“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” (Ps 19:14)

The other day I emailed my daughters to let them know that they should think about getting a refund for one of the Christmas gifts they gave me.  I mentioned that the gift was broken, that it hadn’t worked since I received it.

The gift was a pair of socks.  On the bottom of one sock it reads, “If you can see this,” and on the bottom of the other it says, “Bring me a cup of tea.”  Well, I’ve had my feet up a couple of times already wearing those socks around the house and Sharon never, not once, ever bothered to bring me a cup of tea, and I know darn well that she could see what was printed on my socks.  So obviously the socks must be broken.

We all know that’s not the way things work.  That’s what makes the socks funny rather than Sharon beating me up every time I wear them and point out that I’m expecting my cup of tea.  This is probably also why Sharon is away for a girls’ weekend in Boston today.  You can only take so much of this.

It’s not only what we believe, it’s not only what we claim, it’s not only what we hope, it’s what we do that makes things happen.  But the two can’t be completely separated either. 

Our aspirations hopefully drive our actions.  They inspire us.  And this is where faith and church feed each other.  What our faith believes gives us the motivation for our church to act, and in turn, the life of the church inspires what we believe.

Think about the story in today’s Gospel of Jesus’ baptism.  We don’t know much of anything about Jesus’ life before He goes public.  The oldest Gospel, Mark’s, does refer to Jesus as a carpenter.  This implies that as Jesus reached the age of young adulthood He was still a working man up in the village of Nazareth in the area called Galilee.

He’s not satisfied though.  He knows He’s called to do something else, something more, but if we allow ourselves to be honest with the story, Jesus doesn’t seem to know exactly what that something else is.

It’s winter.  It’s going to be a cold 70 degrees outside this January afternoon.  But if you get the chance when it does get colder and you want to sit inside with your “bring me a cup of tea” socks on, think about grabbing Christopher Moore’s book Lamb.  It was recommended to me by a couple of clergy friends at the last Conference Annual Meeting in November. 

I was skeptical before I started reading it.  I was skeptical as I started reading it.  But it turned into an actual eye-opener.  It’s a fanciful tale.  It’s even a bit mischievous in the way it treats Jesus’ story.  But its intent is right on the mark.  It brings out the human nature in Jesus so that it is not completely overshadowed by Jesus’ divine nature.

Again, it’s a fanciful story, but when it’s read with a background context of the Gospel stories, it helps the reader to wonder again at the amazing journey for Jesus of Nazareth to reach the realization of who He really is and what He is called to do. 

The story emphasizes that while Jesus was always faithful in the search, it was never easy or obvious.  

This struggle to find meaning led Jesus out of His carpentry shop in Nazareth and brought Him out into the wilderness of Judea to a group of seekers who had gathered around a strange prophetic character everyone was calling John the Baptist.

John, as we mentioned during Advent, left behind a privileged life as a Jerusalem priest.  He traveled out into the desert because he was disgusted with the ways of the world.  And there he preached about a coming kingdom that was going to force out the old order so that the new could come barging in.

Jesus walked away from His old life and literally walked all the way from Nazareth to Judea, about a five-day journey, just to be a part of this community of seekers. 

This is why we can’t make light of Jesus’ spiritual journey.  It wasn’t simple and straight-forward.  It was laboured. 

All of this had taken place before Jesus asked to be baptized by John.  This is important to remember because of the revelation that occurs at His baptism.  The Father in heaven speaks:  “‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’” 

The bewilderment of “my Son, the Beloved” drives Jesus further out into the desert where He will stay for 40 days, but that’s a story for Lent, not for now. 

What I want to speak about today is that Jesus hasn’t even started to do the work of His public ministry.  He hasn’t preached one word, performed one miracle, called one disciple, and yet the Father is well pleased. 

The Father is pleased because Jesus has made Himself open and available to the work that will be done.  Sometimes we may forget that the first step in doing the work of God is to make ourselves available to God.

It’s not enough to think about what we can do.  It’s to trust what we can do with God.

The church, just like John the Baptist, is an alternative to the way the world is.  The church is a place for seekers who believe in something different.  We’re called here just like the crowds were called to come out to John.

God is pleased not only with what we accomplish, but with our willingness to make ourselves available.

Nothing we do as church is small or inconsequential.  It is the work of God. 

It’s not like putting on my tea-socks and waiting for the tea to come to me.  The work of God begins when are willing to go to God and to be open to what He would have us do.

Not only what we think we can do, but what becomes possible when we trust in what God can do with us and through us.

May we all make ourselves available for the work of God so that God may be well pleased with us, His sons and daughters.  In Jesus’ name we pray.  Amen.

“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” (Ps 19:14)

I am really fortunate around Christmas because I only have to buy one present.  I am not a good shopper.  Sharon takes care of choosing all the gifts we need to give.  Sometimes she’ll ask my opinion about option one or two, but if I choose incorrectly, I quickly pick up the signal and change my mind.  

So the only gift I need to buy, is for Sharon. 

I know a lot of you are not big winter snow fans, but Sharon and I like this small company called Vermont Snowflakes.  They produce prints and jewelry based on the photographs of Wilson Bentley who took beautiful pictures of delicate, intricate, individual snowflakes.  Every year they send us a gift catalog. 

As I thumbed through it, a little bracelet of snowflake charms caught my eye.  I called in my order and after about five minutes I was all done with my Christmas shopping.  The package arrived. I hid it away.  Then on Christmas morning I snuck it into Sharon’s stocking.

We all start opening our presents and Sharon is watching all the homeruns she hit with the gifts she chose for our daughters and me.  I ask her when she’s going to open her stocking.  She reaches in and pulls out the box, opens it up, looks at the bracelet for a couple of seconds, and then tells me, “Randy, you bought the same bracelet for me three years ago.”

I had one thing to buy for Christmas and I messed it up.  Wouldn’t it be great if our Christmases could be as perfect as Jesus’ Christmas?  Angel choruses, heavenly stars, fancy gifts brought right to the doorstep like gold, frankincense and myrrh.  But Jesus had God on His side.  Of course there wouldn’t be anything to spoil Jesus’ Christmas.

But just like Luke went out of his way to make sure we understood that Jesus was born as one of us, Matthew does the same in his own way.  He tells us the story of the Magi.  They arrive in Jerusalem, the capital city, and ask the king – of all people – where the newborn “king of the Jews” was born.  Well, if you’re the king, and a paranoid tyrant of a king at that, you don’t welcome inquiries about some newborn king. 

Herod tries to trick the Magi and he tells them that when they discover this newborn king that they should return to him with the news.  He wants to go and honour the child, as well.  But when the Magi are warned against doing this, Herod, the mad, paranoid tyrant that he was, simply orders all of the boys murdered in Bethlehem two years old and younger.  If Herod can’t discover the one newborn king, he’ll just kill all the newborns.  Problem solved.

This sadistic tragedy is just as much a part of Jesus’ Christmas story as the angels, stars and Magis’ gifts.  Joseph must flee by night with his family.  The toddler-Jesus is taken secretly to a foreign land.  The Holy Family must seek refuge in Egypt, away from this maniac king. 

Even when the king dies, Joseph can’t return to his home in Bethlehem because another Herod is now on the throne, and maybe the son is just as crazy as was the father.  Joseph must seek refuge far to the north in a nondescript, common, forgettable village called Nazareth.

Matthew writes to make sure that we know Jesus’ Christmas story was far from idyllic.  It’s no fairy tale.  Christmas tells of a unique birth, but not one without connection to all of us.

Matthew writes for a people who know the harshness of life and the vagaries of powerful people.  Matthew’s readers often find themselves at the mercy of events and people far beyond their control.  They suffer in many accidental and even intentional ways.  Their lives are hard.  Pain and sorrow are not uncommon. 

To these people, and to us still today, Matthew tells the story of Jesus’ Christmas, a story that lets us know that from the very beginning Jesus wasn’t protected from the world’s accidental or intentional cruelties, that Jesus faced the same reality as the rest of us must. 

I think Matthew’s intention is to bring us closer to Christ, and hopefully to each other by sharing this story.  Matthew is trying to stress our shared humanity. 

We live at a time of increasing division.  Another attack on a Jewish family in the New York City area simply because they are Jewish.  Stereotypes are shared loudly.  We look past our shared humanity and emphasize what separates us.  I don’t think we like this kind of world, but we tolerate it and then it becomes more acceptable, that is unless we choose to act and speak differently.

Jesus escaped by the skin of His teeth when the holy innocents of Bethlehem were targeted with violence because of where they were born.  This is not a story about Jesus alone; this is a shared story for too many.  People are judged all the time not for who they are, but where they’re from.

Matthew’s Christmas story offers us a choice to tolerate the kind of world where this is practiced or to stand up for Jesus and everyone in similar circumstance.

Christmas is the celebration of God’s coming among us in Jesus, and it’s also the challenge of God coming among us in Jesus.  What kind of world do we choose?  What will we work toward? 

Christmas doesn’t shy away from telling us the harsh reality that even Jesus faced, but Christmas doesn’t accept it as inevitable either.  And that’s the challenge for us.  Will we tolerate the meanness of the world or will we seek to build something better?

The beautiful words we heard Marcia read from Psalm 148 can be heartfelt, but it’s going to take our choice to make them more than a Sunday morning prayer. 

Christmas is about the sanctity of the world and all its people.  Sometimes it’s harder to see than other times, but we shouldn’t grow so discouraged as to give up because Jesus didn’t, and Christmas promises that He is with us as us.

May our continuing Christmas prayer be that we look for the good in people and in us, in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” (Ps 19:14)

I enjoy visiting Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and one of the reasons is its history.  I like the old buildings and their stories.  One of those stories is about Ona Judge.  Ona was the daughter of a biracial woman and a white man, and Ona was also a slave, a person owned by Martha Washington.

Because Ona was of such light skin, because both her grandmother and mother were raped by “honourable” white men, the President’s wife chose her to be her personal slave.  She accompanied Martha Washington to official functions, on social visits and shopping trips, and assisted her when entertaining at the President’s House in Philadelphia. 

I’m certain that Mrs. Washington thought that Ona should be happy and even proud to be able to serve in these ways, since after all she was just a slave.  I’m quite sure that Martha never imagined that Ona resented being owned and locked in this gilded cage.

This is why Mrs. Washington was so infuriated when on the night of May 21, 1796 Ona escaped.  Martha took this as a personal insult after all she had done for Ona.  The President’s wife placed newspaper ads seeking the return of her property, this woman named Ona, and she offered a reward to make sure that people took her seriously.  Until the day she died, Mrs. Washington sought Ona’s capture and return as her property.

Ona escaped to the seaport community of Portsmouth.  She worked there to support herself by hauling water, ironing, doing laundry and cooking.  These were far more menial tasks than she performed as Mrs. Washington’s slave, but Ona chose this life over her previous one because she was free. 

Martha Washington thought she loved Ona and that Ona loved her, but that love was as real as that of those white men who had raped her grandmother and mother.

I share Ona’s story this morning because today is the Advent Sunday dedicated to love, a real love, a love manifested perfectly in the coming birth of the Bethlehem baby.  When God chose to enter the world in Jesus, He could have come any way He wanted.

God chose to be born in the humbleness and vulnerability of a homeless and nation-less family.  God chose to be born in the poverty of swaddling clothes.  God chose to come in the weakness of an infant with no pretense of power in the least.  God chose to come in a love offered freely to everyone, without precondition.  God chose to come into the world without distinction so that He could embrace everyone.

Martha Washington thought that favours granted her slave made the slave love her, but Ona Judge risked everything to escape from Martha Washington.

Mrs. Washington supposed that she deserved better for treating the slave less like a slave, but Ona always knew that she was and always would be a slave to Martha.

Martha’s favours never changed her thinking that Ona was a possession.  Ona was a special possession, but still a possession.  Being treated better than others by a master does not erase the fact that the master still owns you. 

Just as Martha could love a favourite set of china or a silk dress, she could love Ona.  But Ona knew that this was not the love of one person for another.  This was not a love that Ona could choose to accept or to give.  She could only be loved as long as she acted exactly as Martha Washington commanded, and a forced love is really not love.

We do God no favours when we forget this and go back to teaching about a commanded-love, that God loves us only because we do what we’re told to do and if we don’t, then we can burn forever. 

This is not a very inspiring or sincere expression of love, and it is not the love we honour today. 

In the Gospel we heard the Evangelist Matthew quoting Isaiah:  “‘The virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, “God with us.”’” 

Not God with some of us, not God with us only when we obey, but God with us. 

Jesus’ birth is the opposite of a commanded-love.  It is empathy.  It is God becoming one of us.   

The wonder and awe of Christmas is that the birth of Jesus changes everything.  God is asking for more than a love we can’t refuse.  In Jesus, God is asking us to choose love.

How about this:  until Christmas, let’s pray boldly.  Let’s call on God to come among us.  Let’s ask God to shine on every person and every place that needs the light of his unfamiliar love.  And let’s ask that this love may inspire us to love like God loves.

Christ is Immanuel, God with us.  May we choose to be with Him as we celebrate this wondrous mystery of God’s perfect love.  And may His unfamiliar love infect us and grant us the willingness to choose love.  In Jesus’ name we pray.  Amen.

  Last Sunday's preached sermon was not the same as the printed one.  Seeing "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" the night before church, changed everything.
   This Sunday I didn't preach the prepared and printed sermon so that I could speak to the congregation as we grieved a shared loss.  It was an in-house sermon.
    It was based on the description in Matthew's Gospel that John the Baptist may have died not knowing whether or not Jesus was the Messiah, and still God was able to use him to prepare the way for Jesus and His ministry.  Sometimes when we can't see how, God is still near, God is still working.
   We have every plan and good intention to tape next Sunday's Service and share it on our website.
    Thank you. 
​    Rev. Randy

I thank Nate for taping our church Service.  Through no fault of his, the battery in the receiver linking my mic to the camera died toward the end of the Service.  This is what caused the squeaking sound during the Time with Children and which is also the reason why the sermon is not included this Sunday.
​I am including the printed sermon here, but for anyone at church on this Sunday you'll recognize that it's not the same sermon I delivered.  Sometimes what is written is not what is preached. 


“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” (Ps 19:14)

No one knows anything at all about the timing of the coming of the Son of Man.  Today’s Gospel makes this absolutely clear.  The angels of heaven didn’t know.  Even Jesus didn’t know.  It’s going to come as a surprise.  That’s all we know. 

Ours is a God of surprises.  God doesn’t operate under the same parameters and expectations that we do.  So we shouldn’t be surprised by the surprises.  We should learn to go with them as part of being faithful. 

Friends of ours were looking forward to their two daughters coming home for Thanksgiving.  One was taking the train from New York City to New Haven, Connecticut and was going to be picked up there by her mother.  The other daughter was going to fly in from Colorado, but then a blizzard intervened.

Her father called her up at 6AM just after she had gone to bed – she works as a bartender.  He told her that she better get over to the airport as soon as she could to get on stand-by because it looked like all the flights were going to be cancelled later in the day.

I don’t know how this works, but her luggage somehow got on a flight to Bradley, but she couldn’t.  She had to bounce her way from airport to airport for 18 hours to get home.  But since the luggage made it on that other flight, my friend had to drive down to Bradley to pick up her bag, but not his daughter.  She wouldn’t get picked up until several hours later when her mom and sister were coming home from New Haven.

He's telling me all of this on the phone while driving to pick up just her luggage.  That’s when I told him that I was upset because on the way to Northampton the next night to meet them all for dinner we were going to have to stop off at the car rental agency in Northampton to drop off the car my daughters drove from Boston.  That added another probably a whole two minutes to our travel time.

I don’t think he was too sympathetic.  But the point of all this is that there are surprises in even our ordinary lives, and when we get out of the routine of the ordinary, if only for a Thanksgiving holiday, then surprises shouldn’t surprise.  

And that’s all that Jesus is asking us to do today.  Go with the surprises.  Don’t make them into roadblocks.  Follow God’s detours.
 
Jesus used the example of Noah in today’s Gospel to express the idea of God’s surprises.  It’s not like there were no hints and God just flooded the world impulsively.  According to the story, the people of Noah’s day mocked Noah when he warned them about God’s anger and God’s coming judgment. 

They simply went about their lives and ignored not only God, but this huge boat that was being built at God’s command.  They went out of their way to ignore Noah’s warnings and then they were really surprised according to the story.  

Or take Isaiah’s prophecy.  First of all, it was and still remains a huge surprise to imagine a time of world-wide peace.  It’s as strange now as it was in the prophet’s day to listen to God’s message that we should be beating our swords into ploughshares and our spears into pruning-hooks. 

We should give less energy to preparing for war, says God.  God has warned us about this – repeatedly.  It’s like Noah all over again.  It’s in our face as big as the ark.
 
The late physicist Stephen Hawking wondered if the lack of signs of intelligent life in the universe were a result of the fact that when a civilization got the point of being able to annihilate itself, it did.
 
That’s the point we are at now.  War could soon be a matter of no winners and losers, but only of complete destruction.  God warns us, and His call for peace surprises us, but it shouldn’t.  We have to learn how to live together or else we’re all going to die together. 

Isaiah also says that the nations will stream to Jerusalem because that is where God dwells.  But here comes another surprise.  When God’s messenger of peace came into our world in Jesus, He didn’t have the time or the inclination to wait for people to come to Him.  So Jesus brought God to them. 

God surprised us with a humble Bethlehem birth.  God surprised us with Jesus’ ministry and message.  God surprised us with Jesus’ death and resurrection.  But through all of these surprises Jesus brought God out into our world. 

And even though the world was mean, savage and violent, Jesus was as peaceful as Isaiah foretold.  You can’t force people to be peaceful, but you can set them an example.  You can surprise them by being peaceful even when everyone else is turning their ploughshares into swords and their pruning-hooks into spears. 

Jesus is like Noah building the ark.  He’s plain to see.  His life reveals the will of God.  It’s a surprise, but we shouldn’t be surprised by surprises. 

Today we lit the first candle of the Advent Wreath, the candle of hope.  Hope is the surprise that God springs on us constantly

Maybe God’s surprise is that in Jesus, God has entered our world as us, to show us exactly what we can do.  That we can be so grieved or even terrified by violence that we choose peace.  That we can get so sick of the killing that we work for peace.  That we can finally realize that it’s up to us, in God’s name, in following Jesus’ example, to surprise the world and start taking seriously about hope.

May this be our prayer as we begin our season of Advent longing.  In Jesus’ name we pray.  Amen.  

“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” (Ps 19:14)

Last week the New York Times released classified documents of the Chinese Communist Party.  China is extremely worried about its Muslim citizens.  Anything, including religion, that challenges the absolute rule of the Communist Party is regarded as a threat.  Christians have faced this same kind of persecution in China.

According to these secret documents, up to one million Muslim citizens are imprisoned in what are called re-education facilities.  The documents were instructions to local officials on how to deal with students who were coming home from college for vacations only to then discover that their families were no longer there. 

One particular instruction advised that if a returning student asked if their relatives had committed a crime, the response was to answer that they had not.  Then they were supposed to say, “It is just that their thinking has been infected by unhealthy thoughts.  Freedom is only possible when this ‘virus’ in their thinking is eradicated and they are in good health.”

In other words, freedom is to do and say whatever you want as long as whatever you want is what the authorities want.  What kind of freedom is that where different is illegal?  

​I bring this up today because Jesus is proudly different.  And we shouldn’t try to tame that difference. 

That carpenter from Nazareth, says Colossians, “Is the image of the invisible God, … in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell ...”

This is why Jesus defines different.  Why would we imagine that God has to fit into our molds?  This begins to explain why God enters into the world so strangely as a Nazareth carpenter, and then preaches to us as an unemployed wanderer.  For non-Christians this is so different as to be preposterous.  And Jesus has upset governments and institutions and even churches for longer than He has been called the Christ.  Jesus is God’s disruption of the world’s normal.

And it gets even more so.  While Jesus’ life was strange, His death was even more strange.  Back to what is written in Colossians:  “And through [Jesus], God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.”

And this is why, seemingly out of season, we share a Gospel story about Jesus’ crucifixion.  The cross wasn’t defeat.  The cross is the triumph of salvation.  No matter what others did to Him, Jesus remained consistent and true.  Even as they executed Him, Jesus would not succumb to hatred. 

His commitment to what He preached never wavered in life or death, and it has shown us a completely unexpected path of righteousness and hope. 

This is why Jesus defines different.  

And again, it gets even more so.  Jesus doesn’t die only for those who are saddened by His suffering.  Colossians has one of those astoundingly strange lines that stands out in the Bible and has led to generations of thoughtful speculation. 

What does it mean when Colossians reveals that “through [Jesus] God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things”?  This implies not only the good and holy, as we would expect, as we would define fair, but all things are reunited with God in Jesus.

This moves beyond deservers and touches on the unequivocal, unconditional love of Christ.  Salvation is what God wants for “all things.”  And this is just plain different. 

If you have a pew Bible in front of you, I’d ask you to open to Luke 23:34. 

When you get there, you’ll see that the verse is in double brackets, and there’s a footnote that explains that in some ancient manuscripts this verse is missing. 

The verse reads:  “Then Jesus said, ‘Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing.’”

It’s in double brackets because some biblical scribes, way back in the earliest history of the church, just could not handle this kind of forgiveness.  They wanted Jesus to speak of punishment like so many other biblical passages do. So they never bothered to record this verse in their manuscripts.  They tried to remove it from sacred Scripture.

How could God forgive the ones who crucified His Son?  This prayer of Jesus had to be a mistake.  We all know how good revenge feels.  How could Jesus ask that the ones hammering the nails into His body be forgiven?  How could He take revenge away from us?

And because even in our Bibles we see how hard it is to appreciate this strangeness of Jesus, we have to remember to keep the door open to our imagination when we think who Jesus is and what He expects of us.

The Chinese communists explain different as in infection that needs to be cured.  As Christians, Jesus’ different is our freedom to let Jesus out of the box, the cage actually, where we try to keep Him locked-up so that we’re not surprised by faith.

Jesus’ different encourages a freedom in us too, one that errs on the side of compassion and forgiveness.  

This allows faith, and us the faithful, to be supportive of all kinds of people just like Jesus is.  It gets church out of the business of condemning anything and especially anyone who seems different, and instead encourages us to become compassionate like Christ, that is without reservation.

What a great message with which to bring another church year to a close, that we are as free to be as different as Christ, which means to be as free to forgive and show compassion as Jesus.

​For this may we pray in His holy name.  Amen.