This 2nd Sunday after Epiphany is a good time to think about discipleship. We hear about it in Isaiah’s 2nd “Servant Song” and in John’s version of the call of Jesus’ first disciples.
Both the real prophet we know as Isaiah and those who wrote in his name (for the sixty-six chapters of the book we know as “Isaiah” were not all produced by the same voice) lived during the difficult years before, during, and after Israel’s conquest and captivity in Babylon. Today’s passage gives us a glimpse of the frustrations and difficulties of being a prophet (or, for our purposes, a disciple), in a dialogue between the prophet and the Almighty. Isaiah is very sure of his having been called by God, in fact, from before he was born! “While I was in my mother’s womb God named me.” (Is 49:1) And yet, Isaiah doesn’t feel that he has been able to exercise the calling for which he was born. He has been “hidden away” “like a polished arrow in the quiver”, his mouth silenced behind the “shadow of God’s hand”. (Is 49:2) Isaiah, it turns out, is not shy about expressing his frustration to God: “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing!”, he exclaims. (Is 49:4) God’s response is that Isaiah has been called for an even broader and more important mission than that of teaching and restoring Israel: God’s servant is to be “a light to the nations”, that God’s salvation “may reach to the ends of the earth”. It seems to me that it’s probably not unusual that there is a difference between the calling that a prophet or a disciple may envision for themselves and the work that it turns out really needs to be done. I think that for many of us, the plans we make fall by the wayside when different and unexpected options open up. Scripture is full of accounts of reluctant servants who need serious re-direction before they are ready to accept the role they are called to in God’s vision: Moses and Jonah are two that spring immediately to mind. Turning to this morning’s gospel account of the call of Jesus’ first disciples, we first need to observe how different it is from the better-know story we hear in the other gospels, of Jesus calling the fishers from their work on the lakeshore (which we will hear next week). Today’s narrative takes place in Bethany, across the Jordan where John is encamped with his disciples, baptizing and proclaiming the approach of God’s reign. The reading begins with John’s account of Jesus’ baptism and John’s identification of Jesus as “the Lamb of God” (Jn 1:29) As John testifies to Jesus’ identity to his followers, as Jesus is passing by, two of his disciples begin to follow after Jesus, and he turns and asks them: “What are you looking for?”. The two don’t seem to have an answer ready, and reply with a question of their own: “Rabbi, where are you staying?” Jesus, in turn – in a manner we will, of course, see many times – himself does not answer, but issues an invitation, an opportunity: “Come and see.” (Jn. 1:37-39) Just as our text from Isaiah reminds us that the work to which God calls us is not necessarily what we plan, this story of the call of Jesus’ first disciples provides two simple and fundamental questions that can (and probably should) shape our lives as disciples: What are we looking for? And Are we looking to see what God in Christ is up to? Did the disciples know what they were looking for? Probably not. Like us, they were undoubtedly searching for meaning and direction in their lives. What any of us is looking for is complicated, and varies from day to day and year to year, depending on the issues, hopes, and challenges of the different times and circumstances in our lives. This weekend we commemorate the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. because of his leadership in movement for civil rights for all persons. While most of his life was spent in the southern states, King spent some of his formative years here in Massachusetts. You may have seen or read about the new statue that was unveiled in Boston on Friday, paying tribute. For us as Christians, King provides a powerful witness and model of a life of discipleship, a life lived in response to the gospel. Like Isaiah, King was a servant of God, a “light to the nations” and an initiator of transformation not only in own parish and community, but a speaker of truth to a nation divided by deep-seated racial bias and legalized injustice, bias and injustice that we have still not eradicated today, as we all know. Pastor King’s call to discipleship, like Isaiah, Andrew, and Simon, probably seemed simpler, as he set out on the journey, than it turned out to be.
Pastor King came to experience the cost of discipleship to a new degree during the boycott: four local churches and the homes of both King and Ralph Abernathy were firebombed. The eventual success of boycott – the determination of federal district court that Montgomery’s laws regarding bus segregation were unconstitutional - sparked the more widespread movement for civil rights. Martin Luther King was increasingly called on to organize and provide leadership. The leadership he offered, and which we celebrate this weekend, was grounded in King’s investment in the principle of nonviolent resistance to unjust law, which was born during his graduate studies in Boston, and further nurtured when he traveled to India to study the work of Gandhi. His understanding was based on belief in the “network of mutuality”, the idea that destiny of all persons is connected, that no one can be free if another is not free. King is frequently seen as civil leader and organizer, but all his work was based in his commitment to Jesus, to the call to serve God, to be “a light to the nations” so that salvation might reach “to the ends of the earth.” We know that he often faced violence in his life as a disciple: Martin was jailed, physically assaulted, and threatened on regular basis, and of course, he was eventually assassinated. His relationship with Jesus sustained him. King often told of a critical incident that occurred during the most difficult days of the bus boycott. He recounted it in several sermons and in his autobiography. Here’s one version of the story, taken from Charles Marsh and John Perkins’ Welcoming Justice: God’s Movement Toward Beloved Community: “In January 1956, Martin Luther King Jr. returned home around midnight after a long day of organizational meetings. His wife and young daughter were already in bed, and King was eager to join them. But a threatening call—the kind of call he was getting as many as 30 to 40 times a day—interrupted his attempt to get some much-needed rest. When he tried to go back to bed, he could not shake the menacing voice that kept repeating the hateful words in his head. King got up, made a pot of coffee, and sat down at his kitchen table. With his head buried in his hands, he cried out to God. There in his kitchen in the middle of the night, when he had come to the end of strength, King met the living Christ in an experience that would carry him through the remainder of his life. "I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on," King later recalled. "He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone … He promised never to leave me, no never alone." In the stillness of the Alabama night, the voice of Jesus proved more convincing than the threatening voice of the anonymous caller. The voice of Jesus gave him the courage to press through the tumultuous year of 1956 to the victorious end of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. More than that, it gave him a vision for ministry that would drive him for the rest of his life.” (cited on preachingtoday.com) The life of Martin Luther King Jr illustrates the fact that when we “come and see” the ministry of Jesus, when we take on the ministry of Jesus, we can be summoned to places we would really rather not go. King’s witness reminds us that bringing light to the nations is not always welcome. It reminds us that preaching the gospel involves not just caring for those in need, but challenging the unjust structures in our common life. But, as King was promised, we will never be left alone. As we, in our own time and living with the particular challenges and opportunities of OUR lives, strive to follow Jesus, let us continue to ask ourselves: What are we looking for? Let us pray for the courage to really “come and see”, regardless of where the journey takes us. Let us give thanks for the commitment and sacrifice of those who have gone before us in working for justice and peace. Amen
This is the nativity story we cherish, because it promises that God is with us, and that the often-harrowing realities of the world are not the final word. We cherish the story and come together to sing the beloved songs that re-tell and celebrate it.
But (tonight/this morning) we have heard another nativity narrative, from the community of the evangelist John. John’s beautiful and mysterious “hymn to the Word of God made flesh” has no stable, no Mary and Joseph, no angels or shepherds or star. Matthew and Luke have a story to tell, but John is all metaphor. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry has said in reference to the other gospel writer who has no explicit birth story, Mark, that “he isn’t interested in baby pictures,” and we can say the same of John: he is not so much concerned with what happened in Jesus’ birth as he is with what it means. In the hymn we have just heard that begins John’s gospel, John makes two theological claims. One was more important to the community of Jesus’ followers as the first century of the Common Era turned to the second than it probably is to us. John’s second claim speaks profoundly to us about ourselves. The first concern John’s hymn addresses has to do with the nature of Jesus as the Christ, the presence of God embodied in the world in human flesh. Those of you who heard the teaching sermon on the Nicene Creed in November will recall that the young Church, in its first centuries, struggled mightily to figure out and understand the idea that Jesus was both human and divine. John begins his gospel addressing this very question: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and lived among us… full of grace and truth. The God who came into the world in Jesus, in other words, was not something new, but was THE WORD itself – the very essence of God – the mind, the will, the nature and passion of God that had been present and active from creation itself. Before the birth of Jesus this presence of God was not known to humans, but in the incarnation, the eternal, dynamic reality of LOVE ITSELF became known. John’s second claim is about the impact that the incarnation, the EMBODIMENT of God’s presence, has for us. God’s incarnation in Jesus the Christ has the purpose of changing human possibility: John says: “..to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.” John goes on to say that those who receive and know and understand Jesus as the power of God itself can be born “not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of humans, but of God.” In other words, because we have seen what the invisible and unknowable God looks like in a human life, because we have known the life of Jesus the Christ, we are no longer just the product of the events in OUR lives, no longer tied to the difficulties and limitations of our humanity, but are children of God as Jesus was the child of God. The early “church fathers” – folks such as Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Athanasius, as well as later theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas – taught the concept of “divinization”, a process by which human beings are so transformed by grace that we come to share in God’s very nature.1 If we take this seriously, means that the Incarnation of God in Jesus is not just a one-time historical event, though it is that, but it is an event that opens up an ongoing reality in which we continue to participate, in which it is our opportunity to take up OUR part in the life of God. In John’s nativity, there is only still silence as the Word of God, the eternal, takes on temporal flesh for one fleeting human lifetime. It is, for us, a reminder that Love came into the world to make our fragile, temporary flesh holy. It is a reminder that our fleeting time here on earth is holy, too. We can be, like Mary “bearers of the eternal Word”. It is a radical and mysterious claim, but it is an invitation to life without fear, life lived in abundance. In Christmas, we celebrate tidings of great joy: love has broken through again. Christ is born in us again. Love is made flesh again. Whenever we find love, whenever we offer love, the holy is born in us again. What if we were to really live as if God is not something “out there”, but rather, as if our own being is filled with the infinite, creative, mysterious presence we call God? What if our own deepest self is in God and God is in us? We take part in the divine nature when we allow God’s love to affect us, to change us, to flow in and through us. We can work at more and more consistently living each moment in a way that reflects how much of the sacred we carry within us. In this Christmas season may we continue to explore the Incarnation of the Christ, both in a stable in Bethlehem and in our own lives, here, today; may we savor the gift that we receive in the birth of Christ. Each day may Christ be born a little more in our thoughts, our hearts, and in our choices, that the light enkindled in us may shine ever more fully in our lives.
Rose Sunday is a reference to rose color of 3rd candle in our Advent wreath. Its color is associated multiple meanings, including lightening of color in reference to Mary, whose song is one of the optional readings appointed for the day - we’ll hear a musical setting of it at the offertory - as well as reflecting anticipation of light coming into world.
Probably my favorite name for today is Stir up Sunday. It comes from the opening words of today’s collect, in which we ask God to “stir up your power… and come among us”. Tradition also holds that it’s also a reminder for cooks to “stir up” fermenting batter for their Christmas plum puddings and fruitcakes. The other name for this third Sunday of Advent is the one I’d like to reflect on this morning. Gaudete Sunday refers to the Latin word for Rejoice, which is the first word found in a text traditionally sung on the third Sunday in Advent in the Catholic tradition, taken from Paul’s letter to the Philippians: Rejoice in the Lord always. We didn’t hear this reading this morning because our lectionary has changed, but the name hangs on. All of these designations for the third Sunday of Advent are pretty upbeat and cheery, but calling this “Rejoice Sunday” is definitely a misnomer. The gospel we’ve heard this morning does not invite us to rejoice, but rather, shows us the picture of John, the baptizer, languishing in prison, suffering painful doubts about whether the one he has acclaimed to be the Messiah is actually the one. As we know, John was eventually beheaded by Herod. Throughout today’s readings, we are reminded of the world’s troubles, of our need for hope, our need for redemption. Isaiah offers a poetic vision of the world turned upside down by God’s redeeming power – or perhaps we should say – a world turned rightside up:
In Isaiah’s vision of God’s realm, all limitation and all suffering will be brought to an end: Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, And the ears of the deaf unstopped; Then shall the lame leap like a deer And the tongue of the speechless sing for joy…. The Psalmist, as well, echoes this theme of transformation: (God) gives justice to those who are oppressed, And food to those who hunger. The Lord sets the prisoners free… [and] lifts up those who are bowed down Advent acknowledges the sorrows of our world, but promises that the light is coming. Advent faces us with our brokenness and asks us to believe in the light. It calls us to be messengers of hope. Over the course of the four weeks of Advent our sacred texts have been guiding us to this conclusion. The first Sunday of Advent confronted us with Jesus’ apocalyptic vision of a world of frightening endings – the two workers in the field, the two women grinding meal, one of whom is taken and one left. The two middle weeks of Advent – last Sunday, and today – ask us to remember prophetic ministry of John Baptizer. John and Jesus lived in a world that took apocalyptic visions seriously: they believed a final judgment was approaching and they preached readiness. John and Jesus both recognized corruption and emptiness in world dominated by the struggle for power over others as a means of protecting self-interest. It’s an understanding of the world that we can readily understand. Isaiah and the other prophets of Hebrew scripture AND John the baptizer utilized two images to describe he world God is working to transform, the world Jesus lived and died to redeem: the first is the world as “wilderness”, and the second is the world as “darkness”. In our own time, both of these images need rethinking. Isaiah spoke of one “crying out in the wilderness” to “prepare the way of the Lord’”, identifying wilderness as a place of hostility, barrenness, and danger. Heather reflected on the wilderness in her sermon last week and reframed the concept for us. “Creation is God incarnate”, she told us, and said that it’s our responsibility as followers of Jesus to ensure “that there will be a wilderness for Christ to return to.” Rather than dreaming of being saved from the wilderness, Heather advised that “One of the first steps we can take is to follow John the Baptist’s example by spending more of our time in the wilderness.” “Darkness” is the other biblical image I’d like to reframe.“Darkness” into which the light breaks is another way of describing the reality of the world’s emptiness without God’s presence. You’ve heard me reflect, before, that I have grown uncomfortable with equating “darkness” with the negative, as it has it has such powerful, historic racist implications. I’m not going to give you that sermon again today, but I do want to bring it back to memory, and if you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll be happy to explain. As a substitute, let’s talk about the broken aspects of the world. Brokenness characterizes the world in our time, and too often is within us as well: it is not just the division and violence of our common life that needs transformation, but also the crooked, rough places in our individual lives:
Our lives are full of realities that don’t invite rejoicing. Bur here’s the thing: even as Advent acknowledges the broken and crooked places in common life and our personal lives, it promises the coming of the light and asks us, outrageously, to hope. Over and over again we hear these messages: Isaiah promising that God “will bind up the brokenhearted” That the captives will find liberty That those who mourn will have “a garland instead of ashes”, “the oil of gladness instead of mourning” The Psalmist, likewise: “Those who sowed in tears will reap in songs of joy” “Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed, will come again with joy, shouldering the sheaves” In this pre-Christmas season popular culture surrounds us with sights, sounds, and tastes of the holiday season. Popular culture doesn’t want to have to wait for Christmas. The important thing about these “signs” of the season is that they point toward and offer a taste of the true joy that is possible in God’s life. Just as gifts we give at Christmas are not about the gifts themselves, but express how much we cherish those to whom we give, the lights, music, and delicious morsels we are preparing suggest and remind us of true gifts of love and hope, EMBODIED in the birth in Bethlehem, that we can fleetingly taste but that are hard to hold onto. Advent promises that God has come near, that God has entered into OUR world. That despite painful realities we can’t and shouldn’t plaster over with holiday cheer – God is working to transform this broken world. We are in a between time – after the redeeming life of Jesus, but before the work of redemption is complete. We are waiting. But we can choose how to wait. We can wait for God to “bind up the brokenhearted” and “transform the tears” to “songs of joy”, or we can pitch in. Who, in your life, needs a word of love that you can bring? Our work as Jesus’ followers is to be, as John was, witnesses to the light. The life of Jesus taught us that when we feel sorrow and hopelessness closing in, the way to break through is by reaching out to others, especially to those whose sorrows are greater than our own. To show them, through our caring, that love exists, and that we can dare to hope. In this Advent, let us hear and believe the promises. Let us cry out in the wilderness, bearing and lifting up the sorrows of the world, and let us see beyond them. Let us enjoy the pleasures of the season and understand that they are signs point toward a deeper Reality. Let us continue to reach out in love, and offer the world better visions of what can and will be. In Jesus’ name. While many Christian denominations recite one or both of the creeds in worship at least occasionally, some don’t, and I have to wonder what folks new to Episcopal worship must make of our very regular practice of standing together to articulate a list of things we believe.
Are the creeds rules? Do they express doctrines that we are expected to believe? And what if we don’t really believe some of the things we say in the creeds? Are we meant to understand the claims of the creeds literally? There are questions that I suspect we’ve all asked ourselves at times. Because the creeds are such a central part of our worship life and because they raise such tricky questions, Heather and I decided that our final “teaching sermon” in this series should explore the creeds. The word creed comes from the Latin credo, meaning “I believe”. Probably the most important thing we can say about the creeds are that they are historic documents, born in the days when the Church, the community of Jesus’ followers, was establishing itself. Like other historic documents , they reflect the concerns and issues that were important to their authors. The Apostles’ Creed is the shorter and less complicated statement of the two we use. It contains twelve faith statements. A longstanding tradition in the church was that the twelve were written by (or at least associated with) the twelve apostles. While a simple form of the creed may have been in use in the middle of the second century, the Apostles’ Creed as we now know it didn’t actually emerge until the fourth or fifth century1. What we do know is that the Apostles Creed has always been associated with baptism. From early times, new Christians about to be baptized were required to affirm their faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In one of the nice examples of the Church changing its liturgy to honor and reclaim ancient practices, we now use the question-and-answer format as a means of including the entire congregation present in the affirmation of belief in the three persons of the Trinity (and other fundamental articles of faith) during the baptismal service. We use the Apostles’ Creed during the Morning and Evening Prayer, and when we bury the dead. The Nicene Creed – or, more accurately, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed – is the profession of faith that we use each Sunday in the Eucharist. It’s a more complicated and arguably more interesting document with quite a dramatic history. In the fourth century, the Christian Movement had spread throughout the Mediterranean world. The Roman Emperor Constantine had converted the Christianity and established the faith as the official religion of the Empire. The Church was not of a common mind, however, but was wracked by controversies, with various religious leaders teaching different and often conflicting doctrines. Constantine wanted to bring about peace and unity, and so in 325 he summoned all Christian bishops to Nicea for the first Ecumenical Council of the Church. He imposed a mandate: because religious peace could only occur if a single religion existed throughout the empire, none of the bishops would be allowed to leave until they had agreed on a universal interpretation for Christianity.2 (I imagine this to have been rather like a mother saying to a pair of quarreling siblings “Nobody leaves the room until you two have sorted this out!”) And so the bishops began what would ultimately turn out to be a decades-long debate that must, at times, have been a rather dog-eat-dog process: eventually conclusions were reached about what constituted true and authentic Christian belief, and alternative perspectives were declared to be heresies. Most of the controversies involved relationships between the persons of the Trinity. Bishop Arius of Alexandria and his followers, for example, taught that although Jesus Christ was begotten by the Father, “the Son” did not always exist, and was not of the same nature as the Creator. Macedonius I of Constantinople, meanwhile, taught that the Holy Spirit was not really divine. Both positions (and others) were eventually declared to be heretical, when the bishops took their votes, and bishops who refused to sign on to the agreed-upon definitions of Christian belief were exiled. Following, Nicea, a series of further councils continued to refine the creed established in 325. The final form of the creed that we use today emerged from the Council of Constantinople in 381. The finely-tuned language that we speak together each week reflects the deeply-held convictions of those early Church Fathers, that Jesus Christ was eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from True God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Another line in the Nicene Creed that has been a source of considerable dispute comes in the part of the creed referring to the Holy Spirit. The creed from Nicea, confirmed by subsequent councils, stated that the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life proceeds (or issues, or emanates) from the Father… In the sixth century the Church in Europe, under the authority of the Pope in Rome, added the phrase “and the Son”, so the declaration of faith professed that the Spirit issues from both the Father and the Son, the Creator and the Christ. The Orthodox (Eastern) Church vehemently objected to the addition. Their concern was both that the addition was theologically untrue AND that the Bishop of Rome had no authority to change the common creed. In our own time, most of us grew up with the amended “and the Son” version. The Church in its wisdom has, in the last several decades, chosen to return to the earlier (and more truly ecumenical) form of the creed, which is why we now, in our own worship, say that the Spirit proceeds “from the Father”. Another change to the way the Church has approached the creed has been to shift from an individual statement of faith to a communal expression. Those of us raised on the 1928 Book of Common Prayer declared that “I believe”, while we now say that “We believe”. It seems to me that this change reflects a larger shift in the Church, in our lifetimes, anyway, from a primary emphasis on our personal relationships with God and our own salvation, to a recognition that it is through our connections with one another and our efforts together that we live into God’s dream for the healing of the world. All of the disputes and controversies associated with the creed over the centuries, considered in relation to the troubles that cause the suffering in the world, can seem trivial. It is hard to project ourselves into the minds and hearts of the people of faith for whom these fine points of language mattered so deeply and profoundly, for whom these words represented our very relationship with God. Which point brings me to one of the tricky questions that I asked earlier. Do we HAVE to believe all of the things we say in the Creed to be literally true? Here’s my answer. All of the language that human beings use in our attempt to explain God, salvation, the Church, and other elements of our faith is symbolic. Our words – and for that matter our attempts to express the truth of God in art, music, or any other form – can never capture the full reality of God and God’s dream for us, because these truths are beyond our imagination. Our words (and our images and our melodies) point toward the truth of God and God’s love for us in the life of Jesus the Christ, and of the Spirit that blows among us, but they cannot capture it. As Saint Paul said, we see in a mirror dimly. Our attempts, including the words of the creeds, are the scribblings of children in relation to the glory of God. I love the explanation of late Bishop John Shelby Spong: The church of the future will not dismantle and dispatch the gospel narratives, but will recognize them for what they are, a first-century attempt to explain the Christ experience. We will not jettison the creeds, but will recognize them as fourth-century love songs, sung to those people's understanding of God. We can thus join in singing these ancestral songs. We do not literalize their words, nor do we bend the church of tomorrow to the liturgical patterns of antiquity. We will allow the Christ experience to create new forms through which ultimate truth might be allowed to flow in our time.3 For me, the speaking of the creeds is a statement of faith in and solidarity with the universal Church, with the generations of questioning, struggling, faithful folks who have wondered and who have longed to love God and follow Jesus. The creeds tie us back to those who have gone before us, to those all over the world speaking the same words in myriad languages today, and and to those who, God willing, will continue to do so for generations to come.
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