Water to Wine

Sheepscott Community Church January 17, 2010

Isaiah 62: 1-5

1 Corinthians 12: 1-11

John 2: 1-11

Water to Wine

Last week I talked about the German Lutheran pastor, theologian, and activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was part of a resistance movement to assassinate Hitler. He was imprisoned for suspicious behavior, and after being held in German prisons for two years, was executed by hanging, shortly before the liberation of the camps at the end of World War II. Dietrich Bonhoeffer laid down his life after the model of Jesus, whom he called and saw as “the man for others.”

This week, I would like to talk a bit about Martin Luther King Jr. as cut from that same cloth. He was only 26 years old, a recent graduate of Boston University School of Theology, when he was called to his first parish in Montgomery, AL. On December 1, 1963, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus to a white man, and there began the Civil Rights Movement in earnest. King was drafted to lead the protest committee and the very next day addressed the already aroused community with stirring words: “As you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression...If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong! If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a Utopian dreamer and never came down to Earth! If we are wrong, justice is a lie!”

I think both of these men were prophets, called by God to stand against injustice. For Bonhoeffer, it was witnessing against the evil that Hitler represented in what he was doing. To not rise up in protest, however clandestinely, was to not stand against that evil. Bonhoeffer’s radicalization, if you will, was not a sudden thing. A lifelong pacifist, he had come to believe that the crisis of the times in Germany and abroad was so grave as to require that certain Christians willingly compromise their purity of conscience for the sake of others. He felt he could no longer escape into piety and became part of a plot to do away with Hitler.

King on the other hand overcame––as in “We Shall Overcome”––through nonviolent resistance, a political strategy he had learned from Ghandi, and from Jesus. Planned violence and nonviolent resistance. Different circumstances, different people, different strategies, both open to the Spirit of God and yet hearing in different ways in different times.

Where did these two men find the strength and courage to do what they did? Something we all wonder about: Would we be able to act courageously at the possible cost of our own lives if the occasion arose when we would be tested? Paul writes in Romans, “It is rare that anyone should lay down his life for a just man, but it is barely possible that for a good man someone may have the courage to die. It is precisely in this that God proves his love for us: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

In answer to my own question, Where did these two men find the strength and courage to do what they did? The answer: the Spirit of God, also known as the Holy Spirit, who is Jesus in the world.

With Bonhoeffer, as I indicated earlier, the move from complete pacifism to active resistance was a drawn-out process of prayer and of thought and analysis of the national and world situation, of what he was watching unfold before his own eyes. This did not happen overnight, but when he came to his conclusions, there was no denying the call to leave the safety of family and fiancee for the unknown, of participating in this group that would actively oppose the evil that Hitler did and was.

King was also caught up, you might even say swept off his feet by the momentum of his historical moment. After his first speech following Rosa Parks’ arrest, he faced violence and hatred, but it was a death threat to his family in 1957 that brought him to the limit of his strength. He went into the kitchen and sat at the table with a cup of coffee and turned himself over to God. As King himself reported, “Almost out of nowhere I heard a voice. ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’” Afterward, he said, “I was ready to face anything.” And he did.

I asked earlier where these men found the strength and courage, and answered my own question, which I believe would still be answered the same way: Jesus in the world, the Holy Spirit of God. Martin Luther King was a baptized Christian, but it was the further step of sanctification that happened that night at the kitchen table. That was when he gave his life over to God and God in return gave his Spirit to this young preacher that all might be accomplished through him.

We heard Carroll read from First Corinthians this morning about the gifts of the Spirit. “To each person the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one the Spirit gives wisdom in discourse, to another the power to express knowledge. Through the Spirit, one receives faith; by the same Spirit another is given the gift of healing and still another miraculous powers. Prophecy is given to one; to another the power to distinguish one spirit from another.”

You may recognize one or more f your own gifts in this list, but for my purposes this morning, I’ll focus on the gift of prophecy. I have noted in earlier sermons that prophecy does not necessarily mean foretelling the future, although that can be part of what the messenger of God may communicate. That function and purpose, viz., being the messenger of God is what is important. How do we know that a person is speaking for God and not simply for him- or herself? I think there are at least two criteria for answering that question. In the moment, do we resonate with what we are hearing? Does it speak to our souls? It is reported that when the young Dr. King said to the people of Montgomery, as I quoted earlier, “As you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” When he said those words, the church erupted in applause, and cries of “Yes!” rang out. Those words resonated with the experience of his listeners. God knew their experience, knew their centuries of suffering and pain in families being asseverated, in brutal beatings, in chains on auction blocks, in lynchings. God knew it all, and in the fullness of time raised up his prophet, Martin Luther King, to speak God’s life, the living Word, back into the people, to show them the way to the promised land.

King was a prophet in the truest biblical sense, who proclaimed to his generation the justice and mercy of God, remaining true to his mission, even to the laying down of his life. In 1965, just three years before he died, he said in speaking of how long it takes for justice to be realized––and indeed there were those who asked How long, O Lord, how long?––Dr. King said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In this time of the administration of the first African-American president, it’s worth quoting those words and considering that it was a mere 45 years ago that King spoke them.

He also said in a speech the night before he was killed, that like anyone else, he would like to live a long life. “Longevity has its place,” he said. “But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will... But I want you to know tonight,” he continued, “that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” It’s reminiscent of Moses, isn’t it? Moses was the prophet and leader God had chosen, but like King, he did not himself set foot in the promised land. He had only seen it from afar.

Let’s excerpt Dr. King’s line, “I just want to do God’s will.” That was true for both Bonhoeffer and King, but each of them had to discern the best he could what was God’s will for him in the situation. That’s where the Holy Spirit comes in again, with the gift of discernment. What is the practical application of that when we are trying to discern what to do, what decision to make? We use our reason, our common sense, ask for input from one or two trusted friends, our spouse perhaps, sleep on it, then make a decision and go with it. God will always bring good out of a decision thus made, the best decision we can make at any given time.

Worth noting about King in this context is something he said about himself. “I want you to know,” he said, “that I am a sinner like all God’s children. But I want to be a good man. And I want to hear a voice saying to me one day, ‘I take you in and I bless you, because you tried.’” King struggled to be more than his weakest self, and he challenges the church and all of us to do the same.

Fine for Dr. King, you say. Fine for Dietrich Bonhoeffer. These are extraordinary men in extraordinary times. I don’t deny the prophetic dimension of their lives and characters. Inspiring, yes, but that’s not me.

I encourage you to try thinking about today’s gospel in such a context. The water and the wine. To briefly review, Jesus and his friends are invited to a wedding in Cana. His mother Mary, who was also there, knew that they had run out of wine, and turned to Jesus. He said in essence, “What’s that got to do with me? It’s not my time yet.”

But Mary knew her son and told the waiters to do whatever Jesus told them. Which was to fill six water jars to the brim. When the master of the banquet sampled the water made wine, he chided the groom for not serving the best wine first. What I want to suggest out of this story is that we, you and I, are that water in the stone jar. Not by any action of Jesus––no magic wand, no powders dissolved, no dyes added––but by his word, the water becomes wine.

No less than we, no more than we, were Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King Jr. water in those jars. It was by the Spirit of God, the Living Word, Jesus the Christ, that they were changed into the finest wine and so were able to do what they did. They could not have done that on their own, but God called them forth to meet history head-on, and they agreed, they acquiesced, and they had everything they needed to do what they did, which was the Spirit of God. That Spirit that changes water into wine is with us also, always, as Jesus said he would be, until the end of time, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against.

They were able to become men for others, as Bonhoeffer characterized Jesus as “the man for others” The writer of the book of the prophet Hosea has God saying, “It is love or mercy that I desire, not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than holocausts.” If God does not call us to be offering the blood of bulls and goats, of sheep and lambs on the altar of sacrifice, he nevertheless does call us to identify with Christ’s death to himself, his surrender of his will, that we may be able to offer our lives to God, a sacrifice in that sense.

Yes, God asks us to be a living sacrifice, to let him have all our powers, our gifts. This is the acceptable sacrifice to God, where the regenerated soul deliberately gives up its right to itself to Jesus, to the Spirit of God. Thereby does that soul identify itself entirely with God’s interest in others. We have these gifts of the Spirit in us. Why not lay them at the feet of God? If we hoard our gifts to ourselves, they will turn into spiritual dry rot. Let us give back to God what we have been given that it might be made a blessing for others. Thereby do we become the finest wine given to others to drink. Thereby do we become the finest wheat, the finest bread, broken and given to others to eat.

I was at a friend’s funeral yesterday, and one of the mourners offered the following quotation from George Bernard Shaw as a tribute to the one who had died. It seems fitting here.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no "brief candle" for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

For some there is a fear of loss of personality if they ever do so surrender themselves, their lives with all their gifts. In fact irony is at work here because, as I have mentioned before, it is when we let go to God that we truly discover who we are and are empowered to create the most useful and beautiful life we can. John 12: 24: Amen, amen, I say to you”––Jesus speaking––”unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” If we die to ourselves. Amen.

Board Meeting Notes

Initial Agenda: to be adjusted
1) To ask what the Board wants to do vis-a-vis the by-laws. Is it
enough for you, Cindy, (or me) to read the changes to those assembled?
The revised by-laws had been available for any interested members of
the congregation to read earlier in 2009 at the back of church.

2) To get the Board's opinion/feedback about several different ideas
for a Lenten series of talks.

3) To inform about Easter plans: Maundy Thursday Communion Service;
Good Friday evening cantata presented by Carroll and the choir: "The
Seven Last Words of Christ;" Sunday sunrise service, breakfast,
regular service.

4) Other?

Attendees: Sonnie, Bill, Donna, Cindy, Bev, Lee, Judith and John

I. Approval of November Minutes
Bill; Donna Second. Minutes approved

II. Agenda Additions
A. Coffee maker--blows fuse; use long wall outlet

III. Old Business - None

IV. Minister's Report

A. Education/Presentation
1. Thursday Morning Ladies' Circle (not to be called Ladies' Circle)
a. What do people want?
B. Easter
1. Maundy Thursday Communion, 1. April. 2010
2. Cantata, Good Friday, 2. April. 2010

V. Committee Reports
A. Building Committee
1. Ethan has done a great job with the copious snow.
2. Sonnie asked about an exterior light
3. Bill said heat had been too warm upstairs; keep one downstairs vent open
4. Furnace has been serviced
B. Finance Committee
1. In the black - see attached. Donna moves to accept report; Sonny seconds.
C. Hospitality Committee
1. Easter Breakfast -- Ted Smith has been volunteered to organize.
D. Cookbooks
1. Sonnie: 50 cookbooks left, market saturated; keep it up.

VI. New Business
A. Annual Meeting - draft agenda;
1. Judith asked about order of bylaw changes and new board members
a. New bylaws say one member each from the two constituent groups and the other four members of the church. (Bylaws formerly called for two per grouping.)
B. New Bylaws
1. Will post new bylaws on blog.
2. Judith and Cindy read changes; see link/attached.

VII. Adjournment
A. Sonnie moves to approve; Donna seconds.

A Two-Pronged Faith

Sheepscott Community Church January 10, 2010

Jeremiah 31: 7-14

Ephesians 1: 3-14

John 1: 1-18

A Two-Pronged Faith

My husband Jon has a facility for reproducing the introductions and advertisements of the radio shows of the 1940s, before there was television or computer. People were more challenged then than now, to use their imaginations to create the scenes that went with the dramatic words they heard on radio. That audial generation is a generation of readers as well, who also could picture what they were reading about without needing the prompts of multiple illustrations, valuable as those are.

Some of you have heard Jon “doing” the introduction to “Sky King” or Sergeant Preston and his mighty dog, Yukon King, doing their best in Canada to serve the Queen of England. “Well, King, it looks like this case is closed.” “Rrff! Rrrff!” But my favorite of Jon’s radio reproductions from memory is “The Romance of Helen Trent.” When the seas of life drive her against the cliffs of despair, she fights back bravely, successfully, proving what every woman longs to prove––that romance in life need not be over at 35 and even be-yond!”

Now her thread of hope, what kept her going, was her belief that romance was possible at 35, and especially beyond. Now, get ready to make a leap with me over an abyss of most tenuous connection: Helen Trent has that faith and hope in romance and it did sustain that fictional figure when she was thrown against the walls of despair, again and again, keeping her looking toward tomorrow. What can we say of ourselves, those who are trying to practice a Christianity, trying to live it out when we too are thrown against real, not fictional cliffs of despair erected only for entertainment’s sake? Despair may be a little strong, although I don’t doubt that there are people who feel it, possibly in this very congregation today, but you’d never guess it. Over a lifetime people become very adept at hiding those feelings beneath a smiling countenance.

No less than Helen Trent with her faith and hope in romance to sustain her, do we need such a faith. But given what we encounter––job loss, angry and unforgiving feelings in households over betrayal by infidelity, bouts of drunkenness, violence exacerbated by drunkenness, descent into drugs, depression, seasonal affective disorder, no regular paycheck with mounting bills resulting, an overwhelm of credit-card debt––is that enough? I think so. These are causes for despair, but I would offer our two-pronged faith in incarnation and resurrection as an antidote for despair. Helen Trent has her fictional romance to sustain her. We have our faith in the Christ to sustain us, and it’s real, not fiction.

At this time of the year, we are particularly concerned with the first prong––incarnation. What are we to make of that? It is worth reviewing that basic tenet of Christianity, as we have just concluded this season of the birth of Christ. The writer of the gospel of John treats the subject of incarnation in this morning’s gospel in a poetic way. “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God.” Jesus is understood as that preexisting Word. He was with God in the beginning and through him all things were made...In him was life and the life was the light of men. The light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.”

Verse 14: “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, or otherwise translated, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, who came from the Father full of grace and truth.”

Who can accept this? Well, it’s gospel––literally. But, who can accept that God would become flesh, the living Word? We can be willing to make space in our belief or unbelief for such a tremendous possibility, but we cannot make ourselves believe. That is grace. But it does begin with our desire. Objection! Why should I desire that “opiate of the people,” as Karl Marx called it? I would rather trust in my own intellect and chosen, humane and humanitarian actions, which I can rise and fall by. Okay, try this.

The Lutheran theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer of Germany, author of the classic text The Cost of Discipleship, was part of a plot to assassinate Hitler. A lifelong pacifist, he had come to believe that the crisis of the times in Germany and abroad was so grave as to require that certain Christians willingly compromise their purity of conscience for the sake of others. Bonhoeffer’s simplified description of Jesus as “the man for others” reflects that insight gained over time. It expresses the fundamental difference between the religious God who is all powerful, and the Christian God who suffers and is powerless; between a religious God who keeps mankind in despotic thrall, and a Christian God who exposes and judges men’s craving after power.

Bonhoeffer changed his position on pacifism as he continued to think through his place as one individual in history. He had begun to see pacifism for himself as an illegitimate escape, especially if it tempted him to withdraw from his increasing contacts with the responsible political and military leaders of the resistance to Hitler. He no longer saw any way of escape into some region of piety. His friend Eberhard Bethge, the editor of Letters and Papers from Prison, had never realized, until Bonhoeffer, that so much was involved in trying to be Christlike: One’s outlook on the world, one’s intellect, ethics and trials were all interwoven.

For Bonhoeffer, following Christ was a matter of being engaged in this world, “living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God,” he said, “taking seriously not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world––watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think is faith; that is metanoia,” or complete change. I submit that that is incarnation. That is the Christ realized in the world. For all its fragmentary nature, Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers continues to live in the reading of it because it brings to birth again, in our own generation, the joy of discovering the Christian nature of Christianity. And the Christmas season gives us the opportunity to talk about this incarnation business again.

Arrested in 1943 on the basis of suspicious activities related to the conspiracy to kill Hitler, Bonhoeffer was writing to his parents on December 22 of that same year that he could, he hoped “bear all things ‘in faith,’ even my condemnation, and even the other consequences that I fear; but to be anxiously looking ahead wears one down.... I must be able to know for certain that I am in God’s hands, not in men’s. Then everything becomes easy, even the severest privation.” On April 9, 1945, at Flossenberg Camp in Germany, the 39-year-old Bonhoeffer suffered the ultimate punishment of death by hanging for the moral position he had arrived at after much thought and prayer, and the activities that grew out of that position. That is only one challenge to us when we consider the question of incarnation. How much room will we allow the Christ, the incarnate Word of God, to have his way in us, through us for the sake of the world, whatever small piece of that world we may have our hand on, may have our eye on?

God has spoken into time and the world the Living Word, who is Jesus––incarnation. The Word of God taking on flesh. God speaks this way not to be deliberately obscure, but because, unlike a word in the dictionary whose meaning is fixed, the meaning of the incarnate word, Jesus, is the meaning he has and is for the person he is spoken to in the context of a life. That meaning becomes clear, becomes something, someone we can commit to only when we ferret it out for ourselves, which happens by grace, and our fiat, our acquiescence, our yes.

I want to emphasize Bonhoeffer’s willingness, desire and need to throw himself on God’s mercy. His faith in that God who is in the midst of men, of human beings, was his sole source of hope. Not to trivialize but to remind that while the dramatic fictional character Helen Trent believed in romance, and that sustained her from day to day, Bonhoeffer, a real, flesh-and-blood human being, believed in love, in Jesus, the man for others, and that sustained him from day to day through death and into life, whatever that may prove to be on the other side.

That of course is the second prong of our forked faith: resurrection. But I’m not going to deal with that now because it is not the season. The hour is still that of our protracted Christmas. We have looked at Epiphany already, and today, on our first Communion Sunday of the new year, more of Bonhoeffer’s words are worth quoting. The following is taken from a letter to his family written on Christmas Eve, 1943. By that time he had been separated from all the people he loved for nine months and did not know when or where his ordeal would end. He wanted to say something that might help his family through those hard times. Listen carefully for how these words may speak to your own life.

“Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time, it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; He does not fill it, but on the contrary, he keeps it empty, and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain.”

We are full of the memories of moments in our lives, some good, some not good. By God’s grace we have loved and been loved and survived to be here to share communion today. I suggest that we consciously allow God’s presence in Christ to let us be one with those we love who are not here with us, separated by geography or illness or disagreement or even death, that the Spirit of God, incarnate in Jesus and remembered in this sacramental meal may further make us one in this church today. One in worship, one in purpose, one in Christ. Amen.

Reading the Signs

Sheepscott Community Church December 27, 2009

Isaiah 60: 1-6

Ephesians 3: 1-12

Matthew 2: 1-12

Reading the Signs

Red skies at dawning, sailors take warning.

Red skies at night, sailors’ delight.

I thought of those familiar lines on Tuesday morning when I was thinking about this sermon. I had been thrilled that the sun was actually shining after days of overcast, wind, snow showers and colder than seasonable temperatures. With our passive south-facing solar glass unable to really take the edge of cold off in the house in those days, because of the overcast, I rejoiced in the thought that we could finally get a bit more comfortable in the house.

About 10 o’clock I noticed clouds overspreading from the East. Darn! What happened to that blue sky? that bright sun? I felt betrayed by what is only par for the course in now astronomical as well as meteorological winter. I went back and checked the weather blurb in the newspaper. There it was: overcast with snow showers in the later afternoon.

If like the sailors, we can read the signs in the skies, everything depending on whether that rosiness is evident on the horizon at dawn or at dusk, at sun’s rising or setting. If we can interpret those meteorological signs, why not the signs that attended the birth of Christ? While I grant it is accepted scholarship that legends have grown up around the myth of the birth of Jesus, as with the birth of other great religious figures, it is nevertheless worth investigating any individual who rises to that stature, especially in this case, to someone who is seen as a divine figure, in fact the Godhead itself realized in a human being. That proposed reality wants very close scrutiny from every individual.

What am I getting at here? What am, I suggesting? This is the day we are marking Epiphany. Although it occurs on the calendar date of January 6, today is the day it is liturgically possible for us. I remind you that Epiphany is a showing forth, and especially the showing forth of a divine or superhuman figure. It has come to be associated with the showing forth of the Christ, Jesus, to the Gentile world, represented by the three Wise Men, the Magi, the Three Kings. It is the twelfth and last day of Christmas.

We have talked before about our old friend Herod, who was the insanely jealous king of Palestine, who reigned from 47 BCE to 4 CE. It was he who murdered his wife and her mother because he suspected they were rivals for his power. But he didn’t stop there. He assassinated his eldest son and two other sons for the same reason. The Roman Emperor Augustus had bitterly said of Herod that it was safer to be Herod’s pig than to be his son.

One more anecdote about him to convey the depth of his brutality in the service of jealousy and warped sense of morality. When he came to be 70 years of age, he knew that he didn’t have long to live, and so he arranged to have a group of the most distinguished citizens of Jerusalem arrested on trumped-up charges and imprisoned with the order that the moment he died they should all be killed. He was well aware that no one would mourn his death and he wanted to be assured that there would be tears shed in Jerusalem when he died, regardless of whom they were shed for.

This may give you more understanding of the heart squeeze that Herod must have felt when he heard the story that wise men from the East had arrived searching for a little child, born to be King of the Jews. The chief priests and scribes were summoned into Herod’s presence to tell him what Jewish scripture had to say about where this anointed one should be born. They responded with the quotation from Micah, which you heard in this morning’s gospel reading: “But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,/ are by no means least among the rulers of Judah,/ for out of you will come a ruler/ who will be the shepherd of my people Israel.”

It was then Herod sent for the wise men, charging them to make a diligent search for the little child who had been born. And he said that he too wanted to come and worship the child. Yeah, right. We know the sad ending of the tale, but it is not used in this cycle of readings. When the wise men returned to their home port after receiving directions to do so in a dream and not return to that dog Herod, Herod was outraged. Using the calculated birth date from the chief priests and scribes, he ordered all of the male infants under two years old in Bethlehem to be slaughtered. This event has come to be marked by what is called and onserved as the Feast of the Holy Innocents in some churches. It’s a sad tale we don’t like to hear and imagine, but it is entirely consistent with Herod’s character.

Now, let’s look at the signs I alluded to earlier. First, we have the sign of the wise men from the East, traveling to find this child born to rule. The writer of Matthew introduces the Magi, here translated as wise men. The Magi were originally members of the Persian priestly caste, but the word came to mean any possessor of supernatural knowledge and power, often with a pejorative bent. These wise men were understood to be astrologers, interpreters of the movements of the stars and planets in the heavens in relation to events on earth, and consequently, people’s lives. Gazing at the heavens, as they no doubt did, in order to practice their art and craft, the Magi would have noticed an unusual star.

It was a common motif in antiquity that a new star marked the birth of a ruler. Consequently, it is an exercise in futility to seek out astrological phenomena of the time, e.g., the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 CE., to explain what is a literary and theological motif. Nevertheless, I would like to take this opportunity to sound a positive note in this area of astrology, commonly associated in some religious circles with wickedness and evil. It is here clearly put in the service of calling attention to the birth of the Christ. Is sinfulness vs. usefulness for the purposes of God all in the mind and heart of the practitioner? I’m inclined to think so.

Astrologers as either scientists, or necromancers have been around for thousands of years. In the case of the Magi, they are what we would consider astronomers, a little bit of both old science and what we would consider astrology, predicting or explaining world events by the positions of the stars and planets in the heavens. Remember the wise men as astrologers when you hear someone indicting other ways of knowing about God. It is God who knows the heart and the reasons why any individual practices as he or she does. Just an aside, but a significant aside. As I understood from a recent dream I had and would pass on to you, in case it’s useful, hear God saying, with regard to any area we might be troubled about, and think we need to make a judgment about, “Let me be the judge of that.” Burden lifted Just love. That’s all you have to do. Love well, and leave the rest to God. There’s plenty to keep us busy there.

So, we have the star as a literary and theological motif indicating the birth of a ruler, in this case a religious ruler, and yet the King of Kings, as we believe. Other signs are the gifts themselves which the wise men brought to the child. We’ve known these since childhood, and just sang about them in the hymn “We Three Kings” just moments ago. “Gold I bring to crown him again;” “Frankincense to offer have I; Incense owns a deity nigh;” “Myrrh is mine, its bitter perfume breathes a life of gathering gloom.”

The three gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh gave rise to the idea that there were three Magi or astrologers with specific names: Casper, Melchior and Balthazar. In fact scripture does not specify how many men there were, but the tradition developed into three wise men, who morphed into kings themselves. The stuff of evolving legend, but legend grows out of truth, and the underlying story is that truth. A very important person born. How do we know that? By important personages coming to honor that one, and that brings us back to the gifts.

Gold, the king of metals, is a fitting gift for the king of human beings. So then, Jesus was the man born to be king, but different from most kings because he was born to reign, not by force, but by love.

Frankincense is the gift for a priest. It was in Temple worship and at Temple sacrifices that the worshipper could smell the sweet fragrance of frankincense when it was burned. The function of the high priest during worship or sacrifice in the Temple was to open the way between God and the worshippers. The Latin word for priest is pontifex, which means bridge-builder. The priest was a bridge-builder between God and human beings. This certainly is what Jesus is and does: he opens the way to God for all of us. He makes it possible for us to enter into the presence of God.

Myrrh is the gift for one who is to die because it was used to embalm the bodies of the dead. While Jesus came into the world destined to die, as we all are, he came into the world to live, to show us how to live, to be the bridge-builder between God and man.

Gold for a king, frankincense for a priest, myrrh for one who is meant to die. The three gifts which the wise men, the astrologers, the Magi, the kings brought to the child–– signs to the world then and now of that child’s meaning, which each person is bound to figure out for him- or herself.

If we look at today’s gospel reading, we can see that no sooner was Jesus born than men began to group themselves in one of three ways in response to him. There was the reaction of Herod, one of hatred and hostility. Herod was afraid that this child would interfere with his exercise of power and so he wanted to destroy him. There are still those who would destroy Jesus as the Christ because they see in him one who would interfere with their lives as they want to live them. They see Jesus as the Christ as someone who will take away their access to what they want when they want it.

A second grouping is that of the chief priests and scribes, whose reaction was one of relative indifference. They were so engrossed in their Temple rituals and legal discussions that they completely disregarded Jesus. He meant nothing to them. Poof and piffle. There are still some among us who react the same way to Jesus as the Christ, viz., with complete indifference. Jesus? What? What about him?

The third reaction was that of the wise men, who were truly wise. They came searching for understanding about the significance of this birth. Do we come searching for its significance? Their reaction was to drop to their knees in worship. To be in the presence of God does that to us. We don’t think about it. We don’t analyze it and wonder what the one on our right might think; what the one on our left might think. No. We drop to our knees. We don’t make a choice. The reality of God’s presence chooses us; it drops us. That’s only one indication of what and whom we are dealing with.

Worth remarking again is that the wise men brought gifts. Besides dropping in worship, they laid their gifts in acknowledgment of the one whom they had found, the one to whom the star of wonder, star of night, star with royal beauty bright pointed.

Go in the company of the wise men, the astrologers, the Magi, the kings, the searchers whom God knew by name and intention. Tolstoi’s last words were, “To seek; always to seek.” Those are words to indeed live and die by. I suspect that when we actually encounter the Christ in the fullness of his meaning, only then will the seeking, the search be over. Amen.

Blessed Are You

Sheepscott Community Church December 20, 2009

Micah 5: 2-5a

Hebrews 10: 5-10

Luke 1: 39-45

Blessed Are You

“My soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit rejoiceth in God, my Savior.” How about you? Does your soul magnify the Lord and your spirit rejoice in God your Savior? Mary’s prayer of praise, which we read this morning as the Call to Worship, is a prayer of overage, if you will. Mary is so full of joy that she is overcome. Some people sing, some people go running, some people laugh. Mary prayed. She was so full of joy in the moment that she spilled out the Magnificat, as that prayer of praise is called.

Just for the record and in order that you will be able to sleep tonight and not be worrying about it, magnificat, the word itself, it is from the Latin verb, magnificare, meaning to esteem highly. In this case, soul is the subject of the verb: “My soul doth magnify, or esteem highly, the Lord.”

If any time of the year calls forth the occasional feeling of Magnificat, it is this Christmas time, and that especially for children. Do you remember the feeling of almost unbearable excitement? I remember listening to Don Kent who was the weatherman for WBZ-TV in Boston almost forever. By the time of the Christmas Eve evening weather forecast, he would have the first reports of an initially unidentified flying object, which became identified by the end of the forecast as––amazing as it might seem––a sleigh with what appeared to be reindeer pulling it. Then he would demonstrate on the map where in the Arctic region it had been spotted. Oh my gosh. The thrill. He’s on the way. They actually saw him. Definitely Magnificat time.

We have different reasons for Magnificat throughout our lives. Getting an A on your first research paper you worked hard on in the seventh grade. Smelling the earth during mud season, when the frost comes out. The taste of that first homegrown ear of corn from the garden. Falling in love, whether it’s at 15, 25, 50 or beyond. Your first child being born. Your first grandchild, your second, third and fourth. A sudden awareness of God’s presence in any situation: in nature, in the delivery room, the emergency room, the cemetery, over coffee with an old friend. The list is endlessly varied because people and how they experience God is endlessly varied.

But today we’re talking about Mary and her Magnificat. The story tells us that it was when Mary was visiting her cousin Elizabeth and they got talking about the extraordinary events in their lives that is when she erupted in spontaneous prayer.

Mary doesn’t get a lot of play in the gospels. We know about the annunciation, when the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that God had chosen her to bear his Son; we know about the Nativity, the birth of that child, which we will celebrate in another five days; we know about the vigil of the mother at the foot of the cross when that same divine child, the Christ, was dying. We are also familiar with today’s gospel of Mary’s visit to her cousin Elizabeth to help her during the last three months of her pregnancy. That’s difficult enough for any woman, when she feels like a beached whale as those last three months progress. Getting out a chair with grace is a lost cause. Getting out of a chair at all is an accomplishment.

Complicating the universal discomfort and difficulties of the third trimester as all women experience them, Elizabeth had the added factor of bearing her first child at an advanced age. The gospel doesn’t tell us just how old she was, only that she was no spring chicken. Mary, on the other hand, was really just a kid, by our estimation: probably between thirteen and fifteen years old, according to scholarly estimates. She easily could “hurry” to the hill country, where Elizabeth lived, or go “eagerly” as another translation has it, because although she herself was newly pregnant, she had the strength and fleetness of foot of one who is young.

Elizabeth says to her young cousin, “Blessed are you among women and blessed is the child you will bear!” This echoes the words of the angel who came to Mary at the annunciation according to the NIV translation, which we use: “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” Another translation has the angel saying just what Elizabeth said, “The Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women!” Blessedness is what I want to consider here.

If someone were to ask you if you would want to be among the blessed, as opposed to those not blessed––cursed or outside or other, perhaps––it seems like something of a no-brainer that you would choose the former, to be among the blessed. But before making that dive, that leap, a little circumspection might be in order, especially and for our purposes this morning, through a consideration of the reading of the gospel.

There is paradox to consider: the joy of the moment with her cousin, who confirms her status before she has said anything about what has happened to her with her question, “Why am I so favored that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” How that must have rejoiced Mary’s soul: There. I’m not crazy. Elizabeth knows about it too. And the two women would no doubt have sat and sipped whatever they had for tea in those days and chatted on about the events that they were living out. Just imagine...

But as those who have read and heard about the story of Jesus for much of our lives, we know the other side of the paradox is the sorrow down the road for this young mother-to-be. And whether Elizabeth survived into John’s career as a prophet of Jesus, the one he came to point towards, we don’t know. But I find myself hoping that she didn’t live to see his violent end at the hand of Herod’s executioner. If old age didn’t kill her, that surely would have.

Given the way things turned out for Mary and Elizabeth, not to mention Jesus and John, why would anyone sign on for blessedness? This does seem like a very good time to be asking that question. Last week I talked about our hearts becoming the Christmas crib, the receiving blanket that will provide a place of rest for the divine child. It is the Spirit of God who shows us where we need to repent in order to prepare our hearts for such a visit. It can be through Mary’s agency as mother of the Christ, she who brought him to us when she bore him into the world that Christmas night, it can be through her agency as a model of surrender that we can have our hearts prepared to receive him in the fullness of his identity, knowing what we do––perhaps more than Mary knew when she assented and when she gave birth––and knowing that increasingly more may be asked of us as we draw closer and closer to the author of life.

When Mary said to the angel, “Let it be done unto me according to thy word,” or “May it be to me as you have said,” her saying that is called her “fiat,” the Latin for “Let it be done.” I would like to think that Elizabeth’s exclamation about Mary’s fiat, “Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished,” may be exclaimed in the courts of heaven about us. Is that too much? Too outrageous? Why can’t we have that same level of faith that Mary had to believe what the angel had said, to believe that God can use us to promote peace and justice, to embody love and kindness in a world that cries out for it. As Paul wrote in Romans 8: 22, “All creation groans and is in agony even until now.” We live in a world that groans in agony and cries out for us to be willing to believe, to set inordinate modesty aside that would keep us from believing God would use us for his purposes. “Let it be done unto me according to your word.” Fiat.

Do you think that Mary and Elizabeth’s world was vastly different from ours? Perhaps, in the technologies and medical advances and infrastructure changes, yes. Of course. It would be vastly different, but if we look closely at Mary’s Magnificat, we can easily see that although the surface of things may change, people do not change. And because they do not change, governments made up of people do not change nor do modes of behavior.

In this context, consider the Magnificat as a revolutionary document. “He has scattered or confused the proud in their inmost thoughts.” That is a kind of moral revolution. William Barclay, in addressing this issue, relates an O. Henry tale of the friendship between a boy and a girl, who were good friends when they were in school. The boy went off to the city, where he fell into evil ways, making his living as a thief. After he had successfully relieved an old lady of her purse and was feeling particularly pleased with himself, the girl whom he had known back in the village approached in all her innocence and goodness, and he felt overcome with shame because of what he had become. He leaned against the lamp post. “God,” he said, “I wish I could die.” He saw himself for what he was, which is the beginning of the end of pride and the beginning of a moral revolution. “He has scattered the proud in their inmost thoughts.”

The Magnificat also contains in its lines social revolution: “He has brought down rulers from their thrones but he has lifted up the humble, or raised the lowly to high places.” There is no honoring of class or caste in God: we are all equal. There are also the lines, “He has filled the hungry with good things while the rich he has sent empty away.” These are revolutionary words economically speaking. Nothing wrong with a fortune, but it is what is done with that fortune that declares who the person is before God. Think Ebenezer Scrooge. The expected key word is share. Share the wealth, no matter how much, no matter how little. We are challenged by the words of Mary to share, just as she shared her own self, bodily. She was not impressed into service. She was invited, and she accepted, thereby giving us a model of how to respond to God.

It is a revolutionary act to say yes to God because thereby one life begins to be changed and one life––think Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Greg Mortenson of Three Cups of Tea fame––one life can beget great change in the larger world. Our own lives can beget change. Which brings me to the prophet Micah, from whose writing Tony read this morning. Most of us are familiar with this morning’s reading, which concerns the prophet foretelling the reign of Jesus, who has yet to come. And he does fill the bill, doesn’t he? Born in Bethlehem, one who shepherds his flock in the strength of the Lord, and one whose greatness did reach to the ends of the earth. And finally, he is peace, no matter what else you may hear. He is the Prince of Peace, no matter the bending and twisting of his words to fit any other model.

If Micah foresaw this blessed one, whom Mary consented to bear, and whom Elizabeth recognized by the leap in her own womb at Mary’s greeting, we are called these eons later to consider these words and events, to decide whether they have meaning for us now. We have a responsibility to consider carefully what we heard read this morning and what we will hear read and sung later today. I like what Carroll Smith said about the Advent Service of Lessons and Carols, that it was another opportunity for a person to make his or her soul “aright,” viz., in a right manner, justly, correctly, straightway, in a right course. That’s what we want, isn’t it?

Although not included in today’s reading from Micah, it is in his book that we find the epitome of that soul set aright lived out in these words, and they are literally words to live by:

Micah 6: 8: “He has showed you, O man, what is good./ And what does the Lord require of you?/ To act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” There we have the formula to live a blessed life, but knowing the paradox of blessedness in the lives of those who have accepted God’s invitation, I caution, Take care in accepting the invitation. It will mean the greatest joy, and commensurately the greatest sorrow, but also, more work because everyone who accepts the invitation to be among the blessed assumes responsibility to share that blessedness. But what could possibly be better than to know that we have said yes to the Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace? Just ask Mary: I expect she will say it is and was all worth it. Amen.

The Lord Is Near

Sheepscott Community Church December 13, 2009

Isaiah 12: 2-6

Philippians 4: 4-7

Luke 3: 7-18

The Lord Is Near

I think Brie’s birthday tomorrow is a perfect parallel to this morning’s readings. You may recall that when Advent began, I mentioned to the children the one pink candle, which is pink and not marked by the purple of this season of repentance because we are half way through the season. We are called today to rejoice because we are almost there. As Cindy read from Philippians, “Rejoice!” Rejoice because the Lord is near, nearer than he was two weeks ago. Although Brie’s birthday is not until tomorrow, we rejoice with her in anticipation of that special day. It might be a good idea to have some little treat at home to mark this day of rejoicing, and to think of John the Baptist, seeing his cousin approaching, as we see the feast of Christmas approaching, and exclaim with him, “Look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world!”

Don’t you get a feeling of excitement and expectation from the Gospel of Luke this morning? The people were wondering in their hearts if John might be the promised Messiah. His words, his appearance, all of it was compelling. And the people were deeply longing for the Messiah. Maybe, just maybe, this might be he. But John quickly disabused them of that notion when he said clearly, “I baptize you with water. But one more powerful than I will come , the thongs of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

If anything those words built up the anticipation even more. But what or who was this Holy Spirit, they must have wondered. I can sense the excitement in the background, which was John’s as much as theirs. Imagine how he must have felt when he actually saw Jesus approaching.

In John the Evangelist’s gospel account of this same event, he writes that some priests and Levites had come out to John in the desert to ask the Baptist who he was. Immediately he says, “I am not the Christ.” Further on they ask what he does have to say about himself, and he answers in the words of Isaiah the prophet, “I am the voice of one calling in the desert. ‘Make straight the way for the Lord.’” In that gospel, John also says that although he baptizes with water, that one whom they do not know will come after him and it is he whose sandal thongs he is not worthy to untie.

The very next day, whom should he see but Jesus approaching, and he exclaimed, “Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” This is who I meant when I said, ‘A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me.’” And so forth. I find myself wondering, why didn’t they recognize each other? They were cousins after all. And then I remember at our son’s wedding seeing a niece and nephew I had not seen for 20 years since they were toddlers, and if their parents had not brought them, whom I easily recognized, I would not have known who they were. So, maybe it was like that with Jesus’ parents and John’s parents: they might have gotten together only on the most important of occasions. Finally we’re left with speculation to fill in such time gaps, and we have talked before together about the lesson of the story being what matters, not the perfect alignment of facts according to our own grids of critical biblical appraisal.

Here the story is that Jesus was baptized by John, who openly said he was not the Christ, but also just as openly pointed the finger at Jesus as the one before whom he was sent.

We know what it’s like to wait in an emergency room for news of a loved one who is being worked on in one of the examining rooms. We are hoping for good news, but it could go either way. Sometimes the best outcome we pray for proves out in death, where we had hoped for healing. Some of us know what it is to hope for and anticipate a job following a layoff and a radical curtailment of available money for even groceries. We know what it is to await news of our own or our child’s application to the college he or she so badly wants to attend. If we haven’t experienced it ourselves, we know of someone, or a couple, who want a child badly and every month wait for the good news of conception or adoption.

We understand the anticipation and hope connected with these experiences, and also the disappointment at some outcomes and its resultant sadness. We also understand the reward of a hoped-for outcome and its resultant joy. We’ve all had both kinds of experiences and have learned to live with reward or disappointment with greater or lesser degrees of acquiescence.

The difference between anticipation in these human experiences that can go either way and the anticipation connected with John the Baptist and those who heard him and us ourselves as we travel through Advent approaching the feast of Christmas is that there is no disappointment at the end of the four weeks, at the end of the preparation and waiting period. Christ will come. Christ will inhabit the crib of our hearts on that night, where we have prepared for him a place of rest, a receiving blanket fashioned of repentance and desire to be new.

It is worth mentioning again, as I did last week to the children, that even though on the occasion of Christmas we mark the coming again of the Christ into the world, he is always already here, that fact made real by another of the major players in this religious drama, whom John the Baptist alluded to this morning: the Holy Spirit. Christ dwells with us through that Holy Spirit who makes us one in spite of ourselves, and in spite of our protests and our running in the other direction to get away from our fellow human beings.

The novelist Somerset Maughm’s Of Human Bondage has a wonderful paragraph in it that affected me permanently when I was a teenager, more arrogant than many. The message of the paragraph was that the character was refusing to participate in the human fray, thinking he was better and then calling that human fray coarse or something like that. The character justified his own avoidance of responsibility to be part of the whole thing by calling it coarse. That blew my hair back that day because it spoke to my condition, a condition of thinking I was better than. What a joke. I want to note that the Spirit of God can use a well-written text, an inspired poem, or piece of music or art to move us in our deepest selves into wider truth, which we may not have recognized otherwise and may have avoided for whatever reason.

The Spirit of God, that Holy Spirit, the source of all creativity, who knows us absolutely intimately, knows what our buttons are and what pushes them, what stirs us to action, what excites our passion. That Spirit, the same one whom John the Baptist alludes to in this morning’s gospel, is present in Christ to us today, right now, here in this church, in each of you, in me. That’s exciting, that’s challenging, and here’s the good news: it is true. I have never lied to you, and I would not say what I just said if I did not know it to be the truth without qualification. The Spirit of God, the same Spirit who is responsible for all of creation, whom John the Baptist speaks about, is with us today. And we are preparing to honor that one’s coming in Jesus a little less than two weeks from now.

Think about swine flu. Very contagious. Regular winter flu. Also very contagious, as are colds. This negative contagion of illness underscores how we are one and are affected by one another. Masks and gloves, washing our hands frequently during the day, drinking plenty of fluids and intaking Vitamin C notwithstanding, we cannot finally fully protect ourselves from illness. Think Howard Hughes. This Holy Spirit with whom Jesus will baptize is a positive contagion, will make us aware of how we are one, in spite of ourselves and our desire to run in the other direction from belonging. We can never outrun the Spirit because we can never not be part of the Body of Christ, regardless of fancy thinking, or despairing thinking. We can never get away from one another. Deal with it.

Often, before we can live and act under the joyful and creative influence of the Spirit, we have other work to do in the Spirit, and that is repentance. Repentance is the bedrock of Christianity, and yet conviction of sin is one of the rarest things that ever strikes a person. Repentance is the threshold of the understanding of God, of approaching God, but a person cannot truly repent on cue because true repentance is a gift of God. We come to see who we are before God: Nothing. And yet we are received with love and forgiveness. Gratitude for receiving what we could never deserve comes forth from that. The old Puritans used to pray for the gift of tears, and those tears are finally the only appropriate expression of unspeakable sorrow we have before God when convicted of sin.

Lamentation, beating of the breast, exclamations of woe, Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”––these are thoughts that might rise up out of what I am saying. I won’t discourage them because they are an oft’ neglected part of the whole picture of what it means to try to be a Christian. It is not all sweetness and light. It’s facing ourselves as we truly are. I’m not talking about the big sins of idolatry, murder, stealing, adultery, covetousness, although these can parse into our everyday lives quite easily––a sermon for another time. I am talking about our pettiness, our meanness of spirit, the withholding of a smile or a kind word when that word could shift the wind for another suffering soul. That’s what I’m talking about. The everyday stuff.

But it isn’t all breast-beating and woe either. In this season of repentance, we need only pay attention to what John the Baptist is saying in this morning’s gospel. After the opening words of threat and judgment, the people who had gathered to hear John asked with one voice, “What should we do then?” John gave them by way of reply the social gospel to share with one another. The man with two tunics should share with him who has none, and food, the same.

When tax collectors and soldiers asked him specifically what they should do, he instructed them to work out their salvation by doing the job as it should be done. Let the tax collector be a good tax collector, and the soldier a good soldier. Let the boatbuilder be a good boatbuilder, the medical technician a good medical technician, the teacher a good teacher, the insurance salesman a good insurance salesman. It was and is a person’s duty to serve God where God has set that person, and it was John’s conviction that a person can best serve God in the day’s work. Very Shaker. “Hands to work, hearts to God.”

We have plenty of work to put our hands to over the next two weeks, and let us consciously remember to give our hearts to God in that work. How to do that? Just by saying so out loud or to ourselves. “I give my hand to this work, God, and my heart to you.” If you want to expand on it, extemporize, go right ahead. If you’re baking, “May each of these cookies that I make with love, bless with love all those who receive them.” Make free in your prayers. The freer we are in our gift of prayer to God, the more room we make for God’s response to us. Amen.

Don't Shoot the Messenger

Sheepscott Community Church December 6, 2009

Malachi 3: 1-4

Philippians 1: 3-11

Luke 3: 1-6

Don’t Shoot the Messenger

The messenger I had in mind in the title of today’s sermon is of course John the Baptist, one of the chief Advent players. As you heard in Zachariah’s extensive prayer of praise, which we read together this morning, John the Baptist, the prophesied child of the high priest and his wife Elizabeth, would be the prophet of the Most High, who would go before the Lord to make a way for him.

At this point in preparing the sermon, I heard Canada geese and ran outside to try to catch sight of them, a seasonal event that never grows old. Late, at this late date, but never old. I didn’t see them, but I could hear them honking their way South, a natural harbinger of impending winter. The Canada geese in their migration, the barn swallows in their arrival and departure, the wooly bear caterpillar with its stripe of supposedly prophetic weather forecasting–– these are all natural prophets, as are the frost on the pumpkin, the sun lower on the horizon, the skim of ice on the pasture pond. Can we read these signs?

We can read John the Baptist as a harbinger of a season unlike any that had ever dawned before or has since that time. He was the prophet of the promised Messiah. Luke considers the emergence on the scene of John the Baptist so significant that he carefully lays out the political geography of the period against the world background of the Roman Empire. Because of this gospel’s detail, scholars have been able to use that roadmap to determine that John the Baptist was preaching and baptizing between about 27 and 29, the Common Era.

The writer of the gospel of Mark paints a clear picture of John the Baptist in the first chapter of that gospel. “John wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.” It sounds like someone who may have appeared in the background of a ‘60s documentary on the Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco. We recognize this figure of the outsider, especially the religious outsider, the prophet with the sandwich board, walking the streets of New York City or San Francisco or Memphis or Little Rock, and often featured in New Yorker cartoons. We have certain expectations when we see that figure.

A prophet can appear in Newcastle or North Whitefield. I think I’ve mentioned before the biblical message painted many years ago on an outbuilding in Whitefield about the end times and being ready. Which reminds me of a story Jon told me about being a child in summer in Boothbay Harbor and seeing a station wagon with a megaphone affixed to its roof that would drive around the Harbor, warning people to get ready for the end. He said there was a biblical reference written around the box that held the megaphone. He is able now to calculate that it was probably the abbreviation for Second Thessalonians 5: 1-10, which his child mind of the time interpreted as the world coming to an end on Thursday at 5:10.

Anyway, we recognize the stereotypical and caricatured figure of the prophet. We do get a little uneasy when we see and hear prophets, don’t we? These odd loners who might be speaking the truth. We listen with one ear because we may be thinking, He’s a nut! but what if he isn’t? The people in Palestine in John the Baptist’s day flocked to him to hear what he had to say, to be challenged to repent and be baptized. They were thrilled by his words and many readily went down into the Jordan. They responded to his call to prepare the way of the Lord, just as we are doing in this Advent season, preparing the way of the Lord.

There was something about John that attracted people to him, in spite of his appearance, his rugged demands, and his calls for repentance. It was the Spirit of God in him, that same Spirit that drove him out into the desert where he himself prepared for his career, just as the Spirit of God drove Jesus, following his baptism by John, out into the desert to prepare for his career. Both careers––that of the prophet, the messenger, and that of the One prophesied––both careers were short-lived, but they changed the history of the world.

If we get a little uneasy when we see or hear about prophets, we also are suckers for the lists of so-called prophesies from people like Nostradamus or Jean Dixon, who have presented themselves and been recognized as seers, foretellers of future events. Here a distinction needs to be made between a prophet and a fortune teller . A true prophet, one called by God for God’s purposes, like John the Baptist or the major and minor prophets of the Hebrew Bible, for instance Malachi in this morning’s first reading, a true prophet is one who speaks for God, who is God’s messenger. True prophets do not tickle the ears of their listeners with blandishments. True prophets may speak of the outcome of ungodly behaviors, and also may offer consolation in times of suffering, and words of assurance of God’s presence at such times. They may tell something of the future, but not necessarily. It is the speaking for God that makes a prophet a prophet, not the foretelling of events.

The Spirit of God is in or upon the prophet, and speaks sometimes in a halting way because of human limitation, sometimes in an exalted way because of the Spirit of God overcoming human limitation. The prophet is the presence of God among his people.

Think of the “I have a dream” speech of Dr. Martin Luther King. There was the message of God delivered through a contemporary prophet. Dr. King had other words written to be preached that day, but the Spirit of God took over and the prepared text was set aside to give the people the hope, the encouragement they needed to hear to keep on keeping on, to claim the freedom that was indeed their God-given right and to act towards it. “I have been to the mountaintop,” he said. And he had seen the Promised Land, but like Moses, he was never to enter the Promised Land. Five years later, he, the messenger, the prophet, was shot dead by James Earl Ray in Memphis TN, where he had gone to support the striking sanitation workers. When the tent poles of Martin Luther King’s activism were moved to accommodate all the poor, not just the African- American poor and disenfranchised, it seemed at that point that he had become more of a threat and needed to be done away with.

Martin Luther King learned his model of leadership of nonviolent resistance from the Indian leader Mohandas Ghandi. Ghandi had read Tolstoi, where he learned about nonviolence, and Tolstoi had read Henry David Thoreau’s essay on “Civil Disobedience.” The message of nonviolent resistance, which King understood and internalized as a Christian and young graduate from Boston University School of Theology, was first articulated in Concord, MA, traveled to Russia and thence to South Africa, where Ghandi was a the time, and later put into practice in India, and then back to the homeland of the United States. The power of the written word became the spoken, prophetic word, became the activating, enabling word of God made flesh.

Oscar Romero, another prophetic voice for justice, was a bishop in El Salvador during the late 1970s. He moved from being a conservative bishop who kept his mouth shut in that oligarchic country, to being a prophetic voice for the poor of the country. His conscience was activated at the time of the assassination of a friend who was a Jesuit priest who served the poor. After that death, Romero was named archbishop of San Salvador and he unexpectedly and to the annoyance of the powers who were responsible for naming him to that post, he became the voice of the poor documenting atrocities of injustice week by week on the radio and calling to account the officials of a corrupt and repressive government.

He knew his days were numbered because of speaking out. That fact did not silence him but only seemed to stir him to bolder and bolder statements, as if to take fullest advantage of the time he had left. “I have frequently been threatened with death,” Romero said in an interview a few weeks before his death. ”I must say, that as a Christian, I do not believe in death but in the resurrection. If they kill me, I shall rise again in the Salvadoran people.”He was assassinated by a single gunman while saying Mass on March 24, 1980. Shades of Thomas a Becket, whom we considered a few weeks back, running afoul of Henry II, his one-time friend.

Like Becket and John the Baptist, Romero met a prophet’s end. The messenger was shot.

I note here that neither John the Baptist nor Jesus was interested in worldly power. Nor were Thoreau or Tolstoi or Ghandi, or Sojourner Truth, Virginia Woolf, or Mary Wollstonecraft, or Martin Luther King or Oscar Romero. On the contrary, they were interested in the empowerment of others––particularly the disenfranchised––to be able to live their lives in a godly way, which is a fulfilled way. John called for repentance by way of preparation––We’ll hear more about that next week––and Jesus called for us to simply receive all he had to give––love, peace, his very self, which we will partake of this morning in the Communion. May the mutuality we enjoy in this sacrament make each of us a prophetic presence, ourselves the message of God in Jesus to the world. Amen.