Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Luke 6:17-26

In the Bible, mountains are the places where we seek contact with God. Mt. Sinai is where Moses receives the “Ten Commandments,” Mt. Moriah is where Abraham is stopped by the voice of God before he sacrifices Isaac, Mt. Hermon is where Jesus has an interaction with the Divine so powerful that it transforms him into shimmering light. Mountains, in Bible language, are where we go to encounter God. It is telling, then, that Luke places this sermon from Jesus on a level place, where he brings God to us, bearing his “God-talk” amongst the people, trying to teach us what God is really like through this sermon “on the plain,” as it is often called.

When Jesus puts forth these blessings, he is asking for us to think about God differently, to have different theology or “God talk” and, in doing so, to see the world differently. It’s not something we take to very easily, we humans. Jesus’ God and the God we have constructed are very different, and we resist the kind of grace, the kind of wasteful Love that Jesus teaches us is the essence of divinity. It’s one reason Jesus uses parable and story to spread the Gospel, for the good news comes to us slant. It has to because, like one of those “magic eye” posters, we can be staring right at it and miss it. It’s only when let go of our ideas about God long enough to actually experience God that we can see the kin-dom that Jesus preaches. If God is Love, as our Bible also attests to so often, and Love is rarely a respecter of laws or borders, then we must learn to see like Love sees, to act like Love acts. Yet we so rarely do, we humans. There is no system we have created on earth that is ruled by Love, which is why we have to pray “on earth as it is in heaven” in the Lord’s Prayer.

Maybe there’s a reason that Luke takes Matthew’s “sermon on the mount” and brings it down to the level places, evoking imagery from Isaiah, making the rough places smooth and leveling out the journey with some teaching that can help us understand what God is really up to in our world. But here’s a warning – be careful – God’s vision, what Jesus calls the kin-dom, turns our world upside down, changing all our values and norms and expectations. Jesus calls these world turning ideas “blessings.”

And when the Sermon on the Plain issues it’s blessings, it follows up with a series of woes. Woe is an expression of grief like, “woe is me.” But who says “woe is me” anymore, unless you’re trying to be silly? What it means for the purposes of this passage is something more like, “trouble ahead!” or “Look out!”

Now, that may not seem like a welcome or even appropriate thing to put after a blessing, but sometimes it is the very thing that needs to follow. We tend to think of life in terms of “either-ors,” as one side or the other, when most things we encounter are on a spectrum rather than a polarity. Beyond that, whether something is a blessing or a warning might depend on your point of view, or your perspective. We all know the stories of people who have won the lottery only to have that immediate and unearned wealth tear their lives apart. (Of course we’re all still willing to take that chance, right?) I am reminded of a story told in many ways, but I’ve heard it as a Taoist tale, told like this:

A farmer gets a horse, which soon runs away. A neighbor says, “That’s bad news.” The farmer replies, “Good news, bad news, who can say?” The horse comes back and brings another horse with him. A neighbor says, “That’s good news.” The farmer replies, “Good news, bad news, who can say?” The farmer gives the second horse to his son, who rides it, then is thrown and badly breaks his leg. “So sorry for your bad news,” says the concerned neighbor. “Good news, bad news, who can say?” the farmer replies. In a week or so, the emperor’s men come and take every able-bodied young man to fight in a war. The farmer’s son is spared. “Good news, bad news, who can say?”

Often things that seem initially like blessings can seem later like woes. Sometimes things than seem bad can turn out great. The truth is that these blessings and woes are more like dance partners than they are magnetic poles. Good news and bad news are interwoven, like a tapestry in our lives, not separate lanes of traffic flowing purely in one direction or the other. This sermon of Jesus is not a chance to offer us an either-or list, for we are all, at one time or another, recipients of blessing and woe. We must look deeper than that, for if you ask me, the lists that Jesus presents us with are reversed in our society. The things he calls blessings are curses and the things he warns about we celebrate and praise. But it isn’t that simple, for we often praise the wrong things and ignore that which is worthy of our attention. Jesus’ promise is the rainbow at the end of the storm, though that is a qualified blessing when the rain is pelting your face and the winds are knocking you over. And then his warning comes to those who might be so comfortable and confident that they don’t even hear it, for God is at work on us all – all the time.

It can be tempting to sentimentalize the Beatitudes, to domesticate them as a soft dream of an ideal way of life, where pain is over and sorrow banished. What they actually do, however, is issue a fundamental challenge, a challenge to our own eyes, to the way that we see the world and how we make meaning. On what, these blessings ask us, do we set our own happiness? Is it totally on earthly things, or solely on the spiritual side of life? Do we invest ourselves only in things that bring short-term contentment, or do we commit to a larger sense of reality, on the vision that grows past our own lives, not next year but seven generations from now? The woe to be found comes directly from the blessings, declarations of God’s love that will, in the very example of Jesus, turn things on their heads. And here’s one thing I know for sure — turning the world upside down may not be what we expect it to be at all. It might be difficult to accept. It might be challenging. It might actually cost you something.

The more I think about it, the more that I think that the coming of the kin-dom of God is, for us today, like the ending of racism and white supremacy. By this I mean that there are people who profess to love the ideals of the kin-dom, who embrace the declarations of the Beatitudes and the life and mission of Jesus…to a point. We have no one I know of clamoring to build a monument with the Beatitudes on it outside the Capitol. We rarely hear “blessed are the poor” from the halls of power. And we never claim the title of “happy” or “blessed” when people revile us for hanging a rainbow flag on our sanctuary in the name of a Jesus who reached out for the outcasts of his day. We certainly don’t seek that kind of confrontation and discomfort, nor rejoice in it when it happens. We like the idea of the kin-dom, we Christians, we appreciate these Beatitudes conceptually, but living out the reality is another thing altogether – especially when doing so might mean we change the way we’ve always done things, or interrupt our comfort zones. We might say, “Your kin-dom come,” but such a call, taken even half-way seriously, really challenges how the world is constructed and, for many of us, that construction works…or at least works enough to keep us placated.

In the same way, we embrace the ideals around the end of racism and white supremacy, but we’re invested in the world it has created. Even for those of us who are well-intentioned and engaged, the spectre of racism sneaks up – it reveals it’s ugly head in places we never anticipate and only then do we see how deeply the roots run, only then do we realize how entrenched it is in our systems, our mechanisms, our social structures. And often we fail to listen to the voices who are trying to tell us how invasive it is, dismissing them as reactive or dramatic.

In order to divest ourselves of the things that really do not build the kin-dom, we will often need to set aside our egos, our pride, our desire to be “right,” or our privilege – even privilege we don’t see at the time. This is precisely what I think that Jesus is getting at when he shifts to this list of woes, trying to help us understand that the kin-dom is worth it, the work and sacrifice today will build a better tomorrow. If we are only invested in our own comfort, then we have already received our reward.

The kin-dom does not ask us to put a new coat of paint on the way of empire, or to use the tools of oppression and tyranny only evoking the name of Jesus before we do it. It demands that we change our values, that we seek to be on the side of the poor, the weak, the marginalized, the stranger, the outcast, the “least of these” which has, in case you didn’t realize this, NOT been the strategy – here in the United States or perhaps anywhere in human history. The kin-dom, these blessings, they come with woes, with warnings that the so-called “good” comes with the so-called “bad.” They go hand-in-hand when you are working to restructure, when you are investing yourself in change, when you are busy turning the world upside down, which takes time and effort and sacrifice and pain and struggle.

It is almost like we have to have entirely new eyes, like our entire reality has to be scrubbed, the understanding of how things work, our value systems, our ethical and moral guidelines all scraped and primed and repainted. And, as anyone who has painted anything can tell you, that is a never-ending process.

Sometimes, friends, as we struggle to enact the kin-dom among us, we do it poorly. We make many mistakes, we can wound and hurt, divide and alienate, and our intent can be very different from our impact. Sometimes the good news can feel a lot like bad news. But I’m here to remind us all this morning that we have a God who makes all things new. Despite our limitations, our short-sightedness, our poor decisions, we have a God who brings a bigger vision, so that in our Good Friday pain, we can remember that Easter comes. May it come soon, and may God turn our eyes so that we can see clearly, and we can continue to work faithfully, taking in all the news that comes our way – good, bad – who can say?

AMEN.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 19:1-6 & Luke 4:14-21

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, or made powerful by the Spirit.News that he was back spread far and wide through the countryside. He taught in their meeting places to everyone’s acclaim. Then he came to Nazareth, the place where he had grown up…

This is Luke’s start of the ministry of Jesus. It’s a dramatic story, but the Lectionary leaves out an important part with this morning’s cut. See, this ends with us thinking that Jesus is just being bold, stating that scripture is making history, right here and now – implying that it’s coming to fruition in him, like he’s the delivery of salvation. But the story continues after the part you heard read, after Jesus continues his sermon, calling out his fellow townspeople for their xenophobia and fear, challenging them that God’s liberation will arrive neatly prepared and packaged. That’swhen the gathered congregation grabs Jesus and drags him to the edge of a cliff, intending to throw him to his death. It is the same passage used for the sermon at my own ordination by the Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers, who took the opportunity to say – are you sure, Chris? There’s still time to back out of this whole preaching thing, ’cause you may come into it on fire to change the world and then get in trouble for just changing the bulletin.

When Jesus first arrives in Nazareth, the text tells us, he comes in the power of the Spirit, or made powerful by the Spirit. He comes with power. So I’d like you to picture what that might look like. What’s the first image that comes to mind if you say that someone walks into the room with power? Are they riding a white horse? Do they have on a particular kind of clothing? A suit with a power tie? A uniform? A cape? Do they have on bright, red heels? Are they carrying a weapon or brandishing a staff or a scepter? Do they have an entourage? How do we know when someone has power?

Well, I want us to notice something with Jesus. He comes with power before he ever says a word. I mean, he’s been teaching other places, he’s got a rep, but a rep only carries you so far. Preaching is far more than the speaking of words. You have to showsomething. Aren’t we more likely to hear the words of a person who has been there, more willing to get military advice from a combat veteran, or parenting advice from someone who has kids, or savior advice from someone who has felt like he needed to be saved?

Jesusliveshis words. He builds a reputation as the guy who eats with the sinners and the destitute, the unclean and the marginalized. He heals, in the face of a system that casts out people deemed “useless” or “used up.” He redeems and gives hope to those who have been so oppressed as to feel unworthy of such love, and, I have to assume, it is THIS kind of work that he has done in the these other meeting places all across the countryside. So when he shows up, it’s with more than words, it is with words made real by experience and life. The word, friends, has to be made flesh.

I’m not even sure that we recognize that kind of authenticity as power, yet it is exactlywhat the Spirit leads him to develop. That’s what his “40 days in the wilderness” is all about – a metaphor for the deconstruction and reconstruction of his soul that forces him to examine his claims, not just be able to say them louder than anyone else.

He pulls out the Isaiah text and reads,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because God has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
God has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

That list starts off with bringing the good news to the poor, who are the very people Jesus plants himself in middle of, not as the center of charity, but as a politically provocative statement. Luke has several options in Greek to say “poor,” but he choosesptochos, which means those without resources, those reducedto begging, those destitute of wealth, education, property, prosperity, hope. Ptochosare the ones who have been madepoor. In the Isaiah words, made flesh by Jesus, they are to be liberated from systems that imprison and disable and crush people, in direct violation, Isaiah says, and Jesus embodies, of God’s will.

This is why he says that scripture is fulfilled, that it is coming alive right now, for his ministry will be a complete redefinition of power, known in his example. He will have toredefine power, for his people think they already know what it is. They have seen it in full force. Rome is power. The armies and the senate, the emperor and the empire – that’s power. But the power that Jesus brings denies that power’s legitimacy, picking up all of the people that “imperial power” discards and discounts. The power of Rome determines who matters and who doesn’t. The Power of the Spirit says, either all of us matter or none of us do. There’s little else more “fleshy” than that, my friends, for Jesus proclaims, in the words of the prophets before him, that there is life and death, and we are to choose life, and the things that give life. If our resources and wealth and abundance do not serve those on the margins, then we are on the path of death, we are serving a different power than the one that resides in and on Jesus of Nazareth. He uses the words of scripture to shine a light on his own time, his own space, his own hometown, seeking to reveal for them how they perpetuate the very systems they decry.

Who are the poor, the blind, the unaccepted, the ptochosnow? Is it the 40 million living in poverty right now, in the wealthiest nation on earth? Is it the 35 million without access to healthcare, those who cannot get clean water to drink, or even participate in the very political systems that imprison them because of voter suppression or the “New Jim Crow” that locks up more black and brown people than anywhere else in the world? Is it the parent fleeing violence and poverty in a distant land, come to the place of immigrants to seek asylum and met with a wall? Is it the almost half of transgendered youth who attempt suicide in our nation because there is no room for them at the inn? Where is the preaching that turns our eyes towards them? And what happens to the preachers who give those words flesh? What happens to the prophets, in the church and beyond the church, who point out our complicity with these unholy systems?

Jesus escapes the crowd dragging him to the cliff – I probably should have said spoiler alert there – and continues this ministry of word and action, taking every chance to turn people’s eyes toward the edges. So when we call for universal healthcare, when we demand criminal justice reform, when we seek the liberation of people of color from the racist systems we have created all around them, and chant “no wall,” we do so on the platform of Jesus Christ, the word made flesh. Let us not get caught up, as Rev. Barber says, in the puny language of left and right. We are not talking politics here, friends, we are being political. We are announcing the new kin-dom, the new empire of God’s love and justice, injected into our own systems, transforming them from cruelty to compassion, from punishment to promise, from hierarchy to hope.

We know all about power, friends, at least we think we do. We see the world’s version of it on display every day. We see it in an exchange between high school students and an elder in the Omaha tribe on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. We see it in the slow uncovering of corruption, lies and manipulation that gets played out before us in excruciatingly slow details, and we see it in a shutdown that finally broke not when right and left came together for the people, but when the people shouted out – when flight attendants’ and air traffic controllers’ unions said we’re going to shut down the airports and grind this thing to a halt. We see it in the constant battering of “build a wall,” when we know that the walls are really being built are in our own hearts. Yes, we know all about power. But power is power onlywhen it sets others free, only when it builds up others, only when used for the betterment of those around you.

How do we know that?

Jesus of Nazareth, come in the power of the Holy Spirit, come to give us life,

come to show us a better way.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Psalm 36:5-10
John 2:1-11

I threw a party once – a big one – where I made a special pie requested by the guests. A banana cream pie entirely from scratch. I had made it before, from an Emiril Lagasse recipe, with perfect crust, a firm and flavorful pudding and towering, fluffy mounds of whipped cream. The praise, if I do say so myself, was lavish. Unfortunately, I am the roulette wheel of chefs. I rarely do the same thing twice and use the directions as more of a guideline. So this time the pudding never quite set, and the whipped cream was good, but not great. Most ended up eating their pie out of bowls. As banana cream pies go, it was a decent pudding.

Despite our best laid plans, things go awry. This wedding party is supposed to deliver, but fails in multiple categories, not the least of which is the major social faux-pas of running out of wine. But no worries when you have invited the Son of God, right? Important reminder as you assemble your next guest list – always invite Jesus.

A miracle ensues and the guests are soon back to getting sloshed as they toast the happy couple.

Here is the point in the story when I usually say – wait a second! This is one of John’s seven miracle stories in his Gospel, more than any other gospel. The others include several accounts of healing, the feeding of the 5000 with a meager amount of food, walking on water and raising a man from the dead. Now, I don’t know about you, but getting some more wine for a party kind of pales in comparison. Is he just starting off slowly, kind of getting his feet wet with this whole miracle thing? Like, don’t start with raising the dead, it’s all downhill from there…

The wedding at Cana story resonates with some of the cultural practices of first century Judea, showing how Jesus fits into the natural flow of his day and age, and it serves, for John, as a backdrop for the many ways that his miracles not only “save the day,” but also alter the flow of the status quo. John, above all else, wants us to know that Jesus is special, like really, truly, differently special – sent among us as god with us, the Word made flesh, and his presence alone is holiness made real. This is decidedly John’s take on Jesus. When we ask who Jesus is, each Gospel fills in the blank differently. Take, for instance, the foundational public act of Jesus. For Matthew it is the Sermon on the Mount. For Mark, it is an exorcism. Luke has a return visit to his hometown and John has this – a miracle to start the ball rolling. This is why we have four gospels, because people couldn’t decide who Jesus was…just as we can’t seem to decide today who he is. Is he ransom paid for the sins of each of us in a cosmic bargain with an angry God? Is he teacher, Lord, savior and king? Is he just another in a long list of really good people, like Gandhi or Mother Teresa, or the man for whom this holiday was born – Dr. King?

Who we say Jesus was and how we shape the stories we read matters a great deal to who we think Jesus is now. Do we read the miracle stories in John’s gospel, for instance, as a sign of Jesus’ divinity, or as a way that Jesus interrupts the regular flow of life? Is Jesus just God in a human costume, or does Jesus encounter and struggle with life’s polarities the way that we all do? Is Jesus only here for the show, to make an impression and then be sacrificed? Or is his example actually something for us to emulate, not just admire?

Which Jesus you choose, or which Jesus is chosen for you, has a profound impact on what it means to you to be a Christian. And one of the reasons we have multiple gospels is that the different answers about Jesus help us to ask different questions and to balance our approach. If you are a Jesus with “no supernatural” stuff, these miracles are a challenge to your vision. Likewise if you are a Jesus’ sole purpose was to die on the cross as payment for our sins person, then the Sermon on the Mount asks for some reformulation. I’m not sure, frankly, that we ever find the “answer” for Jesus. In fact, I don’t think that is helpful, maybe not even possible. But continuing to search, to question and to wrestle is critical to fully lived lives of faith.

It is proper this morning to receive some enlightenment on this matter from one of the great poets of our time, maybe all times. Mary Oliver died this week and her legacy as purveyor of simple and profound wisdom will linger for a long time. She will be deeply missed. She once wrote:

You might see an angel anytime
and anywhere. Of course you have
to open your eyes to a kind of
second level, but it’s not really
hard. The whole business of
what’s reality and what isn’t has
never been solved and probably
never will be. So I don’t care to
be too definite about anything.
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
and almost nothing you can call
Certainty. For myself, but not
for other people. That’s a place
you just can’t get into,

not entirely anyway,

other people’s heads.

I’ll just leave you with this.

I don’t care how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin. It’s
enough to know that for some people
they exist, and that they dance.

When we wonder which Jesus to hold onto as we survey the myriad of answers from our gospels, I offer a humble suggestion. Why not all of them? Don’t we think that the fundamentalist side of our religious tradition needs to embrace the loving, grace-filled, border-busting Jesus that we find in story after story? Don’t we think that “they” need to read the stories about Jesus condemning LGBTQ people and disempowering women because, we say glibly, there aren’t any? And, my friends, might we also need to read about miracles and the cross and the tomb and wonder what Jesus means beyond a great guy who taught us to be nice?

We need all the versions of Jesus to paint a complete picture. Yes, we also need nuance and definition, detail and substance so we can talk about Jesus as more than just a token. It’s when we think that we have it all figured out and we know exactly who he was and what he stood for that we lose the complexities that make our faith lives pliable, functional and meaningful.

Tomorrow we march again in the memory of Dr. King and the same issue applies to him. Which Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. do we honor? The “I Have a Dream” MLK? The “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” MLK? Is it the MLK who doubted his cause in his dining room after a threatening phone call? Is it the one who surely wept thinking of his family after numerous bomb attempts on his home, or after he was stabbed at a crowded speaking engagement? Is it the MLK constantly hauled into court for the most trivial of complaints, or the one filing his own lawsuits against the injustices of his time? Is it the one who said, “I have a dream,” or the one who said, “Again we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad?”

As we do every year, King gets sanitized as the holiday rolls around. The same could be said of Jesus, who is kept as a tiny, 8 pound, 4 ounce baby sleeping peacefully in a manger rather than announced as the end of empire and evil…he is celebrated as King Jesus on an Easter Sunday (in April this year) without also acknowledging that this must then mean all our other kings– political party, economic system, war and profit, racial and gender hierarchies – would be subject to him. The baby and the lower case king are easier, friends, as isthe Dr. King who tells us with a gentle smile to love, while we leave out the sacrificial, privilege-eliminating, hierarchy-leveling costs of the very love he proclaimed.

We need all of the components, my friends, the Jesus of the Beatitudes and the Jesus of Calvary, the King who said, “the time is always right to do the right thing,” and the one who declared that there were “two Americas,” one which worked for some people and another a legacy of racism, slavery and poverty. You can’t hold up the Martin Luther King of tolerance and “get along” without also lifting up the Dr. King who denounced a military industrial complex and called for a guaranteed minimum income for all people, just as you cannot hold up a Jesus who “died for our sins” without reflecting on the number of times he pointed those sins out in parable and action.

May we learn in these complicated and troubling times, to find the comfort and the challenge from our prophets. May we breathe them deeply in, trusting that that Holy Spirit is guiding us. We have a long way to go. We still have food deserts and broken economic systems lingering from one of the worst race massacres in our nation’s history just a few miles from this sanctuary, almost 100 years ago. We have racial bias in our policing, our courts, our voting systems and our culture. We have a lot of work to do. What I hope we might do in this new year is re-pledge ourselves to this work, not as a race looking at some far distant finish line and trying to dredge up the stamina to keep running. No, my friends, rather as a way of life, as a mantra, as a matter of faithful living in this world, driven by our examples of people who lived and worked and even died for something that they would not see come to fruition. So work, rest when you need to, understand that you cannot – you ARE NOT – fixing the world, and focus instead on finding ways to participate. “If you can’t fly,” Dr. King encouraged us, “then run. If you can’t run, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl. but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.”

We thank you, O God, for the gift of Christ Jesus, the whole of the gift,

come to set us all free.

And we ask you this morning to bless the memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – ALL of it.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-17 & 21-22

It is no longer a safe assumption to think that when you say “baptism,” everyone will know what you are talking about. Just look at the sanctuary this morning. I’d wager a fair amount that we have people in here who don’t remember much about their baptism. I was baptized as a baby, maybe like you, and I don’t remember a thing. 

I’ll also bet that we have people here who remember it fondly, some who remember it less than fondly, perhaps alongside some degree of coercion, some who have never been baptized, and perhaps even some who haven’t the faintest idea what I’m even talking about right now. 

So when we tell the story of the baptism of Jesus, we can’t just gloss over the baptism part. Even if we are part of that fond memory, meaningful part of our history group, what does it mean for us now, beyond the nostalgia? What doesbaptism mean? Does it mean the same thing for us that it did for Jesus when he waded into the Jordan? Jesus wasn’t joining a church, right? He wasn’t securing hisown salvation, or accepting himself into his own heart, was he? So what is really at work when we talk about baptism? Let me explain.

The English word baptism is derived indirectly through Latin from the Greek noun baptismawhich is a neologism in the New Testament derived from the masculine Greek noun baptismos, a term for ritual washing in Greek language texts of Hellenistic Judaism during the Second Temple period, such as the Septuagint. Great, everyone clear now? No? How about we unpack this a bit more?

In orthodox, ancient Judaism, there existed a ritual called tevilah,which was the purification of a person via full body immersion in a pool of water. Such a ritual bath is called a mikveh, and Tulsa has one at B’Nai Emunah. One of the oldest ones in town is no longer in use but resides in the basement of what is now the Tulsa Garden Center on Peoria, formerly the Travis residence, a Jewishfamily. Tevilahwas a repeatable event, whereas Christians often think of baptism as a singular event, though maybe we ought to reconsider…more on that later. These ritual baths are all over Israel and ritual bathing was apparently used routinely by a Jewish sect called the Essenes, who lived in the desert outside of Jerusalem in a place called Qumran where the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was made in the late 1940s. The scrolls revealed much about this community that stood outside of mainstream temple Judaism at the time and from which, it is speculated, John the Baptist might have come.

For the Essenes, the ritual bath seemed to be about not only purification, but also transformation. The Baptist’s not-so-subtle phrasing in the prior verses to the people who have come to the riverside is, “You children of snakes! Who warned you to escape from the angry judgment that is coming soon? Produce fruit that shows you have changed your hearts and lives.” Inexplicably, John still draws a crowd, maybe not because of his charm, but because he offers this transformation through this act of repentance which means, in Greek, to turn around. Who doesn’t want a second chance? Who doesn’t know and feel the sting of the things that we’d like to take back, or the ways that we know we fall short of the mark that we set for ourselves? One of the trademarks of the many “anonymous” groups that meet over in our main building each week is a contention with this very issue, a realization that we have faults and weaknesses and, ultimately, we are powerless to control our lives so much that we achieve perfection. So, the “big book” says, we surrender to our higher power, we release, we repent and turn around and do it over and over. By the way, that’s what our “big book” says, too.

In the act of baptism we get what John does not offer with his words…Grace. And once we get that Grace into us, it can grow and mature and build so that we learn to come back to it again and again, using it not as a crutch, but as a foundation. 

So let’s stop right there and notice that John himself, the origin of the baptism ritual, suggests that there is more than one baptism. There’s the water one and then this other one. He says that we baptizes with water, but Jesus will come to baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. The word in Greek is puri, and while it does mean “fire,” it also is the root for purify, meaning that something about the baptism with the Spirit has a distilling effect on us, making us better. And apparently we need this baptism just like the water one. Remember the Acts passage read first this morning which says, The two went down and prayed for them that they might receive the Holy Spirit (for as yet the Spirit had not come upon any of them; they had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus). That descriptor, baptized only in the name of the Lord Jesus, might very well apply to us, right? That’s the ritual we all went through, as an act of church membership most likely, and often with a strong overtone of salvation. 

The community described the the Book of Acts, which we have been studying in the Sunday morning Bible study (at 9:30am in classroom one in the main building, everyone is welcome) gives us the reality of this two-fold baptism, and suggests that one isn’t enough. Sometimes, Acts says, people have this “Holy Spirit” baptism and then get baptized in water, other times it is the reverse, but one won’t cut it. It’s like you have to have both the transformational event AND THEN the transformation. We have to accept the premise, that we need to turn around, and then we to accept the thing that helps the turning, inviting the Spirit in to keep that process going, infusing Grace into our lives until the “turn around” is how we live. The Spirit, particularly in Acts, comes to knock us off our pedestals, to re-wire our outlook and tear down all of our carefully constructed walls. Just read Acts and you’ll see people selling all their stuff to give it to the poor, the healing of the chronically sick, every boundary being busted in the name of a God who says “Yes” to everyone, making the apostles deeply question all of their assumptions. Is that what we expect out of our baptisms? Is that what you were told when you got baptized, that it would tear your world apart and change everything completely? I suspect not.

Baptism is a big deal in the Christian community. It’s a church-fracturing, denomination-generating big deal. How you baptize seems far more important to us than why we baptize, or the implicationsof our baptism. Maybe that’s because it’s easier to focus on the details than it is to recognize that this ritual is really meant to transform us, to change us in ways that the very language used to describe the ritual calls a reversal…a complete 180, as we might say. It does so, the tradition also tells us, because it is the indwelling of the Spirit in us, God working on our lives, not just our New Year’s resolution willpower writ large, but rather the direct impact of God’s love and light changing us from the inside out. It’s not something that we wield, like a super power, but something that wields us, something we are subject TO as we make our way through life, being refined, sharpened, shaped by the Spirit that has descended on us as well. Baptism is about our identity.

The identity that baptism conveys has nothing to do with our worthiness, our success or our failure. It is Grace-driven mark on us, identifying us as God’s beloved, just as God said to Jesus in the Jordan. No matter how often we fall short or fail, nothing that we do, or fail to do, can remove the identity that God conveys as a gracious gift. We can neglect this relationship, we can deny it, run away from it, ignore it, but we cannot destroy it, for God loves us too deeply and completely to ever let us go.

That identity, that baptism identity, is precisely what Jesus and the tradition call on us to remember, not just as a ritual or a mark on the calendar, but as a way of making sure, of remembering, who we are and whosewe are. Only when we accept God’s Grace and Love are we able to consistently give that same grace and love out to others. Such a Grace speaks to our deepest longings, our cravings to find meaning and stability in a world chaotic and cynical. Now, in our times, when we are slowly finding more space and honesty to discover who we are as human beings, who we love, how we present and live and identify, our baptism can also remind us of a deeper identity, a foundational identity as – God’s beloved children. 

As we remember the baptism of Jesus today, we also remember our own. As you leave, the baptismal font at the front of the church is filled, as is a special font setup on your way out. If you wish, dip your fingers in the water, touch your forehead, a wrist, a hand, and remember…let that water remind your soul of the claim that is on you, of your identity as God’s beloved child. If you have never been baptized, if you want to be baptized in a way that you can remember, talk to me. Let’s talk about how we can shape that and what it might mean for you. Baptism is not about membership here at Fellowship, it is about foundation, about transformation, about identity. It’s not about joining this family, but accepting that you already are (and always were) part of God’s family. This is as close as I get to an altar call, so if you want to talk with me about ritualizing that acceptance of the Spirit into your heart, we’ll find some time to grab a coffee and talk about baptism.

For now, know this, and remember it each time that water contacts your skin – with every washing of your hands, every shower, every bath, every drink on a hot day. You are God’s beloved child, in you God is well-pleased. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Isaiah 60:1-5

Matthew 2:2-12

What you heard is only part of the story. Matthew continues with verses 13-18, often called the “slaughter of the innocents,” in which King Herod’s fear of this newborn child, foretold to him as the messiah by the magi, turns into dangerous aggression. Mary and Joseph, hearing of the danger to their baby, flee to Egypt while Herod launches a campaign to protect his power by killing all the children under the age of two in his kingdom. Matthew closes out this awfulness by quoting from Jeremiah, and the lamentation of Rachel after the murder of her own children. I know, I know – killing children…Happy New Year to you too, pastor.

Epiphany is supposed to be, after all, the arrival of the light, the celebration of the dawn of God-with-us. And yet Matthew follows it with this tremendously dark account. But we don’t typically read it. We don’t read it on Christmas Eve, and it’s not saved for next week in our liturgical calendar. It’s just edited out. Why in the midst of the presents and food and lights and champagne and fireworks do we want such a story? Let’s talk instead of the gifts the wise men bring and the fulfilling of the prophetic words of Isaiah – Arise! Your Light is Come! – and the light and the dawn. That’s much nicer, of course, but Matthew doesn’t leave it there. What is Matthew trying to tell us this morning? What word in the very earliest part of this new year, does Matthew send to us – people he never intended to write for – 2000 years later?

Matthew knows something that we all know, too. Darkness and light are not opposites, they are dance partners. And hope is something that we develop, it’s something that we sometimes have to manufacture, drawing on light from the past and the expectation of light to come…a light that is often revealed because ofthe darkness…a light we couldn’t see without the darkness…a light which is actually let intoour souls, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen, by our imperfections and wounds.

Matthew’s story of Epiphany does reveal God in Jesus, but it does so with what I would describe as almost a warning. The magi arrive on the scene and alert King Herod to this child that the stars have revealed to them. Unbeknownst to them, it is their arrival foreign people of a different religion, the very intersectionality of the religions and the nations coming together in the birth of this child that threatens the status quo which grants Herod his power. In reaction, Herod does what power does and creates a great threat to the holy family, a threat so profound that they will have to flee because the message of God. The presence of God-with-us in Matthew’s Epiphany story is so profoundly, publicly, and politically threatening to the way things are that it cannot be allowed to stand. This baby, or more importantly what this baby stands for, is too invasive. It changes all our rules, our norms and our comfortable labels that we have which we think help us define our world. We have darkness over there and light over here, good and evil neatly divided, male and female, black and white, it’s all categorized by us, whose organization gets interrupted by the God who walks among us stepping across our well crafted walls.

Is there a way this Epiphany to consider how God’s message might be threatening to us? We know that following the Christ child can put us at odds with the world around us, but are we also aware of the ways that the Way of Jesus also interrupts our own stories, asking us to reconsider, to re-evaluate, to renovate and restore? It what ways is the Spirit calling to us right now and we are looking to silence Her call, to protect our own status quo, to cling to the ways that we have always done things?

As we enter a new year as Fellowship, it’s probably more than just chance that we start with Epiphany. One of the things that church ought to do for us is to encourage us to think theologically, to take what we believe about God and God’s creation and apply that to our lives. If God is a God of love, then seeking ways to be more loving ought to be important to us. If God is a God of hope, then working on our capacity for hope, both personally and corporately, ought to matter to us. If God is a God of inclusion and hospitality, a God truly of allpeople – all faiths, all tribes, all genders, all labels, a God who seeks to draw us all together across our borders, then making sure that our church models that ought to be important to us as well.

2019 is our year, Fellowship, to think theologically about who we are and how that shapes our space, the way we organize ourselves and what we do. We are, as you no doubt know, a place that thinks theologically with a pretty different lens than most of Tulsa. That’s good, but so what? If we can’t articulate that or, better yet, demonstratethat, then what does it matter? We are one of a handful of “open & affirming” churches in our city, which is important, especially in a time in which many LGBTQ persons still find only rejection and shame from church. IF, though, our “openness and affirmation” stops with a slogan or a rainbow flag on our sanctuary, then we may need to think more deeply about that. Thinking theologically means you continue to press on those places where the Gospel is urging us on, that our values are always aspirations, not finish lines. So we must remember to stay open to the voice of the Holy Spirit, calling us to new things, to be willing to engage in discomfort, to questions our assumptions and certainties so that we might see God’s light still breaking forth, taking us to newness and wholeness that we hadn’t even considered. For God, in our theological thinking, always lies just on the horizon, never quite in our grasp, and never precisely what we expect. We don’t get a clear map, my friends, we have to follow the stars and our dreams.

As we come to share this holy meal for the first time in 2019, may we welcome the presence of the God who still walks among us, still speaking to us, still teaching us of God’s ways, which are not our ways, and seeking our partnership in creating a new world. May we know in this feast a sense of newness, a willingness to leave the past behind, to learn from the darkness and the light, which dance within us all. May we be fed with this morsel, quenched by this sip, by a meal of quality, not quantity, filling our hearts with love, saturating our bones with strength, nourishing our muscle and brain with willingness and intention. Let us pray:

God of newness and change,

You have loved us so much that you have walked among us, knowing deeply of human experience. Feed us in this meal with Your Spirit, that we might risk, that we might hope, that we might work to reveal more of You and Your will for our lives.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Matthew 1:18-25

Lost in the triumphal language of Christmas time, “The Lord is Come” and “Behold! A Savior is Born,” is the less regal way that listeners of Jesus’ day and age would have heard his story. Spoiler alert – it’s not an account of triumph and majesty, rather a pretty meager tale of people born on the absolute margins of the era, in the lowliest of places, amongst the outcasts. We lose sight of that so often in the age of Jesus the King, holy and mighty and God incarnate.

I think we have to go straight to the glory, for if we really examine the situation of his birth then it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the veneer of praise and piety while enabling lots more Jesuses to be born in lots more lowly places. As you all know we took the step this year of placing a chain-link fence around our nativity scene in an intentionally provocative commentary on the current wave of immigration ugliness. It was up for nearly three weeks before I posted a picture of it on social media and the floodgates opened. Since then the post has been shared hundreds of times, we have had “a couple” of phone calls and social media posts, and I have done several interviews, including one with the New York Times. And, to be clear, all that the nativity scene endeavors to be is a theological art display, a commentary on the intersection of our moral and legal lives. I appreciate the praise that is coming our way, but I think taking an asylum seeker into your home is much more worthy, as is work along the border caring for those human lives impacted by legal decisions made from thousands of miles away, or the one-on-one, heartbreaking work of legal representation for people locked away in our own county jail. I think that the challenging role that border patrol agents can play, often having to make difficult and complex moral decisions in a moment, is much more worthy of praise and support, as I think the dedication with which many of you serve our community, trying to make your faith have hands and feet, ought to be lifted up in countless tweets and posts and articles.

Some of the criticism we received has been from people who claim that this is apples and oranges, that the Holy Family weren’t migrants at all and the comparison is false. In keeping with the ways that we want Christmas, and really the whole Gospel, to comfort and reinforce rather than challenge or provoke, let me say that it’s true – this isn’t a straight comparison. There are many differences in our world and Jesus’ world. Rarely does our biblical instruction match perfectly with our culture, for our holy scripture was written for a different people, in a different time and place. We have to extrapolate, to make parallels.

It is Matthew who uses the exodus to Egypt as part of his birth narrative largely to get his audience, stepped in the Jewish tradition, to reflect on the original Exodus story, making sure that Jesus is attached to another great prophet and leader, Moses. At Passover, Jews to this day are asked to not only reflect on the Exodus story, but to actually claim it as their own. They are asked to know themselves as once being slaves in Egypt and knowing the price and value of freedom, so that they might have such empathy for others. The same is true of the story of migration, which we ought to connect with from both our faith traditions and our own human story. The story of humankind is, after all, always a story of migration. And our religion(s) ought to (and do for that matter) appeal to our empathic imaginations to welcome the outcast and the stranger, to support the refugee and the prisoner and the downtrodden…for there, but for the grace of God, go all of us.

The Bible cannot speak directly to our circumstances in 21^stcentury America. It can, and does, speak to values that lie at our moral center. Rev. Dr. William Barber, the new voice of moral authority in our nation in my opinion, tweeted this last week: “What’s going on in America today looks too much like what was going on during the 1st Christmas: ego maniac on the throne, taxes to benefit the wealthy, kids killed by government policy, families forced out of their country, health care & housing denied to poor folk having babies.” Neither Dr. Barber nor I are suggesting that this is a perfect mirror, that the analogy is pure, for analogies never are pure. What I think we are suggesting is that there are still the same struggles at work in our world that faced the Holy Family. There is still much danger for the poor, for the marginalized, for those who, save only the misfortune of their birth locale, face oppression, poverty and exploitation. Jesus came to save our hearts, which would change our policies, but it would seem that we often still resist even the basics of his teachings. Love your neighbor seems a fine platitude, until it costs us something or makes us feel uncomfortable. And love your enemy? Well, that didn’t go over even as the words came from Jesus’ own mouth.

In Matthew’s version of the Gospel story, we are to understand that God’s incarnation comes amidst homelessness, migration and oppression. The Holy Family lives a fragile existence, much like the families that come to our border, seeking the safety and stability of home somewhere away from their home. And then there’s also the stress within the Holy Family. After all, Mary and Joseph were engaged but had not yet married or moved in with each other or consummated their union when Mary comes to him with this news. Or perhaps even more scandalously, he finds out the news of her pregnancy. It’s a safe assumption to think that Jospeh concluded only one thing: that his espoused wife had been unfaithful. Perhaps this is why Matthew describes Joseph as a righteous man — he lives according to the law, which says divorce in such a situation, but also showing compassion beyond the law, for Joseph has two options — public stoning or quiet break up. He opts for the latter out of a sense of kindness, perhaps, to avoid exposing her to public disgrace and brutal punishment, though that option is legally available to him.

Jesus’ birth story in Matthew ought to remind us of how often pregnancy, or even more broadly, the development of “family”, which comes in many forms, can be a situation full of turmoil, fear, even scandal. Matthew’s version de-sanitizes the typical Christmas portrait of the pious holy family and their angelic newborn child, reminding us instead of the messiness of it all, and how God chooses this entry into the world rather than the gold and silk room of a palace. Shouldn’t the “how” and “where” of Christmas matter to us as much as the “why?” At minimum it ought to suggest to us that we really have no idea where God shows up for we continue to read this story in the confines of climate controlled, plush seated, well-lit sanctuaries – edifices to the God who came to us in the straw and dirt of a manger.

The whole of the birth narrative in Matthew’s account is about one-and-a-half verses. That’s it. You’ll spend more time on a tweet. If you get distracted easily, you might just gloss over it, which could be the point. This story is so everyday, so commonplace that we must knowit wasmissed. There were no announcements, no baby showers, not a notice in the Jerusalem Times. It took place in the back of an inn, full of travelers with their own agendas, while the Holy Family took refuge amongst the livestock. It was a lowly story, unremarkable in every way save one. This is the beginning of the story of the everyday made holy, the mundane and plain used by God to show us grace, love and salvation. This is the beginning of the story that frees us from fear.

Fear, you see, takes many forms. It’s not just the boogeyman, or spiders or snakes, both of which are gross and should be feared. No, it’s the fears that paralyze and stymie us, like the fear of failure, the fear of success, the fear of change, of forgiveness, or being forgiven. And it’s the more insidious things, the other things we attach the suffix “phobia” to, like the fear of the unknown, the fear of people from other places, the fear of the stranger, someone with a different religion or custom, someone who looks different, someone whose skin is a different color, or who speaks a different language…the fear of difference. This story of the baby born just like all of us, in the most mundane and ordinary way, is the story of the beginning of the end of fear. For he will teach us a different way. He will teach us that love is better than fear, that hope is better than apathy and that God is a God of abundance, not scarcity.

It won’t be an easy lesson. That should be really clear to us now. Even in today’s story, it takes a visit from an angel to convince Joseph that he need not be afraid. Flowing robes, blinding light, harps and choirs – the whole shebang…direct, divine intervention. “Don’t be afraid, Joseph,” the angel says. And Joseph, his fear masked by culturally accepted behavior, relents to this plan, the same plan surely told him by Mary when she explains herself to him.

It is fear, I think, that keeps us from doing the very things that Jesus came to teach us about – to love wastefully, to see the plank in our own eyes before the splinter in another’s, to forgive seventy-times seven. What might happen if we actually did those things? What might happen if we really tried to forgive that person who wounded us so? What might happen if we really sought to understand someone else’s position before blasting them with our own? What might happen if we simply decided, in each and every situation, to love? I know what you’ll tell me, it’s what I tell myself. It’s more complicated than that, Chris. And I agree…It’s the angel who doesn’t.

See, I think that it’s fear that gets in the way of faith. For despite all of our desires to use the arrival of Jesus for our own benefits, we’re afraid to actually walk with Jesus, while we continue to claim that walking with Jesus is to our benefit. We’re afraid to give up our outrage or our sense of manufactured righteousness. We afraid to stop keeping score, or to believe that our task is to acquire, consume and compete. We’re afraid to lose a grip on feeling that we’re “right,” though Jesus doesn’t come to make winners and losers. We already know that system. In fact, we know it so well that we are afraid to leave it to follow the grace-filled Way of Jesus. After all, it won’t be the right social policy platform that will save us, nor the gross national product or the stock market. It won’t be walls or bridges or Presidents or Congress. It will be living like Jesus lived, accepting the grace he died to show us, having the salvation of Jesus Christ be born in each of us.

It’s almost Christmas and we can debate what baby will be born again – is it the one who’s birth is only a necessary step for his death, a planned execution from the first angel’s visit to Mary, a plan, we might note, that is completely undisclosed to Mary? Or is this the birth of the baby who comes to announce such a revolution of the heart that he offends many, including, at times, his own disciples? Is it the birth of the baby who comes to shine a light on our own souls, asking us to embrace the morality of God’s Love, which will set us free from all of these fears that keep our souls imprisoned? I mean such a claim would be revolutionary, even dangerous. I don’t know if I’d buy it. I might need divine intervention, like an angel, saying directly to me…do not be afraid. God is with us.

Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Advent III: Singing Resistance

Luke 1:39-56

before the sermon a portion of Earth, Wind and Fire’s Sing a Song will be played…

It’s hard for me not to feel joy when a song like that is playing…I don’t know if you’re like me, but a certain song can change the trajectory of a day, at least for a little while. It can cast out the gloom, sharpen up my soul and make me ready for the next challenge. A song can the the antidote for hopelessness…

Well, you may not have noticed, but songs feature heavily in Luke’s Gospel.Mary sings when she is greeted by her cousin Elizabeth. Zechariah sings when his son John is born and his tongue is finally loosened. The angels sing of peace and goodwill when they share their “good news of great joy” with the shepherds. And Simeon sings his song of farewell once he has seen God’s promises to Israel kept in the Christ child. Singing is all over the place, and it is often singing about Joy…maybe joy that is already here, maybe joy that is expected, joy that is coming. It is singing to change the scenario, singing to bring about change, singing as resistance.

In this passage today we hear what is often called “The Magnificant.” It’s a song, known also as the canticle or the song of Mary, and has often been sung throughout liturgical history. In fact, it is widely recognized as one of the oldest hymns we have. Though we tend to read it now, it used to be sung, just the Psalms. Luke knows this long history of singing, and the role that it plays in communities that are struggling and seeking God’s help. It could even be argued that Luke mirrors the language of Hannah from 1Samuel, where Hannah sing her own song of longing and promise. In both cases, these mothers lament the world as it is, seek a child and through this child they see God’s action in the world bringing transformation. Both Hannah and Elizabeth are too old to bear a child, and Mary is so young she is not yet married. They probably knew how little account the world would pay them, likely had experienced it already. And there, tucked away in the hill country of Judea, far from the courts of power and influence, they bear witness to how hard life is under Roman oppression. And in the face of this despair and oppression, they sang. They sang of their faith in God’s promise to transform the world, to upend the powers that be, and to lift up all those who had been knocked down. When things look bleak, one of the most unexpected and powerful things you can do is sing, for it helps usher in joy. Joy is very different than happiness, you understand, not even necessarily what we might call a “happy” emotion. Joy is the awareness that pain is necessary, suffering is part of life and that it is the struggle which helps us create meaning.

Singing often comes from this place of deep joy, an understanding that beyond the storm cloud lies a rainbow. Many of the Psalms are sung by a people conquered and imprisoned in Babylon, yearning for something else. The songs of the slaves in this country echo these calls for justice and freedom, reaching for liberation as a dream which was clearly far from becoming reality. The civil rights movement to come would embrace song as well, singing, “We Shall Overcome” like a mantra as they marched amongst water cannons and attack dogs. That is the same spirit that fills Zechariah and Simeon and Mary, hope coming out of their lungs into the world carried on a melody.

Sometimes when words alone fail us, when actions are hard to determine and the path forward is unknown at best, when joy seems a distant possibility, and hope feels lost, a song can accomplish what we cannot otherwise determine. This may be why we often get nostalgic round this time of year and we sing songs that contain theology or language we’d never use any other time, but which convey something beyond those words…for there is something in the combination of melody and lyric, harmony and rhythm, that expands our souls. There is power in the Christmas carol that awakens something warm in us during the frozen days of winter. The music helps us to imagine newness, to awaken hope and to bring forth some brightness in a dark time. And that music is all around us, sitting right next to us in church every Sunday.

So, rather than a long expository unpacking of the words of Mary, I thought we might peruse our hymnals for signs of this protest music hidden in the familiar. If you will turn with me in the New Century Hymnal to #116, a hymn we sing all the time around Advent. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” derives from the same effort that Luke used to get Mary’s words. The words of Isaiah are often used to describe Jesus, as if Jesus was who Isaiah was predicting would arrive when he said, “The Lord will give you a sign: This virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Emmanuel, God with us.” It isn’t. Isaiah was speaking to his time and his people, but when Jesus came around and the disciples could not make sense of who he was and what he was up to, the words of Isaiah came to mind, maybe they even sung them one day, and they made a parallel – Jesus is just like whoever Isaiah was speaking of…he is “God with us,” he is Emmanuel. This announcement was revolutionary…listen to the words of freedom and liberation as we sing together, verses 1, 6 & 7.

Did you hear it? Did you hear the melody of resistance?

Now let’s try #119, which is a catchy little tune but the words are direct and confrontational. It was written by a physician, Dr. Miriam Therese Winter, who has traveled the world, ministering with her medical skills to homeless and helpless people in places such as the Thai-Cambodian border and to starving children in Ethiopia. She knows something of injustice and suffering as she writes these lyrics. Let’s sing together verses 1, 4 & 5.

The lyrics sing of a turning of the world, of a time in which the things that seem to plague us as human beings — many of which we do to one another — plague us no longer for God’s love has intervened.

And, finally, though Christmas is not yet here…a Christmas song. #153 in the hymnal, written fairly recently from the Iona community in Scotland, this hymn speaks of this same promise that fuels all our hopes and dreams. It announces joy by announcing the unexpected, the arrival of heaven on earth, born in a baby, unlikely and small. It might be strange to think of this as a protest or resistance song, but what could be more resistant to the pull of American Empire, to the surge of hyper-individualism and the era of the “self-made man” than such a fragile image? What could be more of a protest to racism, sexism, xenophobia and fear than the presence of love in a baby, the announcement of God’s vision and kin-dom in a manger, born to the poorest of couples in the smallest of places? Let’s sing together…

We sing our joy. This Advent season as we wait for heaven to come to earth, we sing our joy. This Christmas as we will announce again the baby born to save us all from ourselves, we will sing our joy. Hallelujah. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Luke 1:26-38

Mary, Mary, Mary…like so many women today, we expect you to be it all in the ultimate “lean in” moment, at once virgin and mother, saint and sinner. We have buried you under so many layers of theology, piety, and politics, it’s nearly impossible to excavate. Some Christians exalt you so highly that they pray directly to you. Others ignore you on principle alone. Some call you a victim of divine coercion, like some sort of example of a cosmic #MeToo. Others grant you the title “Mother of God,” which seems quite a thing to live up to. You represent a troubling model of pious femininity— ever sinless, ever virgin, ever mother, woman, but only in the purest sense of that term, encompassing a patriarchal ideal of a feminine honor that is wrapped in conflicting paper. 

As for me, I’m not sure what I feel about Mary. Her exaltation doesn’t work for me because my theology doesn’t claim her as the mother of God. She’s the mother of Jesus, who is the closest example we have of God’s love and power lived out, but not God. And the whole “virgin” motif I understand more as an example of lifting Jesus up than it is commentary on Mary herself. See, virgin births were a way, in the ancient Mediterranean culture, to claim the importance of someone. Caesars were born of virgins, Greek and Roman gods, heroes of renown all born of virgins in a claim of the strange dichotomy that patriarchy still makes on women – be virginal and yet also alluring because sex is dirty and wrong, but “oh, so right” and patriarchy heaps all of it’s anxieties about sex onto women, which is why 100% of the arguments against birth control are aimed at women, though 50% of the problem is men…maybe more.

And then there’s motherhood. This is where I give Mary lots of cred. I know that I am who I am, in part – a BIG part – because of my mother. So, could it be that Mary’s reluctant agreement to this plan the angel presents…is THIS where Jesus learned his own faithfulness in the improbable, even the impossible? Maybe we turn too soon to claiming God’s hand on Jesus and ignore Mary’s hand on him. When she agrees to this motherhood thing, I suspect she does so like lots of women I know – full of high ideals and hope. For if we ever knew beforehand what birthing and raising children was reallylike, the species wouldn’t survive. It’s a strange chemical that invades the heart and mind that allows those subsequent children to come along, too…a holy amnesia that grants grace enough to take that road again. We could say that when Mary says, “Let it be with me just as you have said,” she doesn’t really have any idea what she’s saying.

I have so many questions to ask Mary: When did you tell your parents you were pregnant? HOW did you tell your parents you were pregnant? Did you tell Joseph yourself, or did the gossipmongers of Nazareth take care of that for you? Did anyone in the village believe your story? After Gabriel departed, did you doubt his visitation? At some point, with the stories in the local paper and the constant whispering as your rounded the corner, did you question your sanity? In a culture where “honor killings” are a real thing – did you fear for your life?

We get only ten verses for this whole story, the most tangible origin story of Jesus. This story reminds us that God’s favor isn’t necessarily the analgesic we often think it is…divine favor may not equate with wealth, health, comfort, or ease, an assertion which might surprise some churches that spend about 10 seconds on Mary, her dream and the ramifications of the angel’s announcement before racing to her son, the one who may have been more influenced by his rebellious, faithful mother than we often say. Often this story is portrayed only as Mary’s quick yes to the angel’s offer, yet painters and poets across time have produced art in between these ten verses, giving midrashic meaning to a critical and imminently human experience. In her commentary on this passage, Debie Thomas writes, “The danger in idealizing Mary’s consent is that it distorts her humanity, and keeps her story at arm’s length from ours. For better or for worse, I can’t relate to a person who leaps headlong into obedience. I can relate, however, to the one who struggles, to the one whose “yes” is cautious and ambivalent.”

This is, after all, what I think is the more salient message for us this morning from Mary, visited by an angel in a direct line from God that few, if any, of us get to experience. And yet she doubts. She questions. She wonders and ponders and discerns what it is exactly that she will do next. At some level she knows that her “yes” in this instance means she will give herself over to scandal and ostracism. It means putting her reputation, her family’s honor, her future marriage, even her very life on the line. So she asks some specific questions about God’s intentions for overcoming what she considers impossible and, in the end, says yes only when the very last thing that has to be addressed is her willingness…her own overcoming of her own uncertainty. For God can do much, this story reminds us, but God cannot faith for us. It is we who have to engage with the mystery that is life, with all of it’s twists and turns and inconsistencies. We have to take that first step on that dark staircase when it seems like we have no idea how things might work out or what it is that we will do tomorrow. It might mean saying yes to something even when it seems like it might cost us something.

I don’t think that Mary is meant to be the model of faith for us. I think that she is meant to be the model of faith for Jesus, the example that we see influencing him to take some risks and make a stand, even when it might cost him something. And I’m not suggesting that you have to give birth to the Christ child or die on a cross to be faithful, but rather that you do have to be willing to listen to where God is leading you and trust that you can follow…that you arepreciselywho God wants in that place and time. Mary didn’t know how this would all work out and perhaps if she had, or if Gabriel had told her the whole plot to come, she would have said no. Sometimes it’s good that we don’t know the whole story, for often our best moments in life come from things that are so immensely difficult and trying that we’d have said no straightaway if we could have seen the road ahead. It is this Advent road, friends, that reminds us that in the waiting, in the darkness and doubt there is much blessing. Advent teaches us that light and darkness are not binary opposites but rather dance partners and our wounds are often the very places that light gets into our lives.

I was struck by the words of one commentary writer on this passage where he said, “Having got through [reading of her] Questioning doubt we then stand with Mary on the edge of mystery and miracle. All that remains is the “Let it be.” This is the ultimate wording for an agreement to partnership with God and Life.” He continues, “[A] great song it was by John Lennon, “When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, ‘Let it be.’ John Lennon was not an obvious Christ follower, but he knew enough to know that Mary would know what to do in “times of trouble” [She would] “Let it be.”

Only it wasn’t John Lennon who wrote that song, it was Paul McCartney. And it wasn’t Mary the mother of Jesus who McCartney was referring to, it was his own mother Mary, who died when he was young. Lennon and McCartney always shared songwriting credits, even when the majority of the work was done by only one of them, like Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Lennon actually didn’t want “Let it Be” on the same-titled album, what ultimately became the last studio album the Beatles ever produced. Lennon thought it too “religious”, too “Catholic.” He called it, quite sarcastically, “Hark the Angels Come” and then insisted that a song titled “Maggie May” about a Liverpool prostitute follow it on the original album. 

McCartney later recalled why he wrote the song. One night when he was paranoid and anxious, he had a dream where he saw his long dead mother, come to him in his time of trouble, speaking words of wisdom that brought him much peace when he needed it, peace that passed his understanding. That light came in through his wounded heart, teaching him that he could move forward without knowing how everything would work out. It was this sweet dream that got him to begin writing the song and later genuinely became a way to live his life – development of a comfort with being out of control.

In a way, Mary announces Advent – or rather Advent as a way of life. She listens, she considers, she debates and discerns and questions and then she says – “I’m here, God.” And that’s a pattern we can all use, right now, today. That is an Advent way of life that we can use, for God is still speaking and the incarnation – the visitation of messages from God – they are still happening. Perhaps not as neatly and dramatically as our stories tell, those, I think, would be easier to see. But they are happening. God is all around us, whispering words of wisdom, asking us to engage with God’s great plan of Tikkun Olam, the healing of the world. I don’t know about you, but I need to know that. I need to know that the incarnation matters, that God becoming flesh and living here among us matters, and that Christmas is not just the story of a baby born 2000 years ago, but the story of God born to us each and every day. It is true if we will let it be true. 

Let it be.

After the sermon, Aretha Franklin’s rendition of “Let it Be” was played:

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.A

Luke 1:5-24a

Telling a story can make all the difference in the world. I think of the two most profoundly jarring events of my lifetime, the Oklahoma City bombing and 9-11 and in both cases what was sought and generated and clung to almost immediately were the stories. Where were you? Who did you know? What happened to them? What happened to their families? How many times have you had a great book or movie, a song or poem move you to deep emotion? Story is what defines us and sets us apart. It’s what allows us to connect with each another, to see ourselves in someone else, to truly know and to be known. Stories are how we seek and make meaning. 

This is why this story that we will tell over the next 4 weeks, in song and word, in image and action, is so powerful. It is the story of hope, born amidst crisis and turmoil, born in the unlikely, in the improbable, in the impossible. It is the story of Jesus, the one we call the Christ, and the mythic cast of characters around him that tie his story to a bigger story and that bigger story to us.

You might have heard me say a particular word just then – mythic. And I don’t want to just skip over that. I chose that word on purpose because the story of Jesus is mythic, not mythic as in false, but mythic as in something larger than reality, and much, much bigger than we can place into words. The preeminent scholar of myth, the late Jospeh Campbell, once said that “Myths are public dreams, and dreams are private myths.” It was his obscure way of suggesting that our dream world is one in which we search for meaning from things we don’t expect to be logical, yet we sometimes don’t allow our storytelling the same freedoms. So we, especially we rational liberals, want the stories of Jesus to not reflect anything supernatural, like virgin births or resurrections or miracles. Myth doesn’t really care about all that, it’s trying to make a bigger point than whether something actually happened, like historicallyhappened in a way that a journalist with a camera could have captured.

This story, the story of Christmas, is a collection, really, just like almost all else in our scriptures. The most meaning-making stories in the Bible come in versions, there are twocreation stories in Genesis, the story of the exodus gets told several times, and there are 4 gospels which tell the story of Jesus – and those are just the gospels that made it into our canon. Christmas isn’t just one story, it is a multitude. So as we wait for Christmas, here in this season of Advent, we wait not just for one thing to unfold, but for many things to unfold. Advent is, after all, the season of waiting.

Waiting is a very spiritual exercise. You know how I know that? I don’t want to do it, that’s how. Patience, loving your enemies, trusting in something despite the evidence, hope in times of darkness, these are all things at which I have to labor, sometimes mightily. That’s why they are practices. You practice things you aren’t good at so you’ll get better at them. Thus far this hasn’t happened for me and waiting. I don’t like it. I don’t like lines, I don’t like crowds, I don’t like busy places, in part because I think that means I’m going to have to wait.

And yet, this is the core of my spiritual life as a pastor. I sit with people as they await the diagnosis, the outcome, the verdict. I wait with families for the baby to be born or the loved one to die. I wait with one half of a nervous wedding participant as the other half gets situated, and I wait with a grieving family as they prepare for that awkward walk down the aisle while others watch their grief laid out in public. I wait for answers that never come, for resolutions that don’t resolve and for solutions that never arrive. 

I have spent the last few days waiting for my mom to die. I don’t intend for that to sound so harsh, but the reality is that her cancer was spreading rapidly and making her increasingly uncomfortable. It was time, and she knew it, too. I think she still knows it, though she has stopped verbalizing her communication. So we wait, we no other options. And I’m no better at it in my own life than I am with any of you. Waiting is still a practice, and I’m not sure that practice ever makes perfect in this case.

So, why wait? Why do we put ourselves through this? Well, in part because we have no choice. Life does not happen on our terms. Practicing the art of waiting helps put us in touch with the humility that a good spirituality awakens in us all. It helps us be in touch with the reality that we do not orchestrate the world, nor can we control it…though that might be news for some of you. It reinforces that we live most of our lives in the in-between. It gives us time to write our stories, to hear other people’s stories unfold and to seek God in the midst of all of it.

Rather than think of our Christmas stories as histories, I prefer to think of them as the in-between stories, the making of meaning in the midst of things we don’t understand or control. And what can be more human than that? For our stories not only help us make meaning, they also help us see possibility. After all, who, without storytelling, would imagine something like hope in a baby born to a family from the margins, on the lowest rung of the social ladder? This Christmas story helps us hope in the improbable and to know that God is the God of the marginalized and left behind, the ones that society calls unimportant. And that is a hopeful story.

Even today we hear a lesser known story, the ones that isn’t told as often. It’s the prequel, you might say, of the Jesus story, the miraculous birth of John the Baptist who is not “the one,” as we think of titles, but rather the one who points out the one. The names of the parents of John the Baptist, and Jesus for that matter, were arguably created from the imaginations of the Gospel authors working from the ancient Hebrew stories, the same passages we call scripture, for inspiration. The names were fabricated, they were borrowed, they were used because of the theological messages they conveyed. The writers knew that this story would be important and how it flowed would be important. They needed a John to show the way to Jesus, portraying him as kind of a wild man of a prophet perhaps on purpose. You have to look for God in the world, sometimes from unlikely places, to have an eye out, an expectation that God’s action is at work, for when we fail to look for God’s presence in the world we always fail to see it.

See, the amazing thing is not the miracle of pregnancy in the so-called “advanced” years of their lives, nor the striking mute of Zechariah, nor the remarkable scene of John kicking in his mother’s womb at the sight of Mary. The amazing thing is not that these stories get told again by Zechariah and Elizabeth, themselves surely aware that their own story was mimicking that of Hannah, that their son was foretold to be like Samuel, a forbearer of a messiah, and that they see in Mary the same story that Isaiah casts before his audience asserting hope coming to them in the form of a baby. The amazing thing is that as they reach into their own holy stories to find meaning in their lives that they are willing to let God’s story, trapped in ancient stories, to become their story. They find in what is happening to them now not the fulfillment of a prophecy, but rather the affirmation that God worked among us then and God is working among us now.

A good story makes us wait for that. If Murder on the Orient Expressjust told you the culprits on page two, or if Hamletneatly resolved in the first act, we’d scarcely remember them. The tension and complexity with which they are written mirror our lives, which don’t work out neatly and rarely get resolved…at least not in a single chapter.
As we head into this Advent season, there is a story I hope that we can hear, though it may seem hard to hear it. There is a voice in the wilderness calling to us, my friends, a voice telling us to prepare a highway for our God, a God who will level the rough places and raise the low places. Our work made fade, the old hymn sings, but the work of God – compassion and justice, generosity and love – that work will endure. We have much darkness before us right now, families separated at the border, children in tent cities with an unknown future ahead of them, violence, war, famine, terror and the heavy price of our industrialism that will come due soon, if it isn’t already. Yes, much darkness. But listen…can you hear the voice? It’s not Zechariah, he could not speak of it he was so incredulous…it’s not Elizabeth, she is in seclusion thinking people won’t understand…it’s John, from the side of a river, calling to us in John’s not-at-all subtle way, repent, which means to turn around. Stop the direction in which you are walking and hear the story, YOUR story, whispered from a God who loves you more than you can possibly imagine and loves this world enough to take on human form, our mythic story reads, to share in our lot, to bear our burdens and see creation through our eyes, giving us a chance to learn that we can hope our way through the life that God has given to us, to trust in holy waiting as a practice, a way of life…knowing that God is indeed with us, pleading for us in a shattered world, giving us loving arms to hold onto and bringing us peace again.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermons represent copyrighted material and are not to be reproduced, transcribed, or used in any form without the permission of Rev. Chris Moore or the speaker for that day.

Apocalypse Lullaby

(prior to the sermon, the song Apocalypse Lullaby by the Wailin’ Jennys was played)

Revelation 1:4b-8 & Luke 21:25-36

What’s the deal, pastor? I just barely got done digesting the meal from Thursday and I’ve come here to settle into Christmas, not hear about the end of the world! And yet, here we are. I’m not manufacturing these scripture lessons, you know, this is what the long tradition of the big capital “C” church, in all of it’s wisdom, lays out for us in the series of readings churches all over the world are using today – the lectionary.

It is the Reign of Christ Sunday, actually new year’s eve for us in the church calendar. We start a whole new year, from the point of view of the lectionary, next Sunday, December 2^nd, the first Sunday of Advent. Christmas is just around the corner. I wonder why then, in the mass of holiday shopping, the office parties, the family gatherings, the special dinners, putting up decorations and turning on lights – all the excitement the seasons generates – that the lectionary organizers want us to hear these apocalyptic words about vengeance and foreboding? Now, you might be thinking to yourself, have you ever been to the mall on Black Friday, pastor? How about the 3^rdoffice party in as many nights? You might be seeking the end of something after all that!

These words are here to remind us, just before we begin the 4 weeks of Advent before Christmas, that the birth is only part of our story. There’s a little drama that’s going to be played out over the next 4 weeks, and it’s an episode you’ve seen a thousand times. It’s like those handful of movies – Field of Dreams, Silverado, Tombstone, the Hunt for Red October – that I always watch if they come on, though I’ve seen them a thousand times. We already know the story of Christmas, we know the stable and the wise men and the baby born in the manger. It’s not a surprise, but we listen to it each year because it helps us to remember that our tradition makes this strange claim – that God loves us so much God came to us in the flesh, as the most vulnerable thing, to live lifewithus. It helps us to remember that hope can come in the smallest and least likely of places, and that is very good news, indeed. And it fills us with the sense that we are not alone still – that justice and righteousness are shaping our world, as if a ruler, some kind of king, were dictating it. This king sure seems quiet, I know.

We often avoid these apocalyptic stories, I know, because of how they’ve been warped and manipulated to support a single interpretation heavy with the implication that Christ is coming again to smite the bad guys, who are always the same people we hate. But that’s not the whole story. We also wait, the tradition tells us, for Christ to come again and to rule over us like a benevolent king, exchanging the kingdoms we know with the kin-dom of God. In fact, the tradition calls this Sunday “Christ the King” Sunday. It was a term decreed by the Pope as dictators were rising to power at the turn of the last century and the Roman Catholic Church wanted to remind it’s adherents that their allegiance was to something bigger than the authority of the state. Boy, did that end up being more radical an idea than I’m sure the Pope intended.

We don’t use “Christ the King” here at Fellowship, not only because it’s a very patriarchal metaphor, but also because it is an inert one. We live in the United States which has never had a king and kicked the only one to rule over these lands out in a revolution. Why would we want to name Christ King? But I do want us to pay attention to the metaphoric mechanism at work here. The framework of Revelation and Luke are both from a world that knows all about kings, some better than others. It’s a world that knows power through the office of king, and imagines what it might be like to have someone with Jesus’ integrity and love in that position of power. It imagines a king like none they have ever known, a power greater than they have ever known. And while we can’t just pick that up raw, because metaphors are contextual, we can identify with a power greater than our own political systems…at least I hope we can. Because now, back in our own context, we still have to understand power, how it works, and from where it comes. And we can still make a claim on God’s power, known in weakness, and how different it’s demand is on our lives, our actions, on how we treat ourselves and one another.

This is why there are these titles for Jesus. We say it different ways – God incarnate, the Son of God, part of the Holy Trinity, God of true God, all of that and more. We say Christ, though we most often say it like it’s his surname – Jesus Christ, like Walter Johnson. It’s a title, given to someone at a time in which titles really mattered. They mattered so much that his followers, giving us what we call holy scripture, chose to use the same titles found all around them – Son of God, King, Savior of the World. Those were titles that belonged to Caesar. They were the titles of a dictator, a King with a powerful army whose motto was, “Peace through Victory.” The Roman Empire was built on control, dominance and authority by despotic rule. Caesar fought hard to keep a class system in place, to control borders and dominate wealth in the hands of a few, lifting up high ideals with rhetoric and failing to demonstrate them with actions. It was a “my way or the highway” approach, with little regard given to how it looked or whether or not there was even the appearance of integrity. The strategy was accumulation, at any cost to other human beings. The rule was by fear – and if you crossed Caesar, then you were attacked. Period. Unfortunately we do not have a current political example to give of such tyranny. That would be very useful as Christmas rolls around again and we witness once more the birth of the system that was put in direct confrontation to the Roman Empire.

See, I know what Christmas means out there, but I’ll tell you what it means to me in here. This is the announcement again of a new world, one where love has come to live amongst us, justice is breaking out all over and peace means something far more than the absence of conflict. It means the baby is being born again, hope arrives and the world is about to turn, but I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s easy to do when you already know the story. When Field of Dreams comes on, I start tearing up before Kevin Costner ever turns to his father and says, “Hey dad, wanna have a catch?” Hits me every time, though I know it’s coming. Maybe that’s why the lectionary organizers wanted to distract us with powerful images this morning. Maybe they know that we’ll be already on the downhill run towards Christmas, before December ever starts. Maybe they know that the lights have been up in some place since before Halloween, that some gifts have already been stuffed under the beds and deep in the closets. Maybe they want us to be aware, for we live in a post-Christmas world, despite the fact that we put on this little show each year, acting like this is all new. The baby has been born. The love has lived among us. This reign of God’s justice and righteousness has begun.

On Friday, I stopped by the New Sanctuary vigil at the county jail downtown, now in it’s 76^thconsecutive week at noon on Fridays, to bear witness to the people being held at David L. Moss on ICE holds. Many of them are not even from Tulsa, but housed here because of our county’s agreement with ICE to be a detainment center. We sing and we pray as we see injustice done in our names and it can be difficult to find hope, for the system is quite broken. But we tell stories of people impacted by ideological and political decisions. We make connections and lend aid and sometimes even purchase a bus ticket or a phone that makes all the difference. A tiny gift. And hope is born again.

I then went a few blocks away to a celebration of the life of Dr. Olivia Hooker who died on Wednesday at the age of 103. She was the last known survivor of what is often called the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, but which, as Dr. Hooker said many times in her life, better referred to as a massacre. No one rioted, she recalled. They were targeted, terrorized, massacred. Hundreds dead. Thousands homeless. Arguable the most prosperous black community in the nation burned to the ground in what many speakers recalled as an act driven by economic and social motivations, with a layer of racism used to justify, to excuse, to warrant. Dr. Hooker managed to survive that attack, to thrive in a world that did not want her to thrive, and to live a life of distinguished dignity, always demanding justice and seeking reparations for a great crime visited upon her, her family and her community. Her life might seem small to some, but it was not. And in her voice, hope is born again.

These are not texts of prophecy forecasting the end of the world. They are announcements of a new world – here and not here. They are defiant, steadfast, even foolish declarations in the face of often overwhelming evidence, that there is a greater power, and it isn’t Caesar, it isn’t the King, it isn’t the Dictator or Chancellor or the President. These hard words are often dismissed by us because they’ve been warped like so much of our Bible to serve the very thing they resist. But they can inspire us just as they have the liberation movements in Central America and the solidarity movement in Poland. They are examples of how the idea of hope, generously and extravagantly spread around, can actually generate hope in the darkness.

If we can picture something that isn’t here yet, to reach for something that does not seem real at all, and to imagine ourselves guided, even supported by something larger than just us, then perhaps we can locate ourselves on this long arc that is bending towards justice. Maybe not in our lifetimes, nor our children’s, but bending nonetheless, as if guided by a force that is unstoppable, that is unavoidable, that is setting the course from someplace bigger than where we are. For there are times we must expand our lens out to it’s limits – the widest angle possible – while we engage with the critical and seemingly small task of being light, entering the world as a small spark of that divine energy, a small gust that is part of a larger front, one heart in the middle of a brutal world. What difference could that make? What could your small act of kindness possibly do in a world so broken? It’s a tiny gesture, meaningless, weak and fragile….like a baby, born in a manger.