Always Part of the Plan

 

December 29, 2024 – The 1st Sunday after Christmas Day

Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7; John 1:1-18

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Those are the four gospel accounts. There aren’t four gospels. There’s only one gospel—the singular good news of Jesus Christ. But there are four accounts of that one gospel, and we need all four. 

Some people love to argue that originally there were lots of gospels and that the institutional church only restricted the number to the four we have in the Bible to suit its own needs, but the people who claim that aren’t very good at history. They’re usually trying to sell you a book or get you to watch their series on the History Channel or convince you to share something on social media. Although there have been lots of different texts that call themselves “gospels” or “good news,” the four accounts of the canonical gospel—unlike almost all of those alternate texts—were in their current form by the end of the first century. And, by 180AD, the church, which had not yet developed an apparatus for centralized decision making, recognized by consensus that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John collectively represent the singular and true good news of Jesus Christ. 

What makes the four-fold gospel tradition even more interesting is its willingness to embrace diversity as an essential component of the fullest manifestation of the one truth. You probably know this, but none of the four gospel accounts start the same way. Matthew begins with a genealogy of Jesus before launching in with the story of Mary’s pregnancy and Jospeh’s dream-inspired decision not to break off their engagement. Luke starts with the parallel pregnancy stories of Elizabeth and Mary, the mothers of John the Baptist and Jesus, before giving us the beloved story of the shepherds, angels, and the manger, which we hear at Christmas. Mark skips all of that and begins his account thirty years later with John the Baptist’s call to repentance and the moment Jesus came out of the water and saw the Holy Spirit descending upon him. 

But then John came along and said, “Holy my beer.” We’re not going to begin with the start of Jesus’ ministry. We’re not going to start with Jesus’ birth. We’re not going to start with John the Baptist or even with a genealogy that traces Jesus’ ancestry all the way back to Abraham. We’re going to start at the beginning. We’re going to start even before the beginning—before time itself had been created. We’re going to start with God and God alone, when the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

When John and the community of Christians around him that grew together in faith sought to tell the good news of God’s love, they knew that the story of salvation, which stretched back even before the beginning of time, had always had Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God, at its very center. For John, starting anywhere else was inadequate. The same unified work of God that brought light and life into the universe had brought Jesus of Nazareth into the world as its savior. 

The incarnation, the virgin birth, the presentation in the temple, the baptism by John in the Jordan, the anointing of the Holy Spirit, the temptation in the wilderness, the sermon on the mount, the feeding of the five thousand, the walking on the water, the healing of the sick, the raising of the dead, the transfiguration on the mountain top, the dying on the cross, the resurrection on the third day, the ascension into heaven, and the sending of the Holy Ghost—all of those moments in the story of Jesus have their origin in eternal and timeless Word that, in the beginning, was with God and was God. But the good news of Jesus does not stop there.

When God spoke and there was light, when the waters were gathered together into seas, when plants and birds and fish and animals began to grow and fly and swim and walk, when Adam was formed of the dust of the ground, when the breath of life was breathed into his nostrils and he became a living being, when Noah and his family were rescued in the ark, when Abram heard and answered God’s call, when Moses raised his staff and parted the Red Sea, when the Law was given to God’s people, when Israel crossed the Jordan and entered the land of promise, when they were set free from the Babylonian captivity and returned home, when they waited for the coming of God’s anointed—all of those moments in the history of time have their origin in the eternal Word that has always been.

The salvation of the world did not begin with the birth of Jesus. It began before the world was created. By starting his gospel account with this cosmic prologue, John lets us know that the good news of Jesus Christ is not a plan that God hatched in response to Roman oppression. The way of Jesus is not something God dreamt up as a solution to first-century problems or as an answer to the prayers of our long-dead ancestors. This is how the world was made to be. It was made by and through and for the one to whom we belong. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Jesus, the incarnate Word, is the very foundation of and fulfillment of our existence.

And yet the incarnate Word—the universal light that shines from within all of creation—that light which can never be overcome by darkness—came into a world that did not universally receive it. As C.K. Barrett wrote of God’s sending of that light, it was “an almost unmitigated failure.” “The world came into being through him,” John tells us, “yet the world did not know him.” How can that be? How can God send us the savior whose work of salvation has been written into the very fabric of creation only to have us reject him? Because, as John expresses so beautifully, “the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth.”

In the incarnate Son of God, we see that God’s nature is grace and truth—not coercion or violence, not force or manipulation, not threat or compulsion, but grace and freedom and love. And that means that, although we recognize the fullness of God in the person of Jesus Christ, not everyone sees what we see. Not everyone wants to receive the light. Yet even that—even the incomplete, unfinished, imperfect response to God’s love—is somehow a part of God’s saving plan. Even those moments of failure have their origin in the eternal and timeless Word.

“All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” The eating of the forbidden fruit, the murder of Abel at the hands of his brother, the wickedness that provoked the great flood, the arrogance that built the tower of Babel, the captivity under Pharoah in Egypt, the hardship God’s people suffered in the wilderness, the indiscriminate bloodshed by which Israel conquered the land of Canaan, the idolatry that corrupted the nation, the persecution of the prophets, even the rejection of God’s Son—they are all within the cosmic boundaries of what was created through God’s eternal Word. None of them is beyond the reach of God. God is not glorified by them, but God can and will redeem them for God’s glory. And that’s not all.

“The Word became flesh and lived among us.” There is nothing in all of creation that is beyond the reach of God’s saving love, and that means that there is nothing in our lives that God will not redeem. No struggle, no grief, no illness, no anxiety, no isolation, no failure, no doubt, no worry—nothing at all that we can ever experience that lies outside of God’s plan of salvation.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Why doesn’t God hurry up and fix everything that is wrong in our lives? Why doesn’t God just snap God’s fingers and make all things right? Because God is gracious. Because God invites us to recognize his love, and, when we don’t, God still finds a way to fold it into God’s saving work. How much easier life would be if God took over and forced the divine will upon us, but then we wouldn’t recognize our lives or our God.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Everything that has ever been has been created in and through and for God. Jesus’ work of redemption has always been a part of that story, and so have you. There is no part of your life that does not belong to God. There is no struggle in your life that is beyond the redemption of the cosmic Christ. John’s account of the gospel reminds us of that, and that is good news.

A New Start

 

December 24, 2024 – Christmas I

Isaiah 9:2-7; Titus 2:11-14; Luke 2:1-15-20

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

It’s Christmas, which means that some of you are here because you came home for the holidays, and others are here because you wouldn’t go home if your life depended on it. Some of us, when we go home, actually enjoy spending time with our family but live in fear of running into a high-school acquaintance at the grocery store. Others, as soon as we get to our parents’ house, make plans to go out and meet our friends in order to spend as little time under their roof as possible.

Years ago, not long after college, I was back in lower Alabama and had the chance to swing by my old high school to say hello to some of the office staff that had helped me survive those difficult years. I wanted to reconnect with some people I loved and say thank you for all the times they let me hide out in the office. When I walked through the door and saw their familiar faces, I greeted them warmly and reintroduced myself, just in case they didn’t recognize me. Before I could say a word of gratitude, however, the office secretary belted out, “Evan Garner? I almost didn’t know who you were. You’ve gained so much weight!” I haven’t been back.

Going home can be a blessing or a curse. Usually, it’s a little of both. Some people relish the opportunity to reunite with family and friends, rekindling old relationships and telling stories about the way things were. Others have learned over the years that going back brings up more painful memories than nostalgic ones. And a few of us grew up in homes that we have never once wanted to return to. But, like it or not, Christmas has a way of making all of us look back. As we think about the Christmases of our childhood, we either romanticize the past or fantasize over what the past could have been. Every time we go back home, whether it’s in the flesh or in our mind, we’re either looking for something we once had but have since lost, or we’re searching for something we never had but have always longed for.

I bet the thought of returning to Bethlehem gave Joseph more anxiety than excitement. As his ancestral home, Bethlehem wasn’t the place where Joseph grew up or went to high school, but it was the town from which his family came. People knew him there. Growing up, his family surely would have made the six-mile trip south from Jerusalem a time or two after finishing one of their thrice-annual pilgrimages to the holy city. He may not have kept up with his distant cousins, but only a brief reintroduction would have been necessary to renew all those relationships, for better or for worse. 

This time, Joseph made the trip with Mary, his pregnant fiancée. Back then, people rarely strayed very far from familial connections when proposing marriage, so there’s a good chance that the people in Bethlehem would have known Mary or her parents, but I doubt this was how they wanted to share their good news with their distant relatives. Sometimes an unexpected pregnancy is all it takes to feel like we’ll never live up to other people’s expectations.

What was it like for Joseph to have grown up knowing that he had been born into a royal family only to come back to the city of David as a carpenter whose bride-to-be had become pregnant under inexplicable circumstances? There’s no evidence in the gospel that Joseph’s friends or family gave much thought to his Davidic lineage, but I suspect that this homecoming made Joseph wonder whether his life was measuring up. That he and Mary arrived in Bethlehem with no place to stay—no family member willing to take them in and not enough money or influence to convince the innkeeper to make space for them—lets us know that this trip wasn’t easy for the holy family.

But there’s nothing like the birth of a child to cut short all that wistful longing and self-criticism. While bedding down with the livestock, Mary went into labor, and, whether or not Joseph was ready, the child of the woman he loved was coming into the world. The infant Son of God was born not back in Nazareth, where Mary’s mother, aunts, and cousins could help her, nor in the home of one of Joseph’s relatives, where surely a sympathetic kinswoman would assist with the delivery. The King of kings was born in a stable, celebrated, we are told, not by family and friends but by some nearby, nameless shepherds—as if God wanted us to be sure that the only thing that mattered in that moment was what the future held. 

When the shepherds came to see the Christchild, they did so not as a link to generations past but as a sign that, with this birth, God was doing something new. On that holy night, we hear of no one who came to the manger that was able to say that the baby looked like his grandfather or had his great-aunt’s eyes. These strangers had no way of looking back. They could only see what lay ahead—what the angels had said to them—that this child would be the Savior, the Messiah, the Lord. 

At Christmas, God shows up in a way that only embraces the past by making all things new. Except for the city in which he is born, there is nothing about our savior’s birth that suggests that he is following in the footsteps of David. Joseph may have felt the burden of the past as he came into his ancestral home, but the birth of Jesus shows us that what lies ahead is not a repeat of what has come before. Christmas reminds us that the past may have brought us to this point, but it cannot define our future.

Christmas may feel like a time when the world is urging you to look back, but God wants you to see what lies ahead—something new and hopeful and wonderful. “Unto us a child is born; unto us a son is given.” The reason the prophet Isaiah speaks of an infant leader is because, at that time in Israel’s history, God’s people were desperate for a new start. People were sick and tired of the same old patterns of hardship and struggle repeating themselves in every generation. They needed a break with the past. They needed to start over.

Our new start comes at Christmas. In the birth of Jesus, God rewrites our story by writing ourselves onto Godself. Our past is only our past, but our future is found in God. This gift to the world is like no other. The world’s greatest hope arrives as a newborn—a perfectly clean slate, a sign that, though the work of redemption is not yet finished, the old patterns have been broken so that, within us, God can do something new.

This is the miracle of Christmas—that what we long for is not locked away in the past but given to us in this present moment. This season of hope has never been about recapturing something that was lost or yearning for something that can never be. With the birth of Jesus, it has always been about receiving something new. On this night, God comes into your life, right where you are, celebrating exactly who you are in this moment. Let the birth of this child interrupt any wistful longing or self-criticism that might distract you from that sacred truth. At Christmas, you are the child whom God is making new. 

The God-Bearer

 

December 22, 2024 – Advent 4C

Micah 5:2-5a; Canticle 15; Hebrews 10:5-10; Luke 1:39-55

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video is available here.

It was a hundred miles. Not long after Mary learned from the angel Gabriel that she would give birth to the Son of God, she set off on a hundred-mile journey from Nazareth in Galilee to the hill country of Judea, where her relative Elizabeth lived. As a gift of consolation for a scared, young mother-to-be, the angel had told her that her pregnancy was linked to Elizabeth’s pregnancy. It didn’t take Mary long to realize that the only person on this earth who could understand her situation was her wise, old cousin, who was in the midst of her own unexpected pregnancy.

It was a hundred miles of walking the pilgrim’s road from the northern territory, where Mary lived, to a village near the capital city. It is almost unfathomable to us that a teenage girl would dare to make that trip alone, and she probably had company along the way. Caravans of travelers would often make the journey together, because, along the wilderness road, there was safety in numbers. Mary may have even walked with some relatives or close friends, but, in his description of her travels, Luke doesn’t mention anyone else. It was just her—if not physically alone, at the very least emotionally alone—an unwed pregnant girl, who couldn’t help but hear the whispers of those around her, as she sought refuge in the home of an understanding kinswoman.

Something powerful happened when Mary walked through the door—something besides what is recorded in biblical text. In that culture, elders were revered and respected, so, naturally, Mary was the first to offer a greeting—the younger, in effect, approaching with humility a woman old enough to be her grandmother. But, at the sound of her greeting, all of that changed. Any culturally anticipated distance between the two women collapsed in an instant as Elizabeth felt her own child leap in her womb.

Elizabeth had known for decades the societal stigma that comes with not being able to have children, but now she had experienced in her body God’s great reversal of her status in the eyes of the world. Mary had just begun to feel the shame that bubbled up whenever she caught a glimpse of others’ judgmental stares. She had come to see Elizabeth in the hopes that her kinswoman would understand what the angel had said about the child she carried within her. And Elizabeth’s response to her greeting told her that God was already at work in both of them, changing their humility and shame into strength and renown, in one unified act of salvation. 

As an embodiment of the transformation that was already unfolding within them, the older mother-to-be began to honor her younger counterpart, effectively flipping their roles, as the revered one proclaimed with reverence the blessedness of her guest: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” As the words of Mary’s greeting rang in Elizabeth’s ears, the power of the Holy Spirit filled her. The one who had been asked to shelter this anxious expectant mother had become the one to welcome the Theotokos, the Mother of God, into her home. The blessing of receiving the blessed one was felt even by the child growing within her.

It is only in this peculiar context of role-reversal that Mary’s song can be uttered. Her words would be too much in any other setting. “My soul magnifies the Lord,” she begins, proclaiming with boldness a statement that, while ridiculous on its face, is as faithful on her lips as it would be arrogant on the lips of anyone else. How can it be that a frail human being could ever claim to magnify God’s surpassing greatness? How can it be that a girl whose pregnancy inspired ridicule could become the means through which God’s salvation comes into the world? From Mary herself, we hear both question and answer: “How can this be,” she asked the angel Gabriel, “since I am a virgin?”

The source of her shame becomes the channel for God’s glory. The very definition of her inability, which is to say the biological impossibility of her pregnancy, is the very means by which God acts. Had her womb been occupied by the child of another, she would not have had space in her body to carry God’s Son. Had her pregnancy been celebrated by those around her, she would not have had room in her heart to magnify the Lord. Only because of her poverty of spirit is Mary able to become the mother of our savior, even the mother of God.

In a world that is blind to what God is doing, Elizabeth can see it all. She has not only the wisdom of age and experience but also the insight of the Holy Spirit. A prophet in her own right, she identifies her young relative as the thrice-blessed mother of her Lord. “Blessed are you among women,” she names, celebrating the holiness of Mary’s womanhood. “Blessed is the fruit of your womb,” she declares, anticipating the holiness of the child within her. “Blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord,” she announces, switching from the second- to the third-person in order to let us know that, like Mary, those who trust in God’s promises will be made holy.

Mary is, for us, an icon of faithfulness because she believed what God had said to her and, thus, became the mother of our salvation. She did not heal the sick or raise the dead. She did not defy an empire or slay Satan with a sword. Yet it was through her perfect faithfulness—her eternal “yes” to God—through which all those saving deeds were done. God’s great reversal of humanity’s plight is accomplished through the one whose perfect emptiness gave way to the fullness of God’s glory.

A young, unwed girl, betrothed to a man of David’s line, travelled a hundred miles to see her relative Elizabeth because Elizabeth was the only one who could understand what God was doing within her. As one in whom that great reversal had already begun to take hold, Elizabeth was able to see in Mary what the world was unable to recognize—its salvation coming to fruition. Only when that reversal begins to take hold in us—only when Christ dwells inside our bodies—are we also able to see it.

That salvation—your salvation—is not manifest in the victories, rewards, or accomplishments of your life. Those are gifts of God, for sure, but your true hope is not found in any of them. Our hope is found in our own emptiness. Our hope is in the one who has lifted up the lowly and filled the hungry with good things. Our hope is in the one who was carried in the womb of Mary and brought into this world by her faithfulness to God. Our hope is in Jesus, and, when we, like Mary, approach God with our own emptiness, believing that there will be a fulfillment of what has been spoken by the Lord, our souls will magnify the Lord, and our spirits will rejoice in the God of our salvation.

No One Chooses Thomas...Except Jesus

 

December 21, 2024 – St. Thomas (Blue Christmas)

Habakkuk 2:1-4; Hebrews 10:35-11:1; John 20:24-29

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Video of this sermon can be seen here.

I don’t want to be a Thomas. I don’t want to be defined by my doubts. I don’t want to feel inside myself that the truest part of me is the part of me that doesn’t have enough faith to believe in Jesus. 

I’d rather be a Peter. Or, if that’s asking too much, I’d be happy to be a John or a James or even a Bartholomew. I’d welcome the chance to be a minor character in the story of salvation if it meant that I wasn’t known as the one who wouldn’t believe—who couldn’t believe. I’d be almost anyone as long as it’s not a doubting Thomas.

But we don’t get to choose who we are, do we? We don’t get to decide for ourselves what part we play in God’s great salvation drama. Like Thomas, we don’t even get to choose for ourselves whether we have faith. We either have it or we don’t. In a frustrating and exhausting way, it’s not up to us. We can search for it. We can practice it. We can try and try again. We can fake it and hope that one day our pretense will give way to something real. But faith isn’t something we can manufacture. It’s almost as if faith is something bestowed upon the lucky ones for reasons we can’t discern while the rest of us are left to wonder why we missed out.

Why are we the ones for whom all the puzzle pieces never seem to come together into a coherent whole? Why don’t we get to be the ones that other people look to as examples of how to be calm in the midst of life’s storms or how to maintain hope when everything around us feels hopeless? Why are we the ones who are always playing catch-up, running after those who have it all figured out but without ever getting any closer to them? 

Just once, we want to know what it feels like to have our burdens of grief, loss, and disappointment lifted from us. We want to feel them buoyed by a faith in a God who, we are told, is making all things right but who, as far as we can tell, isn’t making them right for us. The never-ending struggle is wearing us out. The weight of pretending that we are okay when we are nothing that resembles okay is bending us over, literally hunching our bodies, pressing us ever closer to the ground.

Surely Thomas felt that weight upon his shoulders in the week after Jesus died. I can imagine that he didn’t bother to lift his head more than a time or two during those days. His teacher and friend had been taken from him. The one in whom he had trusted—the one whom he believed had come to save God’s people—had been betrayed by a member of their inner circle, effectively indicting all the disciples for failing to see it coming. 

“Why wasn’t I taken with him?” Thomas must have asked in his unanswered prayers. Back when Jesus was still alive, when he had decided to return to Jerusalem to face his opponents, Thomas was the one who had declared that he was ready to go and die with him. But, instead of standing beside his master, Thomas had wilted in the moment of truth. He had fled in fear and shame like all the others. It’s a hard thing to be the one who keeps on living when the one you love the most has died.

Worse, still, Thomas’ friends were convinced that death had not taken Jesus from them for good. Jesus’ humiliating execution, they claimed, had been reversed by God, who had raised Jesus from the dead. “He appeared to us!” they exclaimed to Thomas, “when you weren’t there. Even though the doors were locked, he came into the room, and he showed himself to us. He is alive! Why don’t you believe us? Don’t you trust us?” But finding faith isn’t as simple as taking someone else’s word for it.

“Why couldn’t Jesus have waited until we were all together?” Thomas must have wondered. “Why would he reveal himself to all of the disciples except me? Is it because I am not worthy? Is it because I failed him? Is it because I do not know how to have faith like Peter or James or John?” 

For the longest week of his life, Thomas carried that isolating grief with him wherever he went. He was the only one in the community of disciples who didn’t feel like celebrating. He was the only one who didn’t get to see Jesus—the only one who didn’t believe. And there was nothing he could do about it.

But that didn’t stop Jesus from doing something. A week later, the disciples were right back where they started, which itself suggests that maybe even seeing the risen Jesus doesn’t fix everything all at once. Or maybe it’s a reminder that the community of faith cannot fulfill God’s commission until everyone is able to join in. Regardless, this time, Thomas was with them. And Jesus knew that Thomas would be there. Jesus knew that he could not return to his Father without seeing Thomas first.

When Jesus appeared to the disciples a second time, the only difference was Thomas. He was the reason Jesus came back. “You, too, Thomas,” Jesus said to him. “I love you, too. My work cannot be finished until you know that you belong to me, just like all of the others. Look at my hands and my side. Reach out and feel the wounds for yourself. I want you to know and believe that neither my death nor your doubts have the power to defeat God’s love.” 

Jesus does not come back for Thomas because of Thomas’ faith. He returns because of his doubts. He returns because Thomas isn’t sure, because he can’t figure it out, because he can’t make himself feel what everyone else around him seems to be able to feel. If the resurrection of Jesus means anything, it means that those who have felt the sting of death rob them of their ability to celebrate the fullness of God’s love will one day be rescued by that love which cannot be complete without them. If the empty tomb means anything, it means that Jesus will come and find the Thomas in each one of us. 

Sometimes it’s hard to believe in God. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that a God who would create a world in which pain and suffering are so common will one day make all that pain and suffering go away. Most of the time, we want to believe that, but often we can’t figure out how. And that’s okay. God’s love isn’t waiting on you to figure it out. God doesn’t need you to believe in him in order for God to love you or to come and find you. That’s the real miracle of Christmas—that God’s love finds us no matter what—and we receive that miracle anew every time Jesus offers himself to us in the communion of his body and blood.

Repentance Belongs in the Wilderness

 

December 8, 2024 – Advent 2C

Malachi 3:1-4; Canticle 16; Philippians 1:3-11; Luke 3:1-6

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

Did your parents ever tell stories about your birth that took on a life of their own? Maybe your mother’s labor was as difficult as Rebekah’s, whose twins, Essau and Jacob, struggled so painfully in her womb that they were likened to two nations fighting against each other. Or maybe your mother’s pregnancy was anticipated by a distant but insightful relative the way that Samson’s birth was predicted by an unexpected visitor. There’s a reason we tell these strange stories about someone’s birth, and, by the time we are old enough to hear them for ourselves, it’s hard to know how much they were shaped by the birth itself and how much belongs to the sort of person we have already started to become.

How many times do you think John the Baptist heard his father sing the song about his birth? “And you, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way.” Zechariah’s is a song about the salvation of God’s people and, from his infancy, the role that John would play in it.

This is where Luke begins his gospel story—not with the birth of Jesus but with the promised birth of his cousin, John. Luke starts with the story of John’s parents, Zechariah and Elizabeth. Both of them belonged to the tribe of Levi, which means that they both came from priestly families. Luke tells us that they were righteous people who lived “blamelessly according to all of the commandments and regulations of the Lord,” which is a pretty lofty way to describe anyone (Luke 1:6). But Luke also lets us know that there was a problem: they had no children.

We might not see that as a problem, but, in those days, the inability to conceive a child was understood to be a sign that God had withheld God’s favor from someone. It is remarkable, therefore, that this barren couple, both of whom had passed the age of child-bearing, were still seen by their peers as holy people—holy enough for Zechariah to be allowed to continue to serve as a priest. 

One day, during the two-week period when Zechariah’s section of priests was on duty in Jerusalem, the lot used to determine which priest would be sent into the holy part of the temple to offer incense to God fell on Zechariah. It was an especially high honor. While in the holy place, he looked and saw an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar. He was terrified, but the angel Gabriel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John.” 

Naturally, Zechariah was surprised by this, so he instinctively asked the angel how this was possible, since he was an old man and his wife was also “getting on in years” (Luke 1:18). But, in response to those doubts, Gabriel struck mute the elderly priest, leaving him unable to speak until the promised birth had taken place. Sure enough, eight days after his son was born, and as soon as he had confirmed in writing his wife’s decision to name the child John, his tongue was loosed, and, with the first words he had spoken in over nine months, Zechariah declared, “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; he has come to his people and set them free.” 

Imagine how many times John heard the Song of Zechariah while he was growing up. Imagine how tired he became of hearing his father declare that one day he would become the prophet of the Most High. Imagine how awkward it was at John’s teenage birthday parties to have his father interrupt the festivities to proclaim yet again that his little boy would one day give God’s people the knowledge of their salvation by the forgiveness of their sins. It’s one thing to grow up knowing that you will inherit the family business, but it’s quite another to hear from before you can remember that you have been filled with the Holy Spirit and set apart by God for a special purpose.

Should it surprise us, then, that, by the time the word of God came to the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, it found him not in the temple, where his father had received this prophecy, nor in the local synagogue, where the Torah was read and preached every sabbath, but out in the wilderness, where the only creatures who could hear what John had to say were the hyenas, wolves, and leopards?

Luke wants us to notice that. Luke wants us to be as astonished as Zechariah was when he heard that he would become a father. It’s not an accident that Luke introduces the ministry of John the baptizer by precisely dating it according to the timelines of the political and religious leaders of his day. This was the fifteenth year of Emperor Tiberius’ reign. It was when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, when Herod was the ruler of Galilee, and when Philip and Lysanias were in charge of Iturea, Trachonitis, and Abilene. Luke even grounds John’s ministry according to the time when Annas and Caiaphas were serving as high priests—a reckoning that would have meant something to his parents. 

But John isn’t found anywhere close to those people. He’s out in the wilderness, in the region on the other side of the Jordan River, where civilization stops and the unkempt wilds of God’s unbridled power begin. That’s the place where the prophecy that John’s father had spoken on the day of his naming would unfold. And that’s where we must go if we are going to be a part of it.

We see in the story of John the Baptist that God is doing something strange and unexpected—something which cannot begin among the institutions of power because they are precisely those institutions that John has come to reform. As we will hear more about next Sunday, John’s baptism of repentance draws out into the wilderness those people who dare to believe that God’s will for the world is not being fulfilled by the politicians or priests of their day. John comes to announce that, instead of helping God’s people, those institutions have become stumbling blocks that inhibit their relationship with God and that anyone who wants a fresh start must leave them behind, venture out into the wilderness, and be washed clean in the waters of baptism.

God’s vision, announced generations earlier by the prophet Isaiah, is of a world in which God’s people can return to God as easily as driving down a straight and level highway. Perhaps because he had grown up so close to those institutions, John recognized that all the twists and turns and potholes and speedbumps that got in the way of the people’s relationship with God had been put in place by the very authorities that were supposed to help them. John knew that, once those impediments had been removed, the Anointed One of God would come and establish God’s reign among God’s people without any hindrance. John’s job, therefore, was to help the people see what it takes to remove all those stumbling blocks so that, when Jesus came, they would be ready to receive him. For John, that is what repentance was all about.

Two thousand years later, the nature of repentance hasn’t changed at all, but I wonder whether we’ve spent so much time in the temple and in the corridors of worldly power that we’ve forgotten what it sounds like or where we must go in order to hear it. These days, words like “repentance” and “sin” have become associated with religious leaders and institutions that make us want to run in the opposite direction. But repentance isn’t bad news. It’s how we leave those institutions behind and make space in our hearts to receive God’s salvation. 

Any call to repentance that effectively strengthens an institution’s grip on power is not of God. Anyone who uses shame, fear, or guilt to promote morality or religious behavior is not of God. Those are the very people and institutions whose existence have made it harder for us to know the saving power of God’s love. John calls us to leave them behind and go out beyond their reach in order to receive a fresh start. 

The story of John’s birth, the forerunner of the messiah, begins with a priest in the temple being silenced by an angel of the Lord. That irony is not lost on me. This might be the spot where your participation in the story of salvation begins, but St. Paul’s cannot be the place where it finds its fulfillment. That’s because we are not saved by any preacher or by any church but only by the grace of God. 

Hear again and respond anew to God’s call to repentance—a call that we might hear in the temple but one that always draws us out into wilderness, beyond the reach of those institutions that seek to domesticate the Almighty One. That’s where the power of God runs wild and free, remaking the world in God’s image, one repentant sinner at a time.

Thy Kingdom Come

 

November 24, 2024 – The Last Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 29B
2 Samuel 23:1-7; Revelation 1:4b-8; John 18:33-37

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon is available here. Video can be seen here.

Ninety-nine years ago, Pope Pius XI had had enough. On December 11, 1925, the Bishop of Rome issued the second encyclical (or church-wide letter) of his papacy. This encyclical took its name from its opening words, “Quas primas” or “In the first.” Those words were a reference to his first encyclical, which the pope had issued three years earlier as a way of urging the modern, increasingly secular world to return to its Christian roots. He was not impressed with the response. So he wrote a second letter, which began with a bit of finger-wagging at those who had ignored what he had written the first time:

In the first Encyclical Letter which We addressed at the beginning of Our Pontificate…We referred to the chief causes of the difficulties under which mankind was laboring. And We remember saying that these manifold evils in the world were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics: and we said further, that as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations.[1] 

Between 1922 and 1925, things had not gotten better. Benito Mussolini, whose Fascist Party had come to power after his March on Rome in October 1922, had consolidated his control over the nation and begun to rule as a dictator in January 1925. Adolf Hitler, whose failed coup in 1923 had landed him in prison, was released in the spring of 1924, and his personal manifesto, Mein Kampf, was published a year later. As a sign that their movement wasn’t going away, in November 1925, on the second anniversary of the Nazis’ failed attempt to take over Bavaria, Hitler’s personal bodyguard, the SS, was founded. 

Lest we think that nationalistic tendencies were only manifest in Europe back then, over 30,000 people dressed in white hoods and robes marched on Washington, DC, in August 1925, as the KKK’s popularity continued to grow. And, in October of that year, the land that would become Mount Rushmore was set apart for the national monument—land that was illegally taken from the Sioux Nation—and the same sculptor who had created the “Shrine to the Confederacy” on Stone Mountain in Georgia was hired to oversee the massive project.

Pope Pius XI was tired of telling people that Jesus was the world’s true hope only to watch them choose leaders whose platforms and policies were antithetical to the reign of God. He believed that God’s vision for the world was something different and that the solution was not a further separation of church and state but a thorough enmeshing of the two. He was convinced, perhaps naively, that that remarriage would result in the re-subjection of human authority to the rule of God. As he wrote, “Once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony. Our Lord’s regal office invests the human authority of princes and rulers with a religious significance; it ennobles the citizen’s duty of obedience.”[2]

Words, Pius had learned, were not enough, so, in his encyclical, he instituted the feast of Christ the King, setting aside one Sunday in the church’s year to celebrate the reign of Jesus Christ. “Nations will be reminded by the annual celebration of this feast,” he wrote, “that not only private individuals but also rulers and princes are bound to give public honor and obedience to Christ.”[3]  

Today is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday after Pentecost, the last Sunday before the season of Advent and the beginning of a new liturgical year. Normally, being a bit of a traditionalist, I don’t give much attention to recent liturgical innovations like Christ the King Sunday, which only took hold in our lectionary in the 1970s. But, given our collective need to remember who is really in charge, I’m starting to think that it might be a good idea.

“Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come.” That is how John the Divine, the author of the Book of Revelation, greets those who read his letter. If there’s any book in the Bible that we need to read and study right now, it’s Revelation. This book is God’s good news for a church that was beginning to forget how to believe in the authority of God and of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. 

It had been around seventy-five years since Jesus’ death and resurrection, and things had not gotten better during that time. Persecution was a way of life. One Roman Emperor succeeded another, and any moment of relief was quickly followed by another round of harsh suffering. The fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in 70AD left the early church wondering whether the end had come, but, instead of Jesus’ promised return, all that his followers received was another quarter-century of hardship. Revelation was God’ vision for a new world, and it was given to John the Divine in the church’s darkest hour because that was precisely the moment when Christians needed to remember that God is still God no matter what happens.

The Book of Revelation is a story about the transformation of the world from a place ruled by emperors and kings into the kingdom of God. These days, readers of Revelation often get distracted by the strange images and symbols contained in the text, but those were God’s way of helping Christians believe that everything they had ever known about the way the world worked would not always last. It helped them believe that the suffering and hardship they endured were signs that God’s reign was taking hold and that the forces of evil, which had already been dealt a deathblow by Jesus’ death and resurrection, were merely thrashing about in one last age of terrible but futile power. In other words, the real hope contained in Revelation is the realization that, no matter what happens in the world around us, God is already in charge.

“‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come.” For most of my life, I heard those words—Alpha and Omega—as a statement about the beginning and the end. God was God in the beginning, and God will be God in the end. That’s good news. But our proclamation is far more radical than that. The vision God gave to John the Divine is not one of a God whose reign is manifest in the story of creation and then again at the end of time. Our God reigns in every moment of cosmic history—from Alpha to Omega—from the beginning until the end and through every moment in between—the one “who is and who was and who is to come.”

Remembering that in a world in which suffering and hardship seem to be in charge is an act of faith. Believing that in an age when the victory of God appears to be overshadowed by the triumphs of ungodly human endeavors takes hard work. But, if we don’t, we’ll never learn to recognize how Christ is coming among us as our savior. 

All Christians believe that Jesus will come again and make all things new. But most Christians seem to expect that to happen in a way that makes the cross an unfortunate accident of history instead of the source of salvation that it truly is. To put it simply, when Jesus finally reigns as the King of Kings, do we expect him to wear a crown of jewels or as crown of thorns?

Do we believe that Jesus will return in a show of military might in order to give earthly power and authority to his followers, or do we believe that the power of God is manifest chiefly through the suffering and sacrifice we see embodied by Jesus on the cross? If it’s the former, we’re in big trouble because that means the kingship of Christ is only manifest in moments of worldly success. It means that Jesus’ triumph over evil is not accomplished in the cross and empty tomb but remains unfinished until God decides that it’s time for God to retake the throne that God has lost. But, if we believe that the King of Kings was always supposed to wear a crown of thorns, our hope lies not in a wishful dream but in the one whose suffering, death, and resurrection have already opened for us the way of eternal life. 

The reign of God does not come into focus through the lenses of earthly kingdoms but only through the way of Jesus Christ. As Jesus said to Pilate, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over.” Jesus teaches us that there is no expression of violence or earthly might that can bring the reign of God any closer to us. In the same way, his death and resurrection show us that there is no manifestation of earthly power—no king or president or political movement—that can push the reign of God any further away from us. 

Pius XI hoped for a world in which the reign of Christ was manifest in and through all the nations of the world. As long as we’re standing around waiting for the right people to get elected so that God’s will can take over our palaces and state houses, that hope will be nothing more than a pipe dream. But, if we’re willing to look for it and nurture it in the hearts and minds and lives of Jesus’ followers, we’ll see that Christ’s reign is already here. 

____________________________

1. Quas Primas. 11 December 1925. https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_11121925_quas-primas.html.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

Observational Theology

 

November 10, 2024 – The 25th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 27B

Ruth 3:1-5; 4:13-17; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

What does it look like when the reign of God breaks through into this world? What are the signs that God’s will is unfolding around us? Where do we look for evidence that God is still God when it feels like the ways of the world are squeezing God’s reign out of our lives?

One of my favorite things about Education for Ministry, the four-year, small-group formation program we offer at St. Paul’s, is its emphasis on theological reflection. Perhaps more than anything else, EfM teaches participants to think theologically—to identify situations for potential reflection, examine them for theological meaning, connect them with the broader Christian tradition, and apply the insights that are gained back into their lives. The part of EfM that usually gets the most attention is the reading—the really long weekly readings from the Bible, church history, or other theological texts—but those readings are designed to equip participants for the real goal of the program, which is to engage the world around us through the lens of our faith.

That practice of observational theology has its roots in biblical examples like today’s reading from Mark. In this gospel lesson, Jesus identifies a situation that has potential, examines it for theological meaning, connects it with the broader faith tradition, and then invites his disciples to apply the lessons it offers to their lives. But, as we see in the story of the widow’s mite, the insights we gain must sometimes be mined from deep beneath the surface of our experience.

One day, Jesus was hanging out with his friends in Jerusalem. This was during the series of events that we call Holy Week. Jesus had already made his triumphal entry into the holy city, when the crowds had hailed him as God’s anointed. Then, Jesus had gone up to the temple and overturned the tables of the currency exchangers, openly challenging the legitimacy of the religious operations taking place there. In response, the religious leaders had challenged his authority to carry out such a prophetic action. One by one, the different groups of leaders—the chief priests, scribes, elders, Pharisees, Herodians, and Sadducees—came up to test him with different questions about faithfulness, and each time Jesus turned them aside with an impressive interpretation of the Jewish tradition.

When no one else was left to ask him a question, Jesus offered a scathing critique of some of the most prominent religious figures of his day. “Beware of the scribes,” Jesus said in today’s reading, “who like to walk around in long robes and like greetings in the marketplaces and have the best seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at feasts.” He was inviting the crowd to turn their expectations of who was truly faithful upside down. He invoked the sort of religious figures whom society praised for their generosity and sliced open the motivation behind their religiosity: “They devour widows’ houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation.”

That’s a hefty criticism, but only later does the significance of that teaching become clear. Having finished his critique, Jesus sat down outside the temple proper, across from the place where people came and dropped their offerings into the treasury. Among those who placed money into the treasury was a widow, recognizable by her distinctive dress. Jesus noticed her and heard the subtle sound of the two small coins rattling in the treasury chute, and he recognized faithfulness at work. Before the woman could slip away, he called his disciples over and pointed her out. “Do you see that widow over there?” he asked them. “She has put more into the treasury than everyone else combined because she has given her last two pennies. Others gave out of their abundance, but she has given out of her poverty, everything she had left to live on.”

The prominent religious leaders, who were admired by everyone, had achieved their prominence by exploiting the weak and the vulnerable, even this widow. Yet this woman, whose livelihood had been stolen by the very religious authorities who get credit for being faithful and generous, gave all she has to God by contributing to a religious system that was governed by the same people who had robbed her. Jesus recognized that the Torah’s repeated command to protect vulnerable people, including widows, conflicted with the contemporary religious practice of putting money in the temple treasury. That’s not because contributing to the temple was a faithless act but because those contributions were being managed by self-interested religious authorities who had failed to alleviate this widow’s poverty. And only those who look carefully beneath the surface of success, piety, generosity, and status are able to see what real faithfulness looks like.

Interestingly, Jesus does not finish this theological reflection with an imperative. He never tells the disciples to go and do likewise or that it is to people like this widow that the kingdom of heaven belongs. In other words, he never tells his followers that they, too, should give their last penny to the temple treasury—the same religious institution whose legitimacy he challenged by overturning the moneychangers’ tables. Instead, he reinterprets the significance and size of the people’s offerings in a way that isn’t obvious to the casual onlooker but becomes clear to those who see in this episode what God sees. God knows that true faithfulness depends upon the heart, and only a heart that belongs to God can become a vessel of faithfulness.

Finding ways to contemporize this story is difficult. When we think of modern-day religious leaders whom Jesus would criticize, we naturally turn to the charlatans on television who swindle billions of dollars away from vulnerable people in order to fly around in private jets and live in luxurious mansions. And, while it’s true that Jesus would certainly have had some not-nice things to say about them, I think it’s hard for us to appreciate how universally respected the religious leaders whom he calls out were. Jesus wasn’t calling out the televangelists who make most Christians cringe. He was singling out faithful icons who were held in the highest esteem across the religious culture—the sort of people who get invited to banquets, palaces, and inaugurations—and not just the inaugurations you aren’t excited about. 

Only those who dare to peel back the curtain and look beneath the power and trace back the lines of success to their origins are able to see what God sees. No matter how faithful someone looks or sounds, if they got where they are by stepping on the backs of vulnerable people, they are not the paragons of faithfulness that they seem to be. No matter how good and generous and successful a congregation, organization, or denomination is, if it was built on the subjugation of human beings or achieved its status by excluding people from the community of faith, it cannot be an institution of faithfulness until it grapples with its sinful past. And, if you want to see what God sees, you have to learn to notice where real expressions of faithfulness are made—those little gestures that most of us don’t have time for—the kind of faithful actions that come from people whom the world has forgotten to value but whose hearts belong to God.

The work of theological reflection is as important now as it has ever been, not only for participants in EfM but for all of us. We need to learn where to look for God’s presence among us and to hone our skills at recognizing how God shows up in a sinful world. We need to engage in the work of observational theology, and, to do that, we must equip ourselves by reading the Bible, coming to church, saying our prayers, remaining in community, and serving those in need. Those practices shape us into a people who can recognize and respond to what God is doing all around us. Thus, we practice our faith not to look good in anyone else’s eyes but to learn how to look at the world through the eyes of Jesus Christ.

Comfort and Confidence

 

November 3, 2024 – The Feast of All Saints

Isaiah 25:6-9; Revelation 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon is available here. Video can be seen here.

Not long ago, I was introduced to the term “emotional lability.” I was meeting with someone who started to tear up unexpectedly. As she reached for a tissue, she acknowledged that those tears had been a little closer to the surface of late, and she attributed it to being “emotionally labile.” 

Since I didn’t know anything about the clinical nature of that term, I initially heard it as something positive. The word “labile” means flexible, elastic, and malleable, which to me sounded like a good thing—as if it were a healthy way of being in touch with your emotions. Of course, the word “labile” also means unsteady and unstable, and it turns out that, in the clinical sense, that term is applied to people whose wild emotional swings have taken control of their lives. I don’t think the person I was with meant it in the clinical sense, but I wonder whether we might find a different way of talking about the nearness of emotional experience as a positive thing—maybe “emotional flexibility” or “accessibility.”

Standing outside the tomb of his friend Lazarus, Jesus wept. As a child, I learned that John 11:35 is the shortest verse in the bible, but it wasn’t until much later that I started to realize how profound and deep is the truth contained in those two little words: Jesus wept. We believe in a God who loves us and comes among us not as an invincible warrior who vanquishes our enemies but as tender companion who cries with us, suffers with us, and dies with us so that we might be raised with him to new life. That is the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Still, we wonder why Jesus wept. Lazarus, his friend, was dead. There’s no doubt about that. But, even from the beginning, there also seemed to be little doubt about how this story would end. From the opening verses of John 11, when Jesus first heard that his friend was sick, Jesus made it clear that Lazarus’ death would not have the final word. In his telling of the story, John stresses that, even though Jesus knew that Lazarus’ life was in danger, he stayed put for two more days in order to make sure that Lazarus had died before Jesus could get there to heal him. “For your sake I am glad I was not there,” Jesus told the disciples, “so that you may believe.” At every step, Jesus remained in control, as if he knew all along that his friend’s tragic death would be an opportunity to show his followers that he had the power to raise him from the dead. 

And, still, Jesus wept. He knew that he had the power to bring his friend back. He knew exactly what he would do. He knew that he would stand at that grave and cry out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” But, when Jesus saw Mary weeping, and when he saw the people who were with her also weeping, and when he came to the place where his friend had been buried, Jesus was overcome with emotion, and he joined them in their tears. 

God knows exactly how everything will work out. God knows that he will raise us from the dead and bring us to new and everlasting life. God knows that, because of Jesus Christ, death itself has been defeated and its sting has been robbed of all its power. And still God comes among us as one who weeps. Jesus loved Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus. Even though he had the power to overcome death and bring his friend back from the grave, he was not immune to the grief of his friends. He was not insulated from his own sense of loss. He felt it deeply, and he wept with his friends, real tears of pain and loss—the same tears we weep when our loved ones die.

I am comforted by Jesus’ tears—not only because his gesture of compassion provides me pastoral consolation but also because he shows us that, even though we know our loved ones will rise again, our grief is not a sign of faithlessness or defeat. Like Jesus, we are filled with sadness when someone we love dies, even though we know that God will bring them back, and that sadness does not displace our confidence in the power of God’s love. Like Jesus, we can experience both.

I am comforted by Jesus’ tears, but my confidence comes from something else. It has become fashionable in Christian preaching and teaching to talk about God as the one who suffers with us, who cries with us, who dies for us. And, while our faith is built upon the fact that God’s plan of salvation is accomplished through the death of God’s incarnate Son, who did suffer just as we do, it is God’s power that has triumphed over death once and for all. More than the mere companionship of a sympathetic friend, it is God’s victory over death that gives us hope, and we see that play out in Jesus’ exchange with Mary and Martha.

“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” Mary said to Jesus, repeating words that her sister Martha had said only a few verses before our reading picks up. Kneeling at his feet, she offered these words as a confession of faith. We might instinctively hear them as an expression of angst and defeat, but her posture suggests that she was attributing to Jesus a profound confidence in his ability to heal the sick. Similarly, some in the crowd asked whether the one who had the power to give sight to the blind would not also have been able to keep Lazarus from dying. With this repeated theme, John, the gospel writer, wants us to see that the people around Jesus were ready to believe in him, but they didn’t realize how far that belief could go.

When Jesus told them to roll away the stone that sealed shut Lazarus’ tomb, Martha objected, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” But Jesus replied, drawing from her and the crowd a faith not only in a Jesus who had the power to cure the sick but in one who had the power to raise the dead: “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” John finishes this episode with a triumphant description worthy of a Halloween script: “The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go.’”

Do we believe in a savior who can heal the sick or one who can raise the dead? Do we believe in a God who comforts us in our sorrow or one who defeats the forces of evil, which are the source of that sorrow? In Jesus Christ, we see that the answer is both. We are comforted by the one who is with us in our struggles, who experiences our pain and suffering, and who loves us from a place of vulnerability and weakness. And we are emboldened by the one whose suffering and death are the means by which death itself is defeated—the one who, although immune to the power of death, endured death in order to defeat it once and for all. We are moved by Jesus’ tears, and we are saved by his death and resurrection—saved by a God whose love is vulnerable yet whose power is triumphant.

Today is the feast of all the saints—all the people of God who have been buried with Christ in his death and who have been raised with him to new life. That’s you and me and the children of God who are being baptized today. And what does it mean to be a saint of God except to be able to see the world through the eyes of Jesus Christ? Sometimes those eyes are filled with tears because we are moved deeply by the pain and hurt that are all around us. But through those tears we also see the new life that awaits us and the whole world. We may need to be emotionally and spiritually flexible to experience the joy and the pain of life all at once, but Jesus has shown us that that is possible, and it is by following him that we learn how.

The Ending We Didn't Write

 

October 27, 2024 – The 23rd Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 25B

Job 42:1-6, 10-17; Hebrews 7:23-28; Mark 10:46-52

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon is available here. Video can be seen here.

Sometimes stories don’t have the endings we want, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get the ones we need.

On July 8, 2010, LeBron James used a 75-minute prime-time special to announce that he was “going to take [his] talents to South Beach and join the Miami Heat.” Although 13 million people tuned in to watch the announcement, relatively few left with any sense of satisfaction. Fans in Cleveland, where LeBron grew up and spent his first seven seasons in the NBA, felt betrayed. In New York, where Knicks’ fans believed they would win the LeBron sweepstakes, the thought of another decade of mediocracy led to outrage. Generally, except for those who lived in south Florida, “The Decision” was widely panned as a commercialized spectacle, which celebrated and promoted the entitlement of athletes.

Fourteen years later, after two championships in Miami, another back in Cleveland, and one in Los Angeles, a secret tape that was made to influence LeBron’s big decision has come to light. Rumors had long circulated that the New York Knicks produced a celebrity-filled video as part of their pitch to bring James to the Big Apple, but no one could verify it. The video had never been shown to the public until sportswriter Pablo Torre obtained a copy and released it. 

In the opening scene of the promotional video, James Gandolfini and Edie Falco reprise their roles from the HBO series The Sopranos as if they were living in New York under witness protection two years after the television series ended. Even if you never watched The Sopranos, you probably remember that the final scene of the final episode of the series cut to black, leaving the audience to guess what happened. It was highly controversial at the time. After six seasons, viewers wanted to know how it all ended, but the producers of the show wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. It came to be seen as one of the greatest television endings of all time, but, back then, not everyone was happy with how things worked out, but the Knicks didn’t make things any better

In much the same way, though for the opposite reason, it is hard to read the Book of Job and get any satisfaction from the way the story ends. After suffering the loss of his fortune, the agony of an illness, the death of his children, the desertion of his spouse, and the abandonment of society—and all for reasons Job cannot comprehend—God shows up and makes everything right by giving him twice as much money, ten new children, and totally renewed relationships with all the family and friends who had turned their backs on him. The only thing worse is seeing Tony and Carmela in their tiny New York City apartment two years after leaving the gangster life. To a post-modern reader, the so-called happy ending of Job cheapens the epic tale and effectively nullifies its theological message. Or does it? 

I’m not the only one who hates the way the story ends. In 1958, American playwright and poet, Archibald MacLeish, published J.B., a modern retelling of the Book of Job, with a very different ending. In the final scene of the play, Job’s wife, who earlier in the play encouraged her husband to commit suicide as an act of religious defiance, comes back to him. But, instead of accepting the simplistic restoration of their fortunes described in the biblical story, the Pulitzer-prize winning play depicts the couple clinging only to the near-extinct ember of love between them. “Blow on the coal of the heart,” Sarah says to J.B.. “The candles in the church are out. The lights have gone out in the sky. Blow on the coal of the heart, and we’ll see by and by…”

Instead of leaving the audience to wrestle with their questions about the nature of a God who would allow such unjustified suffering, the play brings those questions right onto the stage. In one sense, the result is a far more satisfying end to the story—one that acknowledges explicitly, with its unrefined conclusion, the irreconcilable theological problems presented by the Book of Job. But, in another way, the play misses the point entirely. Although it acknowledges how hard it is for us to experience inexplicable suffering, in the place of our only true hope, it offers an even cheaper substitute—the thought that the best we can do is endure life’s hardships with the companionship of a human partner, replacing the inscrutable God of the whirlwind with an idol made in our own image.

Surely the story of Job is more valuable than a cheap fairy tale. Surely our ancient spiritual ancestors wanted a better ending just as much as we do. Surely they recognized the inadequacy of a God who would throw money and new children at Job as if that were good enough. Maybe we should do them the favor of saving the book by cutting out the last eight verses. If the story ended with Job’s repentance—his return to God—and the rebuke of his friends for suggesting that bad things only happen to bad people, maybe we’d be left with a story we’d like—one that resists the urge to overexplain and instead just cuts to black. But isn’t that the point in the first place—that our preference for a conclusion that we would have written cannot replace the ending that God has given us without sacrificing our hope in God for a misplaced our hope in ourselves?

Maybe the ending of the Book of Job is a hook designed to catch us, the readers, in our own need for certainty, as sharp and subtle as the fishhook God uses to catch Leviathan. There’s a reason Job never attempts to answer the unanswerable questions about the nature of suffering—because the greatest danger we face is not the suffering itself but our desire to explain it in satisfactory ways. 

Job’s friends take turns explaining to him that a good and just God would never permit such bad things to happen to a righteous and upstanding person. Repent, they tell him, and everything will get better. But we know that’s not how God works. Job demands an audience with God, asserting that his lifetime of unequivocal righteousness has merited a hearing with the Almighty. But we know that even the holiest among us cannot plumb the fathomless depths of God’s mind. Elihu, the young prophet, rebukes Job’s friends for their shallow theology, and he also rebukes Job for failing to subscribe to the prophetic tradition, which teaches that God hears the cries of the oppressed as long as they humble themselves. But we know that all too often the desperate prayers of truly humble people do not receive the answers we think are right.

Whenever we fall into the temptation to seek our own perfect ending and suggest that we know why another person is suffering, we commit a grave sin. Whenever we decide that our plans for how and when something will work out are better than God’s, we commit a grave sin. The Book of Job is designed to teach us that it is dangerous, abusive, and disastrous when people, in the name of God, presume to speak with certainty on matters they cannot possibly understand. And the ending of the story is wholly unsatisfying in order to remind us that the temptation to speak for God is greatest among those who claim to know God the best.

As Sara preached last week, we believe in a God who abides with us in the midst of our suffering, even and especially when we cannot understand how. In the face of our lack of understanding, we may be tempted to exchange our God for one who makes sense to us or for no God at all. But, despite God’s unwillingness to conform to our expectations, God is not wholly hidden from us. The task of our faith is not the fruitless endeavor of pursuing an unknowable God but the unending journey of seeking the presence of the one who has revealed Godself to us in love. And that love does not condemn our suffering or discount it, but it redeems it as something holy and acceptable to God.

God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to the end that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. The way that leads to life everlasting does not avoid suffering but goes right through it. In ways that surpass our understanding, God shows us that our true hope is found in Jesus, the one who redeems our suffering by becoming our suffering. That’s an ending to the story that we could not have written on our own. That’s the good news of our faith—that our ending is neither what we expect nor what we deserve, and thanks be to God for that.

Pursuing Our Own Impossibility

 

October 13, 2024 – The 21st Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 23B

Job 23:1-9, 16-17; Hebrews 4:12-16; Mark 10:17-31

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

Have you seen the meme on social media that captures the exchange between two people, Musa (@muvilakazi) and Orpheus (@umcornell), in which the first states, “Money will not fix all of your problems,” and to which the second replies, “…no offense but money would solve literally every single one of my problems. like all of them?” Or maybe you’ve seen the meme that says, “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy a jet ski. Have you ever seen anyone sad on a jet ski?” Or, if you’re not into memes, maybe you’ve heard the saying from the business world that anything is possible, given enough time and money.  

Money makes the world go ‘round, but that doesn’t mean it rotates symmetrically. The chasm between the poor and the rich is growing faster and faster. According to the Pew Research Center, between 1970 and 2018, the median income for middle-class Americans grew by 49%. During that same period, the median income for lower-income households only grew by 43%, but—you guessed it—upper-income households saw an increase of 64%. Similarly, since 1991, the super-rich, defined as the top 5% of households, saw an average annual increase in their income of 4.1%, while the next 15% of the not-quite-so-super-rich saw income grow annually by 2.7%, and everyone else, the bottom 80%, saw an annual increase of only 1%. [1]

Is it any wonder, in a society in which things are getting harder for those who struggle to make ends meet while things are getting easier for those who don’t, that money has become our currency of hope? I wonder what Jesus would say to us—to our culture—if we were to fall down on our knees and ask him, “Good Teacher, what must we do to inherit eternal life?”

I don’t know if it’s comforting or discouraging to read in today’s gospel lesson that the problem of wealth is at least 2,000 years old. A man runs up to Jesus, kneels before him, and asks, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus then makes a big deal about the fact that the man had called him “good,” perhaps offering a prescribed rabbinical response designed to convey humility. But the man’s decision to call Jesus “good” is significant. It means that the man already recognizes Jesus as a religious authority—that he assumes that whatever teaching will come from the rabbi’s mouth will be of God and, thus, help him find what he seeks.

“What must I do to inherit eternal life?” The concept of inheritance was, in those days, a lot like it is today. In time, you will receive what has been set aside for you—your allotted share—not because you have earned it, as a worker earns their wages, but because you belong to a particular family. For the descendants of Abraham, the barrier between the material and the spiritual has always been permeable, and the idea of receiving an inheritance from God has been tied up in the hope for both the physical land promised to Abraham and the boundless security of dwelling forever in the presence of God. So, when this man asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, he wasn’t just interested in what it takes to get to heaven but also what is required to have a share in the coming messianic age.  

Jesus’ answer is shockingly traditional. “You know the commandments,” he said, “‘You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; Honor your father and mother.” Although it’s not a direct quotation of Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5, the answer Jesus gave is as familiar to the Jewish man as the names Moses and Elijah. If you want to inherit your share of God’s promises, Jesus seems to say, all you need to do is remain a part of God’s family, and you already know how to do that.

If the encounter ended there, the only problem this passage would present is the one posed to thoroughly Protestant preachers like myself, who would then be forced to reconcile Jesus’ emphasis on keeping the commandments with the sola fide (faith alone) foundation set forth in the letters of Paul. But that’s for another sermon because this encounter doesn’t end there. This man wants more—not more eternal life, not a bigger share of his inheritance. He wants to belong to God in a way that impacts his life now. He wants more than the familiar reminder of what it means to belong to God’s family. He’s kept all those commandments since his youth.  He wants to be a part of God’s kingdom, and he knows that Jesus is the one who can help him find it.

Jesus looked intently at the man and loved him—he agape-ed him—which is important. That lets us know that the man was serious and faithful and that Jesus was serious, too. This man wanted to be a disciple of Jesus, and Jesus saw within him the stuff from which disciples are made. There was just one thing missing—one thing that stood between this man and his full and vibrant participation in the messianic reign that God had promised: his wealth. “You lack one thing,” Jesus said. “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then, come follow me.”

“You lack one thing,” Jesus said. Do you know what your “one thing” is? If you asked Jesus what you needed to do in order to become a full participant in the reign of God and he looked deep into your soul and loved you, what would he tell you to give up? What one thing, more than anything else, stands in between you and the kingdom of God?

For most of us, the answer is money. We live in a world in which money is perceived to be the answer to life’s greatest problems. Those who have money feel powerful, if not invincible, and those who don’t feel especially vulnerable to whatever challenges life might bring. It’s worth noting that Jesus didn’t require all of his followers to take a vow of poverty, but he consistently taught that wealth is the greatest obstacle to our participation in God’s reign. The members of the early church took that teaching to heart, selling their private possessions and pooling their resources to be sure that no one was in need. Maybe that’s a vision for using our wealth to participate in the kingdom of God that we should reconsider. As R. H. Gundry wrote, “That Jesus did not command all his followers to sell all their possessions gives comfort only to the kind of people to whom he would issue that command.”[2] 

So what will give us comfort? I think the answer we need comes later in the story, when Jesus explains to his disciples what this difficult teaching is all about. After doubling-down by saying that “it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God,” Jesus gives his disciples a word of encouragement that puts everything into perspective. “Then who can be saved?” they ask him. And he looks at them with the same intensity with which he had beheld the eager man and says, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.”

Isn’t that precisely the place where the reign of God unfolds in our lives—in that space where what is impossible for us becomes possible in God? Doesn’t God’s kingdom always come in those gaps where our limitations are superseded by God’s infinite goodness, power, and love? That’s always the place where God enters in—not in the spaces filled up by our strength but in the emptiness opened up by our weakness—by our very dependence on God. The problem, therefore, isn’t simply our wealth but what our wealth inevitably fools us into thinking—into thinking that it’s our strength, our effort, and our ability that will save us. But that’s never the case. And that’s exactly the kind of thinking that stands between us and God’s reign.

When Jesus looks into our hearts and loves us, he sees what stands in the way of our full participation in the divine life. And he bids us to let go of whatever it is that makes us think that we are our own best hope. We’re not. God is. God has promised to bring us into full, abundant, and eternal life, and all we have to do is get out of the way. We must learn to accept, embrace, and even pursue that place where our impossibility becomes God’s triumph—where our misplaced faith in ourselves can be replanted into the fertile soil of faith in God. Whatever it takes to learn that truth—whatever it takes for us to know that we belong to the God whose power is made perfect in our weakness—we must pursue with all our hearts. You only lack one thing, Jesus says to us. May God give us the grace to accept it.

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1. J. M. Horowitz, R. Igielnik, and R. Kochar, “Trends in Income and Wealth Inequality,” Pew Research Center, 9 January 2020: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/.

2. R. H. Gundry, Matthew, 388, quoted in R. T. France, The Gospel of Mark; Eerdmans: 2002, 400.

A Banquet of Reversal

 

September 29, 2024 – The 19th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 21B

Esther 7:1-6, 9-10; 9:20-22; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video is available here.

I love the Book of Esther, and I think I love it most because it’s unlike any other book in the Bible. There are important theological lessons to be gleaned from the text, for sure, but it’s presented more like a soap opera or a farce than a traditional biblical narrative. The book includes ten short chapters, designed to be read aloud in one raucous sitting, and it’s the sort of script we’d expect Eugene or Dan Levy to write, not Moses or one of the prophets. 

The Book of Esther is the story of God’s people living in a foreign land. Set in the fifth century BC, it recalls a time when some of the Jewish people had settled in Persia, where they sought to maintain their identity despite living within the vast and powerful Achaemenid Empire. Scholars often note that nowhere in the entire book is God ever mentioned, effectively forcing the community of faith to search the story for God’s presence when it does not present itself in traditional ways. If you say Morning Prayer each day, you’ve noticed that readings from Esther have been featured lately, but our Sunday lectionary cycle only includes a reading from Esther once—on this day—so I don’t get a lot of chances to preach on the text, and today, instead of focusing on the search for God in story, I want to talk about parties. 

Esther is a tale of parties. In the relatively brief text, there are ten different banquets that take place. They effectively serve as the glue that holds the story together and the channel through which most of the interesting action takes place. The book opens with a six-month-long debaucherous feast that King Ahasuerus threw for his officials and ministers to celebrate his own greatness, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about King Ahasuerus. 

Then there’s the seven-day banquet the king threw for the residents of the capital city as soon as the six-month banquet was finished. After seven days of drunkenness, we are told that the king commanded that Queen Vashti come and display herself to the king and his guests so that they could admire her beauty. But the queen refused. She was not an object for their delight. She was a woman, powerful and independent. She had already thrown her own banquet for the noble women of the kingdom, and she was not about to parade around to amuse some drunken men. 

As you would expect from a man like Ahasuerus, the king was enraged, and so were his officials. One of his chief advisors said to the king, “Not only has Queen Vashti done wrong to the king, but also to all the officials and all the peoples who are in all the provinces of King Ahasuerus. For this deed of the queen will be made known to all women, causing them to look with contempt on their husbands” (1:16-17). A kingdom that is built upon misogynistic power, we are shown, cannot withstand the threat of a strong-willed woman, so the king did what kings like that are wont to do: he published an edict that banned Vashti from his presence and that declared “that every man should be master in his own house” (1:22). Like I said, it’s a script worthy of a series like Schitt’s Creek. 

After conducting a national beauty pageant, the king selected Esther to be his new bride. Although she was Jewish, the adopted daughter of her cousin Mordecai, a leader among his people, she kept her ethnicity a secret at her cousin’s suggestion. Thus, when the king threw a banquet to celebrate his new queen, the reader can already anticipate the significance of a member of the Jewish diaspora assuming a position of national leadership in a kingdom that was not her own.

The story takes the dark turn we expect at yet another banquet. This time, the king and his chief advisor, the wicked Haman, sat down to dine together and issue a royal edict commanding the annihilation of the Jewish people in Persia. Haman persuaded the hapless king to command the genocide because he was furious that Mordecai repeatedly refused to bow down to him. When Haman learned that Mordecai was Jewish, the Bible tells us, “he thought it beneath him to lay hands on Mordecai alone. So, having been told who Mordecai’s people were, Haman plotted to destroy all the Jews, the people of Mordecai, throughout the whole kingdom of Ahasuerus” (3:6).

Only at the banquet we hear about in today’s reading—the second in a row that Queen Esther hosted for the king and Haman—is the wicked plot revealed. The story includes lots of twists and turns that both the lectionary and I must skip over, but suffice it to say that Haman is undone by his own hubris and by Esther’s bravery and by a heavy-handed dose of irony that makes it clear this story belongs in paperback. “Look,” another of the king’s advisors declared, “the very gallows that Haman has prepared for Mordecai, whose word saved the king, stands at Haman's house, fifty cubits high.” And the king said, “Hang him on that” (7:9).

But, even with the death of the antagonist, the series of banquets is not yet finished. That’s because the genocidal edict that threatened the Jewish people across the kingdom of Persia could not be repealed. In a strange layer of internal commentary on the nature of law itself, according to the Book of Esther, once the Persian king issued an official edict it could never be changed. So, after elevating Mordecai to the position formerly held by Haman, the king needed to be persuaded to issue a contravening declaration—one that would protect God’s people from the mobs that had begun to assemble to exterminate them.

Having learned nothing from his mistakes, the king handed over to Mordecai the authority to draft, seal, and publish a new edict, one that permitted the Jewish people in every city across the land [quote] “to assemble and defend their lives, to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate any armed force of any people or province that might attack them, with their children and women, and to plunder their goods” (8:11). Although God’s people were careful not to take any of the plunder—it seems they had learned their lesson from back when King Saul made a similar mistake in 1 Samuel 15—they killed 500 people in the capital city and 75,000 people across the land. Historians think that 75,000 is a fair estimate of the number of Jews living in Persia at the time, so one might say that their preemptive slaughter was a gesture of balance, though it also begs the question whether any law that condones violence could ever be justified. 

To celebrate their deliverance, God’s people held banquets throughout the empire. The feast of Purim, which is observed every spring, right before Passover, is a reminder not only of the time when Esther and Mordecai saved God’s people but also that the threat of their destruction does not go away when a single enemy is defeated. Even the name of the feast itself—Purim—comes from a word that means “lot,” as in the lot that Haman cast to determine the day when the Jews would be murdered. Each banquet in the story presents another reversal of fortune, and the final banquet, while a celebration of the Jewish people’s miraculous deliverance from near-certain genocide, also contains in its very name a reminder of how real the threat remains.

I wonder, though, whether Christians can hear this story—this amusing and farcical tale designed to entertain as much as educate—and draw from it a different message without undermining the importance of its original Jewish context. I wonder whether we might reinterpret the Book of Esther by reading it alongside the story of our own banquet, the Eucharist, where we, too, experience a reversal of fortune.

In his commentary, Sam Wells wrote about the Book of Esther,  

An invitation to a banquet is an invitation to a political reversal. Here the implications for Christian liturgy become evident. It begs the question, is the Christian Eucharist such a banquet— such a repeated, interactive, reading-and-performing rehearsal of reversal? The Eucharist should be the place and time where Christians recall that God has put down the mighty from their seats and exalted the humble and meek— and that God, the mighty, has come down from that seat and become humble and meek so that we, if we are humble and meek, might, through the power of his Spirit, become mighty. This should be the place and time where Christians celebrate that greatest of all reversals and where they reenact the death and resurrection of Christ, the definitive reversal gently anticipated in the mission of Esther. [1]

To conclude, I want to take Sam Wells’ observation a step further. In the eucharistic banquet, we encounter the ultimate and final reversal of the cosmos. There is no going back. Death has been defeated. Sin has been put away. Our unity with God has been restored. But that great reversal comes not because our protagonist has been spared the pain of death but because he has embraced it. And that means that the path that leads to our salvation must also take us through the grave and gate of death before we can enter the joyful resurrection that awaits. And, if God has used the death of God’s Son to achieve for us the ultimate victory over death, that means that death itself is no longer a threat. Because of Christ, it has been robbed of is sting.

Whenever we celebrate the Eucharist, which we do here today, we not only recall Christ’s death and resurrection, we reenact them by partaking in Christ’s body and blood. This is, as Sam Wells suggested, a “reading-and-performing rehearsal of reversal,” but it is also the place where we submit our own lives to Christ’s death on the cross so that we, being one with him, might find new life. If we come to Communion expecting anything less than our full participation in the complete and total reversal of the world through our own death and resurrection, then we aren’t doing this banquet justice. 

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1. Wells, Samuel; Sumner, George. Esther & Daniel; Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible; Baker Publishing Group, Kindle Edition: Kindle Locations 2127-2135.

Childish Ways

 

September 22, 2024 – The 18th Sunday after Pentecost: Proper 20B

Proverbs 31:10-31; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37

© 2024 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

On January 1, 1965, the undefeated Arkansas Razorbacks strode into the Cotton Bowl with something to prove. It had been five years since the Razorbacks’ last bowl victory, and they hadn’t finished a season undefeated since 1909. Further aggravating Frank Broyles’ team, the Associated Press and the UPI Coach’s Poll had released their end-of-the-season polls earlier in December, and both had declared the also-undefeated Alabama Crimson Tide as the national champion. In short, there was nothing Arkansas could do to take that title away from Alabama—except prove that they deserved it anyway.

As the Southwestern Conference champions, Arkansas faced off against the Big Eight champion Nebraska Cornhuskers in Dallas, Texas, while down in Miami, Florida, the SEC champion Crimson Tide played against Arkansas’ rival, the Texas Longhorns, in the Orange Bowl. Earlier in the season, Arkansas had defeated Texas 14-13 with a goal-line stand on a failed two-point conversion at Texas Memorial Stadium in Austin. In their game against Nebraska, Arkansas came from behind in the fourth quarter to win 10-7 and remain undefeated. Alabama didn’t fare as well. Texas got out to an early lead and then hung on to beat the Tide 21-17.

It wasn’t hard to argue that Arkansas should have been the unequivocal national champion. In fact, in all the polls released after the bowl games had been played, Arkansas was a clear #1. But even more than that, the transitive property of college football—a favorite among mid-sized-school fan bases—made the true outcome clear. Arkansas had beaten Texas. Texas then beat Alabama. Even though Alabama and Arkansas never played each other, the transitive property leaves virtually no doubt what would have happened if they did. But that didn’t stop Alabama from claiming 1964 as one of their so-called eighteen national championships. For what it’s worth, it was the last time the AP released its final poll before the bowl games had been played, so I guess you could say Jerry Jones’ Razorbacks won a moral victory as well.

In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus introduces a transitive property of his own: “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” In other words, by that property, those of us who want to welcome God into our hearts should start by welcoming and honoring the children among us. Of course, Jesus is using a nearby child to make a point. The act of welcoming a child is a metaphor for the importance of humility and a reminder of the value of seeking out and including the least among us. But let’s not leave the realm of the literal too quickly. There’s more to that transitive property than a preacher’s analogy. There is something about a child that expresses the divine nature more clearly than those of us who prefer the company of adults are likely to see. 

It’s clear from the start of this episode that Jesus is trying to get his point across to the disciples but failing miserably. Last week, we heard Jesus predict his passion and death for the first time. After asking the disciples who they thought that he was, Peter said, “You are the Messiah.” And in response, Jesus began to teach them that, as the Messiah, he must undergo great suffering, be rejected by the leaders of his people, be killed, and on the third day be raised from the dead.

Understandably, this was more than the disciples were ready to handle. They believed that Jesus was the one whom God had sent to redeem God’s people from the tyranny of Rome, but Jesus was telling them that the redemption God had promised would only come through his suffering and death. “Lord, this must never happen to you!” Peter exclaimed with well-intentioned disbelief, but Jesus then set the record straight, rebuking Peter and saying, “Get behind me Satan.” 

That was last week. This week, at the beginning of the gospel lesson, we see that Jesus and the disciples are making their way through Galilee, their home territory, but Jesus doesn’t want anyone to know it because he’s still teaching his disciples that the road ahead will lead to suffering and they still aren’t getting the point. To illustrate the extent of their lack of understanding, Mark recalls for us that, as soon as Jesus finishes explaining that he will be betrayed, killed, and, three days later, raised from the dead, the disciples begin arguing with each other about which one of them is the greatest. Later, when Jesus asks them what they were arguing about, no one says a word because, even if they don’t understand what Jesus was trying to teach them, the disciples know enough to know that that wouldn’t get them any compliments from their teacher.

Looking around the house where they were staying, Jesus sees something that will help him get his point across—a child. Picking up the little child and holding it in his arms, Jesus says to the disciples, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” Jesus recognizes that this child is the lens through which the nature of God and God’s Messiah come into focus. 

This is the child who would rather play with the box and the wrapping paper than the present that is wrapped inside. This is the child who doesn’t care what kind of car her mother drives to pick her up from daycare because all she wants is to be held in her mother’s arms. This is the child who does not need a priest or a rabbi to explain why God’s greatest victory must be accomplished by the one who gives up his life for the sake of the world. And this is the child who knows instinctively that, if God loves us like that, we, too, must love one another in the same way, even if it costs us our lives. 

You don’t have to explain those things to a little child. A child knows them because a child knows that true love beckons from us true love’s reply. And Jesus knows that, if those of us who are all grown up are ever going to remember what it’s like to believe that love is the only thing in this world that matters, we need to learn what that little child will teach us.

I have a feeling that Mark didn’t include the story of the disciples’ failure to understand Jesus’ teaching about suffering and death because he wanted us to laugh at the disciples’ foolishness or marvel at their stupidity. I think he wanted us to realize that this won’t be easy for us to understand either. We might not have as much trouble as they did recognizing that Jesus’ death is how God wins God’s victory over sin and death, but what that victory means for us in this life is a different story. Even on this side of the empty tomb, with confidence that the defeat of Good Friday will always lead to the joy of Easter, we still struggle to grasp what it means for us to believe in a savior who died for our sake. Unlike Peter and the disciples, we might begin to wrap our minds around Jesus’ selfless act, but it’s just as hard for us to accept that the path of suffering and death must be ours as well.

It's one thing to believe that the cross of Christ is a façade behind which the glory of God is hidden, but it’s another thing entirely to believe that the cross of Christ is the glory of God in its perfection. Jesus did not die for your sins so that you could be immune from suffering, pain, and death. He died so that the way of suffering, pain, and death, which you must walk in his name, will lead to life and love and peace. 

Jesus’ death is the means by which God brings life to the world. Jesus’ suffering is how God redeems the suffering of all people. If we really believe that, why do we struggle to accept that those who proclaim Jesus as their savior must suffer and die, too? Why is it so hard for us to understand that “whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all?” Somewhere along the way, we forgot that love is the only thing that matters in this life. It’s the littlest children in our midst who can help us remember it.