it’s thrown out and trampled; a light lights or it doesn’t, when it doesn’t it doesn’t help anyone. Jesus is setting up a practical if/then: those who are salt and light are those who are called by God to participate in the divine mission of God’s revolution of love, life, and liberation;[v] they are to help the birthing of the reign of God amid the kingdom of humanity (which, by the way, will bring attention and persecution). A world that is void of divine justice, is a world that is awful to live in; the disciples are to bring the salt to make this world a better place to live in; they are to be the light that exposes human injustice and draws people unto the truth of God’s reign and justice.[vi]

But here is an important point: all of this is done by God’s power and presence in and with them. The disciples are not mustering up their saltiness and lightyness of their own free will and choice; they’re being used to salt and to light (they are these things). Without the divine calling (“come and follow me”), without this divine power (baptism of water and Spirit), without the incarnate Word (the gospel[vii]), one can’t be the salt or light of which Jesus speaks—not unlike when the words of a false prophet fall to the ground (there to be trampled upon, words that do not expose and bring to God).

Jesus continues, that your good works might be perceived and might esteem your Father who is in the heavens (v16b). It’s as if the light that they have by faith in Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit will illuminate (for all to see) their being the salt of the earth.[viii] To be salt of the earth is to cause the earth to be savory (tasty;[ix] thus good and well-pleasing) and also to preserve it so it doesn’t rot[x] and become corrupt(ed) (two uses common to the historical context[xi]). To be salt is to be active in the world to the benefit of others[xii] (being unsalty in the world is like being nothing).[xiii] And it’s the light that shines through them that will expose them as salt to the benefit to the neighbor and the entire cosmos; Jesus’s scope of the disciples saltiness and lightyness, according to Matthew, is all encompassing; it’s massive.[xiv] The salt and light born of faith is loving deeds;[xv] those who love, those who participate in bringing life, those who hunger and thirst for liberation from captivity (for others and not only for themselves), are the salt and light making the world better, more enjoyable, a place that not only sustains but causes life to thrive (for both salt and light are necessary for such conditions of grown and thrive[xvi]). And the depth and breadth of their loving (faithful) activity is a (divine intended) result of being members of the blessed ones just mentioned; like Abraham and Sarah and their family, the disciples are a blessing to be a (public[xvii]) blessing to others and the world.[xviii] In this way, God’s name will be esteemed because of the disciples[xix] (a fulfillment of the petition in the Lord’s prayer to come, let your name be hallowed!).

Thus, Jesus continues to speak of the law and of righteousness (justice),

Do not consider that I came to destroy the law or the prophets; I came not to destroy but to complete. For, truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth might pass away, one iota or one distinguishing point will not at all pass away from the law until all might come into being. …  For I say unto you, if your justice is not over and above, much greater than the scribes and pharisees, you might not at all enter into the kingdom of the heavens (vv17-20).

Jesus completes or fulfills the law and the prophets by being the substance of the promise, in doing what is expected therein, and embodying the heart of the law and not just the words; [xx],[xxi] rather than discard or destroy, he takes up into his being even the smallest strokes of the law (the iotas and distinguishing points).[xxii] Jesus is bringing into being that which the law and the prophets have been pointing to; “carry[ing] them into a new era of completion.”[xxiii] He does so through his orientation in the world that is the product of God’s love for humanity (for God so loved the cosmos…); the law was to be a tool used to structure fractured human love. However, the scribes and Pharisees often missed this component paying attention (instead) to the rubric of the law, the acting out of the words of the law rather than the intent, the “weightier matters” of the law.[xxiv] Thus the law has gone “undone” or not completed; Jesus is here to do such doing and completing. Jesus expects his disciples to participate in this doing and completing, too. How? By being one of the blessed ones, by being the salt and light of the world, by being his followers in the world now (while he is here) and (especially!) after he leaves; by being those who publicly live out what he taught and lived out.[xxv] It is in this way (Jesus’s way[xxvi]) that their righteousness (their Christ defined divine justice) will exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees (human defined justice). It’s not about doing the law better and harder than the scribes and Pharisees;[xxvii] it’s about doing it the way Jesus did it:[xxviii] by faith working itself out in loving deeds for the wellbeing of the neighbor and the world to God’s glory.[xxix]

Conclusion

The good and not so nice expectations offered in the first part of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, give way to the why…why do the disciples need to be concerned with identifying with the poor and those who mourn, being gentle, seeking and desiring justice in the world, being merciful and clear of heart, having an eye to making peace that surpasses understanding, and preparing for being persecuted? Because this is how they add life-sustaining flavor to the world and preserve it from decay; because this is how they become the light shining the light of Christ into the world, ushering everything it touches into the divine presence.

The beatitudes are not a personal pursuit of individual and autonomous righteousness, a means to a self-centered end. In post-modern America, we—each of us—want to know—before endeavoring to participate in a plan, offering a solution to a problem, fulfilling a request, or doing a task—what’s in it for me? We want to know how we will benefit from our investment (whatever form it takes). But what Jesus laid out in the beatitudes and solidifies here in this portion of chapter five is that our reward lies in being found in and participating with the reign of God that is meant not only to bring glory to God but to also bring well-being to the neighbor. Not our own happy state and satisfaction is in mind here; being so oriented is antithetical, according to Matthew, to the goal of the proclamation of the gospel. As disciples of Christ, those who follow Jesus out of the Jordan, we are to put ourselves aside (not deny ourselves as if we didn’t exist) and to intentionally put the needs of the neighbor first (which is exactly what God does in Christ). It is through this other-orientation that disciples are recognized as the salty salt of the earth and the lighty light of the whole world; and this goal—becoming the salt and light of the world—is precisely the goal of the law and the prophets, it is the goal of our encounter with God in Christ, it is the goal of our faith eager to work itself out in loving deeds.

In other words, Beloved, we are blessed to be a blessing; we are loved to be love, to be salt, to be light in the world bringing everything and everyone whom we touch and encounter into the life giving, loving, and liberating encounter with Godself in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] Anna Case-Winters Matthew Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible Eds Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2015), 78. Moving into the instructional portion of the sermon on the mount

[iii] Case-Winters, Matthew, 78-79. “It is prefaced with ‘salt and light’ sayings addressed to the disciples in a way that points them toward their mission in the world. Neither salt nor light exists for its own sake. The salt needs to stay salty to fulfill its function and the light needs to be lifted up to give light.”

[iv] . T. France The Gospel of Matthew The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Gen. Ed Joel B. Green (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 175. “Here the light which Jesus brings is also provided by his disciples, who will soon be commissioned to share in his ministry of proclamation and deliverance.”

[v] Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname, translated by Donald D. Walsh (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2010), 94. “Julio: ‘By liberating it. Because a world filled with injustice is tasteless. Mainly for the poor, life like that has no taste.’”

[vi] Cardenal, Solentiname, 94. “Elvis: ‘…Christians don’t have that Christian taste. They’re simpleminded, insipid. Only the ones who are struggling for a just society are the ones who have that taste of salt.’”

[vii] Cardenal, Solentiname, 95. “Marcelino: ‘I think that “salt” is the Gospel word given to us so that we’ll practice it and pass it on to others, practicing love, so that everybody will have it. Because salt is thing that you never deny to anybody.’”

[viii] France, Matthew, 177. “The metaphor of v. 15 is now explained more prosaically, with the ‘light’ shed by disciples interpreted as the good that they do.”

[ix] Cardenal, Solentiname, 94. “Adan: ‘It seems to me its because every meal should have salt. A meal without salt has no taste. We must give taste to the world.’”

[x] Cardenal, Solentiname, 94. “And Doña Adela, a little old woman with a weak voice: ‘We are the salt of the world because we have been placed in it so the world won’t rot.’”

[xi] France, Matthew, 174. “The two most significant uses of salt in the ancient world were for flavoring and for the preservation of food, and either or both of those uses would provide an appropriate sense here: the disciples are to provide flavor to the world the live in …and/or they are to help to prevent its corruption.”

[xii] Case-Winters, Matthew, 79. “These metaphors imply a turning outward toward mission in the world. The impact of the followers of Jesus upon others is part of the message here. Something good and desirable is given that will cause them to give glory to God.”

[xiii] Case-Winters, Matthew, 79. “These metaphors imply a turning outward toward mission in the world. The impact of the followers of Jesus upon others is part of the message here. Something good and desirable is given that will cause them to give glory to God.”

[xiv] Case-Winters, Matthew, 79. “The scope of this blessing is the widest possible…”

[xv] Cardenal, Solentiname, 95-96. “Felix Mayorga: ‘Maybe the light is the good people, who practice love. Everyone that has a good spirit and loves others, he is the light of the world.’”

[xvi] France, Matthew, 173. “Sir 39:26 lists salt as one of the essentials for human life…’The world cannot endure without salt.’ Disciples are no less essential to the well-being of ‘the earth,’ which here refers to human life in general.’”

[xvii] Case-Winters, Matthew, 79. “The community of disciples cannot be a closed community, an ‘introverted secrete society shielding itself from the world.’ Its witness is public.”

[xviii] Case-Winters, Matthew, 79. “The universal scope of divine blessing through the people of God is consistent with the theme in Hebrew Scriptures of ‘blessed in order to be a blessing’ (Gen. 12:2; 22:80) and called to be a ‘light to the nations’ (Isa. 2:2-5, 42:6; 49:6).”

[xix] Case-Winters, Matthew, 79. “The gifts/functions of salt and light are not self-contained; they are meant to be shaken out and shining forth. Followers of Jesus need to be salty and we have to shine. Are we ‘salt of the earth’ kind of people? Are we ‘shining examples’ of God’s light in the world? Do people have cause to praise God (v. 16) because of us?”

[xx] Case-Winters, Matthew, 79-80. “Jesus’ fulfilling the law and the prophets can have several dimensions of meaning:

  1. That Jesus brings into being what the law and prophets promised. Reference to the fulfilling of the law is often made just before Matthew quotes something from the Hebrew Bible.
  2. That Jesus himself does what the law and prophets in fact require of us. His life is molded by the law, and it defines his vocation and the conduct of his life.
  3. The Jesus teaches and lives the deeper meaning of the law, which is best understood in terms of the love command on which ‘hang all the law and the prophets’ (22:450). All the laws concerning tithing, ritual purity, and Sabbath observance remain in place, but they are subordinate to the love command. Love exceeds these. It requires more and not less than the law.”

[xxi] Case-Winters, Matthew, 80. “All three of these dimensions seem to be involved in Jesus’ relations to the law and the prophets as variously presented in the Sermon on the Mount.”

[xxii] France, Matthew, 186. “The jots and tittles are there to be fulfilled, not discarded, and that is what Jesus has come to do. They are not lost, but taken up into the eschatological events to which they pointed forward.”

[xxiii] France, Matthew, 183. “In the light of that concept, and of the general sense of ’fulfill’ in Matthew, we might then paraphrase Jesus’ words here as follows: ‘Far from wanting to set aside the law and the prophets, it is my role to bring into being that to which they have pointed forward, to carry them into a new era of fulfillment.’”

[xxiv] Case-Winters, Matthew, 80. “The commandments of Torah are not all of the same weight. Jesus argues later that love and compassion for the neighbor outweighs matters such as cultic observance…He chides the scribes and Pharisees because they ‘tithe the mint, dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy and faith.’ Jesus’ own life is an exemplar of attending to the weightier matters.”

[xxv] France, Matthew, 183. “From now on it will be the authoritative teaching of Jesus which must govern his disciples;’ understanding and practical application of the law.”

[xxvi] France, Matthew, 187. A different type of doing the law that is different from scribes and pharisees “That will mean in effect the keeping of the law as it is now interpreted by Jesus himself…”

[xxvii] France, Matthew, 189. “The paradox of Jesus’ demand here makes sense only if their basic premise as to what ‘righteousness’ consist of is put in question. Jesus is not talking about beating the scribes and Pharisees at their own game, but about a different level or concept of righteousness altogether.”

[xxviii] France, Matthew, 182-183. Jesus “the way in which he  ‘fulfills’ the pattern laid down in the law and the prophets.”

[xxix] France, Matthew, 190. “Those who are to belong to God’s new realm must move beyond literal observance of rules, however good and scriptural, to a new consciousness of what it means to please God, one which penetrates beneath the surface level of rules to be obeyed to a more radical openness to knowing and doing the underlying will of ‘your Father in heaven.’”

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A Disciple or One of the Crowd?

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Matthew 5:1-12

Matthew begins by telling us that Jesus after seeing crowd went up/ascended up the mountain; after he sat down his disciples came to him. And after opening his mouth he was teaching them saying… (v1-2). Jesus pulls back a bit. Matthew doesn’t tell us why he creates distance between himself and the crowd, but only that he does. Most likely, Jesus aims to teach something (pointed and specific) to his disciples about what is expected of them. So, Jesus ascends a mountain to give himself (and thus his disciples) some distance from the crowd. What follows is primarily for the disciples of Christ (his own who came to him) and only then, secondarily, for the overhearing crowd who followed the disciples and overheard the teaching.[ii] Thus, what Jesus teaches his disciples must be understood as an expected characteristic of their life in the world; Matthew is intentionally drawing Jesus and the disciples up and out to focus the narrative spotlight on them. This teaching isn’t for the average passerby or casually interested; it’s for those who are called to be disciples, the ones empowered by faith and the Holy Spirit to be Christ’s representatives in the world to the glory of God and well-being of the neighbor.

So, what does Jesus teach his disciples that the crowd overhears?

  1. Blessed [are] the beggarly poor in spirit, because theirs is the kingdom of heaven (v3).

Who are the “beggarly poor in spirit”? Matthew is not setting up a dichotomy between those who have materially naught and those who have spiritually naught. Matthew has in mind the very same people Luke does, the poor. These are the “‘anawim’”; translated from the Hebrew, these are “‘the poor of Yahweh,’” those who find themselves captive to sin (in themselves) and the sin of the kingdom of humanity holding them hostage (in other words these are the “oppressed”; there is no Greek word that neatly translates the Hebrew).[iii] The blessed here are the ones who cry out to God for liberation and long for the kingdom of heaven, exhausted and fatigued by dehumanizing rules and demands of the kingdom of humanity. The “beggarly poor in spirit” are the ones who Jesus then mentions in the following “blessed” statements: the mourners, the gentle, the hungry and thirsty for righteousness, the merciful, the clear of heart, the peacemakers, the persecuted, and his representatives who will live in the world as he did and who will suffer like he did.[iv] To these “beggarly poor in spirit” will be given the kingdom of heaven, the reign of God that will liberate them from death, indifference, and captivity. Jesus exhorts his disciples to see that around them are those who do not fit into the status quo, those who are rejected and pushed out, those who are scapegoated by the powerful and mighty, those who are exiled and deported; it is these, Jesus tells his disciples, who will be heard and answered by God through Christ’s representatives inspired by the power of the Holy Spirit.

  • Blessed [are] the ones who mourn, because they, they will be comforted (v4).

This one is straight forward: those who mourn for loss and in grief and sorrow will be comforted. The mourners are the widows who find themselves afraid and scared, thrust into a situation of precarious dependency on agencies and institutions for their well-being. They are the children who do not know what has happened to their parents. They are the ones who carry the burden of remembering a life cut short too soon and too early, life lost in the wake of impulsive and deadly actions of the kingdom of humanity. Those who lose in the game of health and wealth; their deaths are mourned for. Jesus promises that these who mourn will be comforted; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven, that which is to come, that which is being born through Christ’s disciples and representatives, those who are eager to see life, love, and liberation reign.[v]

  • Blessed [are] the gentle/humble, because they, they will inherit the earth (v5).

In our understanding of the world (the ideologies that are resonant with the kingdom of humanity) it is the powerful and mighty who take ownership of the land, those who initiate and win wars dedicated to taking lands and nations unto themselves, causing their empire to grow in presence and stature. But Jesus says something different: it is not the powerful and mighty who inherit the earth, but the gentle, the humble, or we could say “the beggarly poor in spirit.”[vi] Why? Why does Jesus flip the expectation? Because it is not the powerful and mighty who are the trustworthy, but those who put themselves aside to take up the cause of the earth—flora, fauna, humanity, and creation.

  • Blessed [are] the ones who hunger and thirst for justice; [vii] because they, they will be filled (v6).

Jesus then promises that the ones who hunger and thirst for justice will be filled. God is on the side of the hungry and thirsty, for those who are hungry and thirsty desire and call out for justice which is God’s justice.[viii] It is also those who advocate (in word and deed) on behalf of the hungry and thirsty and strive for justice to be done in the world who find God on their side. The disciples of Christ are to be driven by a hermeneutic of hunger for God and God’s justice to be done on earth as it is in heaven for the well-being of the neighbor.

  • Blessed [are] the merciful/compassionate, because they, they will be shown mercy/will have mercy by God’s grace (v7).

A trademark characteristic of the disciples of Christ is connected to the pursuit of justice: mercy, compassion. It is not a blind reverence and obedience to the law, executing harsh judgment and deadly punishment for noncompliance. Those who dare to wear the name of Christ, those who have faith, those who are participants in the grace of God are those so called to be patient, discerning, calm, and (most of all) merciful. Just like justice, mercy does not set out to harm but to cause to flourish. For in showing mercy they receive mercy from God.

  • Blessed [are] the clear of heart, because they, they will see God (v8).

One may expect this to come first. But it doesn’t. For only the clear of heart are those who do not carry internal burdens of dissonance, shame, and guilt; these ones are aligned—inner to the outer and with God and God’s will. Thus, why they will (and do) see God. Only those who attempt to find a compromise or live according to the tenets of the kingdom of humanity while claiming Christ are considered the “unclear of heart” who, then, cannot see God.

  • Blessed [are] the peacemakers/peaceable, because they, they will be called [children] of God (v9).

To be a maker of peace is to be one who causes peace to happen amid conflict and tension. It is not done by threat or condemnation, it is not obtaining security by means of might and power, it is not done by being the biggest and the strongest. It is done through humility seeking justice; it is done through mercy and patience; it is done through vulnerability and risk. No military of the kingdom of humanity will ever be able to bring peace; security maybe—but only temporarily—but not peace and real safety. It is the ones who strive for peace and unity by means of love, mercy, humility, and justice that can expect to be the children of God.[ix] Like children do, they carry with them (inside and out) the genetic traits of their parents. And in this instance that parent is Abba God and to make peace is to bring divine justice into the world.

  • Blessed [are] the ones who have been persecuted on account of justice, because theirs is the kingdom of heaven (v10).

To pursue the justice of the reign of God as children of God will pit the disciples of Christ against the forces of the kingdom of humanity. [x] This is not persecution because one sides with traditional ideologies or the status-quo of the kingdom of humanity; this is persecution because you dare to be a midwife for the divine reign of God being born into the world. These ones who are so persecuted are already in the kingdom of heaven.[xi]

  • Blessed are you when they might insult you and they might persecute [you] and they might say all evil against you, lying on account of me. Be glad and exult, because much is your reward in the heavens; for in this way they persecuted the prophets those before you (v11-12).

This statement targets the disciples directly (moving it to a direct address with “you”). If they weren’t paying attention before, they are now. Jesus prophesies that they will be persecuted as they pursue God’s justice in the world in the name of Christ and just as Christ will be persecuted for the very same thing.[xii] Those who are persecuted for pursuing justice, for thirsting and hungering after God’s justice are those who follow Christ and will be persecuted because of his name and this pursuit. They are, by default, guilty of bearing into the world the collision of the reign of God with the kingdom of humanity in the name of Jesus and will be treated like he was treated and as the prophets before were treated. Jesus is linking—through himself—those who follow Christ in Christ’s name are the same as the prophets who came before. It is these prophets (past, present, and future) who declare the reign of God comes and who denounce the present controlled by the kingdom of humanity.[xiii] They will be persecuted. But they are to take heart, their reward is the kingdom of heaven because the kingdom of heaven is for the “beggarly poor of spirit.”

Conclusion

We are faced with a question in this moment: are we the disciples of Christ or just the crowd? Are we being addressed by Jesus’s sermon here, or are we overhearing? Discern your answer because how you answer will determine how you walk away from this sermon and what you do with the commands therein and the grace so promised by God and received by faith.[xiv],[xv]

To be a follower of Christ, a disciple and representative, offers not ease and comfort but blessedness. [xvi] The life of faith is not a solitary endeavor, one relegated to isolated mountaintops and singular experiences of worship one hour each Sunday. The life of faith is not meant to take the believer up and out but to push that believer down and in, it is an incarnated faith that is active in love, that is eager to show itself in loving deeds to benefit the neighbor and bring glory to God, it is to be the body broken bearing into the world the reign of God. To be a follower of Christ, a disciple and representative, is to be left without recourse to compromise with this world and it’s fractured and misdirected human rule; to follow Christ out of the Jordan—to be baptized into his baptism (both of water and Spirit)—is to be positioned—forever—at odds with the way things are because they know, by the Word, what should and could be. The disciples and representatives of Christ—not the crowd in general—are called to a higher level of righteousness of the reign of God that is in opposition to the errant righteousness celebrated by the kingdom of humanity.[xvii]

This is both very good news and very hard news.

While our faith does bring us assurance—all who believe are saved and all are the beloved of God—those daring to live out that faith—those “foolish” enough to follow Christ out of the Jordan—will find themselves in the paradox of blessedness and persecution.[xviii] For, “[t]he gospel of the love of God is…good news for sinners, but it is not nice news without any confrontation with human sinfulness for what it really is, a nothing.”[xx] There is absolutely no way for the disciple and representative of Christ to see the pain of the world, to feel the pain of the world and not speak up and not act even if it means being brought to our own end. The life of faith brings discontent and confrontation with the kingdom of humanity; the life of faith—eyes and ears, and hands and heart set on the bringing forth of the reign of God—will cause us to “quarrel” with and “chaff against” the current reality under the rule of the kingdom of humanity.[xix]

But the good, good word, Beloved, is that in all this heaviness of being called to be a disciple of Christ means that God is with us; we labor not alone but with Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit. And if God is for us, then who, I ask, can be against us?

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] Anna Case-Winters, Matthew Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible Eds Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2015), 76.

[iii] Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname, translated by Donald D. Walsh (Eugene: Wipf&Stock, 2010), 82. “I said that in the Bible the poor are often called anawim, which in Hebrew means ‘the poor of Yahweh.’ They are so called because they are the poor of the liberation of Yahweh, those that God is going to liberate by means of the Messiah. It’s like what we now understand as the ’oppressed,’ but in the Bible those poor people are also considered to be good people, honorable, kindly and holy, while their opposites are the oppressors, the rich, the proud, the impious. This word anawim was probably the one that Jesus used. In Greek there was no word like that, and when the Gospel of Matthew was translated into Greek that word was translated as ‘poor in spirit,’ whereas Luke in his Beatitudes as simply ‘the poor.’ This phrase of Matthew, ‘poor in spirit,’ has created confusion, and many have believed that it deals with spiritual poverty. And I said that I met a priest who said that the ‘poor in spirit’ were the good rich people.”

[iv] Cardenal, Solentiname, 85. “I said: ‘The other Beatitudes seem to be only other ways of saying the same thing. In all of them the same poor people are spoken of by other names, and what they promise is the same thing.’”

[v] Cardenal, Solentiname, 86. “…Felipe…: ‘We can be happy about the news that the Kingdom is coming, but we can’t be satisfied until it comes.’”

[vi] Cardenal, Solentiname, 86. “Rebecca: ‘And he blesses those of humble heart. It seems to me that these are the poor in heart or the humbled. Maybe they were even humbler before (that’s my idea anyway) and yet for God they were the most worthy. People shouldn’t feel sad, then, even though they are poor, poor in spirit or humbled, because God will bring them into the Promised Land, which is the kingdom. But those of proud heart will not enter.’”

[vii] Case-Winters, Matthew, 76. “The righteousness to which the Sermon on the mount calls people is not a sinless perfection but a calling to do justice and love mercy (tsedaqah). Matthew is the only synoptic Gospel that uses the word dikaiosynē, or justice. Five of his seven uses are here in the Sermon on the mount. Clearly it is an important theme for him tin understanding Jesus’ central message. To ‘know God’ is to do Justice (Jer. 22:15-16).”

[viii] Cardenal, Solentiname, 86. “Marcelino: ‘He blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice. Hunger and injustice amount to the same thing. Anyone who hungers for good also hungers for justice. They are the ones who are going to make social change, not the satisfied ones. And then they’ll be filled with bread and social justice.’”

[ix] Cardenal, Solentiname, 88. “Oscar: ‘If I’m trying to have one person not exploit the other, I am one who is looking for peace. He says that people who look for peace will be the children of God, because they look for unity, that we should all be brothers and sisters. It’s clear that the kingdom of God belongs only to the children of God.’”

[x] Cardenal, Solentiname, 88. “Alejandro: ‘And he says that they are going to be persecuted because they seek justice, and for that also he blesses them.’”

[xi] Case-Winters, Matthew, 77. “The blessings are directed toward those who have certain disposition and inclination to act in ways consistent with God’s will rather than toward those who have a particular circumstance or status. Matthew is taking an ethical perspective.”

[xii] Cardenal, Solentiname, 89. “Olivia: ‘Before he talked of people persecuted for looking for justice and now he says ‘because of me.’ He wants to point out that it’s the same thing. Everyone who is persecuted in the cause of justice is persecuted in his cause.’”

[xiii] Cardenal, Solentiname, 89. William: ‘And Jesus compares us with the prophets. The prophets in the Bible were not so much people who predicted the future as people who denounced the present.’”

[xiv] Case-Winters, Matthew, 74. “Perhaps the Sermon on the mount strikes a better balance between God’s grace and human action than this question suggests. It is true that it is full of commands to do God’s will and ‘bear fruit,’ but right alongside these are promise of divine mercy and blessing along the way. These are intertwined throughout.”

[xv] Case-Winters, Matthew, 75-76. “In the Sermon on the Mount, this twofold grace is exemplified. Grace and calling to obedience intertwine. They are not a before and after. The law is not primarily a judge that convicts us of sin; it is primarily a guide for life in relation to God and neighbor. It is already an expression of God’s grace to us. … The law is a good gift of God in its role as a guide for living. To live in this way is to already experience the hoped for reign of God. The new relationship with God that Jesus exemplifies is open now for all who would follow him.”

[xvi] Case-Winters, Matthew, 77-78. “Those who have ‘crossed over’ to radical commitment do not find a life of ease and luxury; they find a life of blessedness instead.”

[xvii] Case-Winters, Matthew, 78. “The phrases of the beatitudes may well have reference not only to discipleship attitudes but to minority social position (those who are meek, poor in spirit, hungering and thirsting for righteousness/justice). That would be consistent with the warnings elsewhere in Matthew (6:19-21) concerning the danger that wealth and power present to the higher righteousness which the disciples are called.”

[xviii] Case-Winters, Matthew, 76-77. “The first four beatitudes declare blessing for those who were traditionally understood as being defended by God: the poor, those who mourn, the meek, and those who hunger and thirst for righteousness/justice. The second set blesses those who do what is right by being merciful and pure in heart, making peace and enduring the persecution that attends following in the way of Jesus Christ. When one’s life is characterized by the attributes highlighted in the beatitudes, two things are assured: blessedness on the one hand and persecution on the other.”

[xix] Case-Winters, Matthew, 78. “If we would—even now—live under the reign of God, there are implications. The alternative reality will chaff against the present reality. To love as God loves is to be discontented with the present reality…In our discontent, we may pray with William Sloane Coffin, ‘Because we love the world…we pray now…for grace to quarrel with it, O Thou Whose lover’s quarrel with the world is the history of the world…’”

[xx] Paul Hinlicky, “A Synopsis of Theodor Dieter, Der june Luther und Aristotle: Eine historisch-systematische Untersuchung zum Verhältnis von Theologie und Philosophie (Berlin & NY: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), 19. online article; page number based on printout.

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In Honor of the Life of Friend and (like) Sister, Kate Leighton

Every Sunday at church we recite the creed from Iona Abbey. It’s not a standard or traditional Episcopal way to affirm faith, but it is a deeply theological and spiritual mode of such expression: broadening the language to make the concepts embedded therein accessible to a wider audience, specifically those traumatized by fundamentalists, literalists, and dogmaticians hellbent on one way (their way) or the highway. But it’s not only the broadened language that is its unique contribution to creedal expression, it’s the way the words themselves—though very simple—participate in the descriptive imagery daring to paint divine imagery of the three persons of our Christian Holy Trinity. Of God the Creator, ethereal and light words lift the confessors, bringing them into celestial realms, the feeling of the cosmos fresh on skin, eyes filled with heavenly light, ears ringing with angelic symphony as one finds themselves embraced and enveloped by “God Above us.” Of God the Redeemer, the same confessor is brought down to earth by words incarnate made of human existence presencing the suddenness of the onset of child-bearing labor: “God Beside Us” born among us and dwelling in earthy existence, flesh and bone, vulnerable and exposed, subject to the pain of life and death. This one is with us; this one identifies with us.

But when the creed comes to speak of the third person of the Trinity, the Divine Holy Spirit Comforter and Paraclete, the words take on a separate life from the ones that fell before. The ethereal and abstract words describing God Above Us and the material, temporal words describing God Beside Us give way to words that solicit rapid heartbeats and joy that surges through the bodies of the confessors. The words begin to dance, and the confessor is their partner, twirling and whirling lovingly captured in lexical perichoresis:

“We believe in God within us,
the Holy Spirit
burning with  Pentecostal fire,
life-giving breath of the Church,
Spirit of healing and forgiveness,
source of resurrection and of eternal life.”

In the context of the thanksgiving worship of the eucharist communion service, this change makes sense spiritually as well as theologically. It is through the Spirit we are, by faith in Christ, anchored into Abba God. It is through the Spirit that our very breath as beings and as beings in Christ finds foundation. The church (both general and particular) must acknowledge that its birth certificate resides with the Spirit in the event of the intimate divine encounter of Pentecost; it is this same Spirit that will keep continuity within Christ’s body from one era to another, grafting in those who go before and those who come after. By the Spirit, we are yoked to a God who is Love, Who is Light, Who is Life, and Who is liberation (even when things feel cold and dark, when chaos and confusion seem to be our only cairns on the path, even when anger, grief, and sorrow alight upon our fragile, vulnerable existence). By the Spirit, God Above Us and God Beside Us not only become real to us but are made real in us. It is the Spirit by which one can’t help but feel that all that is isn’t all there is. Hope rises; possibility has priority over actuality; good news comes.

But the point of bringing this up is neither to wane uneloquently about this humble creed of Iona Abbey nor to invigorate in my reader a robust role for the Divine Spirit of Abba God. I mention this portion because it is this very portion that is to me a great announcement of Kate’s life and impact on the world around her and the people so fortunate to be touched (and forever altered) by her. To encounter Kate was to be encountered by the divine spirit, the pathos and zeal of God for the Beloved like the prophets of old, those who felt (deeply and personally) the pain and love of both Abba God and humanity, daring to be a conduit and midwife of love for both. To encounter Kate was to be exposed and accepted like the encounter with the incarnate Word who set about to liberate and bring life to human beings stuck in captivity and the threat of death. To encounter Kate was to be invited to dance with her; caught up and twirled and whirled about by both her wit and intelligence while being guided by her gentle hand and deft step, so consumed with the ease and seeming simplicity of the motions, one would cease to remember who was leading whom.

If there ever was an embodiment of “Holy Spirit burning with Pentecostal Fire” it’s Kate. Her passion and energy for those she loved and the world around her wasn’t only palpable but infectious. She bore into the world joy, celebration, and enough holy mischief to rattle the status-quo. She identified with others and was connected to the world, even if it meant bearing the pain around her in her own person. In word and deed, she gave life to those around her: her presence marked a boundary in space and time that was for them, to be who they are as they are without needing to don a façade behind which to hide to be “acceptable” and remain safe. Thus, she liberated those whom she met, liberating them unto life by her authentic love for them. Whether inside the medical institution or outside, she healed others (spiritually and materially); and she lived a life continually expressing the profundity of divine forgiveness transcending mere human words finding location in the temporal realm. In all of this, Kate participated in making a reality today tomorrow’s hope of resurrection and eternal life announced to us by Abba God, made real in Christ, and sealed to us through the Holy Spirit.

While I find hope in reuniting with her in God at some point in my future, her physical absence is felt deeply. I must now wait to see her again. But in this waiting, I am encouraged and exhorted by God’s Holy Spirit to carry forward the light she brought, the life she gave, the liberation she offered to others. In this way, I carry her and her life’s work further into the world. In picking up her mantel, she is remembered and loved. In being remembered and loved, she is present. Since Love never forgets the Beloved, there the Beloved always is, beside us and with us.

I miss you Kate, and I love you deeply.

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Epiphany: God for Us

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Introduction

At times, in the cool, dark of January and after all the festivities have wound down and the decorations and ornaments have been packed up, one can feel alone, unseen, unheard. Going from Thanksgiving to New Years is a tour of parties and engagements, concerts and events, gatherings and celebrations. One can feel swept up and out of banalities of regular life, being entertained from one moment to another.

As a parent of three children, each of whom is in a different stage of education, Thanksgiving marks the beginning of sweet returns and homecomings as semesters end and all the kids come home to stay, the onslaught of various concerts and parties threatening to overlap, and the rush of shopping, dining, traveling, and being ushered from one family visit to the next. This energy carries all the way through the first week of January. And then… Silence. And everything slows all…. the…. way…. down as if being caught in mud.

It’s not just parents who suffer the experience of the radical shifts between up and down, loud and quiet, active and inactive. Everyone feels it. The first few weeks of January, in the stillness, darkness, and coldness of the month, pose the greatest challenges for mental health; these can be the hardest weeks for our friends and family working with and through depression and grief, sorrow and loss, anxiety and despair, loneliness and alienation. The big drop after the cessation of the holiday feasts and fests paves the way for a dark cloud to loom over vulnerable humanity.

Thus, our orientation outside of ourselves is even more important as we tumble out of celebrations and land on that regular and blah day to day. Last week, Luke guided us to refocus our attention on the initial vibrations of the beginning movement of God’s mission of the divine revolution of love, life, and liberation in the tween Jesus. Today, Matthew continues that refocusing outside of ourselves and on to another. Matthew tells us a story of the divine Son, Jesus the Christ, who identifies with us in all aspects of our life from the greatest of great to the lowest of lows.

Matthew 3:13-17

Jesus has no need for a baptism of repentance[ii] like the one Matthew tells us John is offering to those gathering to and in the river Jordan.[iii] And yet, Jesus shows up. Matthew tells us, At that time Jesus arrives from Galilee to the Jordan toward John to be baptized by him (v13). The sinless one, the Son of Humanity and the Son of God, shows up for the purpose of being baptized by John like everyone else. However, everyone else in that river needed to confess, needed to be washed clean, needed to repent.[iv] But Jesus is not like everyone else; John knows this. John nearly refuses Jesus this event, as Matthew tells us, But John was hindering him, saying, “I, I have need to be baptized by you, and you, you come to me?!” (v.14). Our English version makes it sound like John was speaking it as if from a script but not acting on it. I think he was acting on it with all the passion of a Palestinian Jewish man. With the emphasis embedded in the original language, John is (literally) astounded[v] by Jesus coming to him; it wouldn’t be farfetched to imagine Jesus’s cousin holding Jesus back by the shoulders with wet hands, confessing such words. John’s astonishment and confession to Jesus showing up in the Jordan will be echoed in Peter’s similar astonishment and confession when Jesus goes to wash his feet. God on the move is always on the move in a way that defies human reason and common sense.

Jesus (lovingly) replies to John’s passion not with chastisement or offense, but acknowledges that John’s not wrong, but here in this moment God is up to something different, something that doesn’t make sense, something that is new, something that will fracture the stagnant and toxic status-quo (the status quo he witnessed all those years ago in his week-long stay in the temple). Matthew tells us, Now, Jesus answered him and said, “You permit me just now; for, in this way, it is fitting for us to fulfill all justice.” At that time, [John] permits him (v15). Jesus links his being baptized to the fulfillment of (divine) justice. But what divine justice is being fulfilled here in the sinless God-man being baptized like a regular sinful human being? It is the justice of God that is fulfilled in identifying[vi] with the plight and predicament of God’s people.[vii] And it is through this identification with God’s people—in their highs and especially their lows—that God’s justice is manifest among and in those who are oppressed (spiritually and politically).[viii] Divine justice, divine righteousness is not about what one has (as if it is something we can possess on our own right); it’s about having a fleshy heart and a humble mind that drives one to live life before God in a human way with the people of God[ix] for the goal of “keeping human life human.”[x]

Matthew continues the story, telling us about what happened after Jesus is baptized, Jesus immediately ascended from the water. And, behold!, the heavens opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove coming upon him. And, behold!, a voice out of heaven saying, “This one is my son, the Beloved, in whom I am well-pleased!” (vv16-17). Something new is afoot and God is making Godself known in and through Jesus ascending out of the water and the dove descending to alight on him. Here we have clear images of new creation, of love, of life, of liberation. Jesus ascends from the midst of the water like his ancestors before him crossing the Red Sea to find themselves liberated from the oppression of Egypt; the dove descends and lands on firm ground that is the Christ, the son of God and the son of Humanity, much like Noah’s dove after the flood.[xi]

But what is significant here is the way God makes it known (directly and without mediation[xii]) that God identifies with Jesus and Jesus identifies with God. This is my son, the Beloved…Jesus identifies with the people and identifies with God. In that God identifies with Jesus, who identifies with the people, means that God identifies with the people in and through Christ. In this way, Jesus represents God to humanity and humanity to God.[xiii] In Jesus the Christ, the son of God and the Son of Humanity, humanity and God are united forever. In this way, humanity, the yous and mes of this world, participate by faith in being the Beloved with whom God is well pleased.

Conclusion

We hear this story every year, but do we pause long enough to consider the significance of Jesus taking a baptism of repentance he didn’t need? There’s no logical conclusion except for his desire (thus, God’s desire) to identify with the plight of humanity in its ups and especially in its downs. The Sinless one identifies with the sinful ones, and it’s this profound and earthy and fleshy identification that marks the very beginning of Jesus’s active ministry. If you’ve ever wondered if God is for you, Epiphany gives us a resounding HECK YES, GOD IS FOR YOU!

And not just for you when you are up, when you are “too blessed to be stressed,” when you are clean, neat, put together, organized, straightened up, physically killing it at work and at the gym, spiritually killing it in your quiet time and charity. Epiphany highlights and emphasizes that God is with us at our worst: in our desperate need to confess, to be washed, to repent. God is with us when our acts are not together, when we can barely get out of bed, when we just can’t anymore, when we are depressed and despairing, when we are consumed with grief and emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual pain, when we bare tremendous burdens of loss and sorrow, when we want to quit and when we do. God is with us when we fail. God is with us when our shoulders and backs feel as if they are about to break with the burdens. And what’s more? God is with us when society is against us, threatens us when we are different, and condemns us because we have need, because we lack, because we can’t rise to the demands of a system dead set on devouring us.

Epiphany is the unmediated voice of God telling you, telling us, that we are unquestioningly, undoubtedly, unconditionally accepted by God because God chose to identify with us on no other condition than God’s love and pleasure made known in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit.

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] R. T. France The Gospel of Matthew The New International Commentary on the New Testament. Gen. Ed Joel B. Green (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 117. “The first appearance of the adult Jesus in Matthew’s story takes place in the context of John’s baptism, with Jesus as John’s Galilean ‘follower’ … who receives baptism along with the repentant Judean crowds.”

[iii] Anna Case-Winters Matthew Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible Eds Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2015), 50. “John has been preaching a baptism that signifies repentance. Why would Jesus need to be baptized? What does he need to repent? Our theological tradition has insisted that Jesus is without sin.”

[iv] Case-Winters, Matthew, 51. “Regular ritual washing with water was widely practiced within Judaism and its symbolism of cleansing form sin was understood. This singular experience of ‘baptism’ that John was practicing is more reminiscent of the practice of ‘proselyte baptism.’ When Gentiles converted they were baptized. In extending this practice to everyone, John is in effect declaring that everyone stands in need of conversion, signaling their repentance and turning to God. Even the religious leaders stood in need of baptism.”

[v] Merriam-Webster “Astounded”, “feeling or showing great surprise or wonder”

[vi] France, Matthew, 120. “The most obvious away in which Jesus’ baptism prepares for his mission is by indicating his solidarity with John’s call to repentance in view of the arrival of God’s kingship. By identifying with John’s proclamation Jesus lays the foundation for his own mission to take on where John has left off.”

[vii] Case-Winters, Matthew, 50. “One way we might understand Jesus’ presenting himself for baptism is a sign of his solidarity with sinners. In this context, ‘to fulfill all righteousness’ is to be with God’s people, stand in their place, share in their penitence, live their life, die their death.”

[viii] Case-Winters, Matthew, 50. Righteousness/justice according to Hebrew thought, “It is about the establishment of God’s will that justice should everywhere prevail. God’s righteousness is connected with ‘vindication,’ ‘deliverance,’ and ‘salvation’…God’s righteousness is seen in God’s special regard for those who are powerless or oppressed and stand in need of justice.”

[ix] Case-Winters, Matthew, 50. “Thus righteousness is not to be conceived as a static quality that one possesses (what one is) but rather a matter of what one does in living life before God.”

[x] Paul Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Context.

[xi] Case-Winters, Matthew, 50-51. “That he is baptized in the Jordan (v. 3) recalls the crossing of the Jordan into the promised land. That when he comes up from the water, the Spirit descends like a ‘dove’ reminds us of the links between water and Spirit in Genesis, as ‘a wind from God swept over the waters’ (Gen.:2). After the flood Noah sends out a dove. Themes of creation and new creation are reverberating here.”

[xii] France, Matthew, 122. Divine voice, “…the most unmediated access to God’s own view of Jesus.”

[xiii] France, Matthew, 120. “Further, as Jesus is baptized along with others at the Jordan, he is identified with all those who by accepting John’s baptism have declared their desire for a new beginning with God.” (representation)

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Jesus, Our Anchor Between

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[1]

Introduction

A new year is upon us. 2025 is now in the books; 2026 remains unknown as it stretches out before us. We are caught between letting go and taking in, wrapping up and rolling out, caught between what was and what will be. The beginning of a new year always invites resolutions and promises, some of which will be broken and others fulfilled. Somethings we can leave behind in 2025, others we will carry with us into 2026. For some of us there’s excitement as we think about all the unknown terrain to be discovered over the next 361 days; others of us may be feeling the heaviness the new year brings, fearing and worrying as we contemplate the potential for (more) loss and (more) pain to come our way.

The reality is that most of us probably have some form of all these feelings as we celebrate the new year. We are both excited and nervous, confident and skeptical, in control and not in control. So, it can be hard to feel anchored at this time between two years—one being completed and one barely started. And because we are caught between all these emotions and feelings, we can’t find our anchor in ourselves because that’s where all the instability is currently residing. So, where do we look?

Outside of ourselves. And this is the power of the Christmas season. Something new (even if the story is quite old) is born among us and to us and in us. Jesus, the Christ, is given to us anew, again. And while on Christmas Eve we were part of the rabble invited to the manger among shepherds and animals to look upon the newborn child who is the savior of the world, today we are invited to witness Jesus as tween participating in religious (and family!) life in a new way. The anchor we need at the beginning of this new year is found in Jesus the young and curious teacher and learner.

Luke 2:41-52

Luke tells us that Mary and Joseph were traveling to Jerusalem every year for the festival of the Passover. And when [Jesus] was twelve, they went [to Jerusalem] according to the custom of the festival and when the days of the festival came to an end, they returned and the boy Jesus remained in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know (vv.41-43). Every year for eleven years they traveled, as a family, to Jerusalem for the celebration of the festival of the Passover; every year for eleven years Jesus returned with them. And then, at year twelve, Jesus remains while the family leaves. Luke doesn’t give us a reason (upfront) about why Jesus decided to stay back or if it was an accident as if he was caught up in the events and the dialogues indwelling and swirling about the synagogue and in Jerusalem and couldn’t pull himself away. What is clear is that something new is happening; Luke wants his audience to see a shift in the narrative, to take note of Jesus’s self-differentiation from his family, his parents and siblings, even any extended family that may have been in the traveling company.

Luke continues the story, But considering him to be in the company, they went a day’s journey and then they were seeking carefully for him among the relatives and acquaintances. When they did not find [him], they turned back toward Jerusalem and were seeking carefully for him. After three days, they found him in the temple sitting down in the middle of the teachers and listening to and enquiring of them (vv44-46). Following Luke’s story, Jesus is missing for at least five days if not six. While it took his parents a harrowing three days to find him in the temple, he (most likely) spent more than just that moment (preceding his being found) in the temple. He spent about a week; a week is plenty of time to form observant opinions and rational conclusions.[i] Now, there is a correlation here between Jesus being found by his parents on the third day in the temple and Jesus being found on the third day after his death in resurrected glory; [ii] I’m not sure that’s Luke’s main point. Luke’s point is to make known the very beginning of Jesus’s ministry at a young age. While we know his active ministry starts at the Epiphany, what Luke is showing his audience is that the very beginning—the inception/conception—is here; for it’s here where Jesus is listening and asking, answering and debating with the very same religious leaders he will come into conflict with later when he’s an adult. It’s here, for Luke, where Jesus begins to make himself known and where Jesus begins to become aware of the toxicity of the religious situation for the people of God.[iii] Here, for Luke, God is moving Jesus’s spirit and planting the seeds of God’s divine gospel proclamation that will come.

So, after a week his parents find him and he’s teaching and questioning the elders of the synagogue. Then Luke tells us, Now, all the ones who were listening to him were amazed about his understanding and answers. And after seeing him, they were struck with astonishment and his mother said to him, “Child, why did you do this to us in this way? behold, your father and I were seeking you with suffering pain.” And he said to them, “Why were you seeking me? Did you not consider that it was necessary for me to be in this place of my father?” (v47). Not only has Jesus separated himself from his family, but he is also separating himself from the authorities of the synagogue. Their amazement at his insight and answers indicates that his comments and questions were not textbook but came from a different source, a divine inspiration, a divine, prophetic stirring. And this is what Luke wants his audience to see, to focus on, wherein to find anchor. Jesus the Christ, Jesus the child of Mary; Jesus the Son of God, Jesus the Son of humanity. It is through this one that God will challenge and overhaul the kingdom of humanity through the reign of God; it is through this one that the oppressed (spiritually and politically oppressed) will find liberation not only spiritual liberation with God but political liberation with the neighbor from the systemic oppression of the kingdom of humanity. It is through this divine child of Mary that the challenge and collision of the reign of God with the kingdom of humanity is already starting.[iv],[v] It is in and through this one that the very center of the temple[vi] will be relocated away from cold stones and in fleshy human hearts, away from cold law obedience and to warm faith wherein the law is satisfied and done.[vii]

Conclusion

As we enter this new year—with all its unknown and uncertainty, with all its mileage laying out before us and unchartered territory—we enter with a story of God for humanity guiding our way. We are given someone to walk with: Jesus the Christ, God’s son. So, we enter this new year knowing something significant and timeless: for God so love the world that God gave God’s only son to bring love, life, and liberation to the unloved, the dead, and the captive. Luke gives us a place to look, a focal point, something to allow our anxious minds and nervous hearts to focus on and find anchor. Luke gives us someone outside of ourselves to look to: Jesus of Nazareth, this man who is God. Christmas will always remind us that God comes to dwell with human beings on earth. This is God’s desire: to dwell with humanity whom God loves with all God’s heart. So, with resolutions or not, with promises or not, with intentions or not for this new year, we enter this new year with an ancient story made new to us at this moment. And in this ancient story we find the fulfillment of all we were waiting for through Advent: hope for the hopeless, peace for the peaceless, joy for the joyless, and love for the loveless.

[1] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[i] Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname, translated by Donald D. Walsh (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2010), 46. “Olivia: ‘he went to the temple to teach the teachers of the law, because these teachers knew the law by heart but they didn’t put it into practice.’”

[ii] Cardenal, Solentiname, 46. “Olivia: ‘He also did it to help prepare them. He was going to be away from them later. And once Mary and his other relatives came looking for him, and he told them that his family was the community. And then Mary lost him in death, but on the third day, like here in the temple, he was found.’”

[iii] Cardenal, Solentiname, 46-47. “…Jesus was taken to the temple by his parents, in accordance with the religious traditions that they faithfully observed, ‘as was the custom,’ as the Gospel says. There he saw the Jewish religion, legalistic pharisaical, external. He also saw the money-changers that he was going to drive out later. And then, when his parents were leaving, he went back to the temple to see if he could do something to change the situation.”

[iv] Cardenal, Solentiname, 46. “Felipe…: ‘In this Gospel Jesus appears as a rebellious kid. He’s still a child and he’s already in the temple challenging their religion, criticizing and arguing with those guys, giving them arguments they can’t answer.’”

[v] Cardenal, Solentiname, 47. “Felipe: ‘Conclusion, then: Jesus was a revolutionary from childhood.’”

[vi] Gonzalez, Luke, 44. “The temple is the sign of God’s presence in the midst of the people.”

[vii] Justo L. Gonzalez, Luke, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2010), 43. Potential echo of 1 Samuel 2:26 in Luke 2:52. And, “Furthermore, Samuel’s connection both with the temple and with Jesus hint at the typology that sees Jesus as the new and final temple of God. For this reason, a common theme in early Christian theology was that the destruction of the temple showed that it was no longer necessary, for the temple prefigured the one who had already come.”

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Nothing to Lose; Everything to Gain

“‘Dear Lord God, I wish to preach in your honor. I wish to speak about you, glorify you, praise your name. Although I can’t do this well of myself, I pray that you may make it good.’”[i]

Now it happened, writes Luke, in those days a decree went out from Caesar Augustus to take a census of all the inhabited world … and all the people were going to enroll, each one to their own city (v1,3). Luke’s story about the event of Christ’s Nativity contrasts with what we expect it to be. Experiences and feelings of hope and peace, of love and joy, fill our expectations of Christmas and its season. But, on that night, for Mary and Joseph, for the shepherds at work, there was no hope and peace, there was no joy and love. There was fear. There was anxiety. There was chaos. There was pain (physical and emotional, maybe even spiritual). There was worry and concern threading through every thought and action. There were people struggling to find bravery when they needed it the most.

Luke narrows the scope of the story, focusing in on Joseph and Mary humbly going on their way: Now, Joseph went up from Galilee out of the city of Nazareth into Judea into the city of David being called Bethlehem because he was of the house and lineage of David. He went to be registered with Mary, the one who had been betrothed to him and the one who was pregnant (vv4-5). On that night, Mary and Joseph made a tough journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem. The path wasn’t easy, the ride wasn’t smooth, the forecast was unknown, and there was no confirmation that when they got to Bethlehem there would be lodging. On that night, all was not calm; it was scary and unknown because, on that night, tensions rose and the potential for harm from chaos loomed with every step they took. Adding to this heavy burden, Mary was ready to give birth to her first-born son; her body ached, her spirit fatigued, her mind consumed with what might happen if her time came. On that night, she fought to be brave—walking all that way, not wanting to be a burden to Joseph, unknowing of what was to happen or what would come. Where was God in this for Mary?

And what of Joseph on that night? We don’t hear much about his plight as he made his way, leading the pregnant Mary, to Bethlehem, away from the comfort of his own town of Nazareth, the places and spaces he knew so well. The discomfort of the unfamiliar road and journey barely eclipsed the rolling and roaming narrative in his head: is she telling me the truth? I know the angel spoke to me, but it feels strange, surreal, farfetched… Thoughts of the census accompanied his human doubt and questioning, what will happen to use once this census is done and all the chips are collected into wealthy pockets?[ii] As they traveled into Bethlehem and faced closed door after closed door, Joseph’s brave face faltered as he watched Mary’s face give way to the first pangs of labor. Now it happened, Luke writes, while being there, her days completed… (v6)One prayer passed over his lips, please let me find somewhere safe for her, for him…this child… that’s not even mine… Everything felt up to him; as frustration, fear, and maybe even some resentment began to surface, the burden continued to weigh down on his shoulders.[iii] Where was God in this for Joseph?

In a stable in Bethlehem, they felt safe enough. …[Mary] brought for her first-born son, and she wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was not lodging for them (v7). Neither Joseph nor Mary thought this situation ideal, but it was what it was. And, for now, the child was safe in the wooden manger and hay, among the animals forming fortress around the exhausted couple and the long-awaited Messiah of Israel and the world. Those who felt exhausted from the long, lonely journey, felt beleaguered by the socio-political demands of Caesar Augustus and Syrian Governor Quirinius,[iv] and isolated from family, those who wondered where God was in their plight, now had God in their midst, dwelling among them. God as brave, poor[v] infant daring to face the world in vulnerable humanity: to feel every pain, every sadness, every frustration with systems and ideologies set up and upheld just to keep the already down, down. This one, this brave divine infant, will be the one to heal the fractures existing among humanity and between humanity and God and creation, the fractures that fuel injustice, war, hatred, domination, inequality and inequity, disunity and discord.[vi]

And Shepherds were in that region spending the night and keeping guard through the night over their flock (v8). The shepherds held ground in that dark night, in that silent night. There was, of course, worry about potential animal attacks on their sheep;[vii] there was more worry about what would happen to them and their flock once the census completed. How much more will I lose? I already have so little and this feels like a kick in the gut while down… The shepherds feared not the literal wolf, but the metaphorical one, the one against whom they could not fight and if they did, they knew they would not win.[viii] The shepherds, the oppressed of the oppressed, where afraid; it is quite certain their blanket of anxiety that night did not keep them warm but it sure kept them awake and on guard.[ix] That night, those shepherds didn’t feel that brave as the powerful were gearing up to take what they wanted and they couldn’t do anything about it. Where was God for them?

And then to those who were eager to stay unseen and unnoticed, were exposed by divine, celestial light.[x] Luke describes,

And then an angel of God came upon them and the glory of God illuminated them, and they were frightened with a great fear. And the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid! For, BEHOLD!, I announce to you great joy whichsoever will be for all the people. A savior was born for you today—who is the Lord Christ—in the city of David. And this is a sign for you, you will find a newborn child having been wrapped in swaddling closes and being laid in a manger. And suddenly it happened a great number, an army of heaven appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to the most High God and upon earth peace among humanity whom God favors!” And it happened the angels left from them into heaven… (vv9-15a).

Heavenly light encompassed the shepherds, and for this moment they are center stage in this divine drama. It’s not Jesus the Christ, it’s not God in a ball of fire or voluptuous cloud, it’s not kings or princes, not emperors or governors, it’s not even Mary, the “God-bearer”, who is the center of attention here. It’s the shepherds, the lowly, unclean, unknown, unseen, not-all-that-brave-in-this-instance shepherds.[xi] They are not only addressed by divine representative, they are sent to go find God in a stable, in the hay and wood, among animals, among two very tired, fatigued new parents.

And they go! They are addressed by divine messengers and they are terrified by them,[xii] but they still go because there is always comfort and joy in God’s Goodnews.[xiii] Luke tells us, and they went and hastened and they found Mary and Joseph and the newborn child being laid in the manger (v16). These shepherds feeling, a bit unbrave against the raging of the kingdom of humanity, feel empowered by divine Spirit to go and dare to be in the presence of God without an mediator they know of. These lowly are now the brave, these unclean are now the righteous ones seeking and finding God in God’s humble abode and vulnerable body, it is these humble who are the first to be sent on a great divine mission in the world seeking, finding, and embracing the one who will bring both spiritual and temporal[xiv] release and instigate the divine mission of the revolution of life, love, and liberation to Israel and to the world to defeat the death, indifference, and captivity of the kingdom of humanity.[xv]

Conclusion

Every year I tell you that we are the shepherds, we are part of the rabble that is surrounding the baby Christ in the wooden manger and straw bedding. And this isn’t wrong, we are.[xvi] We are the ones peering in and being vicariously included, completely invited in this story as witnesses and onlookers.[xvii] We are the ones filled with anxiety, plagued with sorrow and grief, dreading what is to come from our own socio-political realities…more anger? More strife? More fear? More division and derision? We’re the ones struggling to be brave in the face of it all. And we’re the ones met tonight by the divine baby in the manger just like the shepherds.

But it’s more than just that; there’s more good news. The theme of tonight’s sermon is bravery. It is the case, in the divine economy, that those who have the least to lose can be the bravest.

Why did Mary say yes to God all those months ago? Because she, the lowly and poor, had little to lose and everything to gain.

Why did Joseph say yes to Mary by way of angelic vision? Because he, the lowly and poor, had little to lose and everything to gain.

Why did the shepherds say yes and hasten to find the new family carrying divine hope, peace, joy, and love into and for the world? Because they, the lowly and poor, had little to lose and everything to gain.

These are the bravest. And each of them was sent by divine summons to go and be in the world in a new way: a way trusting God, a way following Christ, a way empowered by the divine Spirit of God.

The baby is delivered. The mother is exhausted. Step-dad, too. The angels and the host of heaven have announced, glorified, and sang. The shepherds have heard and have found. But the work of Christmas is just beginning… because the baby of Christmas, Jesus the Christ, is born in our hearts tonight and now we become the brave ones called and sent.

“The Work of Christmas” —by Howard Thurman
When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flock,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among others,
To make music in the heart.

Tonight, we are, along with the Shepherds, along with Joseph, and along with Mary, being sent to do something brave: to dare to have hope, dare to work for peace, dare to rejoice, and dare to love. And we can dare to do such things because this daring comes with nothing to lose, and everything to gain. It is by our faith in Christ, the humble, vulnerable infant born this night, that we can dare because he has gone before us and promises to be with us every step of the way. Immanuel, Immanuel, has ransomed captive Israel.

[i] LW 54:157-158; Table Talk 1590.

[ii] Gonzalez, Luke, 33. “A census had sinister implications. It was not just counting people in order to see how many they were, and what population trends were. In ancient times, and long thereafter, a census was in fact an inventory of all the wealth of a region—its people its animals, and its crops—so that the government would be able to tax people to the maximum. A census usually announced greater poverty and exploitation. It was as welcome among the subjects of the Roman Empire as undocumented immigrants in industrialized nations welcome a census today.”

[iii] Gonzalez, Luke, 33. “As usual, oppression is not a merely political matter, the concern only of those directly involved in politics. It also reaches the everyday lives of people, as is seen in the very fact that Jospeh and Mary have to travel to Bethlehem even though she is about to give birth.”

[iv] Gonzalez, Luke, 33. “The setting is rather that of people living under an oppressive regime. The mention of August and Quirinius—as earlier the mention of Herod—is political charged. For a period before the advent of the Roman Empire, the Jews had been struggling against Syrian domination. Now their land was ruled from Syria by a governor appointed by Rome. Whatever the actual chronology may have been, the political structure is clear: the Jews have a puppet government under Syrian and Roman power.”

[v] Cardenal, Solentiname, 24. “‘[Christ] was the greatest revolutionary, because being God he identified with the poor and he came down from heaven to become a member of the lower class and he gave his life for us all. The way I see it, we all ought to struggle like that for other people and be like him. Get together and be brave.’”

[vi] Ernesto Cardenal, The Gospel in Solentiname, translated by Donald D. Walsh (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2010), 23. “[Jesus] was born into a humanity divided and dominated by crime in order to unite us and to change the order of things. And that’s where we are.”

[vii] Justo L. Gonzalez, Luke, Belief: A Theological Commentary on the Bible, eds. Amy Plantinga Pauw and William C. Placher (Louisville: WJK, 2010), 33. “This is not a mellow. Bucolic story about some shepherds tending their sheep with little or no care beyond the possibility of a wandering wolf. That is not the setting in which Luke presents the story.”

[viii] Gonzalez, Luke, 33-34. The shepherds, “they live out in the fields, suffer all kinds of deprivations and even dangers, in order to protect their flocks. But the census threatens a new danger, a wolf more dangerous than any four-legged beast, a wolf that will probably decimate their flocks, and whom they cannot fight, for it is too powerful. It is not difficult to imagine what would be the talk of such shepherds as they sought to remain awake through the night.”

[ix] Gonzalez, Luke, 34. “…the setting itself was one of fear and oppression.”

[x] Gonzalez, Luke, 34. “One of the ways in which the ‘little people’ mange to survive under oppressive regimes is not to call attention to themselves. They seek to go on with their lives unnoticed by the powerful, who could easily crush them. Now these shepherds are literally in the lime-light and an obviously powerful personage confronts them.”

[xi] Cardenal, Solentiname, 26. “Felipe: ‘The angel came to them because they were working men, and I find this is very important for us. Because they were poor little people who were working. They were watching over their sheep which is like taking care of cattle today. They were workers, laborers, poor people. The angle of God could have gone to the king’s palace and said to him: ‘The Savior has been born.’ But the angel didn’t go where the king was but where the poor people were, which means that this message is not for the big shots but for the poor little guys, which means the oppressed, which means us.’”

[xii] Gonzalez, Luke, 34. “It is in that scene, perhaps silent, but not as peaceful as we tend to depict it, that an angel suddenly appears before the shepherds, and they are terrified. Their fear is not surprising.”

[xiii] Gonzalez, Luke, 35. “An encounter with God’s power and might leads to awe and terror, but then God’s gracious word produces joy and comfort.”

[xiv] Gonzalez, Luke, 36. “The title, ‘Savior’ (sōtēr) was employed in the Septuagint (the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible that Luke used) to refer both to God and to those whom God sense to liberate Israel. In the Hebrew scriptures, the function of such liberators in either purely religious nor purely political.”

[xv] Gonzalez, Luke, 36. “The ‘saviors’ in the Hebrew Scriptures liberate Israel from its political oppressors so that the people may be free to serve and obey God…Thus when the angel announces Jesus as ‘Savior,’ his declaration has both political and religious overtones. The child who had been born will free the people from bondage—bondage both to their sins and to their oppressors.”

[xvi] Cardenal, Solentiname, 26. Thomas Peña “‘The way I see it is that those guys who were watching over their sheep heard good news. There they were just like us here, and they heard good news.’”

[xvii] Cardenal, Solentiname, 28. “I: ‘That’s right. At this very moment you are receiving the same news form the angel that the shepherds received.’”

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