Not a little more. All.

Matthew 2:1-12

One of the big emotions of this holiday season, and one of the ones we associate most with the season of Christmas, is joy. The wise men had it right there in chapter 2 of Matthew: "When they saw the star had stopped they were overwhelmed with joy." Not just kind of happy but overwhelmed with joy.

Joy isn't necessarily the emotion we associate with wise people, or with kings, or with people who have a lot of education. We tend to think that they're the pensive ones who are just kind of always level. So to have wise people be joyous sticks out. Joy is something we tend to associate much more freely with children. Now, if we think about what it is that wise men we might say that they study, and in those days what they were studying was, among other things, the stars. That happens to be why they noticed this new thing in the first place. It's guys who are looking at the stars who found Jesus, because you can't notice a new star in the sky unless you're looking in the first place. If a new star showed up in the sky tonight I wouldn't have a clue because I wouldn't be looking, and even if I did happen to look up I wouldn't notice that there was anything different about it because I don't know the sky that well in the first place. It's just not something I know intimately. So it was the wise men who studied, who had that background to observe this, who experience this overwhelming joy. It's worth starting there.

My 2014 year in review

So, basically, my 2014 can be summed up in one picture:

That's Bean, and she's a monster of cuteness.

Basically all other 2014 achievements are dwarfed by that monster in pink.

But other things did happen this year. Many other things, actually. In fact, as much as people liked to tell me that I wouldn't have time for other things, 2014 was a year of plenty of other things. Here are just a few:

Stories, not numbers, on this Christmas Eve

Scripture: Luke 2:1-20

After our Christmas concert at Grace last Sunday afternoon one of the high-schoolers said something to me that has been on my mind this week, and since I have a pulpit and a congregation I’m going to think through it with all of you. She said, “There must be a lot of pressure on you to say something on Christmas Eve that will make all those people come back to church during the rest of the year.”

You can tell a young person said that because she still believes that I have actual power and influence and stuff. It’s cute.

The reason I’m beginning tonight’s sermon with that quote is not to make some of you uncomfortable—well, maybe it’s partially to make some of you uncomfortable—but primarily I want to address it because this attitude that our success or failure as a church is determined by butts in the seats just doesn’t work. Numbers tell a story, just not a very deep one. It’s not data but people that matter, and I worry about some of you not because of the percentage of Sundays you show up in church but because, if I don’t see you very often, I don’t know your story. And I don’t know who does. Do your families? Do you? And I don’t know how the Christmas story matters within the story that is your life. Does it?

Joseph and the importance of just showing up

Scripture: Matthew 1:1-25

Whenever we read about Joseph (the father of Jesus) in the Bible, which admittedly is not often because he only appears in first two chapters of Matthew and even less in Luke, I am reminded of a quote from the 1998 movie, Simon Birch, where one of the boys, Eddie, gloats after being cast as Joseph in the Christmas pageant. He’s pretty full of himself until Simon, the little misfit title character, says, “It's the Virgin Mary, Eddie. What does Joseph have to do with anything?”

Right. What does Joseph have to do with anything?

This really is the question. Joseph is just along for the ride; in fact, it’s his fault they need to make this journey to Bethlehem in the first place. What does Joseph have to do with anything? I mean, how many lines does he get in the Christmas pageant? How many songs are written about him? Nobody cares! And I suppose that’s natural and it’s even kind of funny… until we consider that perhaps Joseph does have a role to play, that, in fact, this story of Jesus’ birth hinges on adoption… and it centers around naming… both of which are incredibly powerful and both of which are Joseph’s job.

I bet most people would say that these verses in Matthew are about the Virgin birth, which is true in part, but I would hazard to guess that we say that primarily because that’s controversial, and our eyes tend to focus on sex if it’s to be found anywhere in the text. If there’s one verse out of one hundred that has to do with sex we’ll pick it out as the most important, because it tends to be one of our big hang-ups. For example, I can all but guarantee that even though this sermon has nothing to do with sex and I’m not going to mention it again after this moment it will show up in a couple of sermon notes. We get so hung up on Virgin birth stuff that we tend to miss the rest of what’s going on altogether. This is a story about Joseph staying in the picture, being the adoptive father of the Son of God, and it’s about the power of naming. It’s Joseph to whom the name of Emmanuel is given, not Mary, though, being the typical guy that he is, he apparently wasn’t listening to the angel very closely because instead of Emmanuel he went with “Jesus.”

Joseph is also important because of his lineage. The first reading today with that overly long list of descendents connects Jesus with the heroes of biblical history. That lineage runs through Joseph. None of those connections exist without Joseph, which is kind of funny if you stop and think about it because it means that Jesus was not actually a flesh and blood descendant of David or Abraham or any of the others. He is only an adoptive descendant of that line. If Joseph goes, so does Jesus’ primary connection with the Old Testament. Jesus’ flesh and blood lineage is through the more-anonymous Mary.

So why does any of this matter?

Know yourself... or else you'll never know why Jesus had to come.

Scripture:Isaiah 42:1-9

I wonder how much we really know ourselves. On the surface that probably seems like a silly thought. Who could you possibly know better than yourself? But we played a little game with our Confirmation students—and I’m going to have you play it wherever you are in a minute. I want you to think about two things--to really think and pore over it--and, if you can, share them with somebody else. The two things are these: #1: What is something you are good at? And #2: What is something you need to work at or improve upon? Take as much time as you need to ponder.

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Was that easy? I think for most of us it’s a challenge, especially when we get to talking about what we need to improve. Most of us have stock answers to those questions: I really need to work on balancing my time better, or I really need to work on getting out more, or I really need to work on having a more positive attitude, but those answers are often only scratching the surface of what’s really going on with us. We have a hard time being introspective enough to know what we need to work on, because it’s scary to look at ourselves in the mirror so closely. In many ways our families and friends can answer those questions about us better than we can answer them ourselves.

Many of our societal problems are rooted in our unrealistic opinion of ourselves. As Bertrand Russell once said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” To use biblical language, there’s a lot of pointing out specks in other peoples’ eyes and not a lot of acknowledging the log in our own. And what ends up happening in a world where we don’t know ourselves very well is that we get awfully defensive. Arguments escalate. Since we are not comfortable in the situation—since we aren’t very sure of ourselves—we overcompensate, and we become louder and brasher. We talk over others. We never listen. Listening is weakness, letting others talk is weakness, admitting there are things we don’t know is weakness.

The general rule of thumb is that the person who is loudest knows him or herself the least.

An argument for reading the parts of the Bible you don't like

“That’s not the God I believe in.” I’ve heard this phrase countless times in many different contexts. Sometimes it’s helpful. I remember our former presiding bishop Mark Hanson talking about meeting with people who don’t believe in God, listening to their stories of why they don’t believe, and then relating that the god they are describing is not the God he believes in either. Our conflicts over religion have a great deal to do with misunderstanding the kind of God that one another believe in. In that way this phrase is useful.

But in other ways I find it a cop out. For example: when it’s used by educated Christians who read the Bible until they find an attribute of God they don’t like, and then they explain that they don’t agree with that scripture because that’s not the God I believe in. This has always seemed backwards to me—I mean, how can you say that’s not the God you believe in when the God you believe in is revealed primarily through scripture? Aren’t you admitting that the God you believe in is only a reflection of the traits you define as “good”? Then, isn't God really only a reflection of you? It’s a pretty short jaunt from ignoring scripture we don’t like to making God in our image.

It bothers me even more when this comes from pastors, because most of them, like me, had to take vows in their ordination that contain a line that reads something like this: “The church in which you are to be ordained confesses that the holy scriptures are the word of God and are the norm of its faith and life…. Will you therefore preach and teach in accordance with the holy scriptures…?” Can we really take that vow seriously if we discount certain bits of scripture out of hand because of our preconceived notions of who or what God is?

I believe strongly in an open-minded approach to scripture, because I believe that all scripture exists to reveal God to us, and if that’s the case then what have we to fear from reading something that rubs us the wrong way? That doesn’t always mean that the Bible is clear or that we will like it; in fact, it pretty much guarantees the opposite; but it promises us that the Bible as we have it is sufficient for faith in the true God. Scripture might contain allegories and parables, events that are described as if historical even if they may not have ever happened, and even words of human people that conceal as much as they reveal, but God is found everywhere in the midst of it all.

In fact, I tend to believe that God is found particularly in the places we are challenged.

It's harder to be thankful as the oppressor than the oppressed (thoughts on Thanksgiving, Habakkuk, Ferguson, and whether we should be affected))

Scripture: Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:2-4, 3:17-19

The following is a transcript

 

We’re reading from Habakkuk today, which is one of my favorite books in the Bible—also, coincidentally, impossible to pronounce. Habakkuk’s preaching has a good deal of weight because he is preaching from a place where he has absolutely nothing. It begs the question in this season of Thanksgiving: how can you be thankful when you have nothing? Thankfulness is something we associate with having things. That makes sense. I mean, it’s much easier when you have things, but Habakkuk tells us something different—that he is thankful precisely for having nothing.

He says, “Though the fig tree does not blossom and no fruit is on the vines… though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation” (Hab 3:17-18)

Though I have nothing… I will praise God for everything.

Habbakuk sounds so un-American. We tend to associate good things as things that we thank God for and bad things as things that we pray to God to remove from our lives. When we say we're "thankful in all things" usually it means that we find the positive in the negative--not that the bad things themselves are worthy of being thankful for. But on the other hand this attitude of Habakkuk is really refreshing, because he’s treating God as more than a good luck charm. We need more of that. At certain times in life this philosophy is very useful. This is why this scripture from Habakkuk has been used against regimes in Nazi Germany and apartheid in South Africa. It’s scripture for people who are being murdered and ruthlessly suppressed. People who have nothing but discover that being thankful even then gives them a kind of power.