Nativity of the Lord – Proper I (December 24, 2022)

People felt amazed, Luke’s Christmas story says, when the shepherds told them the Messiah had been born in Bethlehem. And it seems to have been exactly that point that people found amazing. The angel, the blinding glory, the spectacle of heaven’s hosts singing in the night sky – maybe the shepherds described all of that, too, and maybe people found it impressive. But what really got everyone excited, Luke seems to say, was the news that the Messiah had finally come.

Perhaps I would have felt amazed then, too, had I been around. But amazement simply isn’t among the emotions the Christmas story stirs in me. It never has been, as far as I can remember. The nearest thing I feel to amazement is a hopeful longing that the story of Jesus really did mean everything the Gospels say it meant. What gets in the way of amazement, for me, is all the evidence to the contrary. I may be full of hope and longing, but I also read the papers.

For having been visited by its savior, the world still looks very much in need of saving tonight. Violence, disease, hunger, injustice and suffering seem everywhere. Our Messiah may have come. But what did he accomplish while he was here, where is he now, and why isn’t he doing anything about the mess we are in? I believe he can clean things up, and I fervently hope he will. But his performance to date seems far from amazing.

When I admit to myself that I have these questions, I discover something else I feel in addition to hope and longing. I feel anger. I feel angry that this Messiah of ours seems absent without leave when the world desperately needs him on the job, and no amount of Christmas sentimentality is going to keep me from demanding to know just where in the hell of this world he is, or whether he even is at all.

But as I lay these thoughts before my Messiah tonight – why try to hide them from the likes of Him? – I think I hear an answer I have heard before, but never quite so clearly:

“I am where I always am: among the poor, sick and discarded people you accuse me of ignoring. But where, my child, are you?”

Fourth Sunday of Advent (December 18, 2022)

There will be sermons aplenty this Sunday praising Joseph for showing faith. That’s fine. But I’d like to hear one praising him for keeping it, because raising Jesus can’t have been easy.

As an adult, Jesus could be startlingly brilliant, achingly compassionate, and downright handy to have around in crises ranging from running out of wine in the middle of a wedding party to getting caught out on the water in a storm, contracting a terrible disease or even dropping dead. But he also could be irascible, provocative, exasperating, appalling, and bewildering. We can only imagine what he was like during his terrible twos or – good grief! – as a teenager. A sinless kid would not necessarily have been a low-maintenance one. From what I have read, Jesus certainly wasn’t.

Trouble found the new family quickly. For Joseph, simply sticking with Mary despite her unexplained pregnancy carried risks and invited gossip. And the second chapter of Matthew describes how the arrival of the gift-bearing wise men alerted Herod to a possible rival, prompting Herod to condemn to death every Bethlehem male age 2 or younger. Warned in a dream, Joseph had to flee to Egypt and sneak back to Nazareth only after Herod’s death.

The Gospels tell us nothing about most of Jesus’ childhood. Imagine him, if you like, as a finer carpenter than Joseph from the start. I’ll go along with the assumption that he was probably a quick learner, but I’ll bet he banged his thumbs, sliced his fingers, whined about splinters, cut his boards too short, and ruined his share of projects, just like anyone else learning a trade. And through everything, I picture Joseph rolling his eyes and thinking, “Son of God, come to save us all, the angel said. I just wish he could cut a straight line.”

Our one glimpse of the adolescent Jesus can be found toward the end of Luke 2. Having been brought to Jerusalem, as was the custom, at age 12 to prepare for his full induction into the Jewish faith community at 13, Jesus gave his parents the slip. Discovering his absence a day into the trip back home, a panicked Mary and Joseph rushed back to Jerusalem, searched for three days, and finally found him doing what he evidently had been doing the whole time: discussing scripture with the Temple teachers and wowing them with his insights.

Called out by Mary, Jesus seems as indifferent to their anxiety as he would seem later, when his panicked disciples awakened him from his nap to demand why he didn’t care that a storm was about to drown the whole company in the Sea of Galilee.

“Why were you searching for me?” Jesus replies. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my father’s house?” Joseph was standing right there. That one must have stung.

Joseph’s story ends with a final indignity in Luke 4 as Jesus, by now an emerging celebrity, returns to Nazareth to give a sermon in the town’s synagogue. It all starts well, with Jesus doing a fine job of reading a passage from Isaiah, and everyone nodding in approval and murmuring, “That’s Joseph’s boy, isn’t it?” But then Jesus backhands his erstwhile neighbors with an insult by suggesting God had bypassed them in favor of – gasp! – foreigners, the way God had sent Elijah to a widow in Zarephath, and Elisha to a leprous Syrian called Naaman. Enraged, they mob him, planning to toss him off a nearby cliff.

Joseph’s boy? By then, the crowd probably thought of him as Joseph’s insolent little brat. We don’t know whether Joseph was around for this near-murderous riot or any of the fallout after Jesus mysteriously disappeared from the scene. Joseph just fades away in the Gospels, having never uttered a single recorded word. Classical art showing Mary and Joseph together often depicts Mary as substantially younger than her husband, on the theory that Joseph must have died of old age early in their marriage.

But through it all, whatever all of it entailed, Joseph seems to have kept his faith in what the angel had told him: This boy will save his people from their sins, and you must call him “Jesus,” so that you will repeat the promise each time you say his name.

We sentimentalize each of the Christmas story’s characters – Joseph, Mary, the shepherds, the wise men, and probably Jesus himself more than any of them. If the snoozing baby in the manger is the only Jesus you know, then perhaps you don’t know Jesus much at all. Real life with him is more like it must have been for Joseph: marked by deep love, to be sure, but also by frustration, weariness, bewilderment, offense, anger, doubts, and outrage at being asked to give yet more when so much has been given already. Sometimes, to know Jesus is to wish you had never met him. Blasphemy? Just ask John, whom we left, last week, sitting in prison, doubting everything and awaiting a fate that couldn’t have been difficult for him to guess.

The real Jesus came to love us, yes, but with real love, a love prepared to subordinate everything else – things like keeping us warm, preserving our safety, filling our bellies, protecting our egos, burnishing our reputations, growing our businesses, or even just letting us have a nice peaceful life among friends in a little place we can call home – to giving us the one thing we need most, and really the only thing we need at all: saving.

Third Sunday of Advent, Year A

I could be wrong, but I see more than doubt and despair in the message John the Baptist sent Jesus from prison.

I see anger. White-hot, sarcastic, malicious anger.

I think John wanted his message to sting Jesus the way John’s “brood of vipers” insult had stung the Pharisees and Sadducees back in Matthew 3 (and everyone back in Luke 3). John had warned everyone that the Messiah would wreak fiery judgment upon all who failed to repent. The Messiah’s coming, John had cried, would leave the landscape stubbled with the trunks of the sinful and the air thick with the smoke of their destruction. The preciously few righteous would be gathered and stored safely in the barn, and John, I think, had expected to be first through the door.

But there John sat, locked away in Herod’s prison for having dared to call out Herod’s sins, while the man he had dubbed “Messiah” was dithering in Galilee, far – too far, in John’s estimation – from the Jerusalem power centers John had expected his cousin to attack. Like the rest of Jesus’ family (see Mark 3, Matthew 12, and Luke 8), John had concluded that Jesus had gone off script and maybe off the rails, and someone ought to do something about it.

Never one to self-censor when he thought the powerful needed to hear some hard truth, John sent his disciples with a public ultimatum for Jesus: Start acting like the Messiah, or get off the stage.

But Jesus reacts to John’s insolence in a way characteristically uncharacteristic of the Messiah John had foreseen. John has gone over to the side of the chaff and the fruitless trees. By rights, he should burn along with them. But Jesus does what he would later do with the post-denials Peter: He offers John a way back.

“Go and tell John,” Jesus says – and I picture him saying this before a crowd, as loudly and publicly as John’s disciples had delivered John’s ultimatum – “what you hear and see: The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”

Jesus is echoing words from the prophet Isaiah 35 that describe the Messiah’s coming, and in tones considerably less foreboding than John’s. If he isn’t quite the kind of Messiah John wants, Jesus seems to be saying, maybe John wants the wrong kind of Messiah.

Then Jesus, having reminded everyone who he is, sets out to remind John who John is.

“And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me,” Jesus says. John’s disciples turn to go. As they are leaving, Jesus asks those in the crowd what had drawn them to John’s wilderness. Not the scenery, not a spectacle, not even a hot-looking celebrity, but rather a prophet – and not just any prophet, but the prophet, the second Elijah that Malachi had foretold (Mal. 3:1), the greatest man ever born.

“Whoever has ears, let them hear,” Jesus concludes. I think he is speaking particularly to the ears of John’s departing disciples and, by proxy, to John himself.

As the Messiah we want, particularly when facing a crisis like the one John was facing, when evil seems poised, for the millionth time, to lop the head clean off of what is good and right, Jesus can seem like a disappointment at best. What good is a Messiah who dithers in Galilee, finally makes his way to Jerusalem, then just gives up, dies, and disappears? Maybe he was just a nut, or even a fraud. And if he was, what does that make us, his followers? Aren’t there better messiahs to be found, ones more capable of protecting us and putting the hurt on our enemies? If this one isn’t going to get the job done, maybe we should ditch him and look for one who will. Maybe we are fakers and fools if we don’t.

The problem with butt-kicking messiahs, though, is that they just might kick yours if you ever dare speak to them the way John spoke to Jesus. We don’t know, of course, what John thought about Jesus’ reply, or even whether he still had a head to think with by the time the message arrived. What we do know is what we hear and see in this passage. We hear and see Jesus – the only true Messiah we get, and the only one we truly need – knowing and forgiving the limits of John’s faith. I think it’s reasonable to hope Jesus knows and forgives ours, too.

Second Sunday of Advent (December 4, 2022)

We have to listen extra hard for grace when John the Baptist is screaming things like “brood of vipers,” “wrath to come,” and “burn with unquenchable fire.” To hear John tell it, we can bet that the sweet baby Jesus we’ll all be adoring in a few weeks will grow up to be one fearsome butt kicker, and it’s our butts he’ll be aiming for.

One way to shield ourselves from all this vitriol, of course, is to assume it is directed at others, specifically long-dead people whom we judge to have been more depraved than we are, who had so much more to repent of than we do and, by extension, had so much more judgment to face. Isn’t it true, after all, that John holds back on all the scary stuff until the Pharisees and Sadducees show up? We are invited, it seems, to gather behind John and join him in flinging insults and condemnation at these obvious, ancient villains.

But in Luke’s account of the presumably same event (See Chapter 3), John directs his “brood of vipers” insult, and all that follows, at the crowd in general, not just at the delegation of religious elites. In Luke’s version, we’re all vipers, and John’s unquenchable fire is a universal hazard.

An odd thing happens in Luke’s account, though. In Luke, John gets specific about what this repentance he is prescribing entails. So what, exactly, does it take to avoid having one’s snaky hide burned to a crisp? Share your excess food and clothing with the needy, John says. If you’re a tax collector, don’t enrich yourself by overcharging people. If you’re a soldier, don’t use trumped-up charges and extortion to supplement your government-issued paycheck.

That’s all? I mean, I donate my extra stuff and give to charity, and I don’t think I routinely swindle or extort anyone, either in my professional or personal life. Most people I know are about the same as I am. Like me, they no doubt could be more generous, and they probably cut a few ethical corners now and then, as do I. But all in all, I and they are decent, upright people. Were the ordinary people of John’s time really that much more terrible?

It’s possible that they were, I suppose. Living under enemy occupation in first-century Palestine probably put most folks a lot closer to the edge than most folks today. When everyone is fearful and struggling to survive, selfishness and even barbarity can multiply. And this was a culture rife with slavery, warfare, injustice, oppression, prejudice, economic exploitation, and all sorts of other ills.

An honest listing of our culture’s ills would be no shorter, however. It would differ mainly in content. Our wealth today doesn’t depend, as theirs did then, on forced labor by enslaved people. But it does depend on industrialization at a level capable of rendering the planet unlivable. And while slavery may have disappeared worldwide, it hasn’t been gone for all that long, its effects still feed economic disparities today, and we – especially those of us in the U.S. – still have ways of forcing people to do intolerable, even dangerous jobs for pay so low they can’t afford basic necessities.

It seems, then, that this fiery sermon John preached more than 2,000 years ago remains hot enough for us to burn our fingers on today. And maybe a lot more. It could be that, even today, our occasional moral lapses have consequences far more serious than we surmise. And maybe John’s condemnation encompasses not only us as individuals but our whole culture, even our whole world.

In fact, that’s the only way to understand why John characterizes what’s coming as a “kingdom.” In John’s time as well as today, something as comprehensive as a kingdom doesn’t tolerate rivals, alternatives, or divided loyalties. A coming kingdom, by its nature, poses an existential threat to the existing kingdom. If the new is coming – and John assures us that it is – every bit of the old is doomed. Seen in that context, all of these terrifying metaphors John uses, like axes felling unfruitful trees and fire consuming deadwood and chaff, can’t be dismissed as mere hyperbole from a half-crazy wild man irritated by his scratchy camel hair clothing and utterly disgusting diet. These images really do portray what the new kingdom’s displacement of the old one will be like.

So, where’s the grace? It’s right there in the first word out of John’s mouth: Repent. This coming kingdom will destroy all that stands in its way. But there is a way to not stand in its way. Repent. It’s not even that hard. Just start doing what you already know to be right. You can begin, or begin again, right here and now, in the muddy waters of the Jordan, or wherever else you might be. Prepare the way. Make the paths straight. Pick your side. The new and coming king will handle the rest. He’ll chop away your deadwood, blow away your chaff, and burn it all out of existence, leaving the only version of you that can be real in the new reality he brings.

This baby in the manger will, indeed, grow up. But he will not become your tyrant. He will become your liberator.