Seeking Fulfillment of Prophecy, How far do we go?

This past Sunday I was asked by my minister to preach so she could take the Sunday after Christmas off to rest.  As I reflected on this with a fellow seminarian, we noted that the students get all the after holiday services, which sometimes contain hard topics that get thrown at your right after the happy holiday.  So too with this week's reading.  The slaughter of the babies right after Christmas? I mean come on!  Oh well, enjoy the sermon.

Beth

Matthew 2:13-23

Now after the wise men had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, "Out of Egypt I have called my son." (Hosea 11:1)
When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:

  "A voice was heard in Ramah,
     wailing and loud lamentation,
  Rachel weeping for her children;
   she refused to be consoled, because they are no more." (Jer. 31:15)

When Herod died, an angel of the Lord suddenly appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and go to the land of Israel, for those who were seeking the child's life are dead." Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother, and went to the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. There he made his home in a town called Nazareth, so that what had been spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, "He will be called a Nazorean."

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So how many of you saw the irony in the Children Youth and Family Director preaching on a text where the King says, Kill all the children? I certainly did.  Shouldn’t I have chosen a text which more accurately reflects our hopes and dreams for Skyline’s children?  Surely, this is not the future I hope to see for these kids here.  This is true.  I don’t hope for this story to be the one that reflects the lives of the children in our community.  But I do hope that our community can be a place where they learn to struggle with the hard stories in our text and in our tradition, like the one we are presented here.  It is too easy to take our text at face value, but we understand the need to wrestle and work to interpret the ancient library that is contained in our Bible.  I believe our church should be a place where children and youth can find a safe place to question and connect to these stories; finding places where there is resonance and places where there is something to struggle with, in our texts.  And struggle we do every Christmas season.  Struggling between celebrating the season and becoming more materialistic than we might hope.  And struggling in time trying to get it all done. Struggling to find our truth in the fantastic story of virgin birth and extravagant gifts for a poor carpenter’s son. 

In the past weeks, we have heard the time honored tale of Christmas, the birth in the stable, the wise men who present gifts to the King of the Jews, the happy animals surrounding the idyllic scene.  In our reading this morning, however, we turn a sudden corner and are thrown back into the real world.  A flight to Egypt and a price on the young child’s head.  Feels a little drastic right?  How many of you woke up this morning suddenly thrown back into the fast paced world, out of the calm or quiet that might have taken temporary hold on your houses for Christmas Day?   Maybe just for one day you were able to sleep in, well, if you don’t have young children in the house.  To wake up when your body woke you up, rather than the alarm clock, just for a moment.  So too with our reading.  Merry Christmas!  Now what?  ……. Right?

My oldest sister was born on Christmas Eve.  It always seemed like Christmas and not Christmas at the same time.  Growing up, Christmas never started until we left for the late night church service.  Until that point, it was Jen’s birthday.  There always seemed to be a rush right up until dinner that Christmas Eve night, last minute presents to wrap, last minute adjustments to be made to the next day’s menu. Did you put on your Christmas dress?  Where did the salad bowl go?  Did you take the dog out? 

But then came Jen’s birthday dinner.  Much like the quiet scene we might think of when we see the Nativity scene in our imagination, everyone sat down to dinner and had birthday lasagna, got along for that hour and had real conversation.  After dinner, we bundled up and ran off to church, and CHRISTMAS began.  After church and a good night’s rest (at least for us kids), we would share a day of peace and quiet where we celebrated being together.  That was Christmas.  Right after Christmas dinner though, it was back to work.  My mom was a teacher and always had more papers to grade, and my sisters and I went back to homework, flying off to our own personal Egypts of math homework, term projects and individual bedrooms.  How quickly the Christmas spirit flutters away.  … How many of you have similar experiences? “Get up, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you to return.”  

When we flee to Egypt how do we know when to return?  Joseph was given an order to retreat and wait for the call to return, and he was GIVEN that return call.  In our own lives, do we know when to return from exile?  Too often, our retreat remains more permanent than we would like.  That personal Egypt of solitary time can be a problem too. 

I’m sure it’s not just the speed at which the story changes that feels familiar to you however.  This story strikes similarities with several other biblical ancestors and stories.  Throughout the reading, it becomes clear that the author is working hard to connect this story to the Hebrew tradition of a messiah who will change the world.  Matthew’s gospel is more distinctly connected to the Hebrew world than the others we have, so our text seems in part a long justification to ensure that Jesus is portrayed as very Jewish.  It is Matthew after all who begins the birth story by connecting all the way back to the great father of Israel, Abraham.  Matthew begins by saying “This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah the son of David, the son of Abraham: Abraham was the father of Isaac, Isaac the father of Jacob, Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers,  …and so on until we get to… and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah.”  This list acts as a veritable who’s who of the Hebrew Bible!  There are even a few notable women in that list, whose stories in the Hebrew cannon stick out tall.  Thus, all readers would begin their reading of the text in the right frame of mind, seeing the fulfillment of the Messianic prophecy in THIS babe born in the stable. 

But it isn’t just to the Jewish tradition that Matthew is connecting, it is more specifically to the Prophets and the architect of the Jewish faith, Moses.  Moses’ birth story is clearly paralleled here and his ministry provides a model for Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus the adult as well.  Herod’s action in ordering his people to kill all those under two strikes a close similarity to the story in Exodus chapter 1: “Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: “Every Hebrew boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.”  That’s why little baby Moses was put into a basket and sent down the river.  Now here we are again, threatening the lives of too many children.  Daniel J. Harrington, Catholic priest and professor of New Testament at Boston College has noted several of the parallels between Moses and Jesus that abound in this small scene and in so much more, the decrees of death from a wicked king, flight to escape the decree, the slaughter of innocent children, and the return after the death of the wicked king all point to these similarities.  How about the fact that they are fleeing persecution into Egypt and will leave Egypt to return and begin Jesus’ ministry.  Moses on the other hand leads the Hebrew people out of Egypt at the start of his career in ministry.  The parallels between Moses and Jesus go further, but for now, we can see the trend.  The author of Matthew knows his tradition.  Some have even claimed that these narratives are a “midrash” of the Jewish tradition, they are elaborations built upon biblical texts rather than real events.

To make his point even clearer, the author quotes liberally from the Hebrew prophets.  Particularly in this passage can we see this happening.  Three times in those ten lines are we told that this is to fulfill what the prophets said…  Using the words of Jeremiah and Hosea, the point is made that this story connects clearly to those prophetic statements, and the need for fulfillment.  More specifically, these Prophets, Jeremiah and Hosea wrote out of a time of great need in the Hebrew people.  Jeremiah wrote during the exile when the Hebrews were ensnared under Babylonian rule.  Hosea wrote at a time of decline in the Northern Kingdom.  In times like that, HOPE is needed and these prophets sought to ensure that a vision of hope could be seen.  I’m sure the author of Matthew needed that hope too, as he was writing following the destruction of the Jewish temple, while seeking to show other Jews that the Jewish tradition could be carried out by following Jesus in that first century world.  To do each of these passages justice, however, we need to have the background.  Matthew’s early readers, however, might have been assumed to have a good grasp on these texts as they were cornerstones for the Hebrew people.  In these quotes however, very slight attention is given to the original historical setting or literary context of the biblical quotation.  It seems the point is just to underscore a certain word or idea to emphasize and apply to the event connected with Jesus. What we struggle with, however, is that our tradition doesn’t spend as much time on these texts and so much of the allusion is lost for us without reading the prophets alongside the gospels.  I won’t be able to delve deep enough here to give all the back story of Hosea and Jeremiah.  I don’t want to get too far off track here, I have my own sermon fulfillment to look after. 

In prepping for this sermon, these two texts continued to return to my mind, bringing with them, the rich history Christianity is built upon.  I kept getting caught up reading the verses on either side of Matthew’s quotes just to see if his quotes were taken out of context or if it was to the greater tradition he was referring.  As we look at our text critically and responsibly this morning, we must seek insight from these primary sources as well.  As I look at this passage from my perspective in seminary, I wonder if we could see Matthew as an early seminarian writing his own exegesis, his own commentary, connecting HIS tradition to this new prophet he found in Jesus.  Looking through his bible, he sees foreshadowing everywhere, and lets us know by quoting from these sources. 

2000 years later, however, the tradition built around the once new prophet dominates on the political and cultural level.  And Matthew’s proof-texting can be problematic.  By quoting so liberally from the Hebrew texts, Matthew sets up a triumphalist argument; that the whole of Jewish history was nothing more than a set up for OUR more important prophet. 

Last week, I listened to a podcast of a sermon from one of the mega church pastors, Mark Driscoll.  His church, Mars Hill, is near Seattle boasts a membership at 9 campuses with over 10,000 members.  In this sermon, Driscoll introduces Jesus into the story of Jacob wrestling with God in Genesis chapter 32.  For Driscoll, Jesus is the culmination of the Hebrew testament, and many others agree with him.  This type of thinking devalues the place of other religious traditions in our multi-religious world, in particular Judaism.  And I hope for a better answer than this Our God is better than Your God type of thinking. 

As a progressive church, we have a responsibility to ensure that we are not abusing the traditions of another for our own gain.  Prophecy in the modern era must be seen differently.  We have to undo the assumptions of an argument that claims OUR superiority.  While . . . finding a way to claim authentically our connection to the Divine, found in the person and the story of Jesus.  We cannot claim that my way is right and yours is wrong.  With this text, we are challenged to claim authentically the traditions that feed your spirit and find ways to receive the traditions of another.  Some have said that the liberal church doesn’t stand for anything, that because we say all are welcome, anything goes.  This second part, I know not to be true.  All are welcome is a part of our theology, and integral to what the UCC believes.  But more than that, all are welcome to sit at the same table and be in conversation. 

How do we hold space open for the celebration of Christmas while maintaining a respect for traditions older than ours?  By being in conversation.  How do we celebrate in these old stories which have some truth in them, but which were written and translated by humans with human fallibility?  By learning to allow conversation with these texts, our faith, our understanding of science and miracle all at the same time.  In a fast paced world, how do we make the space to hear the call to retreat and the call to engage?  In our quest for a fulfillment of prophesy, how do we tell this story without stepping on the Jewish prophets whose hope continues for a messiah to come even today? 

This is something I think the greater Christian Community still need to continue to work on.  I cannot accept that my tradition comes at the price of another’s, and I HOPE to live into a world where the fulfillment of prophecy is not as small-minded a salvation as what some might propose.  Welcome for all must be our motto, and conversation our method.  This is what I learn from the story of Christmas each year.  That hope springs eternal, if we open our eyes to see it.  That intra-religious dialogue is a necessity.  That Christmas peace and joy is not a once a year media event, it is always and forever.  And that we together are family, thankfully gathered this day to better understand our world, our neighbors, ourselves.

How will you live out the Christmas story?

Summer of Writing

This summer has been all about writing for me.  I spent a month as one of the tutors for the fourth and fifth grade students Youth Writing Festival and this past week, I spent a week on my own writing as I took a class connecting Process Theology and the creative process.  It was a great class with a lot of depth.  I wanted to share this creativity with all of you in the form of the poetry we wrote this week.  None of these are fully finished, but I really enjoyed the process and wanted to share it with you as my friends and family.  Enjoy, but don't take as a complete explanation of my life and ideas.  We are all still a work in progress, or... process!

The first poem comes from an exercise where we had to rhyme/ slant rhyme with the words on a piece of paper and then pass for the next person.  After a few times around, we had to use all the words on the sheet to make a poem, here is my abstract creation...

Dream swimming

Pie in the sky

Defy the Shabbat

Trimming the tree

Dream swimming the sleep drought

Deus Machina was the shout

Drumming and jumping

The dance is the cry!

Deus Crapina has come

Deify the shallot!


This next piece comes from an exercise where we had to pick out words that stuck out for us in each of our readings.  For that day, our readings pulled from Catherine Keller's On the Mystery to  Audre Lorde and a reflection from Neitzsche.  It was rather ecclectic!

Collective

In our ordinary lives

The miracle occurs

The child is born

The woman suffers

Unfamiliar lives become

Pre-figured we expect the worl

simple, practical, perceiveable

But.

Spiritually dry

Organic reality steps in

Non logical

A fragmentary panorama

Frustration

Our mnemonic device of the sacred has stopped working

Open to the luminous darkness

Wake in the night to see the Etherial angel

Are we awake or still dreaming?

Put it on paper

create         destroy                transform.

The impossible happens

The genesis collective is yours

This next one comes from an exercise of imagining ourselves as an inanimate object.  I still think this is my favorite of the week.

I am the coin in your pocket

Warmed by the body, held close against the skin.

On my own I am of small value,

Together we grow, we jingle, we jangle, we add together.

Taking on the scent of the coffee shop

Where I am spent. Faintness of espresso.

Touched to the lips for luck

Taste of the not-quite-something-ness lingers

Hints of chapstick washes over.

The grooves of my side rolled down your nose

I can feel your freckles.

Transferred from hand to hand, purchase to purchase

I am always.  I will  be always.

My power is not my value, my payment ability

My power is in the future imagination.

What will I buy tomorrow, 20 years from now?

On some future day, to be found

                Cold on the sidewalk.

I will be picked up again and become

The coin in your pocket

Warmed by the body, held close against the skin.

This last one was very structured going in.  We had to use a nesting rhyme at the end of each triplet and needed to write 5 triplets that told a story.  I think this one out of all of them, is one that could be rewritten every day and get a new idea to come out.  Feel free to try this exercise yourselves!  If you don't know what a nesting rhyme is, you will soon as you continue to read.

Discord

When you and I become we, it is as one community

It is not alone, yet as one being, a unit

With lives to live and paths to tread, we are a knotted tie.

It is is hard and discordant, this process of consternation

Each side makes its case, over and against, stern

Making the many into one is rough, this making of a nation.

Over time we break and bond again, our paths are the passages

Toward truth.  In and out of rightness we seek sages

When found, we find their infinite wisdom to sag.

The truth dripping form sugar coated lips, easy to swallow

But once there, hard to hold down.  In failure, we wallow

The real truth that is real is that we must give space, allow

Between the now and the future, there is much we must restrain

Rules and laws, frustrating and confining, are only meant to train

So that we can learn to live, rolling justice down like rain

I'd love some feedback!

The Joy of Wisdom and Creativity

Sorry this one is a little old.  Preached at the end of May but between then and now I've been a bit busy!

A reading from Proverbs 8

Does not wisdom call,

and does not understanding

raise her voice?

she cries out:

“To you, O people, I call,

and my cry is to all that live.

The Lord created me at the

beginning of his work,

the first of his acts of long ago.

When there were no depths

I was brought forth,

when there were no springs

abounding with water.

Before the mountains had been shaped,

before the hills, I was brought forth—

when he had not yet made earth and fields,

or the world’s first bits of soil.

When he established the heavens, I was there,

when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,

when he made firm the skies above,

when he established the fountains of the deep,

when he assigned to the sea its limit,

so that the waters might not transgress his command,

when he marked out the foundations of the earth,

then I was beside him, like a master worker;

and I was daily his delight,

rejoicing before him always,

rejoicing in his inhabited world

Over the course of this year, I’m sure it has become exceedingly clear that nature is one of my sources of inspiration. Another is fantasy and fiction, but I’ll get to that later… I have had the pleasure to preach on many of these stories over this year. Stories of a God who calls from the deep water, of God becoming clear in a sunset, of the calm mornings of silence filled with the anticipation of divine peace. So this morning, it comes as no surprise that I would choose to use the piece of lectionary focusing on the MOMENT of creation.

Well, to be honest, maybe it choose me. Proverbs 8 was my first exegetical assignment in seminary. Now two years in to seminary and at the very end of my internship. Lady Wisdom calls to me again. The Hebrew word for Wisdom is Hokmah. It appears first in Exodus, and is usually a trait, like that of a wise man. But most notably it is found in Proverbs, taking on her own personification. Here, in our text this morning, she makes a stand and gives her resume to the people, asking them to listen to her, to follow her path. Wisdom calls herself a master worker at the side of the Divine who is creating a universe. I’m beginning to wonder if it is more than coincidence, but a moment of divine providence, my own moment of Hokmah that returns me again and again to the stories of the natural world in triumph, and delight.

But of course, Wisdom’s account of creation is not the only version we have. In the Bible alone, there are multiple interpretations of this moment. Genesis provides us two, God as creator in 7 days, and God the potter who build man from dust. Job also gives us a glimpse of God as architect when God speaks from the whirlwind. And then of course there is John’s vision of the Word of God made flesh, the divine Logos. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things came into being through him.” In each of these, the story of creation is told slightly different, even contradictorily so. They each fill in gaps in other stories and leave even more gaps for us to fill in on our own. Throughout the biblical cannon, creation is at the forefront for material. And maybe we can see why. Each moment of engagement in creation contains the possibility of awakening to that greater divine vision, and certainly the authors of these texts saw that.

Modern fiction has that same potential to show us visions of creation to bring us to a greater awareness of God. In Proverbs, we try to answer a question we didn’t know we needed to ask, What would it be like to be with God at the moment of creation? CS Lewis, the 20^th century author and theologian thought to answer that same question. CS Lewis tells us this tale in the Magician’s Nephew. In it, a group of travelers appear in Narnia, the moment BEFORE it had become anything. Please reflect on our second reading this morning…

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And really it was uncommonly like nothing. There were no stars. It was so dark they couldn’t see one another at all and it made no difference whether you kept your eyes shut or opened. Under their feet there was a cool, flat something which might have been earth, and was certainly not grass or wood. In the darkness, something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away, and Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes it was coming out of the earth beneath them. The lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise one had ever heard. It was so beautiful you could hardly bear it.

Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn’t come out gently one by one, as they do on a Summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out – single stars, constellations and planets

The Eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose! You could imagine that it laughed for joy as it came up. The earth was of many colors; they were fresh, hot and vivid. They made you feel excited; until you saw the Singer itself, and then you forgot everything else. …

The lion ( for in Narnia, God is incarnate in the lion Aslan) was pacing to and fro about that empty land and singing his new song. It was softer and more lilting than the song by which he had called up the stars and the sun; a gentle rippling music. And as he walked and sang the valley grew green with grass. It spread out from the lion like a pool. It ran up the side soft of the little hills like a wave. In a few minutes it was creeping up the lower slopes of the distant mountains, making that young world every moment softer. The light wind could be heard ruffling the grass. Soon there were other things besides grass. The higher slopes grew dark with heather. Patches of rougher and more bristling green appeared in the valley. …

When you listened to his song, you heard the things he was making up; when you looked round you, you saw them.

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In Lewis’s vision we can hear the many voices of biblical tradition. The Logos of John and the voice in Genesis that spoke the world into existence is encountered in this vision of creation. But Lewis was not just a biblical scholar, he was also a man of his time, and aware of all the stories his society created about creation as well, the scientific explanations and his own observations of the created world. Today, in our infinite scientific experimentation, we have created a new model of worldly creation. We might say that creation started with the Big Bang, with primordial ooze, but even this is an inaccurate model of a time outside our understanding.

The truth is we just can’t know. As a species, we were not present when the Earth was new. There are some mysteries that we can never truly understand. We can come REALLY close, we might even think we have the answer, but if we are brutally honest, we just don’t know. And that’s a hard place to stay in eternally. So instead of leaving that space blank, we fill it. We create to fill that space. We tell stories and write out hypotheses, we create myths, and we pass these on to new generations of people to help them try to understand the mysteries in life, the mystery of time beyond our knowledge, of creation. We explore what it would look like, smell like, and feel like to see a planet populated with life. We explore what divine power would look like, and create images of that power in our own image. We try to solve the mysteries of that which is beyond knowing. The un-openable mystery box.

JJ Abrams, the creator of Lost, spoke about the allure of solving mystery at the TED convention a few years ago. If any of you have seen or heard about Lost, you will know that it is really all about attempting to connect the dots of mystery, so it shouldn’t surprise that he has a fascination with the mystery box. In fact, he has a box in the office that he has never opened in 20 years. He says, he has kept the mystery box in honor of his Grandfather who opened so many mysteries for him, giving him the tools and interest to investigate the deep mysteries. Abrams, has been impacted by his ancestors and their visions of mystery. His grandfather allowed him to open and take apart telephones, boxes and more, and that experience has shaped Abrams life. His mystery box, in honor of his grandfather stays closed, but on the other hand, through his gifts for film, television and special effects he opens mystery boxes for all of us. Like all of us, Abrams is the sum of his ancestor’s stories and myths, and those stories, those little peeks into the mystery box are what shape what we expect to see in the world.

Even our future plans and technological advancements are impacted by our stories. Have any of you watched any of the multitudes of Star Trek shows over the last several decades? (And I promise this is the last fantasy reference in this sermon). Maybe you remember the communicators? Think about it, in the 1960s when Star Trek was just a dream it was a story that you could talk with people on a handheld device, about the size of a grapefruit, and now… Well, this is my much smaller than a grapefruit hand held device on which I can do much more than call up my shipmates! Our future dreams inform what we do in the present, and our past dreams have shaped our future plans. But all of these unending stories are just that, our ways of understanding that which is inside that un-openable mystery box of time.

What are the mystery boxes in your life? What tools can you use to better understand it? What are the stories in your life that inform who you are? What would creation have to tell you in a moment of awareness?

And so we can learn from the stories of past generations, from Star Trek, and CS Lewis and even the tragedy in the Gulf, as we have learned from so many other tragedies over our existence. We can look deeply and see the web that holds creation together, and see our own place in it. We can be the web spinners of new stories that shed light on the importance of all that is and will be. And we can tell future generations about these new stories, building up our future with our hopes and dreams, the ideas of our mystery boxes. Allowing the memory of our inspirational ancestors, friends and family to be remembered in life giving ways.

May it be so.

Embodied Faith

John 20: 19 – 31
When it was evening, the disciples had gathered together, but, fearful of the Jews, had locked all the doors in the house. Jesus entered, stood among them, and said, "Peace to you." Then he showed them his hands and side.

The disciples, seeing the Master with their own eyes, were exuberant. Jesus repeated his greeting: "Peace to you. Just as the Father sent me, I send you."

Then he took a deep breath and breathed into them. "Receive the Holy Spirit," he said. "If you forgive someone's sins, they're gone for good. If you don't forgive sins, what are you going to do with them?"

But Thomas, sometimes called the Twin, one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. The other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’

But he said, "Unless I see the nail holes in his hands, put my finger in the mark of the nails, and stick my hand in his side, I won't believe it."

Eight days later, his disciples were again in the room. This time Thomas was with them. Jesus came through the locked doors, stood among them, and said, "Peace to you." Then he focused his attention on Thomas. "Take your finger and examine my hands. Take your hand and stick it in my side. Do not doubt but believe" Thomas said, "My Master! My God!" Jesus said, "So, you believe because you've seen with your own eyes. Even better blessings are in store for those who believe without seeing." 19
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Last week, between Easter services here, I ran down to Safeway to get a bite of breakfast. It’s 8 am, Sunday, EASTER Sunday. There are about 10 people in the whole store. Not much need for a lot of checkers. But then, the single cashier’s register break. It just shuts down. He shifts everyone to another register, calls up a second cashier, and keeps trying to get his register to come back to life. All this happens before I step up to the register. Just as I put my juice on the belt, the cashier call me over to his line, now open. “I can’t explain it,” he says,” but it just came back to life.” On Easter morning? What better words could possibly be spoken.
Resurrection happens.

Last week resurrection happened for Mary Magdalene. This week, resurrection happens again for the disciples. We are IN the season of Easter, of Resurrection, of Spring, of rebirth. A time when life springs suddenly from the waiting of a rainy winter. Resurrections surround us. It is certainly no coincidence that Spring and Easter come at the same time. Early Church fathers connected the two on purpose. But to the disciples in our reading this morning. Easter was not joyful and celebratory. Easter was not a season, Easter was a shock that the Divine had been crucified. We know that Jesus is resurrected, but these men, had nothing but hope that Jesus was not just gone from the tomb, but resurrected. Well, nothing but hope and the word of Mary Magdalene who is the only one who stood around the tomb long enough to talk with the angels.

So here we are, dropping into the middle of dinner party, afraid for their lives, and not fully believing the word of Mary, the disciples of Jesus sequester themselves in a safe space. Lock the door, to keep the world out, and just be together. That space I’m sure had healing properties. It was the only place they could be themselves, truly and wholly. And into that safe space, walks…. The divine.

Resurrection happens.

Jesus stands among them, talks with them, lets them see his tortured flesh, so that they believe. Without the physical proof, how could they understand? And in fact, they couldn’t. We typically say this passage is about poor doubting Thomas, but in fact, all the disciples need the same physical proof.

After Jesus introduces himself in the first visitation, with Peace be with you, he shows them his personal identification, the marks in hands and side. But Thomas wasn’t there. Jesus had to appear again, to repeat this miracle. It wasn’t that Thomas didn’t believe. Thomas did believe. In fact, he believed so strongly that his beloved friend and teacher had been killed that even when confronted with the miraculous story of his return repeated to him, he could not believe it. He needed further proof. His doubt in the word of his friends is a sign of his belief, his belief in the grief of loss; a loss he might have felt was without hope. We might criticize him for his lack of faith, but what would you do if the unexpected walked into your door?

Resurrection happened to Thomas

In the 1500s, Italian artist Caravaggio painted Thomas’s revelation as he saw it. Caravaggio’s depiction portrays with intimate detail the incredoolity of Thomas and his fellows. The fraying of their clothes, the plainness of their cloaks, the confusion on the faces of the two in the background, the otherworldliness of Jesus’s bright white cloth, wrapped around him, the peace on Jesus face. In this piece, Jesus in fact PULLS Thomas’s hand toward him to touch the wound.

There is a little artistic license here, in the text, no one actually touches Jesus’s wound. I see this as a way to show that God will not only meet us where we are, but will in fact surprise us by being present in our lives. Rather than this being a story of Thomas, maybe this is a story of just how far God will come to help us believe. This reading, for me, is about the journey of faith. Believing in something is not a static state. It is dynamic and changing in each moment. The journey of faith seeks new ways of seeing, of experiencing, and yes, of questioning the signs. The journey of faith is also the journey of resurrection. In each journey, there is much that must be given up to allow a new understanding to take root.

The Greek word used is actually not doubt, but unbelief. Doubt is about seeking faith. To doubt something requires that you look closely at what you see and how it makes you feel. This IS faith to me. This is Belief to me. So the image of doubting Thomas just doesn’t fit for me. The disciples moved from unbelief to belief by the experience in that room. Because God wanted them to know the divine, God came physically to them, embodied by Jesus’s resurrected body.

God still comes to us today, revealing Godself in times when we see only the temporal world. The divine reveals itself to us in new ways, through our gathering together, through the new growth in the garden, and through the continuing resurrections of life.

This past week, a family’s life was resurrected in Miami. At the time of the earthquake in Haiti, Jenny, was a two month old baby. The family lived in Port Au Prince. She and her mother Nadine were buried in their home when it collapsed on them. Nadine found her way out of that broken place, but Jenny was buried in the rubble of her home. She survived a skull fracture, several broken ribs and crushing blows to both arms. And…. five days of waiting in the destroyed house. She was freed from the rubble and taken to a United Nations triage hospital, but without her parents. Thinking she was an orphan, she was sent to Miami to be hospitalized. Her father Junior had searched for her in that rubble, every day after the earthquake while Nadine was treated for her own injuries. And more than that, they fought the longer battle of explaining that the orphan child was indeed theirs.

But last week, months late and only after DNA testing to prove they are her parents, Junior and Nadine were finally allowed to reunite with their miraculous daughter, the survivor. How the child stayed alive in that place, I have no idea, but she did. How her parents knew that it was their child that was this miraculous baby in Miami, I have no idea, but they knew.
Resurrection happens.

Resurrection takes many forms, but it is here and is being revealed to us through the many miracles of life. The resurrection of Jesus to the disciples is only one of the miraculous examples of God’s magnificence in our lives. The resurrection of Baby Jenny’s reunion. The resurrection of plants as they spring from the ground. Resurrection, reunion, miracles and blessings happen all around us, and in Easter, we are most likely to look for them. What resurrection might you witness today? Where might your journey take you? The journey of faith is the same as the journey of recognizing moments of resurrection and reunion with God. The most important thing we can remember is to pay attention to the moments when we see them.

Resurrection is Happening. May it be in our lives this day.

Behold I am DOING a new thing!

Text:Isaiah 43: 16-21 & This is my Song NCH #591

Hear anew the words of this morning’s text, from the Prophet Isaiah. Thus says the Lord, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild animals will honour me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.

I’d like to start us off today by asking you to participate in a small ritual of cleaning. We talked about ritual a little with the children, and I’d like to get us prepared in that same way. If you are comfortable, lift your arms above your head, and as you breathe out, let them fall quickly to your side. And again, this time slowly lowering your hands until they are at your side……………… Today we are talking about action, and I don’t think we can just talk about it, but must remember to partake of that action as well. Up front, there are several ritual stations from this past week’s Lenten reflection that acted as entry points to a place of awareness, that provide us with space to listen. In our community these few weeks, we have been rocked by hard times. Today, we welcome the holy breath of the Divine to fill our sails with new wind, and bind us together in support of each other.

What did you hear in the reading this morning? You’ve heard it many times so far this morning , and I haven’t even begun to preach yet! I’m sure you’ve created some ideas about the passage, and hopefully, how it might be relevant to your life. Did it complement the Music for Preparation? In our service today, we are talking about, and doing a new thing. One of those new things, is to change our order a little, to rearrange a few pieces. Change is what allows us to see our habits from another angle, enriching them with new meaning. By placing the music in the middle did it jar you a little? What did you hear in the music you might not have heard if it was before the reading?

This is my Song. A song of peace for lands afar and wide. The hymn we sang this morning, is one of my favorites. I first came across it, at a concert of the Indigo Girls. Their music has always spoken to me, but at this one concert, as they sang this piece, live, a capella with the members of their opening act, I was surprised by the connection and joy I felt in this beautiful song. But BOY was I surprised to hear it sung as a hymn in church a few weeks later. How had I gone 20 + years without hearing this song in church? There it is, in the hymnal I’ve sung from, and I hadn’t noticed it. We had not sung it before. From that point on, I became a sort of evangelist for this piece of music. I’ve used repeatedly in worship, at home and in conversation with others. The theology presented in these words is one of worldwide peace and community, two things I feel very strongly about. But it is also about being yourself. This hymn does not ask us to espouse a certain truth to claim our identity.

What we have in our hymnal, however, is not the full story of this piece. The original lyrics in Finnish were fiercely nationalistic, reflecting the country's struggle for its own identity during a time of oppression by Russia.

O, rise, Finland, you showed to the world

That you drove away the slavery,

And that you did not bend under oppression,

Your day is dawning, O land of birth.

Lloyd Stone, however, transformed it into a hymn of international understanding, a beautiful expression of patriotism which honors one's own country while honoring the pride of citizens of other lands. The third verse, which is not printed in our hymnal, goes like this,

May truth and freedom come to every nation
May peace abound where strife has raged so long;
That each may seek to love and build together,
A world united, righting every wrong.
A world united in its love for freedom,
Proclaiming peace together in one song.

What a different story that tells. The fierce superiority of the original hymn has been transformed by something new, a new way to see the world, or maybe a new world to be seen.

In our reading today, we are also told to see the new. To watch for it, wait for it… see it with our eyes. God will do a new thing. This text is a cornerstone piece for me. As a young person who has grown up in the church all my life, I continue to be a seeker of the new. But here, in this passage, it is not just about newness. It is about doing and it is about community. It is about a specific community hearing God’s call and recognizing the transcendent power of our Divine Creator who acts, who ACTS, in the world. Our text does not say God thought or God watched, but God is about to ACT. The Hebrew Bible and even the Hebrew language itself is in fact full of the embodied nature of God. Even creation begins with God’s action. God spoke, and God’s speech created the world in Genesis ch 1. In many places throughout the bible, God is told to be acting. Creating a flood with Noah, wrestling with Jacob, and according to Isaiah, God is still acting, notice he says I am about to.... there is more action to be done. How will we see God’s action? By being aware and responsive to God’s energy in our lives.

This Wednesday, at our second to last Lenten Wednesday reflection, we experimented with action. Around the room, were ritual stations, all set up so that we could partake of them in our own way. Stations of the elements of fire, water, earth and community were part of our circle. For us, in that space, it was a new experience to partake of the smelling of rosemary, the pouring of water, the touching of a piece of cloth as a ritual. We also participated in several methods of prayer which were created generations ago, and yet most there had not experienced them before. Ritual is one way we participate in God’s abundant energy and spirit. Up here on the altar, elements of those rituals are still with us today. The water and earth elements are open for those who would like to partake of them after service. The element of fire will be used during our prayers of the people today when you will be invited to light a candle as we bring our prayers to mind. Are these experiences new? Who were they new to? To generations of others, these same elements would have felt commonplace. So what really is new? What is the NEW action of God?

For me, that new action is about bringing peace. Just as the words of the Nationalistic Finnish hymn were made new by speaking about international cooperation, the new action of God is when we act as God’s hands and bring peace, love and healing to our neighbors, friends and family. And yet this is certainly not a new theme. It is an old message and yet repeated anew in every generation. It is in fact one of the oldest themes in my opinion, and the reason that we welcome a healing and loving God into our worship each week.

I do want to acknowledge a trouble spot that I have with the text, and that you might also have felt when you heard it this morning. To preface God’s continuing action, is the troubling phrase about forgetting the things of old. I can’t say I’m okay with that. In our call to worship, Jennifer and I used four different versions of the passage, all new at some point to some people, and possibly to you as well. And yet, they were all different ways of speaking words that have been spoken for centuries, millennia even. There is also a touch of irony here, because if we are to forget the past, we would not in fact be hearing this text this morning. If we are to forget our history, we will repeat hard lessons we as humanity have already learned. I do not want to forget, but to build upon. The histories of my ancestors are present in me, and while I may do something new, I will still be in relationship to their lives, and their experiences. Where I seek a spiritual message may be from a song that is written today, or it may be as old as this text from Isaiah. I do not want to forget but to reinterpret the message for each new generation, each new situation.

So have we come to any decision about what new is? Not really. Should we? Possibly newness, is in the mind of the beholder. The new work of God for me is one thing. What might that new work of the Divine be for you? What might YOUR NEW ACTION be?