We begin at the end, because the story of Kurt Gödel does not end well, and hopefully this sermon will. Gödel was one of the three great minds of the early 20th century who closed the door on the great project of the Enlightenment. More on that later. Through the middle of the last century, he could be seen most days strolling home from the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, with his dear friend, Albert Einstein, one of the other two great reality-changing thinkers of the time…  Gödel was a difficult man verging on madness, and in the end it was madness that killed him, for he came to believe someone was trying to poison him, and when his elderly wife was hospitalized, he starved himself to death, not trusting anyone else with his food. It was a tragic end, to be sure, for a brilliant career. More than a decade earlier there was a more endearing reference to Gödel’s sanity when Einstein remarked to a friend that Gödel really had finally gone mad. When asked why, Einstein replied that the man had voted for Eisenhower.

If the story ends tragically, it starts rather well, and sets us on a path that will move from advanced mathematics and quantum physics to semiotics and post-modernism, and end where we are, poised on the threshold of becoming.

There have been moments in history where, through luck or design, massive creativity has occurred in a short-period in a single locale. We all know the hotbed of beauty that was Renaissance Florence, the amazing artistic and literary circle that gathered around Gertrude Stein, her partner Alice, and her brother Leo in Paris. But we have largely forgotten that Vienna was a center of intellectual activity before the Second World War. One group at the heart of that activity was the Vienna Circle, sometimes known also as the Logical Positivists. They were the ultimate expression of the great project of modernity and modern science. To them, the only things that were important were things that could be measured. They sought a world in which, as we smashed the world into smaller and smaller component pieces, everything became clear and logical, revealed in scientific mathematical precision. Now, as we discussed last week, the world turns out not to work that way at all, but this was still the goal at the time. This rabid pursuit of perfect logic would extend into other disciplines, including the so-called purest science, mathematics. So it was that the young mathematician Gödel stumbled into the Vienna Circle. Like his colleagues, Gödel appeared to be caught up in positivism, albeit mathematically. His generation was seeking a pure mathematics, one that was consistent and based on a tiny number of self-evident axioms from which all math would follow.

The goal was a simple and clear mathematics that contained no paradoxes or inconsistencies. Every great mathematician was on this quest, until 1930, when Gödel published his Incompleteness Theorems, proving that such a system was impossible. I will not even pretend to understand the math or logic involved, but in a nutshell, Gödel proved that you cannot prove the system of mathematics from within mathematics. In fact, there were two theorems. The first is: “Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory.” The second is: “For any formal effectively generated theory T including basic arithmetical truths and also certain truths about formal provability, if T includes a statement of its own consistency then T is inconsistent.”

I’m glad we cleared that up. But seriously, this was earth-shattering. It meant that the Enlightenment project, to turn everything into an understandable system through reason and logic, was highly suspect if not impossible. In the discipline of quantum mechanics or physics, two great minds had similarly pulled the rug out from under the project. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity had not only opened entirely new fields of study, they had also sabotaged any notion of a pure objective truth. Though none of the three men intended their discoveries to spill over into other human endeavors, their impact was profound. For example, one of the simple logical truths of relativity is that what is true is relative to your position, an oversimplification to be sure, but essentially accurate. Today it is commonly understood that we individual humans might experience different truths, and that in some cases they are equally true. This concept would have been completely foreign to a 19th century thinker.

Einstein, Heisenberg and Gödel were not alone in killing off the great project of the Enlightenment. In fact, the project’s corpse could be found in the fetid trenches of the First World War, for it was Enlightenment-style science that produced the weapons of mass killing, it was Enlightenment-style philosophy that fueled nationalism.

This is not to say that the brilliant trio destroyed science, we know that is not the case. But they dethroned humankind as the ultimate measure of all truths. Human reason had attained god-like status, was worshiped. With the introduction of relativity, uncertainty and incompleteness into what were supposed to be higher sciences, mystery came back into play.

Paralleling these game-changing developments in the sciences were a series of new philosophical systems, especially in the area of semiotics, what I’ll take the liberty to call the scientific philosophy of language. Now, I’d advise you to stop looking at me for a moment and look around the room, for I’m about to say a name that will make most humanities majors break out in a cold sweat. For one of the best examples of post-Enlightenment thinking in philosophy comes from the French thinker Jacques Derrida, with theories that include his playfully manipulated French term “différance.” You’ve had quite enough theories before lunch, but I can give you a simple example to demonstrate this new approach to language. If I say the word “dog,” an image comes to your mind. Maybe it’s one dog, maybe its a long line of dogs. Given a few extra seconds, this word will unravel, many kinds of dogs might pass through your mind, many experiences with dogs. Some of you might be terrified of dogs, others grieving a lost pet. Other words get swept up into your meaning of dog, happy, or maybe muddy, or beach. These words carry along their own associations. And if I didn’t call you back, you could drift off for quite awhile thinking about dogs and beaches and your trip to Aruba next month and when will you get to the store to buy that new suitcase you need, and… You see, there is play in the term “dog,” it is not a fixed empirical thing, and while our categories for “dog” may overlap, they are not all the same.
We have wrestled with two of human-kinds three great modes of thinking.
We’ve not touched on the first yet, for before modernity, that is, before the Enlightenment, humans dealt with mystery by making up stories, inventing explanations, engaging in mythopoesis, the creation of poetic myths. Enlightenment modernity required that everything be systematized and measured, even our theology! Both of these modes of thinking are still with us, and both are still valid. The science of Enlightenment modernity invented the medication that allows me to stand up here before you despite my disability. The stories of pre-modernity speak to me of the power of God and invite me to be part of the story. But we are also a post-modern faith, no longer convinced that there is ever going to be one single correct proof. After Hiroshima and Srebrenica, few are willing to view human reason and logic as the final arbiter of much of anything, and we have begun to understand that maybe humankind is not the final measure of all things, that maybe, just maybe, we aren’t even the sole reason for this creation, this amazing swirling mysterious dance of existence.

With the pre-modern, we are engaging our stories. With modernity, we continue to study, to bring reason and science to the table in our interpretation of our essential humanness. With the post-modern, we refuse to insist on a single understanding, refuse to insist that some magic combination of words is the key to salvation, refuse any creedal test for membership.

Those who claim that science is at odds with faith haven’t been paying attention, have not been paying attention as one respected scientist after another names that divine mystery at the heart of creation, have not been paying attention to science.

Like the finches in Darwin’s notebooks, we are evolving, collectively and individually. Like the complex adaptive systems studied at the Santa Fe Institute, we are robust, unpredictable, no telling what mysterious and amazing things might emerge. Like Gödel, Einstein and Heisenberg, we recognize the unknowable, though we name it as divine mystery… we name it God. Amen.

I got on the train, like I had many times before that year. I had my backpack, my passport, a baguette, sausage and cheese in case I got hungry. I also had my Thomas Cooke guide with train schedules for all of Europe and my Let’s Go guide, letting me know where I could find a hostel, cheap eats, and the best times to visit various attractions. And so we pulled out a Gare du Nord heading to Metz. Now, I am bilingual… I speak English and Southern, but I do not speak French. None-the-less, I did manage to understand the announcement, made in French, that revealed that half of the cars in the train were going to Metz, and that at some point half would split off and head to Luxembourg. And I was in the wrong half.

Did I grab my backpack and hustle to the other half of the train, arriving in Metz as scheduled having already plotted exactly what bus I needed to take to the hostel, having meticulously scheduled my itinerary? That is what anyone who knew me would have expected, but it isn’t what I did. I went to Luxembourg. I have no idea what I thought I was going to see in Metz… I never got there! Luxembourg was lovely, and the crew I met at the hostel was ready for a little Low Country party.

You might not know this, but I’m just a little OCD. I like things organized and predictable. If the world would just organize itself into clearly marked little boxes and follow well documented rules, I’d be happy. I tend to black and white thinking… it take conscious effort to see the world’s greys. So there was complexity in not going to Metz. What happened was unexpected.

Our topic this week, while less tasty than a night in Luxembourg, is equally filled with complexity and the unexpected. Now, before we get too far in, I need to draw a subtle distinction between complexity as we think of it in every day life and the complexity that is studied by scientists. In popular usage, complexity means made up of many parts, intricate and hard to understand. These definitions carry over to the scientific definition, but the scientific study of complexity specifically looks at what are called complex adaptive systems. And the entire field of study started with hundreds of little “huh?”-s.

Since the dawn of the Enlightenment, humankind has pursued the sort of ordering that exists in my dreams. If you just study it hard enough and break it down, you’ll find the rules and fit everything into a box and everything will be predictable and awesome. Except, in almost every field of study, they discovered that it didn’t work that way.

Let’s get concrete, let’s look in the mirror.

Microbiologists can tell you a lot about the stuff of our physical being. From genome and mitochondria to whole systems. The discreet little bits mostly make sense, mostly behave in predictable ways. But when you add all of the bits and stuff together, when you assemble all the cells and wire-up all the systems, something wildly unpredictable happens. Nothing would predict the development of consciousness and personality. It is as if, somewhere along the line, the simply math of reason, the logic of the Enlightenment, has been replaced with a new set of rules. One plus one no longer equals two, suddenly, in the world of complex adaptive systems, one plus one equals five!

Scientists have discovered this in almost every discipline, and it exists in every field that has to do with life. A complex adaptive system exists in the interdependent relationship of many discreet entities. These entities can all be the same or different. A colony of bees is a complex adaptive system, but so are the local Lions Club, the mixed-species ecosystem of the salt marsh, and the financial markets.

Even though it is complex, a Rolex is not a complex adaptive system. Complexity is relational.

Complex adaptive systems share a number of traits, it turns out, which is why, eventually, researchers crossed disciplines to share what they had learned. These systems are unpredictable, logic and reason cannot predict the surprising behavior of these systems. At some pint they reach a tipping point and become more than the sum of their parts. These systems are amazing robust. A portion of the system can be damage or even removed and, often, and in a way that defies prediction, the system will adapt and survive the assault. The pride of lions that loses the dominant male, the church that loses half its membership, the town flattened by a tornado.

Interdependent, robust, unpredictable, and relational… but wait, there’s more! The final trait shared by complex adaptive systems, is best demonstrated, again, by our souls. The trait is called emergence. Something emerges from complex adaptive systems that is more than the sum of the parts, that is unpredictable.

The primary center for studying complex adaptive systems is the Santa Fe Institute. Where else could you find Nobel Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Cormac McCarthy, and a half dozen post-docs sitting around? SFI has used complexity science to contribute to new HIV treatments, to the development of sustainable agricultural policies in Indonesia, to analysis of the wild fluctuations in financial markets in the information age.

Complexity science reminds me of that great Far Side cartoon that showed two scientists stand in front of a chalkboard, with formulas on both sides, and in the middle it says “then a miracle occurs.” Despite all our scientific hubris, it turns out that this is exactly what happens. Sir Arthur Eddington, the British astrophysicist, once said “We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about ‘and.’”

Scholar John Dominic Crossan stated the problem succinctly when it comes to how we interpret the Bible. Either the ancients wrote a text they believed to be literally true, and many of us are smart enough to read it symbolically; or, the ancients wrote a text they believed to be symbolically true, and many of us are dumb enough to take it literally. Crossan believes the latter. I tend to think it is somewhere in between, the ancients realizing parts were true and parts symbolic, and that many contemporary American Christians are unable to admit to themselves and the world that they are choosing which parts are symbolic and which are literal.

This is nowhere more evident than in the culture wars, the great fight in which a certain brand of Christianity tries to force its understanding of the Bible and its moral precepts on the rest of the nation. The wingnuts from Westboro Baptist become the public image of Protestant Christianity in the hype and spin of the 24-hour news cycle, just as the child-molesting priest becomes the public image of the Roman Church, as the jihadist becomes the public perception of the Muslim. It is human nature to be drawn to the sensational, to seek easy categories.

The truth, as we know, isn’t so simple. There are certainly Christians, very vocal Christians, who, in their selective literalism, deny some of the discoveries of science. This is by no means true of all Christians, but it has always been the case with a select few. Take, for example, the 1633 condemnation of Galileo Galilei. Galileo got lots of stuff wrong. He was wrong about elliptical orbits, wrong about what caused the tides, but he was right when he admitted the truths of Copernicus and Kepler, especially the truth that the sun was at the center of our solar system, not the earth. Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, and under threat of torture, recanted.

Those who tried Galileo insisted on a literal interpretation of select texts. This happens at times in our history, but was never the norm. Christians have always recognized that portions of the Bible are poetic, symbolic. As early as St. Augustine we find explicit warnings against literalism. So why do we have these convulsions, these fits in which the Bible is used as a weapon against science?

I would suggest that, faced with the reality that the earth was not, actually, the center of all creation, the critics and inquisitors experienced a profound crisis of faith. They could not accept a system in which humans were not the center of all creation. After all, what would come next? Could a God who created a system in which humans were one small part on one small planet, could this God be the same God who chose only one group of people, in one region? Could the God of this amazing universe that the Renaissance scientists were discovering be the same God that was the God of Abraham?

The tension created when one recognizes conflicting ideas is called cognitive dissonance. A scriptural example would be the tension when we try to accept that the same God who toys with Job, who allows Job’s family to be killed, that this God is the God of justice and love we find in the prophets and that is proclaimed by Christ.

Cognitive dissonance is annoying, a mental itch you can’t quite scratch. We all suffer from it at times. The good news is that it can go away. We can adjust our beliefs so they no longer conflict, we can numb ourselves to the discomfort through substance abuse or manipulative emotionalism, or we can bury our beliefs so deep that we don’t notice the conflict.

Over the centuries, Christians eventually were able to accept that the earth orbits around the sun, and even that our solar system is part of one galaxy that itself is only one of many. Humans learned to live with that mental itch. A much more recent itch came when Charles Darwin announced his discovery of natural selection. Humans had been using natural selection to their advantage in agriculture for centuries, developing crops and breeds without ever fully understanding the mechanisms. Darwin revealed the natural equivalent of this agricultural science. Humans were suddenly faced with the reality that we had slowly evolved over millions of years.

Now, I’m sure there were people who believed in a literal Adam and Eve, but most folks viewed it as a story, and besides, the fact, or what Stephen Colbert might call the “truthiness” of Adam and Eve was not essential to belief. In fact, there are two completely different accounts of the creation story in Genesis, two accounts that are very different, and in the second one we’re made out of the earth just like everything else, and no necessarily given “dominion” over the rest of creation! What really mattered was the belief that at some moment in some way some amount of God-stuff we call the soul was incorporated into every human. And it didn’t have to be the Mormon version where Adam is literally the Archangel Michael. It just mattered that in some way, humans were marked with the divine.

Following the logic of evolution created a crisis for many. If you couldn’t pinpoint the magic moment when we got the God-stuff, then either everything had God-stuff, or we didn’t either. If everything had God-stuff, then maybe we needed to start treating the rest of creation a whole lot better, which no one wanted to do and few want to do today, a century and a half later. And if we didn’t have God-stuff, well that was too painful to even comprehend.

We might think of this as the fear that monkeys have souls. Even the best theologians haven’t fully reconciled themselves to this notion, this monkey-soul-a-phobia, though some are making headway. And, by the way, the idea that monkeys have souls might not be such bad news to parents who tell there kids that Fluffy and Sparky will meet them in heaven!

Many Christian humans are starting to creatively re-imagine where we fit in the scheme of creation, to embrace the idea that we don’t have to be smaller for God to be bigger. We are becoming okay with the notion that, as the late Carl Sagan has been lampooned for saying, a galaxy is composed of “billions upon billions” of stars, and that ours is just one.

But many, faced with the cognitive dissonance, unable to imagine how we can still be blessed and loved by God given the fact of evolution, left the faith entirely. Others went in the opposite direction, and like the Inquisition, denied reality, using selective literalism to deny the thing that made them uncomfortable. Fundamentalism, as we know it today, is a heresy born in the decades after Darwin’s discovery. Named after a series of 90 tracts produced between 1910 and 1915, Fundamentalism insisted on the literal interpretation of some biblical text while willingly disregarding others. This approach was rare in the first eighteen centuries of the Christian tradition, and remains fairly rare today, even as these zealots dominate media coverage.

So, just so there can be absolutely no mistake, this is what I will declare from the pulpit. Natural selection is real, even if we are still trying to figure out exactly how it works. Evolution is real. Satan did not plant fossils to lure us away from the one true faith. Those who deny evolution are mostly just scared of what it means, and I pray for them. But some that use selective literalism when it comes to evolution versus creation also use selective literalism to preach a gospel of hate, and that’s just sin.

Evolution is real. And if you ask me if that means a monkey has a soul, I’m going to quote from a pastor we have recently encountered in our adult Sunday School class. Her answer, my answer, is this. “I don’t know. I don’t know!”

It’s okay not to know. Because this morning I woke up and I felt like I had a soul. And I felt like waking up was a good thing, even if maybe some morning I don’t really want to get out of that warm bed. This morning I woke up realizing that everything about this creation, everything, was amazing and miraculous. That there is something instead of nothing. That we are called, oh so clearly called, to transcendence and beauty, to love, even to self-sacrificial love. It does not matter to me that God didn’t do it in seven days. It does not matter to me that it was slow, that this creation has amazing processes that are beyond our understanding. It does not matter to me that I am a flicker in time against the backdrop of billions of years and billions of stars. What matters is this day, in this body, with this God-stuff in me, saved by the God-stuff in Jesus, and called to care for and to love the God-stuff in you and in all of creation. I have no fear of monkeys with souls, though the ones with wings are a little scary. The fact of evolution does not change the simple miraculous fact that I am. I am. And you are. Amen.

As we begin our three week sermon series on “Lessons Learned from Other Religions,” I thought it might be helpful to clarify how we use the term “universalist,” and why I am specifically a Christian.

Meaning #1: Our own Calvinist heritage, following the logic of predestination, came to believe that God had preselected an “elect” that were destined for salvation, with everyone else called into being predestined to fail. Christian Universalists rejected this notion, believing that if God offered salvation through Christ, then it must be universally available. In this way, I am a Universalist. Today’s Unitarian Universalists spring, in part, from the Christian Universalist heritage, though that movement has moved away from a specifically Christian understanding of the divine.

Meaning #2: Last summer’s controversy over Rob Bell’s book Love Wins centered on this meaning of universalism. Many Christians believe that everyone who does not believe in Jesus in a specific way (sometimes even saying a specific prayer!) is destined for the pits of hell. Now, ignoring debates about the existence or character of hell, or who specifically gets to decide what form of belief in Jesus qualifies, we face a larger question about the kind of God we worship. Could a loving God send advocates for peace and justice, compassionate and self-sacrificing individuals who happen to have been born into non-Christian cultures, to hell? I couldn’t worship a God that I thought could send the Dalai Lama to the pit. In this way, I am a Universalist.

Meaning #3: Despite being a Universalist in the two prior senses of the word, I do not actually believe that all religions are equally “true,” which would be the case if I was the kind of Universalist meant in the third definition. Some religious systems are hard-wired from their founding to treat women as second-class humans and seem unable to evolve past this primitive belief. They’re wrong. Some religious systems claim that a single tribe or race has a preferred status with the divine. They are wrong. At least one highly public religion in the US is marked by violence and slavery if countless reports are to be believed. It is wrong.

Since the various religions make mutually exclusive truth claims, they cannot all be true. That is simple logic. Now, the same logic says they could all be wrong. I just don’t happen to agree. I believe there is some truth in any religion that moves humans toward compassion, selflessness and creativity, that is, in any religion that helps us transcend our baser fear-driven instincts. And I believe that the truth of compassion, selflessness and creativity was embodied in Jesus, the man from Nazareth, who was the Divine Mystery we name God in a way beyond our understanding.

Like other traditions, the Christian heritage is filled with humans, a messy unruly species! Our own history includes episodes of violence, the oppression of women, seriously wrong-headed thinking. Yet, despite it all, the message of the Hebrew prophets and the teachings and example of Jesus refuse to fit into our easy categories. They call us beyond ourselves just as they did 2000+ years ago. I may learn from other religions, but I believe in Christ.

During the next three Sundays we will respectfully engage three other religions, learning what we can that might help us on our Christian path. This week we look at Islam. I look forward to seeing you.

Blessings,
Pastor Gary

Of course, actually, what we celebrate this Sunday, a couple of days behind that actual date, is Epiphany, and epiphany does not mean light. It actually means an appearance or manifestation of the divine, and this is what we celebrate as we close out Christmastide. Jesus as the opposite of darkness, of ignorance, of death. Specifically it is timed to celebrate the arrival of the wise travelers from the east, the three kings of tradition, and so is connected with the gospel to the Gentiles, the idea that the light of Christ is available to all people, not just the Hebrews, and so we are once again wrapped in this archetype of light as goodness.

There is a certain discomfort for many of us, if we are truthful, with this whole light equals good theme. For one thing, it fails to account for those who are not blessed with sight. Might, for their purposes, we refer to Jesus as the sound of the world rather than as the light of the world? After all, our ancient stories tell us that God spoke the world into being. Then there is the great problem of race, for as humans have evolved and adapted to their contexts, some have developed darker skin, and yet, throughout the western, and by western I mean northern, context, white is good, and therefore black is bad. We refer to someone who is evil as having a black heart, the good guys wear the white hats. The damage done by this equation, white equals good, black equals bad, this damage is real, is still a knife through the soul of countless people. Just last weekend a political candidate said in a public context “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” Today, still, racism plagues our nation. So the whole Jesus is light is good thing, you know… must we be politically correct all of the time? Maybe not, but we can try…

The ancient equation of light and vision equaling knowledge and divinity obviously had much to do with agriculture. It shows up in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, in which the philosopher escapes the world of shadows and sees what is real. The Romans used the equation when they called Augustus Caesar “light from light,” language the early Christians would co-opt in an act of defiance. In modern usage the word epiphany has come to mean that aha moment, might we call it a moment of enlightenment, coming full circle back to that ancient equation. So be it. I surrender. As sensitive as I want to be about how our language unintentionally harms, I cannot undo thousands of years of human history, so we land back where we started, at this feast that celebrates the appearance of the divine in the person of Jesus. And that is reason to celebrate.

Maybe, just maybe, there is something we can still rescue from this language of light. I want you to think for a moment, those who are old enough to have driven a car, I want you to think back to a long car trip, at some point in your life. You’re driving for hours, and slowly, ever so slowly, it gets darker. At once it hits you: it is dusk and you are driving without your headlights. This rarely happens these days, it’s nearly impossible to drive with the lights off, but back in the day…

Dusk is one of the most dangerous times to drive, and partly because you don’t always realize that you can’t see. On this feast of the Epiphany, maybe we can, just for a moment, reflect on the many ways our society is in a spiritual dusk. They don’t know what they don’t know, or more accurately, they can’t see what they can’t see.

The good news of our salvation includes this truth: together, we can see more, just as two in the car see more, especially when your passenger turns to you and says “it’s getting kinda dark.”

We have a box full of spiritual flashlights that have been passed on to us from the Hebrew religious tradition, from Jesus, that have had their batteries and bulbs changed and been taped back up by the generation of Christians that have gone before us. The box even contains a couple of flashlight, weird and foreign looking, that we’ve borrowed from other cultures and faith. Those flashlights include some of the most basic things that define us as Christians. To be a Christian is to pray, this is a flashlight. To be a Christian is belong to a covenant community, another flashlight. To be a Christian is to give a portion of your income for the common good of that community, a flashlight. To be a Christian is to study the Word of God, that’s that really big flashlight… I hope you don’t wait to bring it out until there is a spiritual hurricane.

The practices of the Christian faith, not the label Christian, but the things we do, these are the lights that reveal to us the divine, that take away our ancient fear. They are not perfect, there will always be the dark, and mystery isn’t always terrible and scary. We don’t need perfect light! The late Beat poet and Buddhist Lew Welch wrote “Seeking perfect total enlightenment is looking for a flashlight when all you need the flashlight for is to find your flashlight.”

Not perfect. We will still go into that night, raging or not. There will still be darkness, ignorance, death. But when we need it, Jesus the Christ, God’s light in the world. And what he left behind for us, a handy box of flashlights. Change your batteries, check your bulbs. Turn on the lights of Christian practice and let’s continue our journey through the gloom of winter. Amen.

So, it is one more day, really, as good a time as any to reflect and plan. And so we turn to the classic text of Ecclesiastes, drawn from the self-help books of the Biblical age, a genre that is known as wisdom literature.

Now look, this isn’t a Christian text. Scholars believe it was written no later than the Second Century BCE, that is, one to two hundred years before the birth of Jesus. And there are things in the passage that we have, well at least I have, difficulty reconciling with my understanding of Jesus’ good news. Time to kill? Time for war? Time to hate? Really? I mean, the “Day of the Lord” imagery in the New testament is problematic enough, all cataclysm and violence. But this passage seems to say that everything has its right time. And I dream of a day, I believe our covenant and even the Hebrew prophets point to a day, when war will be no more, when hatred and killing will cease.

But there is a core message to this text we can claim, one that is essential to our lives as individuals and our life as a community. Things change. The farmer doesn’t plant a crop and leave it in the field forever because that would just be ridiculous. She or he planted the crop intending for it to fulfill its purpose and then for things to change, a new crop is sewn. There is, as the Teacher in Ecclesiastes puts it, a time to plant and a time to pluck.

In the same way, there is a time to gather and a time to throw. Imagine where we would be, for example, had the followers of Jesus not been gathered together during his earthly ministry and the thrown out, or at least sent out, into the world.

This season, as we reflect on the ancient texts, maybe we can attend to this matter of time keeping. Maybe we can pray that we keep the right time, that we know when to plant and when to pluck, when to gather and when to throw, when to restore and when to discard. May we be wise keepers of God’s time. Amen.

Here they are:

Family Service: One Holy Night

On this night, and in fact during this entire season we view as unique and holy, much of the world puts its normal routines on hold. We gather with family, even that crazy uncle we’d like to pretend wasn’t related to us. Some will enter Christian houses of worship after many months, sometimes years, away. We celebrate our Savior’s birth, or at least go through the routine of celebrating that birth, even if we give salvation little or no thought for most of the year. We declare this to be one holy night.

In truth, as we will hear later in the beautiful words of Sophia Lyon Fahs, every night a child is born is a holy night, and a child is born every night, making every single night, every single day, every single moment when we are privileged to be alive, holy. And yet, there is something special in the birth of Jesus, something worth remembering all the other nights of the year, something special that is overlooked by those Christians who mistakenly view the Cross as the sole path to salvation. For those who believe that Jesus is the promised Emmanuel, that Jesus is God-with-us in some way beyond our understanding, a tremendous thing happens at Christmas.

Before that first Christmas, that Divine Mystery we name God seemed distant, immense, sometimes brutal. Then, in one act, God closed the immense gap between God’s being and our own. God came to feel as we feel, aching dirty feet, the cruelty we can inflict on one another, but also the soaring beauty of being in creation, the passionate love of parent and child, what it truly means to have friends, even, as Jesus learned with Lazarus, what it means to lose someone we love. God chose to be marked with humanness, to experience our being. And in so doing, the divine marked us with holiness.

Incarnation taught us how to live and changed our place in the order of being. Jesus reminded us that every day is a gift, the God wants us to live full lives now, to build a just and caring world now. Jesus in his teachings and in his life called us to courage, to radical transformation. He called us to throw off the shackles of false values. When God closed the metaphysical gap between the human and the divine, the door to contentment, to joy, to mind-blowing creativity, to life changing love, was opened.

What prepared Jesus the man from Nazareth to take on the navel-gazing leaders of his own religious community? What prepared him to take on the brutal Roman empire, to risk and lose his own life? We can assume from the scriptures that Jesus, the child and the man, was formed in the Hebrew religious tradition.

We know that the birth narratives as well as the one story about Jesus’s childhood are meant as teaching stories, as a way for the early Christians to understand what made Jesus so unique, but they also tell us that Joseph and Mary practiced their faith and raised the child Jesus within a religious community. He is presented at the Temple as a child, is part of a community, makes the arduous trip from Galilee to Jerusalem. As a man we see evidence of this religious upbringing. Jesus, who no doubt spoke Aramaic and Greek, is none-the-less able to read Hebrew, as when he reads the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue at Capernaum. He observes the religious law and exceeds it. His regular prayer life is a sign that he was taught by his parents how to pray. Jesus was so fully grounded in the Hebrew religious tradition that he was able to live it in a radically transgressive and transformative way, in such a way that he could enact a new covenant between humans and the divine.

What Jesus offered us, what Jesus offers us this night as we celebrate his birth, his role as God-with-us, is an alternative to all of the false systems we humans create for ourselves. Tribalism, nationalism, racism… Jesus rejected the false values of both Rome and of the Temple.

Today you are told that greed is good, that self-centeredness is okay. Our extended families have been reduced down to nuclear families, then even further down to sub-atomic families. Wall Street and Madison Avenue want you to believe that if you just buy the right stuff, you’ll be happy. How’s that been working out for you?

You can follow the Way of Jesus, or the way of aimlessness and sin. One leads to life in full, the other to suffering. This night, this one holy night, we remember that God closed the gap, that our Savior was born, and that, marking us with holiness, he offered us a new way. May we all embrace it, for unto us a savior was born, is born, will be born, again and again, out of time, out of place, miracle upon miracle. Amen.

Midnight: Christmas Every Day

I’m a sucker for Christmas movies, as those who are here every Sunday already know. But even I, with my Hallmark card idea of Christmas, occasionally encounter a movie so bad that I cannot sit through it more than once. On that list is a 1996 film called “Christmas Every Day.” Many of you will be familiar with the Bill Murray classic “Groundhog Day.” This was basically the same thing, but with Christmas and a teenager. The main character, Billy, is caught in a time loop, re-living Christmas again and again until he gets it right.

As terrible as the film was, there might be a lesson in it. First, how many of us would get trapped in that loop? Or, inversely, how many of us think we get Christmas “right”? Anyone want to do a show of hands?

For many, the Christmas season becomes a frenzied half-delusional rush to check off an ever-growing list of to-do items, to meet every possible social obligation lest we should give offense, and to make enough purchases to keep the CEO’s of major retailers and the generals in charge of Chinese prison factories in Rolexes and Bentleys. A slightly exaggerated picture, no doubt, but pointing toward the truth.

Even a terrible movie can teach us a lesson. “Christmas Every Day” reminds us that Christmas is about relationships, and particularly about one special relationship, the relationship in which that Divine Mystery we name God closed the gap between that utterly transcendent eternal infinite and the human. That relationship, as imagined by the authors of the two birth narratives, begins with a visit from an angel.

The Bible, God’s Word for those who choose to follow Jesus, contains a mix of poetry, self-help, fiction and history. It is not only the story of who we have been, how the ancients made sense of our relationship with our Creator. It is also a story meant to give shape to our future. It is a story meant to give shape to our lives, if only we will let it.

What shape will your life have? Will you be a patient and faithful servant, like Simeon of Jerusalem, who waited patiently for the birth of the messiah, present in the Temple when the infant Jesus was presented, Simeon whose words, now called the Nunc Dimittis, are repeated in nightly prayer by Christians around the world? Will you patiently wait on the Lord, doing the work of the people of God, as did the elderly prophetess Anna, also present in the Temple when the infant Jesus arrived.

Maybe your story will be a story of faithful service, certainly the shape of the stories we imagine for Mary and Joseph, swept up in God’s plan of salvation, maybe not always understanding their role, but always taking the next step, doing what was expected. We certainly see in the stories of Jesus’ childhood and in his adult life that they raised him with strong religious training. They take him from the backwater of Galilee to the metropolis of Jerusalem as a child. They certainly teach him to pray, and he does so constantly. No doubt he spoke both Aramaic and Greek, but he has also been trained in Hebrew, as we see when he unrolls the Isaiah scroll in the synagogue. Joseph and Mary faithfully raising the miracle baby…

Then there is John the Baptizer, the cousin of Jesus, seemingly the first major prophet to emerge in the Hebrew tradition in several centuries. Like John, will you be a catalyst, opening the eyes of those around you, opening the hearts of those around you. Will you be the noble voice in the wilderness, modern day locusts and honey for your diet as you change lives through the love of God?

Then there is the shape of a life we see in Jesus, a difficult but not impossible shape, for Jesus life is marked by being in God. This state of being, described by Friedrich Schleiermacher as “perfect Christ-consciousness,” is not beyond the reach of we mere humans, for we are not mere humans. We are marked with divinity, infused with holiness. This world has seen many who were clearly vessels for the love of God for this miraculous creation. Will you let go of what is false, embrace every moment, and love as God loves, being in God?

Every path that acknowledges our utter dependence on that from whence we came, that attends to the Divine Mystery, is a path to holiness. You are but one piece in a glorious history, in a glorious creation. Like a puzzle piece in the big picture of creation, you will find your right place in the context of community. You path unfolds before you every day, the gentle and sometimes not so gentle movements of the Spirit call you to that path. God moves to as every day, God’s grace pours out upon us, shaped by that moment when God became one of us.

Every day, the call to covenant community. Every day the call to find the shape of your life. Every day the movement of God’s grace. Every day. Maybe that terrible movie was right after all. Maybe it is Christmas every day! And may it always be so. Amen.

Christmas Morning: One More Day

I have found myself in an uncomfortable position in recent weeks. You see, I take seriously the charge to thinking Protestants to take the Bible seriously, but not literally. To be sure, there is plenty of history in there, and truth of a sort that can’t always be verified. But during this Christmas season I have asked many of you to look afresh at the two birth narratives and ask yourself what it is we are supposed to learn from them. You see, Mark and john are silent on the subject of our Savior’s birth, and Matthew and Luke disagree on most of the details. Luke is trying to record a history, albeit through the lens of Paul’s theology, and he doesn’t know the geography of Judea and Galilee at all. Matthew is busy trying to prove that Jesus is the new Moses with authority to create a new covenant, and reshapes the entire story of Jesus’ earthly ministry to that end. But we are so used to the mash-up version of the story, the one that has both Luke’s journey and manger and Matthew’s wise visitors, that thinking about the text feels like a betrayal of sorts. It’s not, but it feels that way.

So this morning, I’m not going to ask you to choose. If you like Jesus born in the family home in Bethlehem then fleeing to Egypt, okay. If you want the census and the manger, that’s cool. And if you want to mash-up the two stories, go for it. Every version of the story is trying to get at the same thing anyways. Each in its own way is attempting to explain how Jesus the man from Nazareth was unique, how his arrival on the scene represented God-with-us, the Divine Mystery we call God present with us in the person of Jesus, not only the Divine partaking of humanness, but humanity being forever marked with holiness.

Whichever story you choose, for Mary and Joseph, for the shepherds, the next day, as the sun rose, it was one more day. One more day of grinding poverty at the dge of a sprawling empire that had no interest in God. Yet the stories we use to understand what happened in Jesus are marked not with desperation, but with fidelity.

Jesus, presented for circumcision at the appointed time. Jesus, taken on a pilgrimage to the Temple when he was twelve. Jesus taught to pray, and though he no doubt already spoke Aramaic and Greek, taught Hebrew as well, so that he could read the sacred scrolls in the synagogue. In a world, in a time, that had other values, other preoccupations, Mary and Joseph were faithful. They had other options. They chose God. And they shaped the infant that became the boy that became the man that taught us how to live, that offered us freedom from aimlessness and sin, that defeated death itself. Daily fidelity, small acts of faith, one day at a time.

The day after the baby is born. One more day of hard work, of breast-feeding, of sleepless nights. For Herod one more day of fear that his corrupt kingdom would be supplanted by God’s just and caring realm.

One more day. Today. One more day. Tomorrow. A day to study God’s word in scripture, as Jesus did. A day to pray, as Jesus did. A day to love your Creator and this amazing creation, as Jesus did. One more day.

The day after the baby is born. One more miraculous and holy day. Amen.

Brother Jesus, you came to us in love, closing the gap between the divine, the quantum swirling mysterious Creativity that calls the world into being. You shared in our humanness, and marked us forever with your holiness. In your life you taught us how to be fully human, how to align our lives with God’s great purpose, how to boldly proclaim God’s just and caring realm. In your death you showed us how to come to our own ends, and in your resurrection you taught us that the forces of sin, evil and death will not triumph. But this day, this holy day, we recall the various stories your followers used to understand how you came into the world, unique, Emmanuel, God-with-us. Bless this gathering, reminding us always that we are people of the promise walking along the Way, together in love. Amen.

The pastor, being human and all, was hurt to think that this trusted friend, wise elder, had so little respect that he would sleep during the sermon. Then, being human and all, this hurt turned to anger. He decided to take the bull by the horns, not always the wisest choice, but one we sometimes make. So during the sermon one Sunday, after Wallace had dozed off. The pastor said quietly “Those who want to go to heaven, please stand up.” Everyone stood up, except Wallace, from whom a gentle snore could be heard. The pastor motioned for everyone to sit back down. Then he said “And if you are damned to hell,” and he slammed the pulpit and roared out “please stand up!” And Wallace sprang up to his feet, fumbling for his hymnal. Jaws dropped, eyes got wide, and finally Wallace, noticing that the organ wasn’t playing, looked around, and realized he was the only one standing. He turned back to the pastor and said ‘Well pastor, I told you when we called you that I was going to stick with you, and it looks like you and I are the only one’s on our feet, so where is it we are going together today?”

Where are we going today, indeed! For many Christians, Jesus saves purely through his death. Torture and execution, demanded by an angry God unwilling to forgive without payment, are the key, and so these Christians refer again and again to the cross, and while Christmas is cute and fun, it is easily commercialized, because it is a fluffy sort of holiday with no real bearing on salvation. It is nothing more than a prelude. For that matter, the things Jesus does and says during his earthly ministry aren’t that important either.

For other Christians, and I include myself in this group, blood sacrifice makes no sense, nor would I choose to worship a god that was so spiteful. For me, and for many, the salvation we experience in Jesus comes both from his victory over the forces of empire, evil and death itself, and it comes from his life and teachings. It is Emmanuel, that is, Jesus as God-with-us, God-for-us, that carries the power to save. And so, during this Advent season of preparation, we are using as a central image a path, a way with direction through a world of aimlessness and sin. This second week of Advent we focus on the traditional theme of peace. So what, I ask you, is the Christian path to peace?

Now I have to confess to being a bit sappy. Despite all of the extra work, the frantic nature of this season, I love Christmas. And one of the reasons I love Christmas is the Christmas movies, no matter how cheesy. Most of you may have a limit to how many Hallmark movies you can watch about families down on their luck, orphans and widows and folks who have lost what is called the “Christmas” spirit. I have no limit. I can watch them again and again, and I am guaranteed to weep at the appropriate moment. I love the idea that, as the saying goes, “the wrong shall fail, the right prevail, with peace on earth, goodwill towards men.” I love the shepherds on the hillside, the lovely manger story, and so I prefer Luke over Matthew’s dead toddlers any day of the week. But truthfully, my happy clappy happily ever after Christmas peace is a little naïve. The “can’t we all just get along” version doesn’t have much sticking power in a world filled with humans, because we humans are far from perfect, and sometimes we’re downright wicked.

What, then, is the peace of Christ? We say it, but what is it? We know what it is not, it is not the peace of Caesar. This is important, because the early Christians intentionally co-opted the language of the Caesar cult to position Jesus in opposition to Augustus and his successors, so it is fair the contrast the Pax Christi and the Pax Romana. The Pax Romana did, for a time, bring a halt to the wars that plagued the Mediterranean basin for centuries. But it did so through brutal oppression, it was a peace of force. It benefited Rome itself, and offered some protection for those few offered citizenship. But for slaves and non-citizens, for those who dared oppose the emperor, there was the ultimate sanction. You were beaten to a pulp, stripped naked, then left hung on a cross to slowly die, a process that sometimes took days. The, as a warning sign to others, your corpse was left on display. If that’s the Pax Romana, you won’t mind me saying, it wasn’t very “pax-ful.”

Of course, we have some challenges in the Pax Christi as well. For example, “peace on earth, goodwill towards men” is a terrible translation, and not just because it forget women and children. A more accurate translation, the one you’ll find in modern texts, is “peace among those whom God favors.” Even Jesus doesn’t promise us peace, instead promising that the choice of salvation would pit siblings against one another, would divide parent and child. This is a peace we want? Not so much!

And yet, there is a peace we find when we choose to follow Jesus, albeit not one that fits a fluffy Hallmark movie notion of peace. The peace we find in Christ has nothing to do with the outward circumstances of our life. To be sure, if we follow scripture, if we love and forgive and sacrifice, if we turn our backs on greed, resentment and violence, our outward lives will be more peaceful. But the real peace of Christ, the real Pax Christi, is an inward peace found in knowing that you have aligned your life with the purpose of your Creator! It isn’t bucolic shepherds frolicking with lambs under a starry sky, but it is a kind of peace.

In fact, if we look at today’s lesson from the Hebrew scriptures, a passage from the unknown author of the second portion of the Book of Isaiah, we get a clue that the peace God promises is an active peace. The prophets had been proclaiming for some time that peace required justice, but something else is going on in our passage. The author is part of the Hebrew community in exile in Babylon. She or he imagines a day of return, a herald who announces that it is time to return across desolate and rugged terrain. The prophet announces a major construction project. Make a level super highway through the desert. Fill in the valleys, flatten the mountains and hills, turn the rugged wasteland into fertile river plains. This peace is active, maybe even violent in its call for some serious terraforming! The exiles see a path to peace, a path to restoration, but they also know it is going to take some work, it is going to literally change the lay of the land.

It is Isaiah that Jesus reads in the synagogue, and it is through Isaiah that we can come to understand the Pax Christi. The path to peace is found in the life, teachings and victory of Emmanuel, God-with-us, even this Jesus, our Christ, our Messiah. But it is not sappy happy clappy. It is an active peace found in aligning yourself with God’s great purpose. Maybe somewhere under all the frantic commercialism, under the pressures of the holidays, even under the formulaic movies on the Hallmark channel, we can find peace. We can choose peace. Amen.

Our lives hum along,
the hum of dozens of electronic devices,
the capacitors of our lives holding us captive,
the hum of our tires on the road as we zip about,
free to drive and trapped in our driven-ness.
Our lives are musical,
the music of ringtones demanding,
interrupting our concentration,
the music of jingles designed to fuel our need,
the squawking heads of desire.

Amidst all this noice,
this captivity and squawking,
you come,
Our Savior and Our God.

Forgive us our willingness to be held captive,
and grant us your liberation,
grant us your peace,
for we know you still call,
still call,
always calling us to peace,
to freedom,
to reconciliation. Amen.