Who is my neighbor?

Who is my neighbor? A sermon for St John the Baptist Episcopal Church, Portage, Wis., and Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis. Fifth Sunday After Pentecost | Proper 10, Year C | July 14, 2019 Amos 7:7-17 | Psalm 82 | Colossians 1:1-14 | Luke 10:25-37

The teacher of the law wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, "And who is my neighbor?"

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: Amen. 

It figures. The lawyer was asking fake questions so that he could make himself look good. 

He asks the question, "Who is my neighbor?" so that he can figure out what the limits are, so that he can know which people it's okay for him not to love. 

And Jesus tells him what has come to be called the parable of the Good Samaritan. A man goes down the road from Jerusalem towards Jericho. It's a downhill road. A curving road, with hills on both sides. You can't see very far in front of you. It's a great place for an ambush. If you go to Palestine today, people will pop out of those curves offering to sell you sunglasses. But in Jesus day, the people who popped out from behind the curves were thieves and bandits. 

Our man from Jerusalem is making his way down this road when the thieves and bandits attack him. They take his clothes, beat him up and leave him for dead. He's lying there, barely alive, when a priest comes down the road. He sees the man, and he crosses to the other side of the road.

Pause. Now it might be one thing if he didn't see the man, but the story clearly says he does, so he intentionally walks around the man who is hurt. It's also worth noting that the priest is not being a jerk. Priests were set aside for the whole community of Israel, so that the whole community of Israel could worship in the temple. If the priest had come to offer aid to the traveler and become ritually unclean, he would have been unable to enter the temple to complete his duties on behalf of the people. 

Unpause. Now a member of the tribe of Levi, the tribe of Israel from which priests came. The Levite came down the road and also saw the man, and he also crossed to the other side of the road. 

And then a Samaritan comes down the road. 

Pause.

Samaritans are enemies of Israel. Some 200 years before this story, an Israelite army under the command of Judas Maccabeus went into Samaritan territory and destroyed the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerazim. The Samaritans traced their ancestors back to Israelites some 800 years before, but they had signfiicantly intermarried. In the eyes of the Israelites, they were half-breeds and heretics, and they were worthy of being destroyed. In other words, there had been significant interreligious violence between the people of Israel and the Samaritans. 

So, thus far in the story, we have two Jews, members of the people of Israel, pass by the injured Jewish man on the road. Now enter the Samaritan. 

Unpause. 

The Samaritan comes down the road and sees the man lying in the road. The people listening to Jesus could almost imagine his thoughts: "An enemy of my people! An oppressor whose country destroyed our temple! A war criminal! A person who, if we allowed him into Samaria, would no doubt be a very bad hombre who would murder us all in our beds." 

But the Samaritan doesn't seem to think of any of those things. The story tells us that he sees him, just as the priest and the Levite saw him. But unlike the Jews who passed the man by, the Samaritan stops and takes pity on him. He bandages his wounds and pours oil and wine on him - in a world with no neosporin and no rubbing alcohol, oil was a salve and the alcohol in wine was a cleaning agent. Then he puts the man on his own donkey, takes him to an inn, pays the bills, and arranges for the man to be cared for. 

Jesus says, "Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man?"

Clearly, it's the Samaritan. 

And now let's stand back from the story and ask a very important question: where are we in this story? What character do we think we are? What character do we identify with? 

The character we probably want to identify with is the Samaritan. We want to be the people who would see the injured man and react. 

But I suspect that if we were honest, we actually would find ourselves in other places in the story. 

Last Sunday night, as we were leaving the fairgrounds after a training for the County Fair info booth and nursing tent that we have been operating this week, we turned on to Washington Street just outside the fairgrounds and noticed an elderly woman standing on the corner looking a little confused. Our kids were at home with a babysitters, and we were trying to get back on time so that we would be back when we said we were going to be back. We obviously want their parents to continue to trust us to be home when we say we're going to be. 

So when Elizabeth turned to me and asked about whether we should perhaps stop and see if the woman was alright, I made noises getting home on time and that the lady was probably out for a walk. 

But I've wondered ever since. When I read this story, I wonder how many times I've been the one to pass by. 

But I think it's more likely that the person Luke wants us to identify with is actually the man in the ditch himself. 

We are people who struggle with sin and evil and brokenness. We have at times made terrible life decisions that have led us places we never expected to go, places where we thought we were far from God. We have been broken down and beaten up by life, and we find ourselves lying by the side of the road, waiting for someone to have mercy on us, for someone to save us from ourselves, from our own bad choices, from tragedy, from our own pain and brokenness. 

The help we needed came from where we least expected it. The help we needed came from a crucified messiah, an executed criminal, an insignificant peasant who lived in a different time and a different place, who didn't speak English, who wasn't famous or rich or powerful. The help came from the one who was put to death by a Roman proconsul named Pontius Pilate in Judea, in what's now Palestine, in the first century AD.

You wouldn't expect help from someone who's been dead for so long. You wouldn't expect to be delivered from sin and brokenness by someone who lived so long ago and so far away. You wouldn't expect someone who should have been forgotten long ago to be able to reach into the deepest darkness of your life and bring you healing and peace. 

But Jesus is alive. God raised him from the dead and sends him through the Holy Spirit into every place and time to look for those battered along the roads of life to bring them healing and joy. 

There is nothing that we can do to deserve it. Jesus' healing is God's demonstration of mercy towards us. We can't justify ourselves. We can't earn it. We don't deserve it, and yet Jesus comes to us anyway. 

We are the undeserving poor, lying beaten on the side of the road. But thanks be to God, Jesus took the distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor to the cross. There is nothing we can do to be deserving. Jesus heals us. We're not worthy. It's a gift. 

You may think this is all a little silly, imagining where we fit into this story. It's only a story, what difference does it make which character we think we are? But here's why it matters: if we can't see ourselves as the undeserving injured man lying on the side of the road, we might not be able to see people that Jesus has called us to serve. 

We might see them, alright, but we might look right past them, because we're too worried about the circumstances of our lives. We might look right past them because they're inconvenient, because they would take up too much time and the babysitter is waiting. We might look past them because we think they're only undeserving, and we only help people who have a job and who don't make bad decisions and aren't strung out on heroin. 

But when we experience the mercy of Jesus deep down in our bones, we know that we don't deserve it anymore than anybody else. That mercy opens our eyes, and lets us see who we are supposed to serve. 

God's mercy lets us see the undocumented immigrants who don't speak English who are scared to death this morning that ICE is going to turn up at their door and take their parents away. 

God's mercy lets us see the lonely and confused elderly people who take so much time and effort and who repeat the same stories over and over again and don't even remember your name. 

God's mercy lets us see the child who has been sitting in a detention facility for a month screaming for mama and papa, with no toothbrushes or hugs or blankets.  

And having seen them, God's mercy to us helps us to show mercy to others. It's not enough simply to see them - the priest and the levite saw the man lying in the road, but they went away, trying to justify themselves. But Jesus calls us to love our neighbor, just as Jesus has loved us. 

When Jesus, the Good Samaritan, picked us up out of the road, he didn't worry about whether we deserved it. He didn't worry about whether we believed in him or in some other God. He didn't worry about whether our situation had been made up by the news media in order to criticize the President. He simply saw us lying in the road. He saw us hurting. He gave us first aid. He put us on his donkey and took us to a warm bed, and put it on his own tab with the innkeeper. 

Thanks be to God that Jesus did not wait until we were deserving to help us. Thanks be to God that Jesus helped us even though we were undeserving. Thanks be to God that Jesus transferred us out of the kingdom of darkness and into the kingdom of his beloved son, so that we could receive eyes to see the darkness in the world around us, and, having seen the pain, bring the mercy of God to it.

This is the Sunday sermon from Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis, from Sunday, May 6, 2018, preached by the Rev. Dave Mowers. 

It’s based the Scripture found in John 15:9-17, especially verse 11. 

The manuscript for the sermon can be read here.

Joy to the World

Joy to the World A sermon for St John the Baptist Episcopal Church, Portage, Wis., and Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis. VI Easter | May 6, 2018 | Year B Acts 10:44-48 | Psalm 98 | I John 5:1-6 | John 15:9-17

If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. In the name of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. Where is your home? Easy question. I live in the yellow house, half a block that way. Where is your home? You all just thought about your address. Easy question, easy answer? And now you're all thinking, "If I had known Father's sermon was going to be this good today, I would have stayed in bed!" But really. Where is your home? When you tell people, I'm going home, sometimes you mean that you're going to the place you grew up. Sometimes you mean that you're going to the very house you were raised in. And that place, that town, that city, that you grew up in, is still what you think of as home. Some of us are young enough to still be living in that house, or in that town, with our parents nearby. But even for the teenagers among us, some of you got dragged along to Baraboo from some other place, and even you look back at what you had in that other town, in that other house, and there's a part of you that wishes that you could go back to that other home. For those of us who look back with fondness on a particular home or hometown, it's common to feel a little bit homeless. When I go back to that sleepy little town in Northern Illinois where I was literally born and raised, I'm confronted by the fact that I've only been gone for 15 years. The house I was literally born in and lived for my entire childhood was sold five years ago, after we buried my father in a country cemetery at the edge of a farm field alongside Mowers Road in rural De Kalb County, Illinois, a farm field that had been part of the original 40 acres given to my great-great-great grandfather Aaron in the Homestead Act. My roots in that land go deep, but I can never go home again. Even when I park my car in the driveway of the house I grew up in, as I did so many times, it's not the same. And it never will be the same. Others of us didn't grow up in that kind of home. Some of us grew up in places where our fathers beat the tar out of us, or were drunk all the time, or were just absent. Some of us grew up with domineering mothers who continue to dominate us even though they've been dead for decades. Some of us were bullied so much in school that we couldn't wait to get out of town, or had to change schools, or thought about suicide. I was reading something else this week when I stumbled across a tweet about someone's high school commencement ceremony. He said, "I was standing next to some friends waiting for the ceremony to start when the girl next to me turned to a group of her friends and said, "Oh my gosh, guys, what if we start to grow apart?" I leaned into their conversation and said, "Grow apart? After this moment, I am never going to see you again for the rest of my life." [pause] A prominent young newspaper columnist responded to the story by recounting how she had skipped her own high school commencement exercise because it didn't matter either way to her parents, so as she walked out of school on the last day of her senior year, she threw her student ID, her notebook, and her day timer into a swampy ditch in the school parking lot. And that's what some of us would like to do with the places we think of as home. We'd like them to rot at the bottom of a swampy ditch on the edge of a parking lot. We're a little jealous of the people who look back at high school, or at the hometown we grew up in, or the parents who raised us, with any kind of fondness, because we couldn't wait to get out, and we never wanted to go back. So what do we do with this wistful longing to go back to homes we loved, or with the anger and disappointment that comes from not having had a home to love and be loved? Jesus uses a word we do not often use in today's gospel reading, and I think that makes it harder than usual to understand, and that word is abide. "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love," he says. It wasn't until late in the week when I remembered that Dr. Hamburg had preached on this very word in last week's gospel reading, and that the way Jesus uses this word means that he wants us to make our permanent homes in him. If you keep your commandments, you will make your permanent home in my love. All of you who yearn for loving homes that you have lost, make your permanent home in my love. All of you who want to fling your memories of home into a swampy ditch, make your permanent home in my love. That sounds wonderful, of course. Who wouldn't want to make their home in Jesus' love, a love that willingly sacrificed everything imaginable for another? Who wouldn't want to make their home in Jesus' love, a love which promises to endure everything forever? But if you're like me, that's not what you notice when I read that phrase. When I say, "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love," you notice that pesky little if. "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love." The first time I read it, I thought what Jesus was saying was that we would make our permanent home in his love only if we did what he said, and that way of reading that phrase robs it of all of the joy of its promise. That's the same if that a lot of us have heard. "You'll be worthy of love if you don't smoke, drink, or go with girls that do." "You'll be worthy of staying in this house if you go and get yourself a job," "You'll be worthy of love if you go to church," "You'll be worthy of love if you stop being a drunk," "You'll be worthy of love if you stop being gay,'' If we're good little boys and girls and do the right thing and look the right way and have our stuff together, then and only then will we be able to abide in Jesus love. If we want to abide in Jesus' love all we have to do is try harder, pray more, come to church, and of course give plenty in the offering plate. If we want to abide in Jesus' love, all we have to do is get angry about the injustices in our world, put on our funny hats and go to the protest, call our legislators and work for liberty and justice for all. But that is conditional love, and conditional love is not love at all. Conditional love has no power to change anything. Jesus doesn't tell anybody to try harder to earn his love. No matter how much doubt we have. No matter how much melancholy, no matter how much we drink when no one else is watching. No matter how many skeletons live in our closets. Jesus wants us to make our permanent home in his love, because he has already made his permanent home in us. No matter how much we long for a home that we long since have left behind. No matter how much we long for any kind of loving home. No matter what. Jesus wants nothing more from you than to love him. Jesus loves you, no matter what. As a mother rocks a sleeping baby close to her heart in the middle of the night, wanting nothing at all from that baby to earn the mother's love, so God in Jesus Christ holds us close to his heart. No matter what we've done. No matter how little faith we have. No matter how many times we've missed church. No matter how many times we've been high, or cheated on our spouse, or otherwise damaged ourselves. Jesus has come to Earth as a human being to make his permanent home with us so that we could find the home we've been longing for in him. 

And when we find our home in Jesus, something strange happens: we long to keep his commandments. Not as a way of trying harder, not as a way of trying to prove how worthy we are. Jesus has already proven how worthy we are to be loved by going to the cross and dying for us. Our worthiness to be loved is established forever in the cross. We don't have to change the world, because Jesus has already changed the world. We are not the agents through which that change happens, we are participants who get to share in the mission of loving our enemies, of praying for those who irritate and annoy and persecute us, of bringing the joy that Jesus has in each of his children to others. That is, after all, the point of Jesus' mission, and the point of Christianity: The mission of Jesus is to make our joy complete. To give us hearts and homes that know and feel that we are worthy of God's love because Jesus has made us worthy. Jesus has come down from heaven and gone into the swampy ditches of our lives to pick us up, and as we dripped stinky water all over him, he carries us out of that ditch. He doesn't mind the smell. He doesn't mind that we weren't where we should have been. He doesn't mind that we would rather have been miserable than let ourselves be loved. None of that matters. When he turns the corner into the parking lot, he looks across that empty expanse and sees us, and he doesn't just pull in and park and sit in his car. He gets out of his car and comes towards us. And he is not walking. He is running. He is running to us. He is running to us to get us from the ditch. He is running to us to get us from the ditch and to tell us that the playground is that way. He is running to get us from the ditch and to tell us that the playground is that way and that we are loved. And he does all this because he wants our joy to be complete. He does all this because he wants his people to not be at home in this world, to be at home amidst the false security of 2.5 children and minivans and white picket fences and 401k plans, but to be at home in the gift of love that he has given the world in the cross. He has made his home in us, in the midst of all of our swamp water, so that we can be home in him. Joy to the world! The Lord is come; Let Earth receive her king. Let every heart prepare room and heaven and nature sing, for he is our home, for he is our joy, for he is our life. 

In the name of the risen Lord, Jesus Christ -- Amen.

“Weird John” is the Sunday sermon from December 17, 2017 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis., preached by the Rev. Dave Mowers. 

The text for this sermon is John 1:6-8, 19-28. 

The full manuscript for this sermon can be found here. 

Weird John

Weird John A sermon for Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis.  III Sunday of Advent | Year B | December 14, 2017 Isaiah 61:1-4, 6-8 | Luke 1:46-55b | I Thessalonians 5:16-24 | John 1:6-8, 19-28 

I. 

It's December. Everywhere we go, there's Christmas music playing. The square is filled with elves on shelves, with Christmas trees in storefronts and above the marquee of the Al. Ringing. There are Christmas parties, Christmas concerts, lists of Christmas cards that need to be addressed and mailed before, you know, Christmas actually arrives. 

And we're here again, for the third Sunday in a row, sitting in a church that is basically undecorated, singing obscure hymns most of us struggle to remember from the last time we sang them, last Advent. 

Our readings this morning have nothing to do with Christmas either. You might expect that the people who determine what Scriptures we read on Sunday might throw us a bone in December, that they might give us a glimpse of at least one angel singing, one shepherd keeping watch by night. 

Instead, on this Sunday just eight days from Christmas, we get only this mysterious witness: A man sent from God whose name was John, sent to testify through the light. 

Even when the priests and Levites come from Jerusalem to give John the third degree, we still don't get anything about Christmas. They ask him who he is, and all he tells them is that he's nobody important. The only thing he really says is that he is the voice. He's just a witness, called to the stand to testify to the facts of the case. He has one job, and that job is to point at someone else, someone that the priests and Levites don't recognize. This is ironic, because priests are supposed to be smart when it comes to religion. They're supposed to be able to recognize God, and they're supposed to be able to point out where God is at work. Instead, John tells these priests that among them stands one who they do not know, the one who is coming after John, the one whose shoelace John is not worthy to untie. No angels. No shepherds. No Linus reading the Christmas story. Just John, out in the wilderness, the one sent from God to testify. We want angels singing and wise men kneeling and all we get is a guy who calls himself The Voice.

The Voice cries out that it's time to make straight the way of the Lord, a reference to Isaiah 40, a passage we heard read and preached on two weeks ago. Make straight the way of the Lord is a literal command: build a road, and make it straight. Take out the potholes, level off the bumps, because the King is coming to lead his people home from exile in a victory parade across the desert. John's announcement is that a King he calls "the light of the world" is coming soon. 

This is not the Christmas story we're accustomed to hearing. 

II. 

What kind of a weird Christmas story is this?

A few days ago I made the mistake of saying that there wasn't as much public grousing about Christmas this year as there had been in previous years. I don't know if it's the fact that our family has endured several rounds of illness in the last two months, or if it's the fact that we watch no cable television, or if it's another reason, but let me stand here in this pulpit as your priest and say:

I was wrong. 

I was wrong because there are lots of people upset about whether people are saying Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas. For the third year in a row, people are mad on the Internet about the design of Starbucks' holiday coffee cups. I've learned that cable news blares away with wall-to-wall coverage about the war on Christmas, about our need to defend Christmas from the onslaught of secular political correctness. As Amy Sullivan in a column called "Have a Very Merry War on Christmas" in the New York Times yesterday, "[This worldview] imbues secular practices like shopping for gifts with religious significance," as though it is blasphemous for us to have a cashier at Costco say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" to us while we're out shopping. Lots of folks seem to be worried that Christmas has been on the way out, has been watered down. In the neighborhood around the church, I saw a sign yesterday: Keep Christ in Christmas. I'm not sure what it would look like for Jesus not to be a part of Christmas, but it wouldn't mean that the Costco cashier said Happy Holidays to me. 

Meanwhile, the reality for most of us is that December is so crazy, we barely even get moments to breathe. We have so many gifts to buy for that relative we don't really like but who got us a present last year. We've got to get the house cleaned so that Aunt Leslie doesn't make comments  about how filthy we are like last year. Oh, and she's bringing Uncle Frank too. Hopefully he doesn't get quite as drunk at dinner as last year. It's worse for some of us who don't have to worry about hosting. Instead of getting our house cleaned up, we have to try to show up to our family's Christmas, our spouse's family Christmas, visit our spouse's grandparents who are too infirm to travel for Christmas, and somehow juggle our kids' naptimes, bedtimes and wants to just stay home and play with their new toys. When we get to the end of all that and we pull ourselves out of bed, bleary-eyed on our first day of work after Christmas is over, do we look back and think, "All that exhaustion was so worth it. We treasured that time with our angry sister-in-law and her entitled children, and we can't wait to do it again next Christmas." 

Yeah, that's what I thought. 

III.

What the pundits miss is that Christmas doesn't need us to defend it. It doesn't matter whether people say Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. It doesn't matter whether a coffee shop's cups have Santa Claus on them. The only thing that matters is that because of Christmas, we know that God looks like Jesus. Because of Christmas, we know that God looks like Jesus. 

John is sent out to the wilderness by God to testify that God himself was coming into the world in Jesus, that in the person of Jesus Christ, the God of Israel was taking on human nature so that he could heal the universe. God could have come to the world as a household name, as a brilliant military commander, as a masterful politician. But instead, he comes anonymously He comes in disguise such that the priests and Levites and leaders of Israel don't recognize him. But weird-John-sent-from-God knows who he is. "I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal," John says. Jesus hasn't done anything of note yet. He's not yet traveling around teaching. He's not healing people or telling people to love their enemies. 

And yet, John says that he is not worthy to untie his shoes. In other words, what makes Jesus special is not that he is a great moral teacher but that he himself is God who has taken on flesh. He is not just a religious prophet in the manner of great prophets - a great spiritual master. What makes Jesus special is not that his teaching bears some superficial similarities to other great spiritual masters. What makes Jesus special is that the God of Israel has taken on flesh and become human. What makes Jesus special is that he directs us first to worship himself. In every other instance in religious history you have a prophet who directs people to a set of teachings, to a certain way of living. Jesus does that too with the understanding that people are frail, that we will inevitably turn life-giving teaching into guilt-ridden rules that we can weaponize against other people. Jesus comes to set us free from that weaponization, to invite us to worship him as the God who lives among us, and to live all of our lives as gracious response to the gift that he gives us in himself. 

In the early 1500s, a German artist named Matthias Grunewald painted a mural for display behind an altar in a church called the Isenheim Altarpiece. It depicts a particularly gruesome image of Jesus on the cross. To Jesus' left as you look at the altarpiece, his mother collapses into the arms of the apostle John. To Jesus' right, John the Baptist stands pointing emphatically at Jesus on the cross. If you know the story, you think to yourself, wait a second, by the time Jesus died, John the Baptist was already dead; how could he be at the cross? And that's quite correct. But the artistic license Grunewald takes illustrates what John had been sent by God to do. His only job was to point at Jesus. His only job was to testify that this man, to whom he pointed, was the savior of the world. The world wouldn't be saved by the revolutionary ideas of great spiritual masters because humanity need an intervention that came from outside ourselves, from outside our foibles and frailty and tendency to break things. The one who came after weird-John-in-the-wilderness was the one who came to do the job of saving us himself. 

And in so doing, he showed us what God is like. Hebrews chapter 1 tells us that prior to Jesus coming, "God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom he also created the worlds. He is the reflection of God's glory and the exact imprint of God's very being." Before Jesus came, the people of Israel heard what God was like through the prophets, but now in Jesus we see an exact imprint of God's very being. In Jesus we see what God is like. 

IV. 

And because we what God is like in Jesus, we don't have to defend Christmas. The God who took on human nature in Jesus didn't defend himself to keep from going to the cross; I think he can handle it if people decide to say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. 

But if you decide that you must keep Christ in Christmas, then I suggest you do the following: pick up your television remote and turn it off. Go outside, and do your best weird-John-in-the wilderness imitation. Point at Jesus. Whereever you see Jesus in the world, point it out. When you see neighbors who might be hungry, ask them if they have enough to eat, and if they don't, go into your chest freezer and get something that you've frozen for later and give it to them. When you hear that ___________ and others are making food for homeless people at the Warming Shelter, you volunteer to help. When your relatives come over for Christmas, some of us will remember all of the things that they have done over the years to wrong us. We'll remember all the old angers, all the old resentments, all the fights over aging parents and their property. We keep Christ in Christmas when we forgive those old wounds, when we go to the relatives we dread to break cycles of resentment and hurt, to forgive the wrongs that have been done to us(Brueggemann, "On Signal: Breaking Vicious Cycles", Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol. 1). We keep Christ in Christmas when we welcome strangers, by inviting people who are not our relatives to join our family at Christmas dinner, by befriending people who need friends. We keep Christ in Christmas when we decide to parent a child we didn't want, or by parenting a child that we wanted but who turned out differently than we had hoped or imagined. We shower that child with love, with gifts, with affirmation, with grace, even though they don't deserve it. We keep Christ in Christmas when we love our enemies, when we bake Christmas cookies for the neighbor who's always whining about your branches hanging over the property line, when we earnestly pray for the good of the people who cause us pain.

We keep Christ in Christmas when we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, forgive the guilty, welcome the stranger and the unwanted child, care for the ill, bury the dead and love our enemies (Kenneth Tanner, Facebook page, December 2, 2017). We don't do it to change the world. We do it because in Jesus, we see what God is like, and in Jesus, God came to us so that we could be like him.

“A Highway to Home” is the December 10, 2017 Sunday sermon from Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis., preached by the Rev. Dave Mowers. 

The sermon is based on Isaiah 40:1-7. 

The full manuscript of the sermon is available here.

A Highway to home

A Highway to Home A sermon for Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis., and St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church, Portage, Wis. Second Sunday of Advent | Year B | December 10, 2017 Isaiah 40:1-11 | Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13 | II Peter 3:8-15a  | Mark 1:1-8  Sometime Friday evening, I was halfway up the stairs in our house when I stopped dead in my tracks. I looked at my watch to check the date. December 8. I missed it. I hadn't been trying to miss it, and in fact, I'd been following the news all week, but with all the news stories flying around, I hadn't heard anyone mention that the day before had been the 76th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, which set off our involvement in World War II. I was surprised that I hadn't heard at least something about Pearl Harbor somewhere on Thursday the 7th, but I didn't. What I did hear this week, though, was Christmas music. Early in the week, as I holed up at the coffee shop, I heard a Christmas song that was written for all those WWII soldiers who flooded into Europe, North Africa and the Pacific Ocean. The smooth bass-baritone filled the coffee shop as Bing Crosby sang the words that have now become iconic. "I'll be home for Christmas; you can plan on me. Please have snow and mistletoe and presents on the tree. Christmas Eve will find me where the lovelight gleams. I'll be home for Christmas if only in my dreams." I. Our reading from Isaiah this morning describes the longing of the people of Israel to return to their homes. The first 39 chapters of the book of Isaiah describe how Israel was unfaithful to her God, and predicted that if Israel did not come around, God would bring about exile. About 150 years pass between the end of Isaiah 39 and Isaiah 40, and in that time, sure enough, the armies of Babylon destroy Jerusalem and the temple there, and carry off most of the Israelites as slaves. They were there several generations, and God seemed to be silent. And then, Isaiah 40. Instead of the hand of God punishing the people of Israel for their sin, we have something very different. We have an announcement: the government of the God of Israel will no longer recognize Babylon as the capital of God's people. In fact, the policy of the Government of the God of Israel towards the people of Israel will now be: "Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem and cry to her that she has served her term, that her penalty is paid, that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins." The time has been served. The penalty has been served. It's time to go home. Someone asks how to implement this plan, of what concrete policy steps we should take now that God has decided to comfort his people. Someone answers: we need an infrastructure bill. Specifically, we need to build an interstate highway: a superhighway. Those of us who have enjoyed the new Highway 12 Bypass, or any other new road, might think that the ancient world had roads just like we do. But they didn't. It was hard to build a road. It took lots of labor to lift up every valley and make every mountain and hill low. There was only one person guaranteed to have the clout to get a road made for them: the King. When the king was coming, roads got built so that he could be in a parade down the road and have all the people come out to meet him. In the wilderness between Israel and Babylon, this voice cries out that there should be a road, that the valleys should be lifted spots -- that means that the low spots in the road should be filled in -- the mountains and hills be made low -- that means that the bumps, even if they are mountains, should be leveled off so that the road can be made, and then the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and everyone will see it. The only thing that we can see now is that God's chosen people, the people of Israel, are stuck as slaves in Babylon. If God is at work to bring them home, we can't see it. But when the people of Israel go through the wild wilderness on that road, then God's work to bring them home will be revealed, and all the people will see it together. What is secret now will be made clear to everyone when the people of Israel go home. But they aren't there yet. II. I think if we're honest enough to slow down during the busyness of December, a lot of us don't feel at home either. We long to go home. Maybe the home we long for is in a place and a time long ago. I think back on my grandparents' house, two towns over from where I grew up, and how special it was to have all of my uncles and aunts and cousins come through around Christmas to watch movies and open presents and play games. There was a porch off the back of the kitchen that wasn't heated, and in December, if you braved the cold out there and took a few steps onto the porch and looked at the shelf about shoulder high, you were guaranteed to find several tins of cookies. You'd grab a tin, scurry into the warm kitchen, open the tin, find grandma's peanut butter balls hand-dipped in chocolate, or snickerdoodle cookies, or pretzles dipped in white chocolate. Maybe you'd only grab one, but usually you'd find some kind of container you could sneak three or four away in - your pockets were an acceptable container - and hurry back to put the tin on the shelf before anyone noticed. The house was filled with the glorious noise of all the cousins, and to this day a cup of piping hot Earl Grey on a cold autumn afternoon can take me straight back to my grandmother's kitchen. We sold that house 12 years ago, and my grandparents died 13 and 11 years ago, respectively. That sense of homelessness can often turn into a sense of despair, especially around Christmas-time. We know that home that we were going to be at for Christmas has slipped away while we watched, and there is nothing we can do to stop it. The people that made that house a home have died. The marriage that made that house a home has gone cold. An illness has come that has redefined everything. We look around at the arrogance of politicians and the sordidness of our political process and how all our public policy seems to put more and more money into the hands of the richest Americans while exploiting the poor and ignoring folks like us. For some of us, the last year or five or twenty have meant that we feel less at home in America than we once did, and we long for the sense of home than we once felt. It doesn't seem like things will ever be different, and if they are, they'll be worse. It seems like political power and arrogance and violence are the forces that make the world operate, and despair the only possible response. III. Into the middle of that violent world, into the middle of longing and despair and heartache and darkness, a voice says, "Cry out!" and in Isaiah we hear an answer "What shall I cry? Everybody is going to have longing and feel homeless and despair and someday they're going to die. What could I possibly say that would make a difference? Yes, people despair and die. But the word of our God will stand forever, so go, go up to a high mountain, O prophet, and be a herald of good tidings: give the people this announcement: Here is your God! The Lord God comes with might and his arm rules for him, and his recompense before him. He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them his bosom, and gently lead the mothers to sleep. The prophet of God is authorized to be the spokesperson of the government, being a herald of good tidings. In other words, the prophet of God is to point to God and say, "Here is your God, and that  will result in victory over your enemies." The prophet's job is to announce to the people of Israel that they are not beyond help, that the military might of Babylon is not what will determine their situation. The God of Israel has come to act in a situation they thought was hopeless. The God of Israel has come to make their dreams of going home comes true. They will go down the highway in the middle of the wilderness in a victory parade, with their God in front of them, on their way to Jerusalem, and all of the people will see that the God of Israel has defeated the armies of Babylon and rescued his chosen people from despair and slavery. "By decree, from [God's] own mouth, implemented by God's own government, uttered in Israel by God's own prophet: the life of [the people of Israel] is decisively altered for good." The good tidings shouted by the prophet from the mountain are that the world has changed for good. It is no longer the way we have assumed it is, ordered by the arrogance of rulers and submitted to in despair. This announcement is only words, yes, but it is strong: the Word of the Lord shall stand forever. God has decisively intervened in the lives of his people, and this is his announcement: on this word rests the future of the world. In our gospel reading this morning, Mark picks up this thread from Isaiah 40 when he writes about John the Baptist: "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight." John's announcement is that it's time to go out to the wilderness, to the backside of nowhere, to build a highway so that all of us who feel homeless can finally go home. Why? Because the Lord is coming. The majestic one who comes with might, and the tender one who carries the lambs near his heart. John the Baptist's ministry announces that the way of Jesus is the way of majesty and mercy that will make the world new. Mark says this is good news, and the way he says it, you'd expect him to be announcing a military victory, the news of a battle far away where our armies were victorious, the opposite of the announcement of the attack on Pearl Harbor. News that changes the world. News that freezes us, and makes us remember where we were when we heard it for the rest of our lives. But this is no announcement of military victory; it is an announcement that the invasion of the world by God to dethrone the powers, presidents and politicians will be a non-violent one, an invasion where God strips himself of his power and comes in vulnerability to lay his life down to be a victim so that he might be in solidarity with every person who has ever been a victim. The announcement of John the Baptist's ministry is that in Jesus, we see the good tidings of Isaiah 40: here is your God! IV. That announcement seems like it's just words. But it is not just words: it is the Word of the Lord which stands forever. Jesus has invaded the world and given us a way home through the darkness, through the despair. Politicians can have the arrogance to claim that they are the only ones that can save us. Our culture can tell us that the only thing that will change the world is the next election. But when has it ever? The season of Advent is a season where we remember how the world really is: In Jesus Christ, God has changed the world, and is preparing to lead his people in a victory parade through the desert. The war is not over; we still live in the midst of darkness. There are still plenty of people who try to claim that they are the ones that change the world. There are plenty of people who say that they acknowledge the self-sacrifice of the Son of God as making the difference for the world, but who actually believe that the only thing that actually changes the world is the use of violence. We are soldiers of the prince of peace, living in a time between the beginning of the invasion and when the war is finally over. Our mission as these soldiers is to prepare the Way of the Lord, to make his paths straight. To go into the wilderness of our hearts and the dark places of the world and fill in the potholes and level off the hilltops. Our mission is to go to the people who are weighed down by darkness and the shadow of death and to sit with them in joyful expectation that the Lord our God will come and lead us in a victory parade over death and despair. We commemorate the anniversary of our victory Sunday-by-Sunday, remembering together that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the final enactment of the policy of comfort towards his people. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is a comfort because it leads us home. No, it won't take us to a nostalgic Christmas at Grandma's house this year. But it does promise that we will be at home on the road: wherever our God leads us in paths of peace and good tidings, we are at home. Wherever the homes we live in have been places of abuse or violence, the shepherd takes us up in his arms and holds us near to his heart, and that is where we find our homes. As we remember the anniversary of our victory this morning, and receive the body and blood of this good shepherd into our bodies, may he lead us home.

And Yet A sermon for Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis., and St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church, Portage, Wis. First Sunday of Advent | Year B | December 3, 2017 Isaiah 64:1-12** | Psalm 80 | I Corinthians 1:3-9 | Mark 13:24-37

I should have known I was in trouble when I turned into the parking lot and saw a sea of cars. Row after row, completely parked full. It was only when I parked down at the end of the row, approximately three miles from the front door of Costco, that I realized this grocery run might not be much fun. I was just there to get groceries but the rest of the Madison Metropolitan Area had begun their Christmas shopping, Christmas decorating, Christmas baking. I navigated the oversize cart through the store, having to avoid bumping into other people at every turn. Even my favorite part of Costco was ruined: as I swooped in the frozen food section to get my hot fresh sample square of Tomato Pesto Pizza, I watched literally several hundred people grab all of the samples up before I could travel the three feet to reach the table. With all that, I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was when I arrived at the front of the store to find that the lines from all of the registers stretching back for aisles and aisles. I got in line, and began to wait. There were more than a dozen people in the shortest line, and I was going to wait for a while. I was annoyed. I was a little frustrated that I hadn't gotten there earlier in the day so that I didn't have to wait. I was ready to get on with the rest of the day. And, because I never got my sample square of Tomato Pesto Pizza, I was ready for lunch and all I could do was wait in this lousy line. I came to Costco to get a month's worth of groceries and socks and household supplies. I didn't come there to sit and wait. For people who don't like waiting, we sure do seem to do a lot of it. Nobody ever sets out thinking that they have a goal and what they'd like most in all the world is to have to take longer than necessary to get to that goal. Nobody gets in a car to drive away on vacation and says, "What I really hope happens is that there's a giant crash on the interstate and we have to wait in stopped traffic for hours." Nobody ever goes to the doctor when they're feeling sick thinking, "What I'd really like to have happen now is that the doctor would have no idea what is going on, and to have to wait a year to have them figure out what the problem actually is." Nobody wants that: and yet that's happened to us and to people we know more times than we prefer to remember. We have children, and they run around as toddlers and children and we have dreams for who we are and what they will become, and as they walk into young adulthood, they struggle. They work the dead-end job, they drink a little too much, you can't stand their friends. And you wonder, "Will this kid ever turn into anything like I hoped they would be?" You got married because you were in love, but now you've been married a long time and things haven't gone the way you thought they would. You find yourself hoping, yearning, praying that your marriage would be different, but you wonder whether you have the strength to stay here waiting if something doesn't change. Lots of us find ourselves waiting in a long line for our lives to be different. We didn't set out to stand in a line of people aisles and aisles deep but here we are. So what do we do? Well, a lot of us who are waiting do what I was tempted to do in line at Costco: a lot of us get out our phones. Why should we feel the pangs of hunger that are telling us we need lunch when we can look at Twitter? Why should we sit at the bedside of a sick person and feel their pain and their questions and their yearning to be well, when we can simply pick up the remote and put four football games on our television at the same time? Why should we feel the pain of relating to our out-of-touch parents when we can just ignore them and send friends we don't like much pictures on Snapchat? But the thing about running from pain in our lives is that the pain will always come out. We can rush around distracting ourselves at every turn, but distracting ourselves doesn't help us to deal with the pain. The pain of waiting for our lives to be different. The pain of waiting for a spouse. The pain of having a spouse who we're not sure we want anymore. The pain of having had a spouse whom we loved who has died. The pain of having had dreams for our lives that have turned into a dead-end job. The pain of having children who didn't turn out the way we hoped. We have a season in the church calendar where Christians slow down so that they can face what gives us pain. Advent is a season where we wait, and we focus on the waiting. We know that Jesus was born on Christmas, but when we look around at the circumstances in our world, it looks like the world of the White Witch in CS Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia: a world where it is always winter and never gets to be Christmas. We can be fooled into thinking that the darkness of our world and the depth of our pain is final, that there is no way to heal, that there is no hope. You might be thinking to yourself: what kind of Christmas message is this? I don't want to hear about the darkness of the world. I don't want to be brought to face the darkness in my own life. I want Christmas carols, and baby Jesus in a manger, and the spirit of Christmas. What's all this darkness doing in the sermon on the first Sunday of Advent. Well, as one preacher famously put it: "Advent begins in the dark." (Rutledge, Bible and the New York Times). Advent begins with our coming face to face with the darkness in our world and the darkness in our own hearts. Our Old Testament reading this morning is not afraid to be frank about the darkness in the world of the people of Israel. People outside the church often want to say that Christians whitewash the darkness in our world, that we aren't in touch with the terrible reality of pain in our world. That's sometimes true, but the people making that critique have also never read from Isaiah 64. A hundred years before this passage was written, armies from Babylon, in what is now Iraq, came to Jerusalem and destroyed it. They destroyed the temple that had been built by Solomon and forced the desirable people to come with them back to Babylon as slaves. Israel believed that it was God's chosen people, the people whom God had allowed to make a home for him to live in, and now they were being carried off into slavery by foreigners. How could God allow this to happen? Was he angry at the people of Israel? Where is God? If God won't come down and rescue us now, is God even there anyway? Maybe, the author says, we brought this on ourselves. "We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and all our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you, for you have hidden your face from us and have delivered us into the hand of our inequity." Exile is awful, the author says. It makes us cry out for God to come, to invade our circumstances like a conquering army to make the world right again. There's a lot about our own world that we need God to make right. Each of us possesses the same human tendency to hurt ourselves, to hurt other people, to break each other. We live in a cultural moment right now where it is tempting to put Matt Lauer and Harvey Weinstein and Roy Moore on the other side of a line between good and evil. And make no mistake - sexual harassment, assault, abuse and rape - are evil. The God we discover in Jesus Christ is a God who stands with victims, who is present with those who are suffering or abused, and whose justice will look like judgment to those abusers. But Christian faith will also not let us simply leave them there, on the other side of a line between good and evil, and walk away. While sexual assault and harassment are evil, they are not the only evil; for Christians, we are all on the evil side of a line dividing good people from bad people. We are all hypocrites. We've broken relationships, we've broken things, we've even broken people. "All our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth," Isaiah writes. No matter what good things we've done in our lives, the karma will never be good: because we all are where Israel is. Now we reach the turning point of the Old Testament reading this morning. Verse 8: Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Even though we are afflicted by the human tendency to break things, even though the people of Israel did not live according to the ways God called them, the author says, "Yet". It's on this "yet" that all history turns. The world is a dark place, the pagan armies have invaded, the lines at Costco are long, the pangs of hunger in our stomach are loud, traffic is stopped on all four lanes on this interstate, and seemingly every man we've ever looked up to in public life cannot keep their pants on. And yet. And yet. And yet, despite our brokenness, God is our Father. And yet, despite all of our circumstances, God is the potter and we are the clay. Our lives are not determined by the darkness, our lives are determined by our being children of God. The world is dark; our pain is real and yet, the God of Israel will not leave us here. And yet, the God of Israel invaded our world, not as a conquering army, but as a tiny baby in a manger. And yet, he grew up and went to the cross to heal the human tendency to break things. On the first Sunday of Advent year after year, the church gets to make this announcement: Our world is dark. Our world is painful. We would rather distract ourselves than be honest about that. We all suffer from a tendency to break things and hurt people. But there is a God who is coming to be our great "And Yet". We wait in joy for Jesus to come again, not anonymously this time, but so, as our opening hymn said, "that every eye shall now behold him." That day won't be the end of our world. It won't be the end of any good thing God has made. It will be the beginning. Our God will come to bring comfort to all those morn. Our God will come to bring liberty to those who are captive. A world where our pain will be healed and our longing satisfied, and where the broken heart is healed, where the bleeding soul is cured, where the poor are given everything they need. This is the great "and yet" of Advent, and it is the great "and yet" the church lives in year round. For this brief season, the church joyfully and expectantly waits for Jesus to return. When we allow ourselves a month, a week, a couple of days, even moments of waiting in the midst of the hustle and bustle of December, when we set aside time to look our pain in the face without distractions, we just might find God already right in the middle of our circumstances. Right in the middle of the waiting in line, the struggling in our marriage, the fretting over our children, we just might find that Jesus has been there this whole time, loving us, strengthening us, working peace in us. We just might find that the joy and healing that will come when he comes again has leaked out right into our lives. The Lord Jesus Christ is coming, not to end any good thing that he has made, but to set us free from darkness. He will triumph over death. He will triumph over darkness. He will bring justice for the poor. He will bring freedom to those in prison. He will heal the sick and the aged. To be a Christian in this world means to wait in solidarity with all of these people, but it is to wait with an unshakeable hope that all things will be made new.

“And Yet” is the Sunday sermon preached at Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis., on December 3, 2017 by the Rev. Dave Mowers.

The text for this sermon is Isaiah 64:1-12. 

The full manuscript for this sermon can be found here.

The one who changes the world

The One Who Changes the World A sermon for Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis. Christ the King Sunday | Year A, Track 2 | November 26, 2017 Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24 | Psalm 95:1-7a | Ephesians 1:15-23 | Matthew 25:31-46

I was leaving my church. I had thought for a while that things weren't going well, that I wasn't as good of a fit as I had been during my first couple of years of college. I had started to read more theology, to ask more pointed and critical questions and to grow frustrated with all of the cliches that I heard both in sermons and as I worked as a volunteer in our youth ministry. Then the phone rang, and the man on the other end of it told me that he and several other people had heard a particular rumor about me. The rumor was not true, but by the time the man called me, it had spread to almost all of our small congregation. He told me who he had heard the rumor from, and as we compared notes we realized that a person in a position of leadership - a person who should have known better - was the person who started the rumor. I remember my reaction to being told that this rumor was out there very well. "Isn't Christianity supposed to change the world?" I sputtered into the phone. "Aren't we supposed to be the people who feed the hungry and give water to the thirsty and visit the sick and those in prison? And isn't that supposed to be how we are known? Instead, we're the people who spread lies about the people we don't get along with. We're the people who stab other people in the back. We're the people who hear someone saying something that we might disagree with and assume that the person talking has the worst possible intentions. I thought the gospel of Jesus was supposed to change the world, but all that's in this church is a bunch of fake Christians." I was 21, and I was kind of a hothead.

I. 

In my response to that phone call, you heard maybe the most famous line from our gospel reading this morning, now the third week we've read from Matthew 25. "Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And wen was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you? And the king will answer them, "Truly I tell you, just as you did it to the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.'"

This parable has significant differences from the ones we've read in the last couple of weeks. It doesn't begin with Jesus saying, "The kingdom of heaven is like this." It doesn't have particularly obscure symbolism that is hard to figure out. It is more like a picture of future history than it is a parable: he compares the righteous people to sheep and the wicked people to goats, and they get separated and judged based on how they have fed the hungry, given water to the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, and visited the sick and those in prison. Those who don't feed the hungry or clothe the naked or visit people in prison go into eternal punishment. It seems crystal clear. It seems like my reaction to the rumors at the little church I attended in college was about right: it's not that hard to figure out who Christians are and who they are not. The people who live out Jesus' teaching by showing tangible mercy to the poor: those are the Christians. Those who don't, aren't. Those who show mercy to the poor are showing mercy to Jesus, and they inherit the kingdom. Those who don't show mercy to the poor are turning their back on Jesus, and they will go away into eternal punishment. The people who lose track of what's important, who spread rumors rather than feeding the hungry, it sure seems they get sent off forever. It seems clear, it's clean, it's black and white. We're the good people, and they, those other people, are the bad people. But this gospel does not let us off that easily. When the righteous get commended for extending mercy to Jesus, how do they react? They say, "Yes, Lord, thank you for recognizing how righteous we are. It was such a privilege for us to be able to serve you. We are blessed to be your people and to inherit this kingdom. Thank you Jesus." Except that's not how they react. They say: "Umm, Jesus? Excuse me, Jesus. We just heard you say that we are going to inherit the kingdom of God. I mean, we're grateful, and you must be right. But could you tell us when exactly we did what you said? When did we feed you? When were you sick or in prison and we visited you? We don't remember when we did that." They're surprised. They didn't expect to be rewarded. They're just as befuddled as the ones who are sent off to eternal punishment. Neither group expected to be in the group they were in. It turns out that it's not as easy as I thought at age 21 to figure out who was a Christian and who was not. II. Figuring out who's a Christian and who isn't really matters to people. I've been asked questions about how to know if a dying loved one or friend is really a Christian, and if they could be sure that they would go to heaven when they die, more than almost anything else. When our idea of what Christianity is about is fire insurance - that is, Christianity is what keeps us out of the fire of eternal punishment - then this is the whole point. When I worked as a hospital chaplain in the year that I was a deacon, I ran into more than one patient whose family was concerned about their eternal destiny - they wanted to know for sure that if their loved one died, they would go to heaven. Sometimes they would call the chaplain's office to see if we could pray with their loved one, the thinking being that if the chaplain prayed a particular prayer with their loved one before they died, that'd be enough to get them into heaven. But our gospel passage this morning frustrates these people too. Just like the self-righteous who think they can just figure out who is a Christian and who isn't, the parable of the sheep and the goats frustrates though who are looking for assurance about who's going to heaven when they die. The Jesus of the gospels seems to be far less interested in who goes to heaven when the die than we are. Even in this parable of judgment, there's nothing that says, "Here is the bar to clear to get to heaven when you die. Here's just how much feeding of the hungry you have to do. Here's just how much welcoming of the stranger you have to do." This passage doesn't give us any of that. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not fire insurance meant to get us to heaven when we die. The twenty-one-year old hothead was right: Christianity is supposed to change the world. III. But the way Christianity changes the world is surprising. Jesus doesn't come to change the world by overthrowing Rome with a violent revolution. He doesn't come to change the world by being Israel's king. He does not come wearing a red baseball cap that says "Make Israel Great Again." He comes as a vulnerable baby, born under suspicious circumstances, to poor parents. They have to take him out of the country because the power-hungry king has all of the babies his age killed, and so he and his parents become undocumented immigrants in Egypt. After they return and Jesus grows up, he goes around Israel feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and healing them, giving water to the thirsty and living water to the ones who never knew they were thirsty. He goes to the people who were written off by society and says, "I'm coming to your house for dinner today", and in so doing scandalized the leading citizens of his communities. This was a man who preferred to be welcomed into the filthy, smelly house of a hoarder instead of eating a fancy dinner with the mayor in a mansion on the hill. This is the man who leaves his disciples with the parable of the sheep and goats as his last teaching. After this parable, the march to Calvary begins. The last thing Jesus teaches his disciples before he goes to the cross is that he has identified himself with the hungry and the one in prison rather than with the successful and the effective. Those are the people with whom Jesus still identifies today. Those are the people in whom we can still see Jesus' presence today. In the midst of squalor and chaos. Against the crushing deadline of the debt collector and the the no-win choices that poverty forces people into. Jesus is king over the world, and his kingdom, though now hidden, will one day be revealed as the mysterious force that fed the hungry and comforted the poor, the force that motivated ordinary Christians in all times and places to love and to cherish people who were manifestly undeserving. That revealing will look like judgment. That's uncomfortable for many of us - too many of us can't shake the image we picked up in parochial school of God being like a nun just waiting to crack her ruler over our wrists. But for the prisoner who has been behind bars for decades for a crime he did not commit, for the rape victim who never saw her assailant prosecuted, for the abused child and the abandoned wife, this judgment will look like freedom, like healing, like the justice that they sought and were denied. If Jesus didn't judge the people responsible for these acts, that would say that he endorses their violence, that he stood with the oppressor rather than the victim. Even though Jesus has gone, Jesus' people still carry out the very same mission that Jesus himself carried out. For Jesus' people, the first step in that mission is to understand whose people they are. That is, the first step in our mission is hear the gospel of Jesus and to trust that the way of seeing the world that it describes is true. We trust that the gospel is true when we live like the gospel is true. When we live like Jesus is the man standing on the side of the road with the "Will Work for Food" sign, when we live like Jesus is the people who get vouchers from St. Vinny's for their clothes, when we live like Jesus is the one-month-sober drug addict who's trying to learn auto detailing from Pastor Bill Harris at People Helping People while staying one step ahead of homelessness, that's evidence that we believe the gospel. If the gospel is true, not matter how bad things seem to get, Jesus is Lord. If Jesus is Lord, our politics are not. If Jesus is Lord, our bank accounts are not. If Jesus is Lord, our fears and failures are not. If Jesus is Lord, he has become Lord by being with and for the poor, and by dying on the cross, he has set in motion a plan that will ultimately result in the entire world being finally and forever changed, a world that will be what the Garden of Eden was supposed to be from the very beginning. IV. For lots of us, this is the moment that changes everything. When we realize that Christian faith is about the world being made new and death being defeated, we can no longer believe that our faith is an entirely private matter between us and God whose purpose is to forgive our sins so that we can go to heaven when we die. When we realize that the point of the gospel is to change the world, we become a part of God's rescue mission for the world, a mission that includes us but is so much bigger than just us. It's a mission that involves hope -- and food -- for every hungry person. It's a mission that involves dignity -- and clothes -- for every poor person. It's a mission that involves personhood -- and friendship -- for every shut-in, homeless person and prison inmate. The point of today's parable is not that we should live our lives however we want and then say a prayer on our deathbed so that we can die and go to heaven. The point of today's parable is that we must trust with our whole lives that Jesus' gospel truly describes the world we live in, and we must do it now, because there will be a time when we will account for the way we have lived. And so we take up Jesus' mission to the stranger, to the sick, to the hungry not as saviors who try to fix people but rather as humble listeners who try to discern the presence of Jesus within each person we come across. Yes, we'll fail. Yes, we'll sin. Yes, we'll have times where we're the biggest hypocrites and utterly forsake what we believe. If the one who came to judge us was Santa Claus, putting us on a list of naughty and nice people, we'd be in trouble. But the one who judges us is Jesus Christ, the one who knows just what it is to be human, the Judge who was Judged for the sins of the world. If there is anyone who can sort through the complexities of our lives, if there is anyone who we can trust to deal with us fairly and with mercy, it is this one. When I got that phone call about the rumors in my college church and said, "I thought Christianity was supposed to change the world," I wasn't wrong: it is supposed to change the world. But what I didn't know at the time was that even though Jesus had gone to the Father, his presence could still be found in the poor, in the hungry, in the prisoner, in the victim, and that in serving them, I was serving him. What I didn't know is that in the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, God has already changed the world.

This sermon was preached November 26, 2017 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis. by the Rev. Dave Mowers. 

The text for this sermon is Matthew 25:31-46. 

The manuscript for this sermon can be found here. 

“I know you are a hard man” is the November 19, 2017 Sunday sermon from Trinity Church, Baraboo preached by the Rev. Dave Mowers. 

This sermon is based on Matthew 25:14-30. 

“I know you are a hard man”

"I know you are a hard man" A sermon for Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis., and St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church, Portage, Wis. XXIV Sunday after Pentecost | November 19, 2017 | Year A, Track 2 Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18 | Psalm 90 | I Thessalonians 5:1-11 | Matthew 25:14-30 As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. It's a cheery passage, this morning's gospel reading. It's one of those that makes you wonder, "How do they pick the passages to read on Sundays, anyway, and why was this one on the list?" This is a hard passage, and we read and preach from hard passages because, like all Christians who have come before us, we believe that God speaks to us through Scripture, even difficult passages in Scripture. The goal is not to make difficult passages like the parable of the talents simpler; the goal is to find God's voice speaking to us through these parables today.    I grew up in churches where this passage was frequently preached. Before I preach this passage this morning, let me tell you about some bad sermons I've heard about this passage. Maybe you've heard some bad sermons on this passage too. So here's a bad sermon on this passage. This parable is about money, the preacher might say. And it's true that there's a lot of money getting thrown around in this passage. A talent was equal to about 6,000 days' wages, so five talents would be what you might expect to make in an entire lifetime of work - for most of us, $1.5 or $2 million dollars. The bad money sermon gets blinded by how much money is getting thrown around: so it tells us that what God cares about is how we spend our money. God wants a return on his investment, so those of us with more money should invest it wisely and then give lots of money to the church. Those of us with a moderate amount of money should also invest it wisely and give a lot of money to the church. But where the bad sermon gets in trouble is with the third servant. If this sermon is about money, about who has it and who doesn't have it, what do you do with the third servant, who takes the money and goes out with his little shovel to bury it before the ground freezes for the winter? If we're clear about anything Jesus says, we're clear that Jesus loves the poor and welcomes them into his arms. So the bad money sermon goes really wrong if it suggests that the third servant is people who don't have money, or who don't give money to the church, or who don't take care of their money very well. So that's one way to go wrong: to make this sermon about the amount of money you have. There's another way to preach this passage badly. There's a bad sermon that makes this passage about talents, that is, about the things that we're good at. Yes, the money that the master leaves with the slaves in this passage is called "talents" and that's the same word we use in English to talk about our gifts, but it's not what the passage means. Nevertheless, that hasn't stopped a truckload of bad sermons that go a little something like this. God has given each of us a variety of talents. Some of us are good at a lot of things, some of us are good at only a few things, and some of us, bless their hearts, are only good at one thing. And so the point of the sermon of the bad talents is that no matter how many things you're good at, you should use the things you're good at for God. This bad sermon has been used to convince a lot of people to do things at church: even if you're only good at one thing, you'd better do it. Warble away in the choir. Bring your overbaked brownies to coffee hour. And if you don't, then God will judge you! So the bad talent sermon picks up on the fact that the word for the money that the servants are given is "talent" and then makes this parable about the "talents" we're given. That's bad not only because it's not what the story is saying but also because it's manipulative - it tells people that if they don't get involved somehow in their church God is going to throw them out where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth. Here's a third way to go wrong in preaching this sermon. We'll call this one the "judgmental God" sermon. Unlike the first two stories, this way of going wrong remembers correctly that the point of parables is to tell us something about the character of God. And that is true. But when you read this story and make the obvious connection between the Master and God, what we find makes us, at best, uncomfortable. It's hard to understand what this parable is supposed to mean, but is the third slave burying his money really a big deal? The Master orders him thrown out into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.  That sounds like exclusion, judgment, and maybe even hell. Whatever the difference was between investing the money and burying it surely doesn't justify the barbaric response of God. So, the  judgmental God sermon says, "The picture of God's character that this sermon gives us is barbaric. Don't you know that we're Episcopalians here? We don't believe in exclusion. We're not judgmental. You can believe most anything you want, but we sure don't believe in a God who gets angry at a small provocations like a slave who buries his money." So the result of the judgmental God sermon is that we dismiss this parable. Whatever God is like, we know that God does not throw servants out into hell for what seems to us to be a minor transgression of burying his money. So what's a better way to preach this parable? What's going on here, and more importantly, how is it that we can hear God speaking to us today through this difficult parable? Let's recap the movements in the story. A man going on a journey and calls his slaves and entrusts his property to them. He's going to be away for a long time, and he is not stingy with what he gives. Ten million dollars to the first, four million dollars to the second, two million dollars to the third. And then the man goes away on his journey. The first servant goes off and makes ten million more dollars with the money. The second takes his four and makes four more. The third takes his money out to the back yard and digs a hole in the ground and buries the million where nobody can find it to keep it safe. After a long time, the man on the journey comes back and comes to his servant to settle the books for when he was away. The first servant turns in his twenty million and gets put in charge of a portfolio of a hundred million. The second servant turns in his eight million and gets put in charge of a portfolio of a hundred million. And then the third servant comes in with his plastic baggy full of stacks of hundred dollar bills, dirt still on it from where he dug it up from the ground. He says to his master, "I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, gathering where you did not gather seed; so I was afraid and I went and hid the million in a ground where it would be safe. Here's the money." I want to suggest to you that the moment where the third servant goes wrong is this moment right here, the moment where he says, "Master, I knew that you were a harsh man." While he was digging with his little shovel in the back yard of the master's estate, the third servant could just see the master sitting at his fancy country club far away, watching the stock returns of all the servants whiz by on the ticker at the bottom of the screen. The third servant thought that the master was harsh. He thought what mattered to the master was performance. He thought what mattered to the master was return on investment. The servant knew that he would never be able to deliver. I think that's a fear we can identify with. Some of us think back to the men in our lives, fathers and husbands and sons, and those words fit: "I knew you were a hard man." Some of us think back to mothers or daughters or mothers-in-law, and we know that we can never measure up to their exacting standards. No matter what we do, we can never be good enough. And so we make the same decisions that the third servant made. We play it safe. We bury the money in the backyard. We don't dream. We try to skate by, hoping that if we just don't lose the money, somehow the hard man and the hard women will come to love us. But that is all wrong. There is no harsh bookkeeping Master in this story. The moment the third servant says, "Master, I know that you are a hard man," is the moment where he goes off the rails. He thinks he knows what the master is like, but he's wrong. He takes all of his fears of a non-existent audit, all his fears that he will fail, and he projects them onto the Master. The servant believes that the Master's favor is based on results - he believes that the first and second servants are congratulated because they brought good returns for the master. The servant believed that the master left him his property just so that he could catch him in a trap and make his life miserable, so he goes out and buries the money to try to avoid the trap. The servant believes that his own fear of the master is real and true. But the master wasn't interested in productive results. He wasn't pleased with the first two servants because they made money; he was pleased with them because they tried to do something with their master's property. The master entrusted his servants with his property not because he wanted to trap them, but because he was a good master who wanted to share in his work with his servants. There was no need for the servant to fear this master. As Robert Farrar Capon put it, "The servant with his little shovel and his mousy apprehension that God is as small as himself is such a nerd! He is just one more of the pitiful turkeys that Jesus parades through his parables to shock us, if possible, into recognizing the stupidity of unfaith." (Kingdom, Grace, Judgment, 503). God is not the hard man that we are afraid of. God is not the demanding mother-in-law, God does not demand productive results. God does not need us to measure up to a particular standard of goodness before we can be loved by him. The world that God has made is a world where God's generosity to us in sending us Jesus has given us everything that we need, and the only response necessary is for us to live out a relationship of trust with Jesus. We trust that we do have everything we need, and so we are people of unusual generosity with our neighbors. We trust that there is nothing to fear when God is our Father and Jesus is our brother, so when chaos breaks out we are the people who run towards chaos rather than away from it. We take all that God has given us in Jesus and, instead of burying it in the ground, try to do the work of the Master, to seek and to save the lost, to heal the hurting and broken and to give mercy to the tired. God's generosity to us matters more than anything else in our world; it matters more than life or death, than health or sickness, than riches or poverty. And that is why this parable ends in such harsh judgment for the servant who did not believe. The servant is one of those people who cannot believe in a gift, who insists that he has to earn it. The servant would rather take what God has given to him and bury it rather than going out to do the work that God has called him to do, because he's afraid that God will be angry with him if he fails. When God judges, he does it out of his love: not because he is mad at anybody, but because he longs for us to open our eyes and see the world as it is. He longs for us to come out from under the structure of our own imagined fears about God and to see that he has given us everything we need. We don't have to earn it. We don't have to be afraid. All we need to do is respond in faith to Jesus, to live our lives out of a passionate conviction that he is who he claimed to be.    And if we do, when God returns from his long journey to judge death and sin and all the forces in our world, we'll be ready. We'll be ready because we've learned that following Jesus is not about tangible results - it's about loving the people we share our homes with really well. It's about inviting the people who get left out to have dinner at our house, to invite our neighbors into our lives so that they can see a small picture of what God's generosity looks like. It's about inviting God the Holy Spirit to heal of our sin and brokenness and empowering us to share the story of the Master with people who need to hear it. God has given us everything we need to be ready. May God give each of us such trust in Jesus that we set aside our fears, love boldly and apologize quickly. May God the Holy Spirit open our eyes to the work that God is doing in our lives, in our homes, and on our streets, so that we can play our part in advancing it. May God set us free from feeling damaged or broken so that we can trust him with all of our lives. I hope all of those things for each of you, and pray for me, a sinner, that I might know them too. Amen.

The wedding of the century

The Wedding of the Century A sermon for St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church, Portage, Wis. and Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis. XXIII Sunday after Pentecost | Year A, Track 2 | November 12, 2017 Amos 5:18-24 | Psalm 70 | I Thessalonians 4:13-18 | Matthew 25:1-13 When you put ten teenagers on the same sidewalk, all walking in the same direction, giggling and loud talking are a given.  But these ten girls are especially giggly, and especially loud. Who wouldn't be a little nervous when today is the day that you're going to be a bridesmaid in a celebrity wedding! Their dresses are black and formal and so much nicer than what their older sisters wore to prom last year. The professional hairstylists have finished with their hair - schellacked with bottles and bottles of hairspray and about a metric ton of bobby pins- and they're headed down the street a block to a short black bus to take them out to the North Shore of Devil's Lake. Here's an odd thing. They're all carrying lanterns. You know, lanterns, the kerosene kind. That might not be the weirdest thing about this wedding. The weirdest thing is certainly that a celebrity has decided to get married in Baraboo and invited ten 14 year olds to be bridesmaids. Let's pretend our celebrity is from Chicago and has come up to Sauk County to get married because of how scenic and beautiful it all is. We'll call him Chance the Rapper. So these girls are carrying kerosene lanterns to Chance the Rapper's wedding, and as you watch, you figure this must be some weird celebrity wedding thing. The girls juggle their lanterns with their phones, because they are bridesmaids in the social event of the century and every moment must be documented on Snapchat and Instagram, and text messages must be sent to all of our friends who aren't here so they know how lame they are for not getting invited to the wedding. Pics! or it didn't happen. But as we watch these girls board the party bus, we realize that only five of them are obsessively taking selfies. The other five are carrying something else. Bottles. From across the street, on a couple of the bottles we can read the label "Clorox" from here (Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment). Some of them have big square bottles, like they emptied out their parents' Costco-sized liquid laundry detergent so that they could fill them with extra kerosene. It's a 2pm wedding, and these girls have decided that they not only need a lantern, they need to haul old bottles full of extra kerosene to the wedding. It's odd. It's awkward. Who carries a giant bleach bottle in their formal dress and unbelievable hair? What fourteen year old leaves their phone at home? The girls go to the North Shore, and then something weird does happen. Chance the Rapper doesn't come. The wedding doesn't start at 2. The girls' hairstyles had fallen out, their dresses had gotten wrinkled from all the sitting in the grass. The girls had heard a rumor that Chance was on his way, so they wanted to stay. When you get to be in Chance the Rapper's Wedding, you do not go home. Eventually their parents came up to the park to check on them and give them blankets. At midnight, there was a commotion: here comes Chance! But the girls who had been texting and on Snapchat and refreshing their lipstick had run out of oil, but the awkward girls - the ones with the laundry detergent bottle full of enough kerosene to torch the world - they still had oil. The ones who had run out asked to borrow extra from their friends but the friends said, "Sorry, we don't know how much we're going to need! You'll have to run to Menards and get some more. The girls looked up Menards' hours on their phone and then exclaimed, "But Menards closed two hours  ago!" Our awkward girls with the Clorox bottles shrugged and said, "Maybe you can try Wal-mart?" Chance wasn't anywhere to be seen, so the girls piled into one of their mom's vans and headed for Wal-Mart. And then it happened. The five remaining girls, hanging out with their lanterns, hadn't been there alone very long when Chance came. The lights went on in the shelter house and the five girls with the lit lanterns went into the banquet with the bride and the bridegroom and the banquet began. And then the door was shut. A while later, the harried mom and five grouchy teenaged bridesmaids piled out of the van. They could hear the music. They could hear the party. They banged on the door for a while, and then finally Chance the Rapper poked his head out and said, "I don't know you. What are you doing here?" They had been invited to be in the wedding of the century - bridesmaids to Chance the Rapper, and here he is closing the door in their face. Keep awake therefore, or you know neither the day nor the hour. The kingdom of God will be like this, Jesus says at the beginning of this parable. That feels hard to us. The kingdom of God will be like the wedding of the century, only the girls who run out of oil will get the door shut on them at the end of the night. It doesn't feel like running out of oil should be that big of a deal. And further, there's a menacing edge to this parable, and you realize that maybe Jesus isn't talking about just any celebrity wedding, but about the big one: the one where Jesus himself, the groom, comes to our Earth, bringing heaven along with him, to fix everything that is broken in our world and to make it whole again. The Bible describes that moment as a wedding feast, as the Wedding Supper of the Lamb. Is this just the bad kind of religion -- you better tow the line, or else Jesus is going to say he never knew you! If not, what is it? This morning comes as we are nearing the end of the church year. In three weeks' time, we'll begin a new church year with the first Sunday of Advent, on December 3. If you grew up in a denomination that didn't observe the church calendar, all of the seasons and observances and colors may seem a little odd, a little exotic, not very applicable to life. But I have to tell you that the next three weeks, these last three weeks of the church year, and then the four weeks of Advent that come after them, are some of my favorites in all the church year. Why? Well, for the next three weeks, our gospel readings all come from this same 25th chapter of Matthew's gospel. This chapter gives us three parables about what happens when Jesus comes to bring heaven to Earth and to remake our world the way it was supposed to be from the very beginning, and those themes carry with us into Advent as we prepare for Christmas. We remember the brokenness of our world and how much we need the healing and restoration Jesus promises to his people. If you're like me, you need little reminding of the brokenness of our world. Just this week: 26 people, including a number of children, shot and killed in worship at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. Saudi Arabia declared war on Lebanon, setting up more violence and the possibility of a wider conflict in the Middle East. On Puerto Rico, 60% of the island remains without power after Hurricane Maria, and is being ignored by both media coverage and the political class. A political class, which, by the way, seems to have just as big of a problem with sexual harassment and assault as the rest of our society; a political class which has debased our society to the point where there are many people who are not clear about whether the criminal sexual assault of a child should bar one from serving in public office. Something is deeply wrong with our world and with us, and I find myself asking the question: is it Advent yet? Well, it's not quite. But the next three weeks, our gospel readings proclaim that God sees what's happening in our world and one day will finally, definitively act to set free those who are bound in darkness. One day our God will act to bind up the broken-hearted, to wipe the tears of the hurting, and to bring righteous judgment to all who have acted against him. "The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a new light has dawned." The light that will dawn on a land of deep darkness will be much brighter than Chance the Rapper coming to the North Shore at midnight. But the reason Jesus uses parables is to use stories to teach us about bigger concepts, so let's go back to our bridesmaids. Is it unfair that five of them get left out? Notice that all ten bridesmaids are in before any are out. All ten bridesmaids are invited to be in Chance's wedding - or, what Jesus really means - all ten bridesmaids are invited by God to the wedding feast of the Lamb. All ten are loved. All ten are called to celebrate  with God that Jesus has made us whole, has bandaged our broken hearts, has set our broken bones, has taken the baggage we carry around with us. The parable calls five of the bridesmaids foolish, and five of the bridesmaids wise. The foolish ones were not the ones we thought were foolish. They had brought their lanterns, and they had brought their phones to document every moment. The ones we thought looked fools with their Chlorox bottles their formal dresses were the wise ones. They were prepared for a long delay. They were prepared for the groom to not come when they thought he was coming. Sure, they looked really goofy walking down the street. Their friends thought they were weird and awkward and maybe even a little scary. They looked like fools. But in the Kingdom of God, the ones who look like fools are the wise ones. Everybody is invited. Everybody is loved. Everybody is called to trust that the groom is on his way and that we will all get to go in to celebrate the wild generosity of God together, that we will all toast the Lamb at the Wedding Feast. But not everyone who is invited gets into the party. The people who get into the party are the ones who look like fools to the rest of the world. They're the ones who were prepared for a delay. They were prepared to wait a long time for the coming of the groom. They were prepared to sit in the darkness of a world, curled up under a park bench, knowing that no matter how late the hour and how dark the night, the groom would still come, the party would still go on. Their oil did not run out; they did not cease trusting in the promise of Jesus. They lived their lives based on the trust they had in Jesus, and that inevitably came out in the way they loved their neighbors. They spent time with difficult people. They looked around the lunchroom and sat with the people who no one wanted to sit with. They were the people who ran towards chaos, not away from it, so that they could bring healing and order in the name of Jesus. These people very often look like fools in our world. Why do they waste their time on that lost cause? Why do they talk to that guy across the street that has problems? They'd get a lot further if they were friends with the people who could help them move up in the world. They'd get a lot further in their career if they got a nice corporate job working for the man rather than that dinky little non-profit that barely skates by month to month and can't hardly afford to pay them. These are the people who look like fools, but they are the people with the extra oil - they are the people who not only say that they trust in Jesus promise to redeem our world, but they live like they trust in that promise. When the darkness closes in, when it seems like we are reaching the midnight of our world, when we find ourselves in the bottom of the night (Rutledge) there they sit, parked on their bench, extra oil in hand, still trusting, still faithful. Ultimately, this is a parable about the church: about those of us who claim to follow Jesus. All of the bridesmaids were invited and called, all of them were a part of God's people. They were baptized and confirmed and all would have told you that they believed in God. But at about midnight there will come a commotion and the bridegroom will come, and then it will be too late. Trust in Jesus is not something that we believe in our heads, it's something that we live in our hearts and in our lives. The bridegroom will come with forgiveness for our ten thousand failures, with mercy for the hypocrites, with patience for the wavering. Our judge will be the one who on the cross was judged for the sins of the whole world, so without shame or fear we will behold his appearing. And yet, the challenge to these bridesmaids endures: keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour. God is coming to make the world new again. God is coming to heal the broken and the hurting and to judge the wise of this world. May God give us the grace to let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream, so that the trust we have in Jesus keeps us carrying our silly bottles of kerosene down the street, keeps us loving our difficult neighbors, keeps us blessing those who curse us and praying for those who hate us, so that on the last day, when he shall return to judge the living and the dead, the Lord Jesus Christ sees us at the door of the Wedding Supper of the Lamb and says, "Come in, good and faithful servant, and share in the joy of your master.

A Family Resemblance: On Sainthood

A Family Resemblance: On Sainthood A sermon for Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis. and St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis. All Saints’ Snday | November 5, 2017 Revelation 7:9-17 | Psalm 34:1-10, 22 | I John 3:1-3 | Matthew 5:1-10 At my uncle's house, the Sam's Club size jar of Jif sits on the kitchen table. If you walked by and saw it sitting there, you'd think it had gotten left out, like someone had put peanut butter on something at breakfast and then put away everything else except the jar of peanut butter. The Jif has sat there, morning, noon and night, for as long as I can remember. It lives on the kitchen table. But the better question is, "Why?" Well, at least once a day, and more often when I was younger, I would watch my uncle walk by the table, pause and turn into the kitchen. He'd grab a spoon, come back to the jar of Jif, take one spoonful out and eat it, and then he'd throw the spoon into the sink and go back to doing what he was doing. It may not surprise you to learn that this little problem with peanut butter runs in the Mowers family. I am a creature of habit when it comes to breakfast, known to eat the very same breakfast every day for years on end before I change and then eat that breakfast every day for years on end. Currently, I'm on about a six-month run of a slice of toast with lots of peanut butter and a little jam. Growing up, we put peanut butter on everything. Pancakes? Done. French toast? Youbetcha. On a plate so that you could dip your banana in it? Absolutely. On celery sticks and topped with raisins? Ants on a log is the best! A while back, I was in my brother's apartment and I saw a jar of peanut butter on the kitchen table, and I didn't even ask. I knew what it was there for. Last week we took M trick or treating for the first time - and there was a revelation when she discovered that some M&Ms have peanut butter in them! We expect traits like that to run in families. It's nice when those traits are endearing, like my uncle's little problem with peanut butter, rather than destructive, like alcoholism or mental illness or child abuse, though those things tend to run in families too. The impact that our parents have on us as we grow up is indelible, and they form us in ways that we cannot have expected and in many cases, would not have chosen. This morning we observe All Saints' Day. We observe it every year on November 1 or the Sunday following, and it's a celebration to remember all the saints: all of the people throughout church history who had this family resemblance to Jesus - whose lives, though imperfect, showed us the face of God. All Saints is followed each year, the very next day, by All Souls' Day, which is a day where we remember all of those who have died, saintly or not, and ask that God would finally make good for all of us the victory that Jesus has won over death and raise them and all of us from the dead. It's a time where we remember that death is temporary. We also remember at Holy Communion on All Saints that we gather around the table of the Lord surrounded by all the company of heaven, and that the barrier between the living and the dead is made paper-thin as we celebrate Communion together. [SJBonly: In a few moments, as we celebrate Communion today, I will invite all of you who have had a significant loss this last year, or any of you who are particularly burdened by any death in the past, to join me at the table as I celebrate this morning so that, as we remember Jesus' death and resurrection together, you can be as close to your remembered loved one as we can get in this life]. Most of us have people we remember and treasure who have died. Maybe they were saintly, maybe they weren't. It resonates with me, and with lots of us, I think, to remember those people at All Saints' each year. If you're like me though, remembering the official saints is a little more foreign. I mean, I think about people that we remember and their impact on me - folks like St. Paul, and St. John, and even more modern saints, people like Martin Luther King or Mother Teresa. When we remember them, they don't seem as relatable as the people I remember. Mother Teresa moved from Macedonia clear around the world to care for the poorest of the poor for 50 years. St. Paul was on a trip to jail and harass Christians when Jesus Christ himself showed up on the road and blinded him. Even Martin Luther King, born just 60 years before me, made sacrifices and became virtuous in ways I can only dream about. I preach to two smallish congregations, do lots to help those churches be healthy and embody the gospel, and change a lot of diapers. In the face of the saints, that story seems a little small. In our New Testament reading this morning from I John, the author writes, "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet be revealed. What we do know is this: When he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is." When we think about the sacrifices that some of the saints we remember have made, or when we look at their images in stained glass around us, or when we ask for their prayers on our behalf, we might think that they aren't much like us. But God has given us the same love that he gave to each of them. God has adopted us: God has called us his children, and that is what we are. So no matter what our lives look like: whether we work in a job we don't love so that we can pay the bills, whether we spend a lot of days by ourselves at home, whether we go to school or do anything else that we might not think of as saintly, God has made us his children. Children sometimes have a family resemblance to their parents and to the rest of their family. If you have a special uncle who leaves his peanut butter in the middle of the table, you might find yourself with a peanut butter problem. When God poured his love out on us in calling us children of God, and when we begin to respond to that love, sometimes we can begin to notice that the peanut butter problem is spreading. And, even if we don't notice ourselves growing in our love for God, or in the ways that we might make decisions differently because of God's love working in our lives, even if we can't see much continuity between our own lives and the lives of the saints, we need not fear: "We are God's children now," John writes. "What we will be has not yet been revealed." For of the saints, the example of love for God and neighbor did not come about because they were something special on their own. It came because the love of God had been poured out on them to make them children of God. In many of the saints, their lives were dramatically changed through an encounter with the love of God revealed in Jesus. For others, the change was much more gradual, much less dramatic. For all of us, the saintly and the not-so-saintly, what we are now only shows a glimpse of the family resemblance that will be revealed later on. We are God's children now, John writes. We have received this love and it is at work in our hearts. In those moments where we think we've failed, in those moments where we think we are far from God, God has made us his children. God doesn't stop loving his children when they fail, or make bad decisions, or miss church or lose patience with their children. God continues to draw us to love Jesus and to center our lives around him, and to love us in ways that will get us to break down our defenses. We might fail now, but what we will be one day has not yet been revealed. When Jesus returns to bring heaven to earth and to restore all creation to wholeness and completeness, and to destroy death and all the works of the devil, we who are children of God will be like him, because seeing Jesus as he is will change us. That's not just true at the end of time either. When we see Jesus as he is in the midst of our present lives, we will begin to be like him in this life. We might worry that this change might change us into a person we don't recognize, that the love of God might make us really sensitive when people swear and turn us into a real-life Ned Flanders. We might think that turning into a saint means that we can't use sarcastic humor any longer, or that we suddenly start praying out loud using lots of thees and thous to make ourselves sound holy. But that's not how it works. God made us as his very good, beloved creation, and God doesn't want us to be other than what we are, he wants us to be more of what we are. When we get familiar with the words and actions of Jesus in the New Testament, we realize that we have been made children of God, that we each individually have been called to follow Jesus, and that in following Jesus we become more like ourselves, not less. We find ourselves changed by the story of Jesus, yes, but changed in this way: that we are set free from doubt, set free from the need to posture to make others approve of us, set free from the need to justify ourselves, set free from the need to hide who we really are, because the love of God has been given to us in Christ Jesus. This is the same love that made such an impact in the lives of the saints. It's the love that turned St. Paul from a murdering persecutor of Christians is the same love that has been poured out on us. When we are around that difficult coworker everyone tries to avoid, the Father gives us that same love to be able to look past that person's words, look past their actions, and see their need. that The love that turned St. Peter from a doubting denier of Jesus with no faith at all into a powerful and compelling leader of the early church is the same love that has been given to us. It's the same love that take us from doubting that God exists half the time to a person who loves Jesus and who centers their life around growing deeper in Jesus and around serving the world in his name. The love that drove so many saints to be martyred instead of recant their faith is the same love that is with us in moments where love must be tough, those moments where we help a loved one get treatment for substance abuse, where we show a teenager that we love them no matter how bad their behavior is, where we care for the physical needs of a difficult older person. When Jesus shows himself as he is, we will be made like him. On this All Saints' Day, as we remember all who have died, and all the saints who have shown us the love of God, may God show us the love that he has for us in Jesus. May God give us us this love so that we can be like him, not only in the next life, but in this one. May God give us this love so that we can be more like ourselves, more like the children of God that we are, so that we can resemble Jesus in all of our relationships. May God work in us a peanut butter problem, helping us to resemble Jesus, and may he bring us, together with all the Saints, to that glorious last day when he will be revealed, and we will be made like him.

“A Family Resemblance: On Sainthood” is the November 5, 2017 sermon from Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis., preached by the Rev. Dave Mowers. 

The text for this sermon is I John 3:1-3. 

The manuscript for this sermon can be found here

To Adore and to Cherish

To Adore and to Cherish A sermon for St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church, Portage, Wis., and Trinity Episcopal Church, Baraboo, Wis. XXI Sunday After Pentecost | Year A, Track 2 | October 29, 2017 Leviticus 19:1-2, 15-18 | Psalm 1 | I Thessalonians 2:1-8 | Matthew 22:34-46     I. "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?" He said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: Amen. It seems simple enough. The Pharisees try to trap Jesus by getting him to say that one commandment is more important to keep than another. If they could get him to do that, then he would be revealed for a true liberal who felt that it was alright to ignore some of God's commandments for others. But, as he has done in our last several readings from the gospels, Jesus keeps wriggling off the hook. Instead of saying that one commandment is more important than the others, he says that there are two commandments on which the entire Bible hangs: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind and to love your neighbor as yourself. These words are familiar to those of us who have been in church for any length of time. They get boiled down into pithy phrases like, "Love God, Love Neighbor" and plastered on bumper stickers and church mission statements. They seem simple enough. But I have a question. It seems like a simple question. Do we really know what love means? "Of course we know what love looks like, Father. We watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians." You laugh. For as much as we talk about it, we are a culture that seems deeply confused about what love is. We have a tendency to think the only kind of love that matters is romantic love. And this gets to be especially problematic when the object of our love is God: when we hear that we are to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, does that mean that Jesus wants to be our boyfriend? Does that mean that he wants us to sit in 4th hour physics class, doodling, "I love Jesus" on our notebooks as if he was the cute girl three desks up? Of course, some of us go too far the other direction. We don't think that Jesus means romantic love when we hear him say that we should love the Lord your God. We hear him say that we should love the Lord our God, and what we think is, "Well, I'll just go to church more often than not, maybe put a little money in the offering plate, and that'll pretty much take care of it." We think that loving God only means being a part of a church, that if we are at a certain place at a certain time on Sunday morning, regardless of what we feel, we're keeping Jesus' commandment. But this, too, is an error. Being a member of a church doesn't mean that you love God with all your heart. You don't have to be in ministry very long before you realize that actually, there are lots of people who come to church here and there because they feel the guilt from their long-dead parents every time they don't show up. There are lots of people who come to church because it used to be necessary if you wanted to be socially respectable, and they never got out of the habit. What does Jesus mean by loving God and loving your neighbor being the most important commandments? He means that the purpose of living is for the adoration of God and for the cherishing of human beings. That is the great secret of life. The only purpose to life is the adoration of God and the cherishing of human beings. That dual purpose displaces every other purpose: not the accumulation of money, not raising our kids, not completing our tasks at work, not playing with our grandkids -- none of those are as important as these. The only purpose of life is the adoration of God and the cherishing of human beings. II. Now when you hear the phrase, "adoration of God", that may sound to you like a passive phrase. But adoration is a verb; it's an action. It's not a feeling. It's something that we do. And the fact is that insomuch as we are like typical Episcopalians, we've probably got some work to do at adoring God. Multiple studies have shown that when surveyed and asked how involved they were in their church, Episcopalians are less likely to say they are "very involved" in their congregation than Christians in any other denomination. Okay, fine: I've just got done saying that involvement in church doesn't necessarily mean that we are good at adoring God. So what do we do outside of church? Well, 46% of Episcopalians said that they have served someone else in a volunteer or community service role in the last month. That number is greater than any other Christian denomination, and it's worthy of being celebrated. But even that number isn't necessarily all good. Just because we serve other people doesn't necessarily mean that we love them in the same way that we love ourselves. It's quite possible to serve someone without caring much about them at all. It's another thing all together to cherish people, to treat them as beloved and as valuable as we think of ourselves. Another finding from these surveys is that Episcopalians tend to not read Scripture much outside of church. One particular survey found that only 14% of Episcopalians said that they read Scripture on a daily basis. The average attender at Mass comes to church twice a month. One of the things that Episcopal Churches do least well is retain our young people as active church members as they go into adulthood, and with all these statistics I'm forced to wonder if part of the reason that our young people tend to leave the church is that lots of folks in our denomination just don't treat faith in Jesus as if it is very important in their lives. I'm reminded of the flummoxed father of an eighth grader in a parish I knew who could not get his children to attend church. He himself came to church about once a quarter, his wife never came. His kids came at Christmas and Easter throughout their growing up. When the eldest child reached eighth grade, the dad wanted all his kids to begin coming to church so that the eighth grader could participate in confirmation classes. Not surprisingly, the eighth grader rebelled and all of the kids refused to come to church. The dad meant well. He never asked me for my opinion, so I didn't give it. But we can't expect our kids and grandkids to treat the adoration of God as if it's important if we do not ourselves treat the adoration of God as if it's important. [You may know that we are in the midst of the 2018 Partner Drive here at Trinity Church, our annual campaign where we raise funds for our ministries for the next year and where, this year, we'll be asking every adult member to also commit to be involved with at least one ministry here over the next year. As important as all that stuff is, as I've taken stock of where we are as a church community in these last six months, I have come to believe that we have no more urgent priority than to become more familiar with Scripture. Engagement with Scripture is one of the only sure-fire ways to increase the importance we place on adoring God and on cherishing people, and though I'm sure all of us would say that it's important, I imagine that most of us - me included - would say that we want to find ways to study it longer and more deeply than we do now. Coming up in December and January, we'll learn about how we read and interpret Scripture as a part of our Wednesday night programming and then, during Lent, I will be inviting all of you to join me as we begin a parish reading plan to make it through reading the entire New Testament in 40 days. But there's no reason to wait that long: if you find yourselves longing to adore the God we come to know in Jesus Christ, go to the book of John and begin reading, slowly, prayerfully and out loud. You'll find grace there that so many Christians have found through the centuries - grace that will get the good news about Jesus into your very bones, and grace that will transform the way you relate to God and to your neighbors. III. There's another reason why studying Scripture and the adoration of God go together. In our gospel reading this morning, after Jesus tells the Pharisees about the two great commandments, he asks them a question. They should know that they're in trouble at this point. He says, "What do you think of the Messiah? Whose son is he?" They answer, "The Son of David." Faithful Jews in Jesus' day believed that God was going to send a Messiah, which means "anointed one" in Hebrew, and in Greek, is translated as the word "Christ". That's not Jesus' last name, that's his title. He is the Messiah of Israel. But he is not the Messiah the Pharisees expected. The Pharisees expected a Messiah who was going to be a war hero, a masterful politician, and a faithful Jew who worshipped the God of Israel. They thought that he would come from the family of King David in the Old Testament and restore the government that David had over all of the tribes of Israel a thousand years earlier. They thought this Messiah would raise up armies to fight against Rome, who had invaded two generations before Jesus and who still occupied Israel and the surrounding area. But what they didn't think was that this Messiah would be God himself. They were faithful Jews; unlike every other culture in the ancient world, they worshiped only one God. That God was the God who had delivered their ancestors out of slavery in the land of Egypt, and they were to worship him and to serve him only. The Messiah was thought to be a descendant of David, not God. When they said that to Jesus, he asked them, "How is it then that David by the Spirit calls him Lord, saying, "The Lord said to my Lord, 'Sit at my right hand until I put your enemies under your feet"? Jesus is quoting from Psalm 110:1, which was thought at the time to have been written by King David. When he says, "David in the spirit" what he means is that David wrote this Psalm under God's inspiration, and in it, the faithful Jew King David wrote "God said to my king, Sit at my right hand." But how could David, who was king over Israel, call anyone else a king? There was only one more powerful than David, and that was God himself. Jesus' point is that the Messiah will not be just a Son of David, but a Son of God. Jesus' point is that the Messiah will not be a revolutionary who throws the pagans out of Israel, but the one who defeats evil and death in every nation. Jesus stands before the Pharisees not just as the one who calls us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, but as the God-centered man who stands above death, above his nation, above all other human responsibilities. What that God-centered man gives to us is the grace to adore the God who sent us his Son so that death could be defeated and to cherish even the most broken people we come across, not as service projects, but as people with names and histories and stories and value. When the story of that God-centered man gets inside our bones, we cannot help but sit in adoration before God. We cannot help but see our neighbor as a beloved child of God for whom Christ died. IV. Above all else, we need to be people who are rooted and grounded in the story of Jesus Messiah. That story has to get deep down inside us, into our bones, so that it can shape the way we view ourselves, our church and our community. When the gospel gets inside of us, it changes us in ways we never could have anticipated. The story of Jesus Messiah tells us that we are loved profoundly, just as we are. That love sets us free from judging ourselves, from forcing ourselves to be someone or something other than what we are. When the love of Jesus gets inside of us, sometimes we find ourselves able to forgive those we never could before; sometimes we find ourselves set free from addiction, healed from illness or reconciled with long-estranged relatives. These sorts of changes don't come just from coming to church and going through the motions of Christianity. These sorts of changes come when the Holy Spirit brings us to Jesus, and we hear ourselves called beloved children of God . And so, as we meet together Sunday by Sunday for the Eucharist, we invite Christ's body and blood to transform us. As we engage Scripture together, we invite God's spirit to speak to us. As we serve together, we invite God to surprise us by showing us the image of God in people that we would normally discount. As that happens, we learn how this first century commandment to adore God and to cherish humanity still speaks in the 21st century, in ordinary churches like this one, through ordinary people like you and I. May the God revealed in Jesus Christ speak this good news to us, and in turn give us the grace to speak this good news through us.