Inversion; a sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent

Luke 1:26-38

26 In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, ²⁷to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. ²⁸And he came to her and said, ‘Greetings, favoured one! The Lord is with you.’ ²⁹But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. ³⁰The angel said to her, ‘Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favour with God. ³¹And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. ³²He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. ³³He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.’ ³⁴Mary said to the angel, ‘How can this be, since I am a virgin?’ ³⁵The angel said to her, ‘The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. ³⁶And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. ³⁷For nothing will be impossible with God.’ ³⁸Then Mary said, ‘Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.’ Then the angel departed from her.

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
   be acceptable to you,
   O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

You can’t always get what you want.

You can’t always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes you’ll find you get what you need.

Popular songwriters have a certain genius, at least from time to time. Mick Jagger is no exception. This probably isn’t the last time I’ll quote him in a sermon.

You can’t always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes you’ll find you get what you need.

Theologically, of course, it’s a problematic statement. Just like a lot of popular and oft-quoted statements. Even our hymnody and our Christian education materials are packed full of problematic statements, but often they can point to something that can help reveal the nature of God.

And I think Jagger does that for us today.

During Avent, we’ve looked at the greater design of creation, we’ve considered John the Baptist as model of both the weirdness and the humility of heeding the call of God’s Spirit, and now we’re considering Mary and her own observation about the predicament in which she finds herself.

And it’s quite the predicament.

Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.

…

And also with you?

What do you think was going through Mary’s head?

I know y’all are going to get tired of me trying to put us in the shoes of the characters in the story. Sorry. It might be my best means of getting into the narrative. And personally, I don’t think it’s a method that can get old.

Mary is likely a teenage girl, maybe just getting to the age of being married, which is, you know, fourteen or fifteen. She has all the horomonal craziness associated with that going on in her body. What was going through Mary’s head?

Who is this person?

What is this person?

Who’s favored?

Crap, did the Lord just see me doing that?

I don’t know. One thing I’ve never been is a teenage girl. And I’m thankful. We put teenage girls through their own version of hell in our culture. It may or may not be better than what teenage girls went through in the ancient Near East. But it’s definitely different. The torture and expectations are less blatant, more subtle, and quite possibly more damaging.

Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.

Yeah, of course she was perplexed! But the angel told her:

Chill, yo. Fear not. God thinks you’re pretty awesome.

Do y’all tell your children that every day? I recommend it. That and “I love you”.

God favors you.

And you’re going to get pregnant with a little boy. Call him Ieshua.

Jesus.

And he’ll rock. And his name will be Son of the Most High.

Wait, wasn’t his name Jesus?

And God’s going to give him David’s throne, because, Mary, you know your lineage, right?

Oh, and his reign won’t ever end.

And Mary said:

…

I… I can’t… I haven’t… I mean… I’ve never… I’m not…

Dude, Mary, we’ve got that covered.

The Holy Spirit will come upon you…

the power of the Most High will overshadow you…

Now, let me tell you, I either preach this with boldness or I leave that verse out. But I’m going to leave the interpretation to your imagination. We do not doubt who the Father of Jesus is. And the angel is perfectly clear about it.

And Mary said:

Well, okay then.

You can’t always get what you want.

You can’t make this not scandalous.

You can’t just have little baby Jesus swaddled and warm on a Bethlehem night. You’ve got to have the forty-ish weeks of Mary’s body doing exactly what a body does when the foreign body of a human baby is trying to grow inside her. You have to have all the ways her body counteracts the instinctive need to reject it.

You have to have the mess and pain of the birth. You have to have Joseph wondering what God has gotten him into.

You have to have the full scope of history converging on this one moment when God and creation collide in their entirety.

All the mess and glory. You have to have it all.

And Mary may not have realized that right off. But I think that slowly, she did. And she got a glimpse that day, and her spirit burst into song:

My soul gives glory to my God.

My heart pours out its praise.

God lifted up my lowliness in many marvelous ways.

My God has done great things for me:

yes, holy is this name.

All people will declare me blessed, and blessings they shall claim.

From age to age, to all who fear,

such mercy love imparts,

dispensing justice far and near, dismissing selfish hearts.

Love casts the mighty from their thrones,

promotes the insecure,

leaves hungry spirits satisfied, the rich seem suddenly poor.

Praise God, whose loving covenant

supports those in distress,

remembering past promises with present faithfulness.

In humble Mary, God turns the world upside down.

Our leaders look down from lofty places of power.

God chooses to dwell with us.

In this world, we look to the wealthy and powerful for role models.

God is always on the side of the poor and oppressed.

We value experience and knowledge.

God chooses the Blessed Virgin Mary.

What’s that say to you?

You can’t always get what you want, but if you look sometimes, you’ll find God gives what you need.

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

Prayer over Coffee

God, you who with your Spirit breathed life into humanity, pour out your Spirit now into my french-pressed columbian roast, that my hermeneutics might reflect your Wisdom and my exegesis might pour forth your Word; through you and through your Holy Brew Spirit, one Cup, now and forever. Amen.

Clumsy with Grace

When I was first learning to kayak on whitewater, one of the essential instructions I received was to always look where I wanted my boat to go. Don't look at the car-sized rock in the middle of the river that I need to avoid. Look at the channel beside it, at the smooth tongue of water narrowing into a downstream V where all the water in the river wanted to go. That's where I want to go, too. If I look at the rock, then no matter how hard I try to turn, no matter how hard my sweep stroke is, no matter how much I lean, I'm going to end up broaching on that rock.

The same rule applies to driving. I will inevitably steer straight toward the side of the road where I'm staring at the errant cow who is, in turn, staring at me; she, wondering why I'm veering toward her; I, wondering how she got out of her fence.

What has been fascinating to me is to watch my children learn the same lesson, not in a kayak or a car, but simply on their feet. Each of the three has gone or is going through the same transformation. Learning to walk in a straight line is a challenge. Our three-year old runs everywhere, but she seldom focuses on where she is going. She bolts down the hall for something that is of the utmost importance in that moment, gets distracted by a noise her sister makes, fails to note that her brother left in the middle of the hallway a wooden car, which she catches flat-footed and instantly reels forward onto her face because her hands are clutched around the monkey she can't release. And she has no idea that if she had just watched the floor in front of her, she wouldn't have fallen at all.

I often feel that the time I invest in ministry is plagued with a similar problem. I find it very easy to get distracted by peripheral problems. I miss deadlines, overbook myself, forget to pack the right materials for a meeting, misprint details in the weekly bulletin, misspeak in worship or even during a visit. All because I can't focus on where I'm going.

But then, ministry is seldom goal-focused.

And I make that statement fully aware of the number of times that I have been trained to drive toward goals that a given congregation can achieve, to be detailed and realistic about deadlines and project sizes and job expectations. I know how much of our training is geared toward getting things done.

But I am also aware that ministry isn't about programming and building. Ministry is about investing time in people. That's what Advent teaches us. Emmanuel is more than a name; it is a proclamation. God Is with Us. God is investing time and space with us, and not just in the dust and heat of the ancient Near East, but today, sitting in the cool December basement of a small United Methodist church in Virginian Appalachia. In the quiet of this space, God is with me. In the time and conversation I invest visiting at the hospital, Emmanuel. Across the telephone wire, zapping across a 3G network, Emmanuel. Maybe even on Blogger as you're reading, Emmanuel.

Who knows when and where? Emmanuel, unlimited by time and space. Emmanuel, everywhere. And the more I allow myself to be distracted by peripheral stuff, the more I see Emmanuel. The clumsier my focus and time becomes, the more I notice Emmanuel.

That's when grace gets ahold of me. When I stop focusing on what I know I have to get done and turn my focus on whom God is calling me to see. That's when grace flows through me, and when I see and breathe in the grace of my neighbor. When I allow myself to dwell in the miraculous clumsiness of humanity.

Thank God that grace is clumsy.

Feast of Saint Nicholas of Myra

With all the hubbub about a jolly old elf in a bright red suit and flying reindeer, it's pretty easy to be distracted from the actual, historical person who was Bishop Nicholas of Myra. I think he's a lot more interesting than our caricatured distributor of elf-made gifts. I'm also going to spare the details here and let you do the footwork on your own. Enough has been written about Nicholas that I don't need to add my humble voice to the mix.

I simply want to make a suggestion. To remember Nicholas, let's take the day to give of ourselves, not by investing our time at the mall, but by quietly, anonymously sharing what we have with someone who doesn't have as much.

In fact, I'm going to spend my time not on this blog post, but on leaving the office and going to see whom I can find. There's plenty of need all around us. We just have to go out and see the world as Christ does.

The Season of Busy

I attempted to make a commitment last week to make daily posts on this blog. Then family and Thanksgiving happened. Then I realized that, with the time and emotion I spent on pastoral work during Thanksgiving weekend, I actually hadn't taken a day for Sabbath, so I did that on Monday. Then I spent two days this week helping to prepare a Christmas ministry to families in need, which left me no time in front of a computer to reflect on what was going on at the time.

So I posted the sermon I worked on Wednesday.

And I'm back today.

Sorry about that.

Well, no, I'm not really sorry, because what I was doing was important. What I was doing was prioritizing family and personal-contact ministry over the (potential) ministry of a web log.

Priorities are important. And during the Season of Advent, priorities shift around a bit. It's a busy season. There's a lot going on. It's a season when I'm typically overbooked. It's not unusual for me to be required to be in four different places simultaneously.

And, no matter what it seems your pastor has done in the past, we can't actually do that.

During Advent, we, like everyone else, prioritize. No amount of Dr. Enuf can enable me to split myself in two, even though sometimes it feels like it has that effect. I have to determine, whether or not anyone agrees with me, what is more and less important.

So this Advent, I pray that God's Spirit helps you discern the priorities that will enable you to be Christ for someone else. I pray that God is so present, so God-with-You, so Emmanuel, that you might be made a disciple who would transform creation.

May the Season of Busy become the Season of Blessing. Amen.

World AIDS Day

Healing God: Today, on World AIDS Day, we recognize our thirty-year awareness of one of the most devastating diseases of our time, and we pray that you would turn us from ignorance to education, from taboo to compassion, that we might truly be disciples who walk in the way that leads not to death, but to life in you, in whom and through whom we pray. Amen.

Freaky Jesus Dude; a sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent

Mark 1:1-8

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

2 As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,

‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,
   who will prepare your way;
³ the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
   “Prepare the way of the Lord,
   make his paths straight” ’, 

⁴John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. ⁵And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. ⁶Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. ⁷He proclaimed, ‘The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. ⁸I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.’

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
   be acceptable to you,
   O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

When I was in high school, things were rad.

Mrs. Barth is sick and we have a sub? Rad.

The choir is going to Orlando for competition this year? Rad.

The Reebok Pumps I wasn’t cool enough to get until some neighbor kid outgrew them? Stinky, but rad.

Should anybody ask what rad meant, I knew exactly. It meant radical. Like, gnarly. Need to hear it in adult lingo? Way cool.

Should anybody ask me what radical meant, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have said. So when I started hearing the term in reference to people doing out-of-the-ordinary things, things that pushed the envelope of normalcy, I had to wrap my head around the fact that what I understood as radical was, in fact, something completely different from what the word actually meant.

And let me point out, as a footnote, that this is a serious problem we have in our culture. And I’m not just referring to the tendency of young persons to make up or co-opt words to help differentiate them from adults. That is a relatively innocent form of the rebellion that young persons do and ought to experience on their way to adulthood.

I’m referring to our tendency, as responsible adults, to use language completely absent of comprehension. We take words we hear from somewhere, or ideas we hear from somewhere, and we insert them into our everyday conversation with absolutely no understanding of what the words or ideas really mean or entail.

Now, I know we can’t just understand everything about a word or idea the moment we hear it; and I’m aware that there is always something else to learn about any word or idea; but seriously, folks, can’t we try to be a little more responsible with our language?

As an example to take us out of our footnote, how many of us have held God responsible for something that has happened to us? How many of us have observed that something has gone wrong in our lives, that we’re struggling with something, and we’ve claimed the idea that “God is testing me”?

Let’s be very careful about the kind of power we assume God wields. Let’s not underestimate the effect of God-given free will in creation. Let’s not underestimate the power of people to harm us, the power of disease, of systemic sin in our corporate and governmental structures.

Claiming that God is testing us every time something throws us off our game doesn’t make us better Christians. It just makes us naive.

What makes us better Christians is following Christ.

That’s it.

And what makes us better at following Christ is following Christ.

Some cycles are vicious. Christianity is a cycle that’s blessed.

Following Christ makes us better Christ-followers.

But following Christ makes us weird. Because the world calls us to blame and to hold grudges and to hoard, while Christ calls us to love and to forgive and to bless. Following Christ makes us bizarre, makes us outcasts, even in the Church, even among family and friends.

Because following Christ makes us radical.

Being rad is never cool. I should have known better. I should’ve stopped and studied the word I was using.

Being radical is exactly uncool. It doesn’t make us wealthy or powerful or even respected. Being radical for Christ means being one of those Freaky Jesus Dudes; standing out for the sake of love, stopping for a stranger whom even the “righteous” won’t touch, speaking for truth even when all the world - even when all the Church claims it’s wrong.

Being radical won’t make us look like the rest of the Church. It’ll stand in the face of conservatives and fundamentalists and liberals and progressives alike, proclaiming a Christ that even most Christians aren’t willing to accept. Because most Christians just want to be comfortable. They just want salvation and a La-Z-Boy. They just want enough, even though enough is never enough.

Being radical says, if I have enough, then I need to share. If I have love, I need to love. If I have power, then I need to lift up my sister. If I have a hand, I need to hold a hand. If I have a voice, I need to comfort my brother. If I have eyes, I need to look for somebody who needs a hand up. If I have Christ, then it would be blasphemy for me not to be Christ for the world!

Rad.

Do you want to be fed today? Then come to the table and accept better food than any foolish words I can offer. Come to the table and accept Christ who demands freaky Jesus-ness out of you. Come to the table and become a radical for Christ.

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