Prepare the Way of the Lord...

I am indebted to the writing of the Rev. Dr. Delmer Chilton and the Rev Dr. John Fairless for their insights into the Gospel reading.

MATTHEW 3:1-12

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’”
Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

I have resigned myself to the knowledge that there are some things I just will never understand. Calculus, how to play songs on the guitar that are in, say, C sharp or B flat... and why, smack-dab in the middle of Advent, in amongst all the pretty lights and the carols and the nativity scenes and the cooking and the shopping and all of the buildup to the day we, in our own way, celebrate the birth of Christ, we get slapped in the face with John the Baptist.


It seems that John just showed up one day, out in the middle of nowhere, yelling at the top of his lungs at no one in particular: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight!”


Maybe a group of shepherds, watering their flock in the meager, muddy water of the Jordan, heard him first and went to investigate. It's not much of a stretch to think that they would be a little freaked out by what they saw: a man wearing a garment of camel's hair, tied at the waist with a leather strap. I imagine his hair and beard were unkempt, and that he had a wild-eyed stare, but that is my imagination talking.


But maybe, after gawking and maybe stifling some giggles, these shepherds would listen to what he was shouting, and remember some of the readings they'd heard over the years in synagogue – The ending of the book of Malachi, “Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes...”



This was a nation and a people, after all, who were hungry for a Messiah. What's more, this was a nation and a people whose cultural identity was wrapped up in the writings of prophets... yet there hadn't been a prophet in Judea in hundreds of years. A man wearing animal skins, standing knee-deep in the Jordan and shouting at the clouds certainly could be a prophet...



In any case, word got around, and people began showing up, and kept showing up, bringing friends and family, spreading the word. Because John was doing something new, something unheard of: baptism.


No, baptism itself wasn't a new thing. One of the requirements for those wanting to join the Jewish faith – male and female – was baptism. There was also, in that day, a group called the Essenes, who, rejecting Temple worship in favor of a more personalized and rigorous faith journey, separated themselves from the rest of the Jewish culture, and practiced daily ritual baptisms.


But what John was preaching wasn't to proselytize Gentiles, nor was it introducing a regimen of daily cleansings. John was preaching repentance.


That's an interesting word in a lot of ways. First off, in the original Greek, the word for “repentance,” metanoia, isn't all that remarkable a word. It didn't have particularly religious connotations. It was simply the word they used for turning around.


The Reverent Dr. Delmer Chilton – I love his name – tells the story of a pastor friend of his who met God on the interstate. He was driving north on I-85 when a truck crested the hill ahead of them, going South. Emblazoned above the cab, across the front of the trailer, were the letters G-O-D.


As the truck drew closer, he could read the side of the trailer, “Guaranteed Overnight Delivery,” so he understood what G-O-D stood for in that case – but a question came to his mind... “If God is going South, what am I doing going North?”
In the New Testament, metanoia, repentance, means more than merely changing one's mind. There is more to repentance than feeling bad and telling God we're sorry. Confession is vital, yes, but it isn't the full picture. If we say we are sorry, but we do nothing to change, all we've done is indulge in a feeling. When we are called upon to repent, we are called upon to effect a complete change – a reorientation of the personality!

And that is what John is talking about when he comes down so hard on the Pharisees and Sadducees – both, in their ways, a religious elite, both groups quite comfortable that they were God's special snowflakes. A dip in the Jordan would make them part of the crowd, gain them some acceptance in the community, show everyone around how utterly serious they were about pleasing God, and whenever this Messiah person showed up, they would be assured a place in the re-established Kingdom of David.


But it wasn't about the water. There is nothing magical or specifically holy about the water of the Jordan. Dunk or sprinkle or pour, adult or child or infant, use the water of the Jordan or the water of the Black Warrior or the water of Lake Purdy or crack open a bottle of the off-brand purified water you buy at Wal-Mart, the point of it all is changing the things which separate us from God – the things that keep us heading North when God is headed South.

When John says to the Pharisees and Sadducees – and to us – to “bear fruit worthy of repentance,” the idea is not to do stuff that makes us qualified to repent. We don't run around doing good stuff hoping that God will accept our apology. Rather, to bear fruit worthy of repentance is quite simply to live like we have repented – to show by our actions that we are a changed people.

In this season of Advent, when we remember both the birth of our Savior and anticipate his return, we are called upon to look at our lives and decide if we are going in the right direction, following the correct path, adhering to the way of Jesus Christ. And if not, if we are going north when God is going South, now is the time to move in a new and better direction, to jump off the next exit, turn around, and go God's direction.

God is traveling on the side of peace and justice and the poor. God travels the paths of mercy, grace, love and hope. God moves toward lifting the downtrodden, freeing the oppressed, and including the marginalized.

It is not for us to debate whether or not that is the side God is on, or whether or not God should be on that side. It is for us to get on that side.

The Good News of the Gospel is that no matter how far we may have gone in the wrong direction, there is always hope with God; and turning to go in a new way is always the dawn of a new day in the life of the spirit.

Alleluia, amen.

Martha, Martha...

Thanks to the work of D. Mark Davis, Delmer Chilton, Robert Hamerton-Kelley, and Paul J. Nuechterlein for their insight and scholarship.

Luke 10:38-42

Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me." But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."

This is the Word of the Lord.

Our Gospel reading this week takes up right where we left off last week, with the parable of the Good Samaritan. With that in mind, it's kind of confusing that Jesus would go from telling a lawyer to show and receive love, caring, and hospitality to and from all people, to wagging his finger at Martha for trying to show Jesus and his disciples love, caring, and hospitality.

In a historical context, Martha is doing exactly the right thing. We know from elsewhere in the Gospels that Martha and Mary have a brother, Lazarus. It is entirely possible that Lazarus invited Jesus and everyone else to his house. Martha has welcomed Jesus and his disciples into her home, and is very likely making sure the feet of thirteen-plus people (one of them a celebrity) are washed, all their cups are full, and that dinner is on the stove.

In the historical context. Mary is doing exactly the wrong thing. First off, yes she should be helping Martha with the chores of hospitality. Secondly, the very idea that, in that day and age, a woman would sit among men as an equal, sitting at the very feet of Jesus, no less! But sit she does, and no one – not Jesus, not Lazarus, not one of the disciples – thinks a thing about it.

And yes Martha blows up and yes Jesus corrects her and says Mary has chosen the better part. But to just look at this as a sibling rivalry, or a battle between an active life and a life of contemplation, or for a preacher to wag his finger at the congregation and say “take time to listen to Jesus,” then go sit down for lunch without a thought as to how much actual work goes in to preparing that or any other meal... well, I think those approaches either oversimplify or completely miss the point of the text.

First off, let's look at today's reading in the context of last week's reading: it sounds delightful, the idea of spending all of our time and attention “at the feet of Jesus,” listening to and meditating upon the Word of God. Yet a life spent only in contemplation leaves no room for action. The lawyer who challenged Jesus in last week's reading knew the Law, meditated and studied it and memorized it day after day, but he didn't know who to act compassionately toward – he had never really put all that thought and study into action.

So sure, we should understand that balance is necessary to a well-rounded life of faith. We should study, meditate, pray, and we should act. We should help and love and show support and hospitality.

Yet is it not true that there are times when action is vital, when there simply isn't time to meditate and contemplate and vegetate. In last week's reading, the Samaritan didn't pause to ask “WWJD” or remember that he was on a dangerous road or that this guy was a despised enemy. He saw an immediate, pressing need and he acted.

We have seen that kind of response many times in our lives, and relatively recently. I still remember how, on 9/11, people were running from the Pentagon until the word went out that people were trapped in the collapsed, flaming section of the building. As a person the wave of people reversed, and they ran back to help. I saw the same reaction right after the bomb went off at the finish line at the Boston Marathon. Following the April 27, 2011 tornadoes in Alabama, people and money and goods flowed into the affected areas from all over the world, and no one stopped to make sure the recipients of the aid were good people, or were the right religion, sexual orientation, or color. The same is true for Hurricane Katrina and the earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan, and the list really does go on and on and on.

Martha was doing exactly what needed to be done. Aside from the cultural expectations, there is the reality that these people were tired from the road, they were thirsty and hungry, and they were under her roof. If she had done what Mary did, nothing at all would have happened.

I think it isn't entirely my imagination that sees Martha rushing around, frazzled. The Scripture says she was “distracted,” and the Greek there, “perispao,” means to be overly occupied with a thing, to be obsessive about a task and all the details involved; like the bride before a wedding, or a director on opening night of a play. Martha is a flurry of activity, so much so that things are starting to fall apart. There are cooking utensils hitting the floor and the bread is getting burned because she is trying to fill cups and pick up behind the disciples, and her nerves are getting more and more frazzled, and she stares a hole through Mary every time she rushes past, and she is banging plates down on the counter and slamming the oven door – I know, there weren't oven doors back then, but you get the idea – and maybe she is grumbling under her breath about the nerve of that lazy, ungrateful, insolent Mary!

By the time she talks – probably interrupts – Jesus, she is about to blow a gasket. “do you not care that I am working my fingers to the bone while that sister of mine does nothing? Tell her to get up and help!”

I imagine that everybody fell silent when that happened, but everybody there has been around Jesus for long enough to not be shocked at a woman speaking directly or even sharply to Jesus anymore. They are worried for Martha, and maybe a little embarassed that they hadn't lifted a finger themselves to help.

Jesus says, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things...” but I think the Greek for “worried and distracted” carries a stronger feeling than our translation gives it. “Thorubazē” means to disturb greatly, terrify, strike with panic... it also can mean a noise, tumult, uproar, perhaps the noise of persons wailing, of a clamorous and excited multitude, and so on. In Acts 17:5, it means an uproar or a riot. In Mark 5:39 and Matthew 9:23, it refers to those who are wailing in grief. In Acts 20:10, it refers to the alarm that people had over someone who had fallen from an upper story window.

Martha isn't just stressed or distracted. She is in a panic. There is too much to do, too many expectations, too much need, she can't do it all and the walls are closing in on her.

So I think it is a mistake to read Jesus' words to her in a tone of condescending rebuke. I hear real concern in Jesus' voice: “Martha. Martha! Honey you are freakin' out, take a breath...”

Part of the backstory here is that in Luke's ninth chapter, we are told that Jesus “resolutely set out for Jerusalem.” Everyone knows that Jerusalem is the center of power for all those who oppose Jesus, ground zero for the men wanting to see the itinerant Rabbi dead by any means necessary. Jesus knows this, and he knows that he must go there, and nothing will stop him from fulfilling his Father's plan.

When Jesus walks in to the house, I can imagine that Mary realizes something: this is the last time she'll probably get to see Jesus. She is one of those people who knows – knows – who Jesus is and why he came, and maybe she doesn't understand it any better than any other disciple, but she knows it as well as any of them. So she sits as close to him as she can, and she listens, hanging on every word.

We have to appreciate Martha’s position before we critique Martha. What if Martha feels the same way Mary does, and her way of reacting to this terrifying knowledge is to determine to do the best job ever of providing comfort to the King?

And what if the responsibility overwhelms her? She is having what looks like a panic attack. She certainly sees what she is doing as a struggle and she feels completely alone in it. Until we sympathize with the genuine challenge that Martha is facing, the internal ‘riot’ that she is experiencing, then we will only dumb down this story into “Martha, Martha” as a condescending pat on the head.

I want to be careful here, because I think Martha's situation connects to the parable of the Good Samaritan, but I in no way want to paint Martha as a bad person. The man who is beaten and left for dead in last week's parable gets passed up by a priest and a Levite before the Samaritan shows up. One way of looking at why they cross to the far side of the road to avoid him is that they don't want to chance becoming unclean by touching a corpse. Of course the Scriptures compel them to help much more strongly than they compel them to be clean, but their culture expects them to be able to stand in the Temple and make sacrifices and do priest-y and Levite-y things.

They let cultural expectations block out the clear Word of God. And perhaps Martha has let her obsessive attention to the task at hand, her determination to serve Jesus, the noise of the riot and panic in her mind and heart, actually block out Jesus.

In a way, the lawyer who challenged Jesus in last week's reading and Mary are similar: they are deeply invested in experiencing the Word of God. Martha is similar to the Samaritan, in that they are doing important, necessary work, acting as the hands and feet of God in this world.

Both are important, both have their place, and sometimes you can't do just one and not the other, but I think the key is focus. The lawyer, and Martha, let the minutiae drown out the truth.

Perhaps we read this account and want to be Mary, but the reality of our particular life situations, or the persistent noise of living in the twenty-first century, make us far more like Martha – obsessed and busy and in a low-grade panic from time to time. But busy-ness isn't wrong. Jesus never says that Martha is irrational or wrong-headed. He merely says that he will not stop Mary from sitting and hearing.

Mary has chosen the good part out of the many things by sitting at Jesus’ feet and hearing the word. She is entitled to be there and not obligated to leave there – either because of her gender or because of the real, overwhelming work that calls to be done. She has chosen the necessary part. She needs to be there.

I think Jesus is calling on Martha to calm the riot within – to listen as she works, to experience the joy of being near her Lord within her activity. She needs to be there, too.

And we can work, and pray, help, and meditate, love, and listen, too. We need to be there, too.

The Both/And God...

My deepest appreciation  to Kathryn Matthews Huey, D. Mark Davis, Jeannine K. Brown, and Verlee A. Copeland, pastor of First Parish Congregational Church in York, Maine for their priceless insights on today's Gospel reading.

Luke 7:1-10

After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum. A centurion there had a slave whom he valued highly, and who was ill and close to death. When he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave. When they came to Jesus, they appealed to him earnestly, saying, “He is worthy of having you do this for him, for he loves our people, and it is he who built our synagogue for us.” And Jesus went with them, but when he was not far from the house, the centurion sent friends to say to him, “Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; therefore I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed. For I also am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes, and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes, and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and the slave does it.” When Jesus heard this he was amazed at him, and turning to the crowd that followed him, he said, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” When those who had been sent returned to the house, they found the slave in good health.

This is the Word of the Lord.

We could be forgiven, I think, for reading this passage from the Gospel, stopping a moment, re-reading it, and saying, “wait, what?” So much flies in the face of what we expect. Take your pick: the faithful centurion, a slave owner who considers a slave as dear to him as his child, the Jewish leaders who address Jesus without questioning his authority or ability to heal, the faithful humility of a Gentile who doesn’t want his impurity to rub off on the One who can heal his beloved servant…

Like so many people who play a part in the Gospel accounts, we don’t know this centurion’s name, but there is a lot that we can imply – he is in Capernaum with about 80 soldiers, making sure order is kept and the taxes are paid. He was a man of means, no doubt; centurions made fifty to one hundred times what an ordinary soldier made… but for some reason, this centurion chose to spend his money on the people he was tasked with subjugating… Somewhere along the way, it seems, this Gentile, this pagan, this outsider fell in love with the people of the God of Israel.

Yes, the taxes still got paid, and yes, order was still kept, but this crusty, battle hardened veteran made it a point to show compassion to the people of Capernaum, even building a synagogue for them.

And then a favorite servant fell ill. All of his power meant nothing in the face of illness. He couldn’t order the servant to be well, he didn’t have the authority to arrest the illness, all of his money could not buy health for this young man who meant so much to him. All he could do was watch as his servant, more than just a prized possession, withered away.

And yes, the translation we read makes it sound kind of cold and calculated: this slave was worth a lot of money and was sick… like the poor centurion’s Mercedes was leaking transmission fluid or something. I think the original language makes it clear that the relationship was more nuanced than that…

Make no mistake, slavery is slavery. In Roman law, slaves had no rights whatsoever, they lived and died at the mercy of their owners. Educated, skilled slaves had it better than unskilled slaves, to be sure – those with no education lived very hard, very short lives at hard labor in mines or quarries… but for even the most educated, most skilled, they were only of value as long as they performed, and if they dared rebel or in any way displease their owner, they could be summarily executed, crucified, without trial and without recourse.

A person could be sold into slavery to pay a debt, they could sell themselves into slavery, and they could be freed by their owners or, if permitted to save money, eventually buy their freedom. But they were property, nothing more, less than human.

But this centurion, he had a special place in his heart for this particular slave. The language that Luke uses to describe how the centurion acts when he learns of Jesus is telling – our translation says that he “sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave.” The word for “ask” is stronger though, different – perhaps a better word is “beseeching,” even “begging.” This wasn’t a man worried about losing money, this was more than financial, this was deeply personal. In fact, later, when he sends his friends to stop Jesus from entering his home, he says “But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed,” and the word for “servant” there is “pias,” a term of endearment which could be translated “child.”

Now, in defense of our rather cold and matter-of-fact translation, it is way too easy to go too far with all of this; however beloved the slave is to this centurion, he is still a slave, still property, still a possession, not an equal… he is an outsider to everyone, both to those in the Roman culture and, like the centurion, an outsider to the Jewish people.

And everyone knows it – the Jewish leaders know it, and they make it a point to tell Jesus that, even though this guy is a Gentile, and even though he is part of the Roman occupying forces, he deserves to get what he is asking for.

The centurion knows it – I have no real proof of this, but I imagine the centurion walking back into his house after asking the Jewish leaders to bring Jesus, and freezing in the doorway, suddenly realizing the position he has put the itinerant rabbi in.

You see, if a Jewish person entered the home of a Gentile, he or she would be immediately unclean, and would have to undergo ritual purification and a waiting period before allowed to resume participating in worship.

He was deemed worthy by others, but deemed himself unworthy to expect such a sacrifice – as Fred Craddock puts it, that isn’t a bad set of credentials, when you think about it. So he sends his friends to Jesus with a very specific message: I know you have authority from the God who sent you. I know how authority works. Say the word, Jesus, and it will be done.

And just like that, it is done.

I want to take a couple of steps back for a moment. I find it fascinating that the Jesus who meets these Jewish leaders at the gates of Capernaum is somewhat different than the Jesus we meet in the book of Mark, who, when confronted by the Syrophoneician woman seeking healing for her daughter, argues with her, saying he was sent to heal faithful Jewish people, not pagans. Here, Jesus doesn’t bat an eye about healing the outsider property of an outsider.

In other words, in Mark, Jesus appears to see God as an either/or God, and is convinced otherwise by the dogged faith of an outsider.

Here, in Luke, Jesus sees God as “both/and.” There is no arguing, no sense that God’s love and grace is a limited commodity that must first be meted out to the deserving Jewish people and, if there is any left, then to the Gentiles… No, in Luke God’s grace and love and healing are limitless – available even to those hostile to God’s chosen people! Jesus is acting on his own commandment to “love your enemies, and do good to those that hate you...”

Yes, the centurion is an outsider. He represents all that is wrong in the province of Judea – the hatred and disdain of Rome, the occupation, the oppression, the starvation brought on by tax upon tax upon tax, the constant cloying temptation to give in to Hellenization, to go ahead and worship other gods, lesser gods like Caesar…

But this outsider is different, yes. The taxes are still being collected, order is being kept, but this guy is making it a point to give back, to show his love… and what’s more, the centurion, for all his flaws, believes! He has hope – trust – that this Jesus, this emissary of the Living God, can and will do what he asks of him.

And Jesus turned on its head the prevailing understanding of who was invited to the welcome table, by his willingness to restore health based not on who held the printed invitation, but on who by faith was willing to walk through God's front door of mercy.

Many times, those of us who were in church nine months before we were born and haven’t stopped since forget – we forget that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” We are a community of aliens and strangers who have been loved and accepted and saved and brought into relationship with God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

The Reverend Doctor Delmer Chilton tells the story of a Lutheran World Relief project in India to develop better agricultural methods and sanitation practices. The project would start its efforts in each village by training a villager to be in charge of that project.

In one village there was a couple who had only one child. They had had six pregnancies and six years. All six babies had died in their first year of life. The parents believed that the devil had come and snatched their children away. When the seventh child was born, her parents named her “Garbage,” in the belief that if the devil heard the family calling her garbage he would not want her and she would live.

Imagine growing up being called Garbage by everyone, including your parents. She was an outcast in a village of outcasts; a nobody in a community of nobodies.

Until the Lutherans came to town. Garbage was the person picked to head up the program. Following Indian tradition she was given a title. And so it was that lowly Garbage became instead The Esteemed and Venerable Garbage. And with the change of name came a change of status. The one who was out was now in, the one who was low was made high, the one who was nobody became somebody.

That’s how Jesus treated that centurion. Sure, he had power and all, but as far as his standing in the Jewish faith, he was nobody – he couldn’t worship in the synagogue he had built, he was unclean. But because of his bold, audacious faith, Jesus included him in God’s love, mercy, healing, and forgiveness.

And that is how God is with us and with all people. We label others as less than us or other than us; and God takes our labels, our fearful alienation, and turns them into faithful reconciliation.

We are a community of aliens and strangers whose names have been changed from nobody to somebody by the love of God. We are called of God to open our hearts and our lives so that, “. . . when a foreigner, a stranger, someone not of our people . . .” is willing to walk through God's front door of mercy; they will not only be welcomed, they will be transformed.

"...Just As I Have Loved You..."

My deepest thanks to the Reverend Dr. Delmer L. Chilton for his insights, which helped greatly in preparing the sermon.

John 13:31-35

When he had gone out, Jesus said, "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once. Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me; and as I said to the Jews so now I say to you, 'Where I am going, you cannot come.' I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

This is the Word of the Lord.

Taken at face value, the words in today’s Gospel reading are nice enough. Jesus is preparing his beloved disciples for the Cross he is to endure, and assuring them that in it both the Father and the Son will be glorified. Then he tells them to love one another, and that their love for each other will be the indicator to the world around them that they are Christians. He even calls that whole loving each other thing a “new commandment.”

It’s a wonderful passage, and a well-known one. It is hard to find someone, inside or outside of Christianity, who hasn’t heard the “new commandment, to love one another as I have loved you.” After all, we’ve had two thousand years to translate, commentate, pontificate, evaluate, argue over, and put these words on plaques and sell them in Christian bookstores.

Yet for all of that, I want to submit to you that, all too often, Christians still don’t really understand it.

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Jesus says, “Just as I have loved you,” and he says it in a point in time where he has just sent Judas out into the night to find the Temple leaders, get the guards, and lead them to arrest Jesus. Not too many verses after this, he will look at Peter, the man who first said the words, “you are the Christ,” and tell him that, in a way quite similar to Judas, he too would betray Jesus.

In other words, Jesus sandwiches talk about love between two acts of deadly betrayal. We talk about love. We put it on t-shirts and coffee mugs. And to a good degree, we are OK with the idea of love… especially if it’s loving people who share our beliefs and convictions to one degree or another, and share our DNA and name. People who vote like we do, have the same accent and like the same teams…

But Jesus speaks of love in the context of one disciple, who has been with him for years, who has shared meals and seen the miracles and heard his words, going to the very people who want Jesus dead and saying, “I’m your man.” He speaks of love in the context of another disciple, a member of his inner circle, who saw the glory of the Mount of Transfiguration, who stepped out of the boat and walked on water, trembling in fear before a little servant girl and using the vilest of words to swear that he never knew Jesus.

How can Jesus talk of love at a time like this? And even if Jesus can love Judas… even if Jesus can love Peter… how can he seriously expect us to love like that?

I think that we, too often, confuse the idea of “loving” with “liking a lot.” I was reading something this week by Delmer Chilton. He pointed out that in our culture, love is almost always associated with romantic love, what in Greek is designated by the word eros. So to love is to have intense feelings of affection for another human being.

We also associate love with friendship, the Greek philea, as in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. And again, this is a natural thing, not something that can be commanded, for crying out loud. We like some people and others we don’t. We get along with some people, with others we don’t.

Marriage is usually a combination of eros and philea, as well it should be. Friends we make along life’s way, people we just like being around, this is mostly philea, affinity and affection.

All this is natural and cannot be commanded.

And if we think about love only in terms of how we feel, then the idea of Jesus feeling love toward Judas, of feeling love toward Peter, well… that is incomprehensible. I cannot feel love toward people who betray me, who speak evil and do evil to me and my friends and my family, so even if Jesus could have felt love for Judas and Peter in that moment, for him to expect me to is insanity! How can that be commanded? I mean, we “fall in love,” right? We feel what we feel. Commanding someone to feel a given way is like commanding the wind to blow south instead of east – both impossible, and a little bit silly at best, or downright destructive at worst.

Well, I cannot tell you how Jesus felt. And I don’t think Jesus paid very much attention to how he felt when it came to love. I just know what he did, and that is the point.

Bear with me.

Our Lectionary reading from the Book of Acts centers on the Apostle Peter explaining to some very upset believers in Jerusalem exactly how he had the gall to go and share the Gospel with (of all people) the Gentiles!

Peter was, like all of the Jewish Christians in those early years of what was called “The Way,” very observant. There were foods one simply did not touch, much less eat, and the very idea of eating with people who ate unclean things was abhorrent.

But God saw things differently. Peter, on a roof praying, sees a vision of a sheet lowered from heaven, with, oh I don’t know, bacon and ham and shrimp and lobster on it, maybe, and God says, “hey Pete, pig out.”

(I am paraphrasing a little…)

Peter says, “No way! I don’t eat unclean stuff!”

And God says, “I will decide what is clean and what ain’t clean, son.”

Peter felt disgusted at the thought of eating unclean things, just as he felt revulsion at the idea of fellowshipping with Gentiles.

But God could care less how Peter felt. God cared about what Peter did.

We may think of love in terms of eros or philea, but Jesus calls deeper, calls us to agape, self-sacrificial love. This is the God kind of love, love that has to do with how we act toward one another, not how we feel about each other. 

God’s love, Jesus’ love, is not determined by the worthiness of the object, but by the character and intentionality of the one who loves.

It is God’s nature, it the very core of God’s being, to love. Love is what compelled God to create us in the first place. Love is what makes God sustain us. Love is what brought Jesus to this earth. Love is what Jesus taught and lived every day of his earthly life. Love is what took Jesus to the cross, what caused Jesus to defeat death in the Resurrection, and love is what Jesus left behind to bind us together.

When Jesus commands us to love one another in the same way he loves us, he is not demanding that we fall in love, he is calling us to love on purpose, to act with intentional agape toward one another and toward all those around us. Like Peter, we are being called to move beyond our comfort zones in terms of whom we relate to, and how we act toward them.

Love – the action of love, the agape – comes first, and our feelings follow.

Jesus could and did speak of love, right there on that night of the Last Supper and in the midst of every kind of betrayal, because his kind of love is not a feeling, it is an act of holy intention.

OK, fine, we say. So what is this kind of love, anyway? If it isn’t a feeling, what is it? How do we do it?

Hear the Word of God from Saint Paul’s First Epistle to the Church at Corinth, and I am using “The Message” translation:

“Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have. Love doesn’t strut, doesn’t have a swelled head, doesn’t force itself on others, isn’t always “me first,” doesn’t fly off the handle, doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, doesn’t revel when others grovel, takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, puts up with anything, trusts God always, always looks for the best, never looks back, but keeps going to the end. Love never dies.”

And not one of us deserves that love any more than Judas or Peter or any of the others who ran like scared rabbits at the first sign of trouble. But all of us have received that love, and all of us are called to share that love, pass it on, spread it around; we are to love one another, just as Jesus has first loved us.

To love like Jesus loved is to love without reservation. To love like Jesus loved is to love friends and enemies. To love without hesitation and without limitation. It is a radical, unheard-of love. It is love lived, not in thought or emotion or in words, but as a verb – as an act of the will, deliberate, direct, and in spite of the consequences. This kind of love is the product of God’s Holy Spirit within us, loving, actively and deliberately, with extravagant abandon.

Who is the person, who are the people we find least loveable? The ones who disgust us, or frighten us, or who seem not worth the effort?

Who are the ones we find most loveable – the ones who bring us joy and comfort, whose presence or even their voice on the phone – even a text message from them – energizes us? And who are the ones in between those extremes?

All of these are the ones we are called on by Jesus to love, actively and intentionally, loving on purpose despite how we may feel: good bad and ugly, hair warts and all, no matter how we feel. Yes, just as Jesus has first loved us.

Alleluia, amen.

Black and White...

Thanks go out to the writings of Scott Shauf, Kathryn Matthews Huey, and the Rev. Dr. Delmer L. Chilton, as well as Eric Fistler and Robb McCoy's "Pulpit Fiction" podcast.

I treasure the comments I receive here, on FaceBook, and on Twitter. Your input makes me a better preacher.

 

Luke 13:31-35

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you." He said to them, "Go and tell that fox for me, 'Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed outside of Jerusalem.' Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.'"

This is the Word of the Lord.

Well, that’s odd, isn’t it? Pharisees actually trying to help Jesus, warn him to get out because Herod has it in for him.

I mean, the Pharisees are the bad guys, right? Them, the Sadducees, the scribes, those are the Gospel’s team of black hats, facing off against Clint Eastwood Jesus, they are the Lex Luthors of the Bible, doomed to defeat by Superman Jesus, but defiant to the end. Oh! Oh! And of course they are all in league with Herod Darth Vader against Luke Skywalker Jesus, too.

Life isn’t a spaghetti western though, is it? It isn’t a comic book or a science fiction movie. Things are rarely so black and white, and people, even groups of people, even groups of people in the Scriptures, are complicated.

Nicodemus, who visited Jesus in the dark of night in the third chapter of John’s Gospel, was a Pharisee. Joseph of Arimathea, who, following the crucifixion, got Jesus’ body from Pilate and gave it a decent, if temporary, burial, was a Sadducee. There are many occasions in Scripture where Jesus eats dinner with one Pharisee or another, and not every encounter with a scribe is a bad one.

To set the scene a bit, Jesus has been traveling around Galilee preaching and teaching. Now, he is headed out, on the road to Jerusalem both literally – I mean, that’s where the road goes, after all – and figuratively, because he is determined to fulfill his Father’s will, to meet and defeat death on the cross.

Galilee is Herod Antipas’ home turf, his tetrarchy. Now, I think it is safe to describe Herod as a weirdo, and a dangerous one. This is the guy who divorced his wife and married his brother’s wife, and when John the Baptist spoke out against that act, Herod killed him. What’s more, when Herod hears about Jesus, and the miracles he performs, Herod makes the wild logical leap that Jesus is John come back from the dead.

Add to that the things that Jesus has been saying, even in the verses right before today’s reading: those who are first shall be last, and the last shall be first, many of those who think they are going to get in to the eternal Kingdom of Heaven won’t, and the very people they hate and exclude and oppress will. It isn’t much of a stretch to believe that Herod, who is mad as a hatter and not above killing even his own family anyway, might hear what Jesus is saying, interpret it as a call to overthrow him, and be scared enough of Jesus to want him dead.

So that being said, why would the Pharisees want to protect Jesus form Herod’s wrath? Well, in many ways, these things that Jesus is saying are right up the Pharisees’ alley.

Here’s what I mean: the Pharisees are, in point of fact, not exactly what we have come to think of them as: tight-laced keepers of tradition, bent upon keeping everyone in lockstep to the rules and traditions of Judaism. We tend to group the Pharisees and Sadducees all together in our minds, yes, but they were in fact two religious factions who were vehemently opposed to one another.

The Sadducees were the upper echelon of Jewish society, according to the historian Josephus. They were in charge of the Temple, and had control over all of the religious and political affairs of the province. The priests who served in the Temple were Sadducees, the members of the Sanhedrin were Sadducees, the Sadducees collected the taxes, represented the interests of Judea internationally and were responsible for normalizing relations with the Roman occupiers. They considered only the first five books of the Bible to be God-inspired and authoritative, did not believe that the soul was immortal or that there was any reward or punishment following death, and did not believe in a resurrection of the dead. For them, the center of worship, the path to relationship with God, was through the systems and rituals of Temple sacrifice.

We get a hint about the Pharisees from their very name, which translates “set apart ones.” Separatists, a group intent on changing the way people understood their faith. They believed that the worship of God extended beyond the Temple, into the affairs of everyday life, that God was interested and invested in the normal and the mundane. What we do and why we do it was important to the Pharisee because they very much believed that the soul is immortal, and that reward or punishment followed death, and they believed in a resurrection of the dead and a Messianic age. To this end they held Scripture and oral tradition to be equally authoritative, ands were intent on, as closely as possible, adhering to each of the Mosaic laws.

The Pharisees were at different times in history a political movement, a religious sect, and a school of thought. Following the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, the groundwork laid by the Pharisees became the foundation of modern, or rabbinical, Judaism.

So you can see that in the grand, overarching themes, the Pharisees and Jesus would have been in general agreement. They both sought to make God accessible to all people, not just those in the elite or who had access to the Temple and the resources for all the offerings and sacrifices. They both understood the reality of eternity, and the hope of the resurrection. Where they differed was in the matter of keeping the traditions and the Law of Moses. The Pharisees emphasized them, and Jesus dismissed them. Maybe these dinners and discussions were, up to a point, an attempt by the Pharisees to correct the minor flaws in Jesus’ theology, I don’t know, but we all know that in the end it didn’t work and the Pharisees wanted Jesus just as dead as the Sadducees did. But it is possible that perhaps, just perhaps, in this case, this small group of Pharisees were concerned for his safety and saw themselves as doing Jesus a favor.

That, or they just wanted him out of town and out of their hair as soon as possible.

But of course Jesus isn’t fazed. He in effect says, “Herod, Schmerod. When you happen to see that fox, you let him know that I’m doin’ my work, and if he wants me, he can find me in Jerusalem, because he can’t do anything to me anywhere else. After all, prophets don’t get killed anywhere else than Jerusalem.”

And it would be a really good story if it stopped right there, but instead, something interesting happens. It is at this point that the text changes dramatically, doesn’t it? Jesus goes from dismissive defiance to lament in the space of the period at the end of a sentence. It is as if Jesus’ very heart breaks at the mention of Jerusalem.

After all, Jerusalem is the center of a nation which was supposed to have been a beacon to all nations, an example to all people, the shining light on a hill which drew them to the knowledge and worship of the one true living God. It is no mistake, no mere poetic mechanism, that causes Jesus to liken himself to a mother hen bent on protecting her chicks against the fox in the henhouse, and no mere clever twist of phrase when Jesus identifies Herod as that fox.

Herod represents the forces which would sell out to Rome, which for the sake of personal power and security and financial boon, would forsake all that is good and holy, would reject the God that loves them, would enslave themselves and everyone else to a bloodthirsty, insatiable, pagan entity bent on global dominion.

And the Jerusalem that Jesus laments, that Jesus weeps for, isn’t the dot on the map. It isn’t the geography, the buildings and the streets; it is the people, all of them: the Sadducees and the Sanhedrin, the Pharisees and the scribes, the moneychangers and merchants and the men and the women and the children. Yes, he weeps for those who lay out the palm branches and cloaks when he rides in to the city… but he also longs to gather in, to protect, to save the very ones who welcome the fox, and all that the fox represents – the ones who literally or figuratively bow their knee to Herod and to Rome, who, for the sake of their own little bit of power and influence and security and money, put politics in place of God. Jesus longs to gather in, to protect, to save all who love him, who follow him, and all who reject him, who speak out against him, who even now are plotting his demise, who soon will scream “Crucify him!” in Pilate’s courtyard…

And on that day that Jesus hangs naked and bleeding and suffering and suffocating on the cross, and he cries, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing,” he is pleading not simply for the Romans who drove the nails, who roll the dice for who wins his clothing, but for the ones who plotted for his death, and for the ones who remained silent when a word would have set him free.

And Jesus dies, and rises, and lives and loves all of them. The Pharisees who cared enough to warn him that day on the road out of Galilee, and the ones who plotted to have him killed. The Sadducees like Joseph who followed him, but only secretly, and the ones who populated the Sanhedrin in an illegal mock trial to facilitate his torture and execution. The men and women who openly followed him, like James and John and Mary Magdalene, and the ones who couldn’t give up what they had in this life to gain eternal life. Jew and Gentile, slave and free, oppressor and oppressed, Jesus lived and died and rose and ascended and lives and loves all of them, and yes, all of us.

I started out by saying that life, and that people, aren’t a spaghetti western or a comic book or a science fiction movie. Things are rarely so black and white as that. People are complex beings, and life is nothing if not complicated.

I will tell you this, and I believe it with all of my heart: there is an absolute, there is something that is black and white, that there are no shades of grey to, no ifs, ands, or buts.

God loves you. God loves us. All of us. Whether we would most realistically identify with the fox in the henhouse, selling ourselves to the highest bidder regardless of the consequences, whether we are the ones screaming “Crucify!” in the courtyard, or whether we are the ones weeping at the foot of the Cross, Jesus longs to gather us in, to save us, to nurture us in the Holy Spirit, to bring us into fellowship with the one true and living God and into citizenship in the now and coming Kingdom of God. Yes, the best of us and the worst of us, the ugliest and the most beautiful, yes, emphatically, all of us.

And in this season of Lent, God calls us, all of us, to lay down the things we have chosen as more dear, to tear down the altars to that which entertains us and which we think give us security and assurance, to hear Jesus stand at the door and knock, and not just open that door but tear it off its hinges, to at long last look to Him and say “blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”

Alleluia, amen.