Gary Brinn’s Blog

“Borderlines”

Jeremiah. 23:5-6 The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.
In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The LORD is our righteousness.”

You might have noticed that the two scripture readings don’t seem to go together, that in fact they seem to contradict one another. Now, in case you were momentarily distracted, let’s recap. In the first reading, taken from the First Book of Samuel, the loose confederation of Israelite tribes come to Samuel, judge and prophet, and ask for a king. They have good reasons, the Philistines have moved into the region with advanced technologies and are putting pressure on the western border. Samuel warns them that a king is not God’s plan for the people, but they insist. Even though this text was written in the centuries after a monarchy was established, it records the uneasiness the people still felt about loyalty to anyone other than God.

The second reading was written five centuries later. The United Kingdom of Saul, David and Solomon had been torn in two. The Northern Kingdom called Israel had fallen, and the Southern Kingdom, Judah, was at risk, with invaders at the gate. In this reading, God promised through his prophet Jeremiah to raise up a new king for his people. Monarchy had become the theological model from which the Judeans operated. So when the people were in trouble, it was up to a great king, an anointed one, a messiah, to rescue them. Unlike the people of the exodus, these people believed that God worked indirectly, through others, through chosen kings.

The readings suggest that God changed plans, though we have adopted from Hellenism an unfortunate notion of a God that cannot ever change. The truth is that the Israelite religion is a trajectory of change. God creates a covenant with one small tribe through one man, Abraham. Then God creates a new covenant with that tribe through all members when he frees them from bondage, a covenant mediated by Moses but executed by the people. Then God changes models again and creates a covenant with a single household through one man with the Davidic covenant. We could fall back on the oft repeated trope “God planned it all that way,” but that would leave no room for human freedom, only a puppet-master God, one that seems less than worthy of our love. So what are we to make of all of this change?

Its actually amazingly simple. The world changes. God created for us a dynamic universe. The planet earth, the Milky Way, the universe itself, flinging out into the cosmos at incredible speeds. Humans, free and growing, dynamic, miracle. And when the world changes, when we change, we adapt our beliefs, our values, our practices to the new world. This doesn’t mean that God has changed, if you insist you can stick to your Hellenistic security blanket. But it does mean that we humans encounter God and understand God in different ways at different times.

In fact, contradiction and change are part of our religious DNA, they are the dynamic threads of a living faith that flows from Abraham to Moses to David to Jesus, and yes, even to Paul. Our understanding changes if we are open to God, if we listen to God, for as our own denomination has declared, God is still speaking. In fact, we are in a position today to know more about the biblical people and their context than they were 1500 years ago as the fifth century Christians attempted to freeze our faith, to determine once and for all what would be acceptable or orthodox belief and what would be considered heretical. We have used the amazing gifts of God, reason and intellect, to learn. We have dug up ancient ruins and texts, we have deciphered ancient languages.

This is pretty uncomfortable. We are humans, we like stability. Sure there is change, just please, not in our back yard. We’re happy that our Christianity came to reject slavery. We’re fond of the Protestant Reformation. That women have a voice in our faith, well we wouldn’t have it any other way. Gay and lesbian people are no longer burned to death by Christians, at least not in the United States and Europe, and we think that’s a good thing. But please, God, can you make sure the next change happens after I’m gone? I like the way things are, they work for me…

Of course, they don’t work for everyone, but we can do just enough social justice work to ease our collective conscience and move on. But things change because God made it that way. We change because God made us this way. The universe is not going to stop because we are comfortable.

So where do we turn for guidance when things are changing? There is only one place we can consistently look for God’s voice, and that is the scriptures. We can look at the historical and theological trajectories of the Word of God and discern answers for our own time. Though, as we all know, misused the Bible can become a weapon that destroys lives. As I challenged the children, so I challenge you. Study the Bible. Read it. Pray over it.

And when you turn to the Bible to hear the voice of God, know that that voice is most consistent, is most clear, in the words of our savior, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God. The core teachings of Christianity are not the teachings of Paul, though we have much to learn from him. They are the teachings of Jesus. Which brings us back to the problem of change.

You see, the world was changing when Jesus walked the streets of Galilee and Judea. And as the world changed, people adapted. But like us, they weren’t happy about it, so they created structures and systems of belief and defended them with their whole lives. The Pharisees sought an answer to the changes of life under an occupation army by clinging to the Law, by self-righteousness and legalism. The Zealots sought an answer by arms, they hoped that a military rebellion would reveal the messiah-warrior-king. The Sadducees and Herodians decided to compromise, to make the Judean and Greco-Roman worlds co-exist. The Essenes moved to the desert, rejecting the world all together. Then there were the Gentiles, but who cares about them? Each group was busy drawing borderlines. On this side you are on God’s side, you are good, holy, you are right. This is the border between us and them.

Then Jesus came along. Jesus who healed and exorcised Judean and Gentile alike. Jesus who brought Matthew the tax collector, the agent of the brutal Empire, and Simon the Zealot, enemy of that Empire, together. Jesus who rejected Sadducee and Pharisee alike. As busy as everyone was drawing borderlines, Jesus was busy smashing them. Even the boundary between in-group and out-group was smashed. The radically open table fellowship at the heart of Jesus’ ministry smashed social boundaries, but it also smashed boundaries of righteousness. You didn’t even have to repent, to be bathed in the Jordan, to come to the table. You only had to believe.

We still draw boundaries. I still draw boundaries. We are, when we get right down to it, inclined to Social Darwinism. It is at the heart of our socio-economic system. Those people over there are not like us. It’s no wonder they are impoverished, suffering under a dictator, hungry. Feed, cloth and visit Jesus says, ignore the boundaries. Jesus calls us always to move beyond, to be more, to do more, to love more. Hitch a ride on this amazing ongoing creation, smash through the borderlines, and do it now. What are you waiting for?

The message of Jesus could not come at a better time. Petroleum is running out. All life in the oceans will be gone in our lifetime. These are not the lunatic ravings of some crackpot scientist. These are facts. We are destroying the planet just as we have always destroyed one another. Economic and political systems are broken beyond repair, including our own. The plans we are busy making for those little miracles in our Sunday School are not going to be realized if they are based on a world that looks like this.

This is not the first time in the history of humankind that there have been sweeping changes, great trauma. The world has always changed. Great plagues, colonialism, the scientific revolution, the dawn of modern democracies. But in the last half century man has developed the ability to wipe out life itself. This is new, this is unheard of in the entirety of human history.

Of course, we can stick our heads in the sand and pretend none of this is happening. We can call such realities apocalyptic, or offer it all up to God. We can keep doing the same old things. But the world is going to change. And someone is going to recognize that change, is going to bring to that change a value system, and they are going to act. We can sit back and let them do it. But Jesus wasn’t a very sit back kind of guy. Jesus didn’t preach a gospel of sit around and pretend. Jesus preached a gospel of get up off of your rump and go do something. Go change the world. If the world is going to change, then maybe we should be the ones envisioning that change. Would you rather have progressive Christians taking the lead, Bible in hand, or would you rather leave it to extremists, busy with their borderlines? Or maybe our future should be decided in corporate board rooms?

Am I the only one who dreams of a new economic system that is grounded in the message of Christ? Surely there is some Christian economist out there who can think outside of the current box! Because our current system is, in the words of Brian McLaren, a suicide machine. It is destroying us.

Lead or follow. It’s up to you. Take the Bible in hand, study it, pray with it, work together as communities of love and faith and change the world. Or let the world be reshaped by intolerance and greed, by the keepers of the borderlines.

I am asking us to do three things. One, admit to ourselves that the world is changing, stop pretending like everything is okay. It’s not. It never will be. Jesus knew that. Even John Calvin knew that! White middle class life in a North American democracy is not the model of God’s kingdom found in the scripture. Two, get serious about the Bible. As individuals and as a congregation. In classes and study groups. With commentaries and with scholarship. With one another. Because the life that keeps you too busy to read and study the Bible is crashing down around your ears. And finally, three, armed with the Word of God, I am asking you to take action. Don’t sit back and let others decide the shape of our world. Change your life. Then change the life of one other person. Then change our life as a church. Get up, Jesus says. Get up and walk. Get up and go out. Get up and feed and clothe and visit. Get up and do.

Let me end with this one dream. Imagine a world in which we put as much time into the Word of God as we put into our love of professional sports, of the Patriots and Celtics and yes, even Red Sox. If we were that serious about our faith! We could save the world through the power of Christ’s saving Word.

May we make it so!

Many of us are concerned about Burma. We were concerned when democracy was yet again suppressed by the military dictators. We were concerned when the monks protested against the junta and were brutally attacked. And we’ve been concerned that the junta is obstructing relief to those effected by the recent cyclone, tens of thousands of people dead, even more still at risk of disease and starvation.

I am surprised, however, that no one has compared this situation to the one in Nicaragua after the great Managua earthquake. You may remember it as prompting the relief flight that killed baseball great Roberto Clemente. You may not know the eerie parallels.

Nicaragua was ruled by a military dictatorship. As relief supplies rolled in after the earthquake, the military stole significant amount of the aid. The regime didn’t rebuild Managua, it was still a wreck when the Sandanistas overthrew the dictatorship. The new rulers set up schools and began to rebuild, as much as they could while confronted with an illegal war by proxy waged by the US.

There are important questions here. Did the confiscated aid help prop up a corrupt regime? Did the civil war take longer to come and longer to win because of the aid?

I don’t have the answers. I just remember how bad Managua still looked over a decade later. And I remember listening to those who suffered under the old regime, suffered during the civil war.

What a moral dilemma! We give aid, it gets confiscated by the regime, but some might get through… but we help prop up a brutal junta. We don’t give aid, maybe the liberation of Burma comes sooner, but there will be deaths, more from the disaster, maybe less from the civil war.

In the end, only one nation can force the junta’s hand. Only China can bring sufficient pressure on the Burmese generals. And China, with its own disaster and its own track record of genocide, has no interest in this affair. And yet we will consumes untold millions of dollars in Chinese goods this week. It does make you wonder…

The second sermon going up tonight is the one I preached in the Divinity Hall pulpit on Thursday (where Emerson gave the Divinity School Address!) as part of the 2008 Billings Preaching Prize competition. It is really just a shorter version of a sermon I preached at First Cambridge last April. I made the finals this year, which will be held April 23rd, but I honestly don’t think I’ll win. I’m up against my dear friend Sheila, or as I like to think of her, “the Rev.” She’s a grandmother from Brooklyn, and wow does she have the Spirit!

(Update: Sheila did, in fact, win the Billings Prize, one of Harvard’s oldest awards, for “eloquence in the pulpit.” I am very happy to have been among the finalists, as the finals sermons were all amazing, and filled with God’s Word.)

The Sermon

The standard sermon for the story of Doubting Thomas goes something like this: Poor Thomas, he just didn’t have enough faith. It’s a good thing we have enough faith. Yeah us! Or maybe, I know you’re having a hard time believing the teachings of the church in light of the real world, but don’t be a doubting Thomas. This is not going to be that standard sermon.

Now, let’s imagine for a moment that I’m an author, and the Gospel of John is in manuscript form, and here I am sitting before my editor waiting to hear the magic words: cash advance. But instead what I hear is: “Let’s talk about the motivation of Thomas in the final chapter. I’m not sure you’ve made your case. The man has seen Lazarus raised from the dead, the storm stilled, walking on water, miracle after miracle. Why doesn’t he believe now? It’s just not plausible.”

We probably all feel a bit like my fictional editor. Just because something happened while I was out getting the milk and bread doesn’t mean I don’t believe it. Judas Didymus Thomas has been with these folks, these women and men traveling with and learning from Jesus, for several years. They’ve been through some amazing times together. And they’ve seen miracles, they’ve seen death defeated. So why doubt now?

It probably helps to think a little bit about what was going on when this text was written. Early Christians didn’t know what to believe about Jesus. Christianity was moving towards orthodoxy, but it wasn’t there yet. The authors of the Gospels were deeply involved in a struggle to understand. Jesus mattered, they knew that, but he always seemed to be just beyond their understanding.

One area of conflict was how were they to understand the resurrection? Was the resurrection bodily, with flesh and blood? Or was it a resurrection of spirit. This was a question not just about Jesus, but a question about what it meant to be human. This gospel story affirms the physicality of the resurrection, flesh and blood, stuff you could touch. One hint of the counter-argument can be seen in the story of the appearance on the road to Emmaus.

Another struggle was between those who would come to define orthodox Christian belief and those who adopted other understandings of Jesus. The apostles most commonly associated with the heterodox group called the Gnostics were Mary Magdalene and Judas Didymus Thomas. Our text is about confirming that Jesus was resurrected in the body, and it is about deciding whose understanding of the Christ event is correct. That is not to say that these events did not happen. But it helps us to see the humans involved in the gospel story, in the creation of the gospels, in the decisions about which stories were written down and which were not.

So what are we supposed to do with the story of Doubting Thomas? If this text is very much about doctrinal struggles, what can a Christian today learn from it? Well, we can all admit that Thomas comes off looking like a knucklehead. But they all look like knuckleheads. Let’s start with Simon Peter. In the Lucan version of his call, we always skip to the line where Jesus says “I’ll make you a fisher of humans.” We ignore Peter’s first response. “Dude, I’m unrighteous. Go away.” I suspect Peter gets nicknamed Rock not because he is “the Rock of the Church” but because he is about as smart as a box of rocks. Who can forget the three denials? Of course, he gets it right sometimes too.

Then there are James and John, so rowdy that they get nicknamed the Sons of Thunder. I like to think of them as the biblical Bash Brothers. If you’re the right age to know the Mighty Ducks movies, you know what I’m talking about. “Dude, let us be your top two guys?” they ask Jesus. And Jesus’ response? “Dudes, you so do not know what you are asking.”

These guys don’t know what’s going on, don’t know what to believe, the gospels writers tell us that Jesus isn’t even trying to make it clear, because it will become clear on resurrection morning. The preaching and teaching and miracle, the feast in the Upper Room and the murder on the tree, it will be clear. The Holy Spirit will comfort them and inspire them and they will change the world. But they’ll still be a bunch of knuckleheads! Even after the resurrection. After he has assumed a leadership role in the early church, Peter still blunders at Antioch. “Unclean food? What unclean food?” They don’t know what to believe, what to do, how to act. But they do know this. Jesus changes everything!

They tried to explain Jesus in terms of his own Judean religion. They took up term of the Roman Emperor. They used many terms trying to describe who Jesus was, what he did, what he meant. And in the midst of this confusion and this grasping for meaning, they did an amazing thing. They changed the world.

No doubt, the mixture of sheer terror and overwhelming hope of that one weekend in Jerusalem stayed with the apostles, women and men, for the rest of their lives. The confusion, the shock. But they took their evangelion, literally the good proclamation, and they went out there and said this: Jesus changes everything.

Today, the name Jesus is controlled by the neo-Pharisees who have the audacity to speak for God. They’ve reduced Jesus to death insurance, to an excuse for self-righteousness, to a nationalistic warrior. Many of us sit back ashamed of what has been done in the name of Jesus, afraid to speak it in public. Jesus has been co-opted by Empire, by the individualism of the Enlightenment, by the thinly disguised selfishness of our economic system. You don’t have to be a theologian or a biblical scholar to see what is at stake. You don’t even have to be certain. You can be a knucklehead and spread the good news!

When I get up in the morning, a week and three snooze-buttons behind schedule, I can do so knowing this. God is good. Jesus changes everything. Even a knucklehead can get that! Do you know that Jesus loves you? That God is good? Does knowing Jesus change your life? We must be the ones to proclaim it. Jesus lives! Reclaim the name. When others preach hatred and division in the name of Christ, confront them, tell them they are worshipping idols of their own creation. If progressives are silent then Christianity will die a slow irrelevant death.

The world today wants Jesus, a real authentic mysterious Jesus. Easter Jesus is always just beyond our grasp, and that’s okay.

If we prayerfully engage the world, if we bring sacrament and Scripture and love with us into the world, we can change it. We can be the leaven in the loaf, not because we can do it on our own, but because Christ is with us when we are gathered in his name, because the good news is the tree and the empty tomb, because Easter is joyful hope, stunned confusion, it is fear and love , it is life in our amazing God.

We must reach back to that original Easter morning, and tell the world! Change the world. Proclaim the good news. Christ is risen indeed. Jesus changes everything. If Peter with his head of stone, if the Bash Brothers and Thomas and Mary Magdalene, if they could go out and preach, so can we. They didn’t know what they were doing either. They lived in that Easter moment. So can we. So must we. Welcome my knuckleheaded sisters and brothers. Welcome to the joy of life in Christ! Proclaim the name! Jesus the Christ, our salvation. Amen.

I’m putting up a couple of short sermons. First is the sermon I will be preaching tomorrow, Baseball Sunday. We’ve invited folks to wear their uniforms, team colors, etc, and to bring their equipment. We’ll be having a special blessing for the season. Brian Packham is leading the music, and will be serving up some baseball flavor of his own… BTW, Brian is an amazing musician. Check out his website: http://www.okihikoki.com/

The Sermon

Sermon
Baseball Sunday- April 13, 2008
Gary Brinn, Pastoral Intern

You might be wondering what baseball has to do with being a Christian. Well you could say that our whole story starts in the big inning, that Eve stole first and Adam stole second, and there was that incident with Gideon and the pitchers. But that would be silliness, and we’ll have none of that!

Actually baseball, or at least the ideas behind the sport, have a lot to do with being a Christian, and no, I don’t mean the competition, nor do I believe that God cares whether my overpaid professional athlete beats your overpaid professional athlete. But I do believe that baseball calls on us to celebrate this amazing creation, nature and ourselves, these amazing bodies. Sure, we sometimes have a disagreeable relationship with these bodies. They break down, ache, eventually they all will fail. But life is good, and these bodies, these amazing miracles, are a gift from God, a gift that Jesus took on himself when he walked among us. Of course, Jesus had a task in mind when he became human like us, but imagine the sensory delights of being one of us, the caress of his feet being washed, the taste of the salted fish, the texture of the sand as he bent down and wrote while challenging those who would throw stones. These bodies are amazing, and at their best they are agile and swift like David with his sling, the young athlete facing the great adversary.

But this sermon is not about the miracle of the body. It is about the infield fly rule and our covenant through Christ. To begin with, I’ll need to explain the rule. If a ball is hit and pops up so that it is a fly ball that will come down in the infield, the batter is automatically out, the umpire simply signals that the rule is in effect. Now you may ask why, after all, a pop-up that is in foul territory must be caught, even if it requires that the catcher run into the television cameras, that Jeter dive into the stands. The reason for the rule is this. If a ball is popped up in the infield and there is a runner on base, the infielders would be rewarded for NOT catching the ball. You see, if they catch the ball, only the batter is out. But if they drop it, they stand a very good chance of making a double play, getting two outs for NOT performing to the best of their ability. And every player, after a certain level of play, CAN make that catch. So without the infield fly rule, players are not rewarded for doing their best, they are rewarded for failing. It may not surprise you that the leagues with the youngest players do not have the infield fly rule, because there is no guarantee that they’ll make the catch, and if they hit a fly ball in the first place, its likely as not to come down in the infield.

Now Paul, in Romans, spends quite a bit of time on the difference between our covenant in Christ and the old covenant, what he calls the Law. This is tricky ground, our Christian story is marred by a history of anti-Semitism that finds its basis in supersessionism, the idea that the new covenant with Christ replaces or supersedes the old covenant completely. Theologians and scholars have argued this point for two millennia. In fact, the question of Paul and his relationship to the old covenant is the topic of much current research and debate. And the horrors of the Holocaust have made us keenly aware of the evil that can be done with a wink and nod from bad theology. So I’d like to avoid being tarred with the brush of supersessionism, but I will risk suggesting that there is a fundamental difference between the old covenant as it is portrayed in traditional Protestant theology and the new, and that that difference looks a little like the infield fly rule. Like the game of baseball without the infield fly rule, the old covenant did not reward you for doing your best. It rewarded you for doing enough. There were benchmarks you needed to meet, over six hundred rules regarding everything from social structure to honoring God, rules about purity and sacrifice and financial dealings. It didn’t matter what you felt, what your motives were, and there was no reward for going beyond the standards set by the Law. You just had to do enough. And if you kept the rules, as tough as that might be, if the nation kept the rules, there would be immediate reward. Like so many in the our nation today, there were always individuals looking for loopholes, for ways around the laws, the Sadducees for example. The various parties were in constant dispute over how to live in the law, or get around the law, to throw out the law, with only a tiny handful saying “the Law isn’t enough.” This nation is in the financial state it is because of this tendency to believe law is enough, is the boundary for appropriate conduct, and that whatever you can do to get rich is okay. You can skirt the law, regardless of whether it is ethical, right, or good, in fact you can even break the law. You are only foolish if you get caught.

Then, in the midst of the Judean system of Law came Jesus. And the message of Jesus was this. You think it is about the Law? You thought it is about obeying some set of rules, and if you just obey, you’ll be rich? Israel will be free again? Think again. It’s not about ticking off the right boxes. There is no such thing as enough. You can’t say I’ve obeyed enough Laws, I’ve honored God enough. There is no enough in the kingdom of God. Never enough love, never enough honor. The Law, Jesus asks? Really? Did you miss the whole spirit of the Law? It is love and justice, not a simple “enough.” What God is asking of you, what I am asking of you, has no limits. There is never enough. You’re not going to be rewarded for doing anything less than your absolute best. And that absolute best has only one limit, the boundary which separates this life from the next.

In fact, Jesus tells us, there is no greater love than to sacrifice your own life for another. And to prove that he meant it, he did it. Jesus was willing to carry the amazing, boundless good news of the boundary-less kingdom of God all the way to Golgatha, all the way to a grave that could not hold him. The message of Christ is the same message again and again… the Law is not enough. The law is a thing, and I don’t want a thing, Christ says, God doesn’t want a thing, God wants you. All of you, infinite you, nothing less.

What an exhausting challenge! You’re not there yet, whether you’ve served Christ for eight days or eight decades. Christ tells us repeatedly that we need to be willing to give up everything. Follow me, he says. Follow me to where the sick and contagious are housed. Follow me to where sinners join together. Follow me to the table, where we will break bread and share the cup in a way that transcends all of the old boundaries, all of the old divisions, that will not replace the Law but that will transcend it, that will fulfill it, that will make the Law all that it was supposed to be. Follow me, Christ says, on the road to Jerusalem, up the slope of Golgatha, into horror and sadness. And follow me, in love and shock and miracle, on the road to Emmaus.

You’re not done. I’m not done. How exhausting! But God HAS actually provided for that feeling of being incomplete. God has given us Sabbath, a day that God intends for us to rest. Not many of us do, and if you have kids you may feel like you can’t even choose Sunday as a day of rest, because the very sports leagues we celebrate this morning schedule practices and games on Sunday, even as we speak there are teams practicing, children missing church, missing Sabbath, for fear that their absence will land them on the bench. I know, having a Sabbath is hard. But you need that rest if you are going to give everything. Everything in love, of God, of your fellow humans, of yourself. And yes, to fulfill the Great Commandment, you must love yourself too.

The new covenant does not reward enough, it rewards excess. It rewards hearts that are opened, floodgates of love and compassion. It rewards your desire to do more, your efforts to do more, even if you don’t always live up to what you might hope. Christ doesn’t call for you to be perfect, Christ calls for you to try!

Paul’s letter to the Romans could be the pep talk of any coach. You are all part of a team. You all have a part to play. Outdo one another, do not lag in zeal, rejoice, persevere. What can you respond to such instructions but amen, let’s get out there and play in the fields of the Lord! Paul knows a thing or two about tough losses, about perseverance, about love. Paul is a pastor coach calling on the churches, ones he started like that in Thessalonika, and those he did not start, like the church in Rome, and ones today like First Congregational to go beyond, to go out there, to stand on the edge of what we think we can do, and to do just a little more. No reward for enough, Paul says. Give your heart. Give your possessions and your money. Give yourself.
And again I say, how exhausting! Jesus and Paul and God, our amazing God, may grant us Sabbaths, but never, on this side of the grave, will we have arrived, will we be sure that we have done enough. The check boxes have been erased, the tick marks are gone, no one is keeping score in this game, because it ain’t over until its really over, and we have loved beyond this life.

To be fair to the old Law, we must admit that the prophets got it right. They kept telling the people of Israel, the people of the Exile, the people of occupied Judea, that the Law wasn’t about check boxes and tick marks. But it took Jesus, it took God to say enough with your petty fighting about the Law, and enough, more than enough, with your efforts to get around the Law. I’m writing a new Law, writing on your heart. Play all out. Never stop until the final out. Never drop the ball because skirting the rules will give you an advantage! I know you can get that out. What I want to see is that amazing beautiful diving catch. What I want to see is that leap of faith. What I want to see is you best. Because I love you, more than you will ever know, more than you can ever measure, beyond all limits. Love one another as I have loved you. As my son has loved you. Run, and jump, and sing and love, and do so without measure. It’s never enough. It’s divine love!

Amen.

Below is my sermon for the ecumenical Easter Sunrise Service tomorrow morning. There might be nothing new under the sun, and there is certainly nothing new in this sermon, but some of these folks will not have heard me drone on about the same old things, read from the same old texts…

Easter Sunrise Sermon 2008
J. Gary Brinn

The Gospel of Luke, Chapter 24, Verses 1 to 11.

On the first day of the week, at early dawn, the women came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them:
“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.”
Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the women with them who told this to the other apostles.
But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.
This is the Good News of our Savior, Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God. Amen.

Under the old Law, under the purity codes and sacrifices designed to sustain the economy of the Temple’s bloated bureaucracy, uncleanliness was contagious. If I were to touch a dead body and then touch you, I would become unclean and you would “catch” the uncleanliness, which you could then spread to the others, an epidemic of impurity. To be sure, prophets consistently argued against this system of sacrifice and artificial purity, offering instead a religion of humility and love, but it just didn’t take. Humans were, and still are, all about creating categories and rules to decide us versus them. To be sure, John the Baptizer suggested a spiritual purity, a cleansing repentance, but most people still thought of uncleanliness as contagious. And then Jesus happened and reversed the whole system.

Let’s think of one encounter that illustrates the reversal of the purity system in Jesus. In the fifth chapter of Mark’s gospel, a woman touches the hem of Jesus’ garment and is cured. The women has been hemorrhaging, I don’t need to spell it out, she is about as unclean as a person can get under the purity codes, yet Jesus does not become unclean because she has touched him, in fact, she becomes clean. Women were by their natures carriers of uncleanliness under the old system, and here was an unclean woman, and it was not her uncleanliness that was contagious, it was his cleanliness. Jesus touches the dead, touches the unclean Gentiles, Jesus surrounds himself with what is unclean, and he makes it clean.

And then there is Good Friday, where Jesus is executed by an occupation army of unclean Gentiles, who drag him out to Golgotha, the garbage dump, which is unclean, and crucify him as they had done so many others, as they would continue to do to hundreds. And Paul tells us that to be hung on a tree is the most unclean death. Thrice defiled, our Savior is buried in filth. The man who has reversed the purity system by making cleanliness contagious has been made ritually unclean. His corpse is left unclean, unwashed, for the Passover feast, and it is only on the third day that the women, already the bearers of uncleanliness under the old system, come to wash the battered husk of their beloved.

And what do they find? Not Jesus, but two dazzling young men and an empty tomb. Dazzling. Let’s think about that word- we want dazzling smiles and buy toothpaste and whiteners to accomplish this goal. We want dazzling whites and eye popping colors in our clothing, and buy detergents to that end. Dazzling, cleanliness, purity. Jesus has been buried in filth, has been murdered by the occupation army, and has even transformed that victimization into cleanliness, has left behind two clean beings, two angels to announce the good news. The first to proclaim the good news of the resurrection were the angels, the first to receive it were the women, were humans who were not able to legally testify, who were a continual threat to the purity of the community. Mark ends with them running away afraid, telling no one. Luke makes clear that the male members of the group of apostles did not believe their good news.

Here were humans, always one step away from impurity, always one step away from an imperfection that they believed would cut them off from God, always fighting a losing battle against an absurd ideal, and then comes Jesus. You’ve got it wrong. You don’t have to be perfect and pure to approach God, you’re never going to be perfect, to be pure. God approaches you, and when God comes, cleanliness happens. You are washed clean, not because of something you’ve done, but because the goodness of God, the dazzling cleanliness of God, overflows. Centurions and women and thieves on a cross and you, yes you, become clean when you encounter Jesus. And it’s contagious! It is catching, if, and only if, you carry the cleanliness of the Tomb, the cleanliness of the Risen Christ, the cleanliness of our God with you into the world. In the world but not of it, not because we are better, but because we are the carriers of holy contagion, because we carry love and cleanliness, we carry God with us into the world.

This cosmic reversal, this being transformed in Christ, is captured by the 19th century Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who, after lines detailing how impermanent, imperfect, how defiled we humans are, writes:

Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ‘ joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ‘ Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ‘ world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ‘ since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ‘ patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

Immortal diamond, miracle! But we insist in re-creating the old system of laws and rules, of clean and unclean, we re-inscribe division, create us versus them. We have become the same self-righteous legalists that Jesus condemned during his own ministry. He calls us now as he called us then. It’s not about your rules, its not about your purity. It is about a love that overflows, that makes all new, all clean, that even death, even a degrading horrifying death cannot defeat. Life and love that never ends!

Today I will be made clean by prayer, by sacrament, by amazing grace, and I will be made clean by you, and you will be made clean by me, and we will dance and sing in a world transformed. We will be made immortal diamond, we will be made clean and pure, in Christ. Jesus has changed everything! It is Easter again this morning, it is new life, rebirth, it is miracle again! From the muck and filth of our despairing hearts, from our petty self obsessions, from our fears, God has made beauty, has made us vessels of grace, filled with divine love, filled with God’s spirit! Okay, we’re still sometimes despairing, sometimes self-centered, sometimes afraid, but Easter is always there. It is no surprise that we associate Easter with the early dawn approach of the faithful and clean women, for every dawn is Easter all over again, every day is miracle, is a call from God to go out into the world, carrying the love virus, the grace virus, the God virus, into the world. Are you contagious? How might you become contagious? With tomorrow’s dawn, when so many of us will trudge off to work, will you feel “eastered”? Will you carry God with you? Will I? For we can, and we will, with faith, with grace, and with our Risen Savior. We can be vectors not of uncleanliness, of dis-ease, but of contagious cleanliness, of ease and comfort in Christ. May it be so tomorrow, for a thousand tomorrows, may it be so until the world has been transformed, until we are in the Kingdom of our amazing God. Amen.

Yesterday, while many of us were celebrating Palm Sunday, the Federal Reserve met and approved the purchase of Bear Stearns by JP Morgan for $2 a share. These same shares sold for over $170 not so long ago, and the sale values the firm at less than 1/2 the value of its shiny new headquarters. ( Isn’t NPR grand!) These are the facts. A deeper examination will reveal this for what it really is… a rescue in name only. Bear Stearns has collapsed. And it will not be the last bank to go under.

Why is the US economy in such a horrific crisis, while even the ripples cannot seriously damage the strong European market? I believe the answer, while complex, can be reduced to one simple notion. Greed. Corporate governance in America has failed because corporate greed has gone unchecked and unregulated. Manipulations of the energy market, false claims for pharmaceuticals, airlines putting our lives at risk. And we do nothing. Our Congress is bought and sold by and to corporate interests, our president refuses to act because he is himself a son of corporate privilege, is working for the interests of individuals like his father and other Reagan cabinet members, themselves playing a hand in our economic collapse as billions of dollars are lost with the collapse of a portion of their Carlyle Group.

Under Reaganomics, greed went from vice to virtue, and Republicans have done everything possible to de-regulate and allow our Wild West economy to flourish. Unfortunately, there are no hero-strangers to ride in and save the widow and her children. We can only address the crisis with a revolution, a restoration of democracy, a return to the notion of a common good. And that cannot happen as long as we play the greed game.

You may not realize that you play the greed game, but you do. So do I. We have become used to an abundance of cheap manufactured goods because we have allowed corporations to ship jobs overseas to countries where there are no protections for the environment, for workers, to brutal regimes like Communist China. We have borrow far beyond our means to live surrounded by stuff. You might not have… but I am certainly guilty. The television tells us we will feel better if we just buy x, if we take y pill, if we drive a new z. And the truth is, none of this will make us feel good, none of it will make us live forever.

We cannot address the corruption of our political and economic systems until we address our own corruption. I am a reluctant Calvinist, convinced that we are reaping what we have sown. We must return to a love of family, to a love of neighbor, to a love of community. We must return to a Christ-centered existence. Then we will see these crises through new eyes. It will not be the “criminal” illegal immigrants that we will condemn, but the historical systems of greed that left Latin American nations in poverty, and the current greed that creates jobs no citizen can afford to take.

This is a rant, but one that is long overdue. The emperor has no clothes. Naked greed and unchecked corporate recklessness has destroyed our economy. And there is no one with the will to save us. Speculation has driven the price of oil to record highs, yet this president would never release the reserves, dropping the price in an instant. And he could do so at will.

Then there is the great leader of hope and change here in Massachusetts, our very own Obama, Deval Patrick. The governor, as a candidate, promised us a bright future. All he has delivered is a casino plan. Casinos are not an economic plan, they suck money from those who can ill afford to lose it. Soaring rhetoric is nice, but many of us are feeling betrayed by Governor Patrick’s failure to deliver.

Enough ranting. Things are ugly and will in all likelihood will get worse. I can only pray for those who will lose their lives and livelihoods in the coming weeks, I can only reform myself, turn my own heart to God’s order, and away from the new world order of American greed.

Those who will stop at nothing to win power have been spreading the rumor that Barack Obama is a Muslim, and some Americans would hesitate to vote for a Muslim. I’d like to correct that mistaken belief.

Barack Obama is a member of the United Church of Christ. In many parts of the country, this denomination may be little known, and if it is known, it is known as a group of liberals. While it is true that the denomination is progressive, it is as old as the Protestant Reformation.

The denomination itself was formed in the 1950’s with the merger of several smaller denominations. The way of thinking that allowed this merger is captured in the traditional phrase “Unity in essentials, diversity in non-essentials, and charity in all things.” The groups that merged included:

The Congregationalists- located primarily in New England, were themselves a coming together of the Puritans and the Pilgrims,

The Christian Church- a loose-knit movement originating in Virginia and committed to Christian simplicity,

Reform churches- Most Mainline denominations grew out of the Reform movement, driven by Swiss Reformers Zwingli and Calvin. The UCC includes German and Hungarian Reform traditions, as well as strong ties to the Dutch Reformed Church,

The Evangelical and Reformed Church- this movement brought together followers of the Lutheran Reformation with followers of the Calvinist Reform, and included many German immigrants of the 1700-1800’s.

Is the UCC Christian? Absolutely! It is one part of a group called Churches Uniting in Christ, an organization of cooperating denominations that include Methodists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Lutherans. Its roots are as old as Protestantism itself. It has an agreement to share clergy with many major denominations.

Obama has been criticized because his pastor has questioned some of the policies of the modern nation of Israel. Since when do we need to agree with everything our pastor says? And since when does the Israeli government have divine protection from criticism?

Obama has been criticized for being interested in his Kenyan heritage. How many of us are interested in our own genealogy? In the country of our origin? Obama has been successful enough to travel to his father’s land, to visit Kenya. That does not make him less American, anymore than my European heritage and my visits to Europe make me less American.

Obama has been criticized for spending a small portion of his childhood in Indonesia . His mother divorced and remarried. We’ve had divorced presidents, orphaned presidents. Does this disqualify him? In a time when our jobs have been exported overseas, when understanding the world is essential to our national security, it may be that time spent in other cultures is a great asset. And it’s not like he had a choice as a child… He went where his mother went… He obeyed his parent. There’s a commandment about that.

If you are going to vote against Obama, do so because you disagree with more of his policies than with those of his opponents. Not because of nasty fear mongering.

Call to Worship

One: We are a people of the great commandment
All: We are a people of love
One: Always calling one another
All: Always called by our God
One: The body of Christ with its many members
All: The body of Christ with its many miracles
One: We are a people of the Spirit
All: We are a people for today
One: Let us lift our voices as one
All: We lift them in worship and praise

Invocation

Divine Mystery, Loving God: We are a people gathered together in your name, in the name of your Son, our savior, in the power of the Holy Spirit. We are a people gathered, threads on a loom, woven into this amazing church, this witness, this hope.

Loving Father, we are both the weaving and weavers. We pray that our weaving is pleasing to you even as we become, even as we are transformed together in your great work.

Weave from us, we ask, a garment of love, of joy, of praise. Weave from us a cloak of comfort, strong cloth for hard labor, beautiful cloth for miraculous days, warm cloth for cold nights, and even, we pray, a shroud for the journey.

Weave from us, we ask, weave from us all, a shimmering garment of many colors, a Joseph coat, a miracle, a masterwork. Bind and tie us one to another, each strengthened by those around us, each unique, amazing, loved.

As your Son selected his disciples, Peter and Mary and Salome and John, and turned them into a church, woven into the fabric of your kingdom, so you turn us into a church, living, growing, weaved and woven. And so we pray as your church, your kingdom, in the words he taught us saying: “Our Father… trespasses… for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.”

Prayer of Confession

You call us a covenant people, a people gathered, but we are alone. Alone behind walls of our own construction. My rights, my property, my privacy. Mine. And yet you call, again and again, calling us out from that small life that hides behind those walls. You call and we emerge, only to retreat, convinced that this is what you want from us, for us: human justice, personal salvation. Mine.

And so we call to mind those times when we have forgotten your radical call to love, to love God, to love each other, remembering only to love ourselves. We call to mind these moments when we have hidden behind the walls of selfishness, of selfness, when we have missed opportunities to be more ourselves by forgetting ourselves.

We are a people called, forgiven and forgiving. Call us still, forgive us still, even as we reflect upon our failures, growing from them into our true selves, a great choir of worship and love. Amen.

Assurance of Pardon

Know this: God will never fail to reach for us, God will never fail to call to us, infinite patience and infinite love calling us into communion, into the kingdom, into a romance with one another, with life, with this blessed creation. Dare and God will dare with you. Fall and God will reach out. Be amazing, be love, be the church the changes the world, be with me in this radical love, and God will be with us. Amen.

Imperfectly Perfect: Our Lives Together

Most of us know the story. The Allies were within hours of reaching the camp when Prisoner Bonhoeffer was taken from his cell, escorted to the gallows, and executed. His crime was treason against the Third Reich, specifically, he had joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Reformed pastor and committed pacifist, had become a modern martyr, a witness to Christ. Most of us know these facts. His letters from prison are widely read, as is his thin volume titled “Life Together.” We know this Bonhoeffer, the man of courage who returned from London to lead an underground seminary.

There is another Dietrich Bonhoeffer we often neglect, the committed theologian who struggled with this beautiful church situated in an ever-changing world. In his dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, Bonhoeffer wrote about sacred community, and he made one very bold claim. You do not stand alone. God did not execute a covenant with individuals. God executed a covenant with a people. You are not a person without others, we only become ourselves in the context of community, we are only in relationship when the God-called in us is connected to the God-called other. Now, this should make perfect sense to us, after all, Jesus promises to be with us if two or more are gathered in his name. He tells us to baptize one another and to break bread together, to feed and clothe and visit. Of course, Jesus also tells us to sometimes enter seclusion, to go off and pray in quiet. We are at once together and alone.

Now, you’re here, so you get it. You understand that the church is the living body of Christ, that this is the sacred, sanctifying and sanctified community that Christ formed. Heck, some of you even socialize together! But let’s take a moment to really think about the place of community in today’s world, in today’s America, in today’s Boston. Take, for example, that funny little commercial for a local web site. You know the series, all about what makes Boston unique. One of those commercials features the guy, you know him, the guy with the lawn chair in the parking place while the city is buried in snow. And the joke is that they might give that space away in some other city, but here in the Boston area we claim a share of the public street with complete disregard to social conventions around first come first serve or equal opportunity. It is not about community, it is all about me. We celebrate our selfishness.

And since it’s Super Bowl Sunday, let’s take a look at the NFL. Now there have always been stars, guys that seemed just a little bit more, just a little better. But it was always about the team. Brady is amazing, he may be the best quarterback ever on the best team ever, and he will be the first to tell you that it is a team. Then there is T.O. Terrell Owens now plays for the Cowboys, but just a few short years ago he played for the Eagles. But he wasn’t happy there. It wasn’t all about him, there were others stars, other players. So Owens became a disruption in hopes that he would be traded. And in a rare show of courage, the Eagles refused to trade him, suspended him, withheld his pay. Just this week the arbitrator decided that Owens was indeed out several million dollars for his actions. But does it matter. You see, Owens is now playing for the Cowboys with a salary that makes a couple of million dollars seem like pocket change. It wasn’t about the team, it was all about him, and millions of young athletes learned a terrible lesson.

We’ve always had this rugged streak of individualism in the U.S., we’re proud of it. It is innovation and adventure, it is exploration and creativity. But it has this other edge, this self-centeredness and greed that has become dominant and accepted since Reaganomics, this idea that I stand alone. It has even crept into some of our churches. My personal relationship with Jesus. I am saved. If I check off the right boxes, if I follow this legalistic path wrapped in self-righteousness, I can escape death. Never mind that legalism, greed and self-righteousness were the very traits that Jesus condemned throughout his ministry. Even salvation in Jesus has become all about me. Maybe also about us, but definitely about me.

Then there’s Bonhoeffer. It’s not about you. You do not have a covenant with God, you are not baptized into a relationship with God. We have a covenant with God. You are baptized into the body of Christ which is the church which is us. Your salvation is not worked out in the privacy of your own home. Your salvation is worked out in Christ, in Christ the man who taught and healed and died for others, in Christ the church, this imperfect perfect body of love and openness. We come together in love for one another, in love for God. This is the church that Jesus created, the church to which Paul wrote. Paul the pastor. We read Paul’s letters to the churches he started and visited and we see the word “you” a lot. Unfortunately, our language makes it easy to miss the fact that the “you” is almost always plural. We are church, imperfect, and yet always perfect in Christ, a people of the Great Commandment and the Great Commission, lovers and evangelists fully engaged with the world, fully engaged with one another.

There is another organization that is imperfect. Started by a general, a hero of the Boer War in which the British Empire protected its selfish colonial interests, a man with mixed personal motives, it has become despite this beginning one of the largest international organizations dedicated to the formation of honorable men, men who will serve their God and their country. The Boy Scout is called to do a good turn daily. That is, they are called to serve others. There is no all-star in Scouting who scores more points, there is no accumulation of goods. Sure, there’s some friendly competition, but it is never about the individual Scout. Sunday School helped form my value system, but so did Scouting. I learned how to be part of a team, I learned how to lead and how to be led. And I am not the only man in this congregation whose character was developed in Scouting.

And there is more. As we all know, Girls got in on the act. Structurally different, and attuned to the needs of young women, Girl Scouting has been important in the lives of many women and young ladies sitting among you.

Today is Scout Sunday. This isn’t something we invented. Scouts throughout the United States are attending worship at their own churches, and at the churches which sponsor troops. The Scouts that have joined us this morning are here because we sponsor their troop. You might have heard a rumor to this effect, and it is true. They meet in the basement, and they joined many congregants and Girl Scouts in our basement renovation project yesterday morning. Their leaders share our values, our commitment to turning these amazing children that surround us into amazing adults. They are our hope, they are the treasure that we will leave the next generation.

But what does it mean to sponsor a troop? And how can we sponsor a troop? Aren’t the Boy Scouts a militaristic conservative and homophobic organization? For gosh sakes, they wear uniforms!

Let me begin by explaining that the Boy Scouts of America is a democratic organization owned by the institutions that sponsor troops and packs. If the Boy Scouts is dominated by conservatives, it is because progressives abandoned the program rather than working to change it. But as a sponsor, we have a vote. We have a voice in the policies of the local council, of the national organization. Imagine what would happen if progressives organized to push their agendas as successfully as the religious right has done!

Militaristic? No. Homophobic? Well, yes actually. At the national level. But this local council defied the national organization and adopted a policy that prohibits discrimination based on affectional orientation. This local council is a witness for justice, and they have suffered for it. They lost a tremendous amount of money and membership when they took this stand. And the forces of hatred and division are working hard to reverse the policy and regain control.
So yes, we have Scouts in the basement. And we have their courageous leaders. They tie knots and hike and camp and wear uniforms. And they teach boys that it is not all about them. That it is about us. That it is about service and duty. That they must be willing to lead and to be led. A Scout, who must, in order to be a Scout, serve others, cannot exist alone. A Scout is only a Scout in relationship with others, whether those others are members of his troop, family, church, school or community. As we are not Christians alone. As we are not called alone. We are called into this imperfect perfection of love, this Joseph coat of a church. We exist for and because of one another, always calling one another to Christ, always bringing God with us, always finding God in one another, Immanuel, miracle, love.

Okay, it wasn’t my best effort… and certainly not a Gaudete sermon. In the end, that didn’t matter. I was all the way to Melrose in treacherous conditions when I got the call that church was cancelled. So I drove home in the blizzard, put on clean jammies, and settled in for a day of work!

Here is the sermon:

For the last two weeks, our Advent bible study group has been looking at the stories of miracle babies in the Hebrew scriptures and in the New Testament. We have asked ourselves again and again, what do these stories tell us about the Israelite faith? About the faith that Jesus lived? About the faith of Jesus’ followers? If we are going to call ourselves disciples of Jesus, and I can think of no better title, then we had better all ask these questions, ask them again and again… or maybe I’m wrong. If you have it worked out, if you understand what Jesus meant and means, if you understand God’s will, if you can pick up that pew Bible and read a consistent and coherent message, please raise your hand.

No takers? I’m not surprised. You might be here in a UCC congregation because you were born in this tradition, either the UCC or one of its antecedents. But many of us are here as refugees. We couldn’t make sense of our own traditions, could not find the same meaning in that book as those around us. We could find prosperity theology in some portions of the Hebrew scriptures, but we could not find it in the prophets, in the teachings of Jesus, not even in the teachings of Paul. We were told to have a personal relationship with Jesus, a relationship of righteousness grounded in faith that would guarantee immortality, we were told that Jesus came to cleanse us from the stain placed on us by a treacherous woman, a weak lesser human who had succumbed to supernatural temptation. We were told that personal morality and some abstract concept of faith was all that mattered, that Christians must fight abortion rights and homosexual rights.

Many were raised in a pick and choose Christianity that used Jesus as a weapon, that freely mixed passages to justify the dark desires of the human heart, the fear of strangers, self-righteousness, legalism, greed… though these were in fact exactly the topics about which Jesus preached, he spoke of the evils of self-righteousness, of legalism, of greed, not about sexual conduct. The record of the teachings of Jesus and the stories of the first Christians are often combined with selected passages of the Scripture of Jesus, that is the Hebrew Scripture, and twisted to make a monster of the gospel. Good news? I think not! And like so many others, I fled from that empty faith that contained nothing of Jesus. I was a refugee seeking a home… and I found one in the United Church of Christ.

You might be thinking, now wait a cotton-picking minute there, Gary. It’s Advent, it’s Incarnation and obedience to God, and its joy and family, and it’s not time to go off ranting about the evils of the fundamentalist heresy. And I’m going to answer that it is Advent, that the question is, the advent of what? What is arriving, beginning? What are we celebrating? Is it a happy tale with a couple of twists like the no vacancy sign, but one that ends with a tableau of Baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, some kings and shepherds, a little drummer boy, and a shining star? Or is it a tale of a child born into a poor family in the backwards colony of a great and brutal empire? Is it the shepherds and the obedient Mary of Luke? Or the slaughter of the innocents, the homage of earthly kings, and the obedient Joseph of Matthew? Why does the author of Mark, the first gospel written, feel no need to tell the story of Jesus’ birth? What is so important to Matthew and Luke, that doesn’t matter Mark, that they had to expand their gospels, both of which use Mark as a source? Why are Matthew and Luke so different? What are they trying to tell us about Immanuel, about God with Us?

Advent of what? Not of the personal Jesus uber-morality immortality of the Christian conservatives! Jesus was born in a country not at all unlike today’s Iraq. Constant violence, competing factions of what was the same religion. An occupation army that viewed itself as superior, that did not mind using torture and execution to get its way. We have twisted this story into a bucolic narrative complete with lambs and kittens. It’s not a pretty story!

Our gospel reading speaks of God’s power to reverse the human order. Luke tells us that the hungry get to eat, that the rich are thrown down, go away hungry. Tell me how that’s supposed to work with a pledge campaign!

The gospels record two messages delivered in one package. Message one is be good, treat one another well, love God. It is the message of faith and personal conduct. Message two is this: change the world. Do something now! Everything you think you know about God and how the world works is wrong. God wants something better for you, God wants something better from you. Comfortable? Don’t be. Jesus tells us to abandon our families, give up our possessions, to go out and act, to, as the prophet Micah tells us, do justice and walk humbly with our God. And the package is this- the kingdom of God is at hand.

Not the kingdom of heaven, as the author of Matthew writes. The kingdom of God. Not some unknown then… now, right here, right now. As we build our own kingdoms day in and day out, walling out the things that scare us, that challenge us, God is there to break it down. Not your kingdom, God says. My kingdom. A kingdom of radical amazing selfless love… a love so strong that it can survive the most brutal conditions, the most brutal death. God is calling us again and again to live into the kingdom of God. And the reason we need to celebrate it every year is that it is breaking in all of the time. The kingdom of God, the kingdom of love, is dynamic, is kicking the legs out from under our own petty kingdoms and daring us to soar. This is what Jesus means when he tells us again and again that the Kingdom of God is at hand, has come near to you, that you will not taste God before you enter the kingdom of God. The kingdom is now and never, in time and timeless. It is today and it was yesterday, and it will break through tomorrow. It will break through again with the next season of Advent, and the Holy Spirit will quicken our hearts, the stories will be told, and if we listen, if we study, if we pray, we might just hear the call of the kingdom!

Now, I’ve been going on quite a bit about a kingdom, and some might question the language, might wonder if such a term still makes sense, after all we are a democracy, we threw off the yoke of kings. And king, that’s a masculine word, surely I’m not endorsing just one more patriarchy. And the fact is, I’m not. I’m using the language adopted by the first followers of Jesus. The titles Son of God, King, Savior, these were titles for Augustus, and by extension for the succeeding emperors. To declare faith in Jesus was an act of subversion, it was high treason. There’s the edge we need! Jesus was brutally tortured and executed by an occupation army, he was an enemy combatant. Are we happy now that we are the empire?

Advent of what? What are we preparing for? For God with us? Yes! For the Kingdom of God? Yes! For the moral courage to live beyond ourselves, to stretch and to grow and to leave what is comfortable for what is brave and courageous and of God and just? Yes, I tell you, with grace and together, yes! We can re-claim Jesus from those who would turn him into a Victorian prude. The British had a wonderful ad campaign for the Easter season a few years ago. Jesus was depicted Che Guevarra style, and underneath were four words. Meek. Mild. As if.

The ad campaign got it right. Jesus the subversive is asking you to forget everything you think you know, is daring you. I’m daring you. Life in full is a life lived into the kingdom, is a life that straddles both worlds. I’m standing on the edge of everything I’ve never been before .
Years ago I stood in a small house just north of Bluefields, Nicaragua. The walls were bullet ridden. The elderly woman described hiding in the cistern as the US-funded contras tortured and killed her husband. This was a land that had suffered incredible cruelty. Under the dictatorship, when they wanted information from you, they would take your entire family up in a helicopter. And then they would throw them out of the helicopter one by one until you confessed or divulged, until they got their way. And here sat this woman in her tiny bullet-ridden house, free of the Somoza regime a few short years before we Americans waged a proxy war against them, and she looked at us with eyes full of love and said “I have hope.” I have hope. I have hope that we can reclaim our scriptures from those that do evil in God’s name. I have hope that we can stand on that edge of everything we have never been before, and that we can have the courage to dive over, to be in the world but not of the world. I have hope! And I have faith. I have faith that this Sunday, this year, this blizzardy gross morning, is the Advent of the Kingdom of God. May it always be so! Amen.

The Harvard Divinity community gathers on Wednesdays at noon for worship. This week the UCC students hosted, and I was blessed with an invitation to preach. The reading was an amazingly scripted parallel of the Gerasene demoniac(s) story from the Synoptic gospels. (Thanks to Matt, Alex and Gusti!) The audience included HDS students and staff, as well as vistors considering enrollment. Here ismy sermon:

The Task of the Christian Minister

Jesus crosses the sea and casts out some X number of demons from some Y number of demoniacs. The gospels don’t agree, but when it comes to scriptural disagreement, this is minor league, nothing like the differing accounts in the Birth and Passion narratives. Okay, fair enough, Matthew’s version has an unflattering image of Jesus as tormenter of demons, kind of like the little boy burning ants on the sidewalk with his magnifying glass, not at all congruent with the happy clappy Jesus of the liberal tradition. And Matthew has that whole “before the time” line that is way too eschatological to be comfortable. Well, actually all three have this thing about Jesus not sending the demons back to the abyss, or at least letting them off easy with a piggy-back trip over a cliff, maybe an indication that demons running loose are part of God’s purpose. Try fitting that one into your theodicy. So maybe even these straightforward passages with their minor variations do have some theological implications. At least our congregants won’t hear them in the same lectionary year!

And we don’t have to preach on them. We can dodge them, try the reading from the Hebrew Scriptures on for size, and if that doesn’t work, throw the whole thing out and pick a reading that feels more comfortable. Besides, the budget isn’t looking good, Shinji and Heidi need marriage counseling, and Rebecca just lost her father, and don’t even get me started on the war that is raging over the flower arrangements. I don’t have time to deal with abstract theology… this is a church you know!

Of course, we sit at this end of the Christian trajectory because of women and men who did get caught up in abstract theology. Little scriptural details and subtle differences in belief were make or break, you were orthodox or out, cut off from salvation. And here we sit at our end of the trajectory, of our particular branch of the trajectory, because others became obsessed with these details, with scripture and theology and the meaning of God with us, of salvation and of sin. And here’s the bad news… our branches, and especially the branches of mainline and progressive Protestantism, are withering, becoming irrelevant in our world. We wrap ourselves in liberal self-righteousness, preach sermons designed to challenge, but not too much, and then re-wrap ourselves in our cloaks woven from the slave labor of brutal regimes. Jesus may have said drop it all, walk away, leave your family, but we have responsibilities!

What is the task of the Christian minister in such a time? What are we to do when the only forms of Christianity that thrive are those that perceive themselves as at war with the world, those who see the world as broken, those who embrace apocalyptic? What is our task, I mean other than serving as caretakers for a dying church?

We might begin by being honest with ourselves and our congregations. We like to pretend that God’s revelation closed at the end of the apostolic age, with the formation of the biblical canon. We flatten the developing theology of the Hebrew Scriptures, whitewash the contradictions. But here is the truth, a truth that the United Church of Christ has been bold enough to proclaim. God is still speaking. God has always spoken. And while God speaks, we change, our world changes. And so, necessarily, our understanding of God changes. Now before you accuse me of violating the doctrine of divine impassability, a fair accusation, understand that I am not suggesting that God changes. I am suggesting that if we change and our understanding of God changes, then we should attend to that process. We should stop viewing our faith as some modern incarnation of a religion that was finalized centuries ago, whether we choose Chalcedon or Wittenburg as the end point. Because here is the truth… the understanding of God and the human evolves throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, continues to evolve in the particularity of Jesus, and evolves further as the Jesus movement collides with the Roman Empire. It continues to evolve and diverge to this day. Our story is now and always has been one of constructive theology. Lying to ourselves is not helpful, God may be God, but I’m not my grandfather, and his understanding of God in his world is not my understanding of God in my world. The prophets knew this, they also were constructive theologians… practical theologians, with an urgent message for humans to change how they were in the world, but also very much in the business of reshaping theologies that no longer fit the world in which they lived.

Heck, we’re willing to embrace Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, we are willing to get on the post-modern wagon, at least here in the safe halls of the academy, but are we willing to ride that wagon up to the pulpit. Are we willing to preach a constructive theology? Are we willing to ask the hard questions, questions like how can we make sense of the “Our Father” when we’ve abandoned the image of a male ego-needy god upon whom we depend as helpless children, passive before divine gift? Are we willing to ask hard questions? What if they cost us our pulpits?

If we don’t ask these questions, we might keep our pulpits, but there won’t be any pulpits left in the future. Our faith survives because it evolves… if it stops, it withers and dies, because the world doesn’t stop… When we change our understanding of human dominion over creation because the consequences are right before us, when we go green and develop a green theology, we are doing constructive theology. And when we say that God is not for war, despite the warrior God depicted in the scriptures, we are making truth claims. We are not only constructing a theology that goes beyond the plain text of the scripture, we are stating that others are wrong.

Let me repeat this last bit, because it is important. When we make claims about justice and scripture and theology, we are always contradicting someone else’s claims. Progressives shy away from telling others that they are wrong… but we must. Theologies of oppression must be denounced… we must follow Martin Luther… “Here we stand, we can not do otherwise.” We’re actually pretty good at this part… but we won’t call it theology, and we won’t admit that these new understandings are the result of a changing world, of a changing humanity, of a changing constructing theology.

If you are going to keep Christianity alive, and especially the particular branches of mainline and progressive Christianity, then you must be honest with yourself and with others. You cannot be a caretaker, satisfied to keep the budget balanced and the parishioners happy. You must be a prophet, and like the prophets, you must be a constructive theologian.

As a candidate for ordination in the United Church of Christ, I will be charged with faithful study of the scriptures, and with a life of prayer. Scholar and practitioner, believer and theologian. I will be asked to strive for unity in essentials, diversity in non-essentials, and charity in everything. Charity is the most important of these, for if I am to do my part in this great tradition, I will have to often admit that I’m unsure, and I will often disagree with colleagues. We will struggle and build and tear down and rebuild. We will be a community of charity, a community of theologians and biblical scholars and pastors. A community that stands in amazement at this miracle world, this miracle life, that weeps in joy and in sorrow. We will throw off the comforts of detachment… but we will remain scholars! We are constructive theologians because we believe, because Jesus changes everything, because life in Christ is raw and joyful and yes!

It is so easy to get caught up in the day to day. It is so easy to let the pastoral and administrative aspects of our jobs overwhelm us. So listen carefully. The world is filled with counselors and administrators. You are called to be a pointer, a bridge, a sign… you are called to be a prophet, and yes, a biblical scholar and a constructive theologian. You are called to be the rabbi to whom the villagers come when they cannot reconcile their experiences with their beliefs. And you are to take the raw stuff of life and the powerful stuff of faith and you are to reshape it, a potter for Christ. Earthen vessels, yes! But my aren’t they lovely!

Go forth in unity, in diversity, in charity. Go forth as theologian, ready to serve our God. Amen.