Silence and Darkness

Luke 1:5-13, 57-80

I want to talk today about two of the things we fear about this season: Silence and darkness. Both of these things that seem at first like things to be avoided at all costs are also necessary to give this season the depth of meaning that it has.

            I’m not just talking about silent moments, either. I was editing this sermon last night after watching the kids all day, and I was desperate for silence, but Elias was still awake, Kate was watching TV, I was overwhelmed by noise and touch. Seriously, why do the kids have to always be touching me? I mean, I love snuggling on the couch for an hour, but why does one of them need to be sitting on my chest for the next five?

            Anyway, that reprieve of silence at the end of the day is obviously good, but there is something even more meaningful about silence that takes us from relief into uncertainty before encroaching even upon discomfort. Silence, like darkness, provides depth to the human experience, it forces us to confront things as they really are; it turns our autopilot off and forces us to think, to feel, and to live in the uncertainty.

            Yesterday was the shortest day of the year—the winter solstice. For six months, things have been getting darker and darker. With the encroaching darkness comes a weightiness to the season, a certain gravitas that we can feel whenever we wrest ourselves away from the shiny lights of commercialism and the busy-ness of responsibility. Perhaps this is why we fill our lives with so much this time of year. We fear the heaviness of the dark and the pregnant silence that comes with it. It is a season that bears the hopes and fears of all the years, as the hymn (O Little Town of Bethlehem) says.

            God doesn’t show up in a light, airy moment. The Gospel accounts of the lead up to Jesus’ birth, the birth itself, and its repercussions all bear witness to a world in the throes of a long night. A petulant king fights back against a dangerous child—it sounds like The Mandalorian… or America 2019; history just circles back in on itself. The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.

            Today we read about Zechariah, the father of the John, who would become known as John the Baptist, cousin to Jesus. Zechariah receives a promise from an angel that he and his wife will have a son in their old age. Sound familiar? History circles back around—Abraham and Sarah become Zechariah and Elizabeth. But she couldn’t have been that old; after all, her sister, Mary, must have only been a teenager. So, in Zechariah’s case, his lack of belief seems like it has less to do with biological impossibility and more to do with mistrust of the unknown. Who doesn’t, really? Whose first reaction to angels wouldn’t be that they were being punked? Who doesn’t doubt?

            Still, because of his response, Zechariah is rendered mute. He can’t speak from the time the angel proclaims the coming child to the moment of his naming. That silence is itself a theological statement on how we are to wait. Zechariah is not being punished. He is being forced, like so many before and after him, to experience the silence between words where God moves.

Real comfort

Isaiah 40:1-11

“Comfort, comfort my people!” says Isaiah. Then, also, “The people are grass.”

            Isaiah hasn’t had a lot of pastoral training. Few prophets have. That’s not really their job, to be completely honest. Prophets are free agents, who are really just God’s agents, subject to nobody. It’s actually a bit strange that Isaiah leads with comfort, because so often the prophets burst onto the stage and can’t seem to help themselves but proclaim judgment and justice and all those things. Comfort is a softer kind of word, more a pastoral word than a prophetic one.

            But Isaiah is also bringing a different kind of message. For the last several weeks now I’ve been preaching on the change in the prophetic imagination as we leave behind old covenants and discover the new covenant. This new covenant is whispered in first Isaiah—an earlier prophet known as Isaiah, who we read about even before Harvest Festival—then in the reforms of Josiah, then in Jeremiah, and today, finally in second Isaiah. These are, in fact, the first words of 2^nd Isaiah, and it is the first time we hear in the book of Isaiah that Jerusalem has been destroyed.

            Perhaps that gives some clue why Isaiah leads with comfort. You preach comfort to people who need it, not to people who need to know about the impending judgment looming over them. No, these people have experienced the trauma of losing their homeland, of the desecration of their religious capitol, and the loss of their history in that place. These are people that need comfort, and, yet, that comfort comes not in a promise that they will one day return home.

The new covenant you won't believe

Jeremiah 31:31-34, 33:14-18

Two readings from Jeremiah today, three chapters apart, and both begin with the words “The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will… 1) make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah, and 2) fulfill my gracious promise.

            This gracious promise—this new covenant—will not be like the covenants of old… which is kind of weird if we’re being completely honest, because God makes these covenants with a people forever. God said to Noah, “I will never again destroy the world by flood, and here’s a rainbow as a sign of my covenant.” And God said to Abraham, “You will have descendants and land. This is my covenant.” These are supposed to be eternal promises, but these eternal promises are dependent on the people responding correctly. And there’s the really obvious flaw that Noah and Abraham and Moses seem to be missing: People absolutely never respond correctly. So, what good are these covenants, really?

            God makes a promise, says you get this nice thing as long as you obey, and about five minutes later people are like, “You know what would be really fun to worship? A golden cow!” A covenant that requires human beings to be something other than sinners is a worthless covenant, because we won’t be, we never been, and we never will be. Give us any length of rope whatsoever and we will manage to hang ourselves. Just because we have Jesus does not mean we have left this kind of thinking behind. The predominant view of God, even in Christian circles, is as one who gives us nice things when we obey him. Perhaps you’ve seen the Joel Osteen clip going around where he says, “When you are poor, broke, and defeated all that proves is that you are poor, broke, and defeated. It doesn’t bring any honor to God.”

            This, of course, is fundamentally opposed to everything Jesus said—blessed are the meek, become like children, etc—but it doesn’t matter. Osteen can get 40,000 people in a stadium to give him a standing ovation for saying it, because it is a sexy lie. We want to believe that we can lift ourselves up by our bootstraps and earn the covenant, like the Israelites were supposed to keep up with their end of the bargain. We want to believe we are different despite the fact that the entire history of the human race is marked by the failure to be even halfway decent followers of God the moment we provided with even a single alternative thing to worship. Osteen is low-hanging fruit, but he is a perfect example because the prosperity Gospel would be the best possible Gospel if it were possible.

            The problem is sin. The problem is us. God tried this prosperity business. That was essentially what happened with Noah and Abraham, with Moses and eventually with David. God tried to give us the possibility of living up to the expectations. Just be good, said God a hundred times, like the parent who feels obligated to parent in this way even when we know deep down that our children are going to not be the perfect little angels we expect them to be.

            So, when we come to Jeremiah, God has reached the stage of parenting where he throws up his hands and says, “Fine! Don’t be good then! See if I care!”

            But on the other side of this despairing over the behavior of God’s children—on the other side of exile and lots of death—comes this:

³¹ The time is coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. ³² It won’t be like the covenant I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt. They broke that covenant with me even though I was their husband, declares the Lord. ³³ No, this is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my Instructions within them and engrave them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. ³⁴ They will no longer need to teach each other to say, “Know the Lord!” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord; for I will forgive their wrongdoing and never again remember their sins.

Losing Land, Finding Hope: A Harvest Festival sermon on exile and taking one step at a time

2 Kings 22:1-10, 14-20; 23:1-3

            The high priest, Hilkiah, comes to the secretary, Staphan, with a message: I have found the Instruction scroll in the Lord’s temple!” (2 Kings 22:8). This might seem like a very little thing, but it is one of the earliest accounts we have of people following written scripture. Apparently, the Bible—as it existed in those days—was hanging out somewhere in the temple for Hilkiah to find. What this scripture is we don’t know exactly, though best guesses suggest something like the 12^th-26th chapters of Deuteronomy, since the reforms that Josiah institutes are limited to that section of what became Deuteronomy.

            Josiah must have realized that he had only part of the law. He had to have known he was dealing with partial information, but he also had to start somewhere. He understood that it’s often better to do something with little information than to do nothing until you have a fuller picture. He took the next step. And today I want to talk about what that looks like for us on the day we celebrate and give thanks for the harvest of 2019.

            I was pleased to find that the commentary on Working Preacher for the scripture of the week was by Mark Throntveit.[1] Dr. Throntveit was the seminary professor who preached at my ordination, and at that ordination service (eight years ago this month), he talked about the lamps that burned in ancient times, citing Psalm 109:105, “Your word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.” We have a pretty modern image of lamps, something with a halogen or LED bulb, i.e. something awfully bright. The headlamp that I wore while hiking for a month had something like 325 lumens, which was enough to light my way for thirty feet without much difficulty. But the lamps they were using in the ancient world were lit by candles. Their lamps weren’t anything like the lamps we use today, not even like the kerosene lamps used for generations before us.

            Dr. Throntveit was making the point that “Your word is a lamp unto my feet” only means that God’s word gives us enough light to get us to our next step. We can’t see even three steps ahead, just one. We have only a little light, which means we only ever see a very small part of the picture. We might imagine that what we see is all there is, but it’s really only a little view, hardly anything in the scheme of things. If we overanalyze and overexert ourselves, fixating on every detail about the little that we see right now, then it’s easy to forget what is anchoring us.

Welcome to Advent (because, let's be honest, December is Christmas)

Isaiah 5:1-7, 11:1-5

We have two readings today from first Isaiah that, like last week, move us from a God of retribution and judgment to a God of something more. I know this is hard to do in this season of holiday everything. Honestly, the radio station Kate uses at the coffee shop—a certain not-to-be-named one out of Grand Forks—switched to Christmas music on Friday… November 15—and we aren’t even remotely in advent yet! Nonetheless, you are already being bombarded by advertisers trying to tell you that Christmas is right around the corner, which makes it particularly hard to do the necessary work of putting ourselves in the sandals of people who didn’t have Jesus yet.

            In fact, this is the yearly ritual of Advent in a nutshell, but by the time we reach December it’s probably fruitless to pretend that Christmas isn’t coming, so what hope we have for a real Advent lies in November. Advent is about anticipation, but it is not a clear anticipation; it should be as if we are about to hear the Christmas story for the first time. Advent is the season in which we should all become children again, wondering and marveling in the mystery of what is coming.

            This is the mentality we need to bring to Isaiah’s passage about the stump of Jesse. The stump is dead, as stumps are. Jesse was David’s father, a nod to the lineage of the kings of Israel. That line of kings started with David, but now it’s dead. It’s a stump. Yet, Isaiah anticipates a shoot springing from the stump—a sign of life from a thing most assuredly dead. And what will this shoot do?

            Oh, just judge the poor with righteousness and work for the equity of the meek; he’ll merely kill the wicked, and embody righteousness and faithfulness. In short, Jesus is coming to turn the world upside-down—not reform it, not to tweak it. Jesus is coming to turn everything around. The funny thing is we think that sounds great. There is a reason that Isaiah and the other prophets talk as much about the coming judgment of God as they do about the grace and love of God. It’s both. It starts with judgment before it can ever move to grace. The advent of God coming into the world is the harshness of the law first, Gospel only thereafter.

God's expanding love

Hosea 11:1-9

Hosea 11 stands as a fulcrum on which the history of God’s love pivots. We who know Jesus may find ourselves less than keen to delve into the Old Testament because of the love of God we find there. After all, from the beginning, God’s love felt harsh. God loved us so much that he said “Don’t eat that one thing” not knowing, as parents do, that there is no better way to get our children to do something than to tell them it is the one thing they are not allowed to do.

From then on, God has a kind of quid pro quo relationship with the Chosen People. I am your God, I will give you land, and children, and a throne that endures IF you worship me. Through much of the Old Testament, God’s love is finite and dependent on a response. If Israel fails, then God’s love turns to rage, as in the Great Flood, as in Sodom and Gomorrah, as with many others. God’s love was a transaction with Israel as Chosen People.

However, with the prophets we begin to see hints of something more. God’s love doesn’t seem to be the same. Through scripture, we are presented with a God who changes. It’s the same God and, yet, the rules of the game evolve over time. Once Moabites were evil, but then there came the story of Ruth. Once Samaritans were impure, but then there came to the story of the Good Samaritan. God’s love, which once was bounded by human imperfection, begins to break through as we begin to see hints of the life we have in Jesus Christ.

Jesus changed everything. And, yet, it was a process that had already begun. Hosea gives voice to God’s love in this poem we read today, saying “My compassion grows warm and tender” even for a people who have failed and disobeyed. God’s love, which was once dependent on you getting it right, is now something different. In Hosea, we begin to see hints of grace—hints we cannot understand until Jesus.

Worshiping America (and other gods)

“So Ahab sent to all the Israelites, and assembled the prophets at Mount Carmel. Elijah then came near to all the people, and said, "How long will you go limping with two different opinions? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him."”

It’s that simple, and it’s that hard. If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.

It’s hard because Ba’al might be a made-up god but Ba’al is certainly an attractive made-up god. In fact, you might say we have plenty of our own Ba’als to deal with in 2019. There is the Ba’al of wealth, the Ba’al of fame, and the ever-present Ba’al of power. There are plenty of gods out there.

If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Ba’al, then follow him.

It is tough to be a Christian in America today. I’ve heard people say that, and I agree with it, though perhaps not for the reason most say it. It’s tough to be a Christian in America because for the entire history of this nation the Christian faith has been tied to power. From the pilgrims establishing their New Jerusalem to Manifest Destiny and the accompanying Christian justification for slavery and genocide, it has always been a good thing to be a Christian in this country. That hasn’t really changed. It’s tough to be a Christian in this country not because Christianity is becoming oppressed or anything like that. Rather, it’s hard to be a Christian because a few hundred years of history has tied our faith to the concept we call “America” and Christianity is not a faith that weds itself to political power. The great idol of American Christianity is—and always has been—America, whose tenets of freedom have freed us toward allying our faith with power. The American ideal is our Ba’al.