Luke 3.7-18
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning Plymouth Congregational UCC Fort Collins, Colorado There is a part of me that wonders why the Senior Minister always has to wear the black hat…why I always seem to get the tough passages…Last week, Jake gets the song of Zechariah, “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he hath visited and redeemed his people.” And next week, Jane Anne gets the Magnificat: “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit doth rejoice in God my savior.” So nice. And what do I get this week? [cue theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly] “You brood of vipers!” I actually realize that part of my call at Plymouth sometimes is to tell you things you would rather not hear…it just goes with the territory, even though I don’t always get to use the theme from the Clint Eastwood’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. So, when you hear about this fella, John the Baptizer (unlike Jane Anne’s family, he wasn’t Baptist; he was Jewish), he often gets to wear the black hat. He is out there in the wilderness, subsisting on a diet of locusts and wild honey, clothed in a rough garment of camel’s hair (very scratchy in all the wrong places), and probably smelling a lot like a camel as well. Perhaps that’s why he was so into ritual bathing in the Jordan…it wasn’t just sin that he was trying to wash away. John gets to challenge those who have followed him out into the wilderness -– a place of danger and testing, as we know from the biblical narratives –- to move out of their comfort zones and not simply to rely on their Abrahamic ancestry, but to “bear fruit worthy of changed hearts,” changed minds, and changed lives. John is out on the margins, living a physically and mentally difficult, rigorous, ascetic life, which strips away the less important aspects of life to get down to the basics: to live a fruit-bearing life. He challenges those who are there who have two coats to give one to the poor…this does not mean just bringing an extra coat in the back of your front hall closet and donate it to Homeward Alliance like I did two weeks ago. It means if you have two houses, give one to somebody who hasn’t got one. [Cue The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly theme.] John’s message and ministry were distinct from that of Jesus, and as you learned last week from Jake’s sermon, John was the son of Zechariah and Elizabeth (Mary’s cousin), so Jesus and John were first cousins once removed. And Jesus was initially a follower in the John movement, but after John lost his head and Jesus went into the wilderness for 40 days, Jesus started a new movement that was focused on healing and proclaiming the kingdom of God.
I had never been a big fan of John the Baptizer. He was rough around the edges and seemed obsessed with purging people of their sins by washing them away ritually. And I have seen Jesus’ primary message as different. But in reading this text, the three examples of repentance that John spells out all involve economic justice. Giving your coat to someone without one. Tax collectors should only take the amount prescribed by the government (which was not the general practice). Roman soldiers should not extort money but be satisfied with their wages.
Sometimes, you have to look harder to see how figures of the past might emerge. About six years ago, I was with Dom Crossan and Marcus Borg on a pilgrimage in Italy, and one of my favorite places that we visited is far off the beaten tourist path outside the town of Nola near Naples. After wandering through the tiny village of Cimitile and attracting surprised stares from the local residents, we arrived at a Paleo-Christian church. (Paleo-Christian is not a diet plan…it just means that it’s very early…from the 4th century.) Going through the complex we saw ancient frescoes of early Christians, who seemed to look out at us postmoderns from a different millennium. Even through the disrepair of these ancient frescoes, their eyes of our Christian brothers and sisters seem to convey a longing to connect. And as we moved to a different part of the room we saw a few remaining representations of different saints and biblical figures, including this one of John.
You cannot see his eyes or his facial expression, but you can see the coarseness of his hair, and that fits in with the impression we have of John: the wild man who lives on the fringe of society who has a message to proclaim in the wilderness. And you can also see the Latin inscription, “Johannes Precursor,” literally John the forerunner.
I’ve noticed that there is something of a visual trope...
...in paintings of John, as the bearded guy with tousled hair and a doleful expression on his face. And one of the things this does is to project an image of John as a real, full-blooded human being (and unlike some beatific images of Jesus, looking fully divine, but not-quite-human). John looks like he’s carrying an emotional burden, as if the cares of the world are on his shoulders. For me that makes him more than a guy who wears the black hat and more of a real person who sees what is wrong with the world he lives in and tries to do something about it. John is the challenger, the confronter, the voice crying out in the wilderness.
This John is perhaps a little more like us, one who understands God’s justice and sees the disconnect between that vision and the world-as-it-is. Jesus was part of his cousin John’s movement. And though it is only in Mark’s and Matthew’s accounts, the death of John the Baptizer comes after he called out Herod, saying that the king’s marriage to Herodias, his brother’s wife, isn’t legitimate. And the wife and daughter of Herod literally request John’s head on a platter, and Herod delivers.
Criticizing the empire and its petty kings is dangerous business. John is the precursor, the forerunner, the messenger who proclaims that the messiah is coming. John’s demise led Jesus to reframe John’s message and to recast it into a proclamation of an alternative vision for the world: the kingdom of God. And as we know, the demand for economic justice is at the center of that realm that Jesus proclaimed, the kingdom that he said is within us and among us. The call to a change of heart is central to message of both John and Jesus. It is a call away from the narrowness of self-interest and into something far greater than our own lives. It is a call to give of oneself and to become part of a world order that is grounded in faith, in hope, and in self-giving love. John offers each of us a challenge this Advent, in terms of how we can help live out economic justice, which is especially important in our current political reality. It is a challenge to ask ourselves how we can contribute to the realm of God, rather than simply to ask, “What’s in it for me?” As we walk through these final days of Advent, I leave you to consider the question that the crowd around John asked him: “What then should we do?” What can you do to help as a cocreator of God’s realm today? Amen. © 2018 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. All photos by the author. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses. AuthorThe Rev. Hal Chorpenning has been Plymouth's senior minister since 2002. Before that, he was associate conference minister with the Connecticut Conference of the UCC. A grant from the Lilly Endowment enabled him to study Celtic Christianity in the UK and Ireland. Prior to ordained ministry, Hal had a business in corporate communications. Read more about Hal.
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The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph
Plymouth UCC, Fort Collins, Colorado Second Sunday in Advent: December 9, 2018 Luke 1: 68-7 Sometimes the best theological tools come from the most unusual of places. Not a theologian, but definitely a great singer of the 1960s, Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette (better known by her stage name, Dusty Springfield), accidentally developed a shorthand for how we should actively engage the practice of Advent Anticipation. Advent practice in a nutshell is, “Wishin’ and Hopin’ and Thinkin’ and Prayin’ and Planin’ and Dreamin’.” [1] The six forms of active anticipation that Dusty Springfield identifies in her classic song might be the most useful memory tool for Advent practice of all time. Let me tell you how, but first, I have to leave you in anticipation. Would you join me in prayer? May the stirrings of our hearts, the musings of our souls, and the words of all of our lips all be harbingers and signs of peace for our world, for our families, and for ourselves. May I not fail you, God, in speaking a word of truth with your people. Amen. “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel!” Benedictus Dominus Deus! With these words Zacharias, the father of John the Baptist, starts his great song of praise, of hope, and of peace known throughout the Church Universal and all time as the Benedictus. It is the great Invocation of all of the Gospel good news to follow. Today, our Scripture is invoking the very essence of good news for peace in our world. The Benedictus is used in the Matins (morning worship) of monks and nuns, Communion Liturgies of almost every Christian tradition, and as the most ancient recorded liturgical way to begin worship services. In all, this beautiful poem exclusively found in the middle of the First Chapter of the Gospel of Luke, symbolizes the hope for peace in all of Christian traditions across difference, time, and place. It communicates two things. The first half is a summary of the prophesies of the past and God’s continued presence and promise of peace from generation to generation. The first half is looking backwards in praise and accounting. Then the second half from verse 76 and following looks forward with anticipation. We hope that God will guide our feet in the way of peace forever and ever amen. It is this latter part, the hope for peace, that I think we need to focus on today. This latter point that calls for a time, soon approaching and already breaking upon us, where we are guided in the way of peace must be the topic of our thinking today. Moreover, it raises a big moral, ethical and theological question for us: How can we, in a time of so much verbal, emotional, physical, psychological, technological, and even internalized violence. dare speak the word "peace"? How can such a brave word be spoken? How can we do this and not make ourselves liars or make God out to be the same? It is dangerous work—this work of speaking about peace because it produced anticipation and expectation. Disappointment and disillusionment is always sure to follow. The word I would use to summarize the Benedictus, the reason that it is so effective as a call to worship, the reason it is an essential part of traditional Eucharist liturgies can all be summarized with that one word: Anticipation. Now, anticipation is a word that typically means a preconceived idea of what will be. We think of it as being a neutral state of passive hope. I anticipate that it may snow. I anticipate that I will get Christmas presents. I anticipate that we will continue to be a great church. I anticipate world peace. Our Scripture today is the very definition of anticipation. Unfortunately for us, anticipation has been incorrectly defined from an etymological perspective since the 1800’s, so what does it really mean to anticipate peace? Is it really a passive act? In actual fact, the real meaning and history of the word anticipation and what it meant until the mid-1800’s was “the act of being before another in doing something.”[2] Anticipation has more to do with being avant garde than simply hopeful. Christians are called to start walking the walk and to anticipate that the world might could catch-up. This means that rather than just imaging that it may snow, that you get your snow boots out. Rather than just hoping that God will bring peace to us on Christmas, that we actually start living peace right this second. It is cliché, yes, let there be peace on earth and let it begin with me. Anticipation is not a passive state of hope or the art of gracefully waiting. Rather, it is the act of being before others…preparedness for what God has promised. Now, a trick question. How many of you think the Benedictus in context in the Gospel of Luke is about Jesus and/or the birth of Christ? In fact, it has almost nothing to do with Jesus. It is actually a song sung by John the Baptist’s father, Zacharias, about his son who will prepare the way for peace to come. John the Baptist is sort of an overlooked figure in the shadow of Jesus, but he is the "Wind Beneath [Jesus’] Wings." He anticipates the peace of Christ and, in many ways, makes it possible. In many ways, anticipation is the business of John. If Christmas is the celebration of Jesus Christ’s birth, then in many ways Advent is the celebration of the birth of John the Baptist. It is about the very real and intentional work of making a way for peace even when it seems impossible. The Benedictus is our song—it is your song. It is the song of all of those who are called in every time and every place to make a way for the Peace of Christ in the world. It needs to be reclaimed, for perhaps more than any other character in the Advent-Christmas-Epiphany story (as fun as it is to dress up as Sheep, Three Kings, Shepherds, Mary, Joseph, and Angels) we are really meant to be John the Baptists. That is our real role in the Christmas narrative. Today, we are all John the Baptists. The work of anticipation—of creating ways and practices of peace is our job in both this short season before Christmas and really every day of our lives. We are called to the work and to lives of anticipation. I am against preaching and not leaving you with some kind of a concrete spiritual practice. How are we supposed to actively anticipate the peace of Christ and help make it happen like John the Baptist did? How do we learn to sing our own Benedictus of hope for this day and age through our Advent living? Remember Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette (better known by her stage name, Dusty Springfield)? She wrote what is the very best unintentional Benedictus and description of the Season of Advent ever. Better than the Church Fathers and Mothers, Dusty wrote a song that describes the meaning of active anticipation. It is really a six-point to do list for this season of the church year. It goes like this:
Wishin’ and Hopin’ and Thinkin’ and Prayin’ and Plannin’ and Dreamin’
We need a new Benedictus more than ever! Each of the six practices at the beginning of that great song of 1962 is a different way to participate active anticipation. Each one is its own spiritual practice. Here they are: Wishin’ for peace. A wish is defined as "a desire for something thought unattainable." Sit and set your intention for peace in the world. Wishing for peace means that you align every cell in your being with what seems impossible. Remember when you were a kid and all you wanted for Christmas was a pony or a Tonka truck, or an iPhone? Remember the intensity you put into your letters to Santa or to what you would say to Santa at the department Store? I’m thinking of A Christmas Story. I want that same level of wishing and motive put into the wish for peace. I want each of you to write a letter to Santa this year as a spiritual practice and put that childlike willpower for a wish into the letter written for peace. Wishing is an act of utter rebellion against the tyranny of possible. Hopin’ for peace. Hoping is a much more delicate practice than the willpower of wishing. Hope is allowing yourself to not let go of what you wished for even after the wish has failed time and time and time again. Even if it is your fifth year wishing for a pony, hope is writing that letter again. Hope is more delicate like a snowflake in the palm of your hand. It has to be observed. Don’t be careless with you hope. Name it and claim it and whisper your hope for peace in yourself and in the world. Hope is like a wish but more personal and more enduring. How can peace become your hope again? How do you protect it? Thinkin’ of peace. We need to spend time thinking and brainstorming new ways to create peace in the world. We cannot give into narratives of tyranny that say that everything good has ever been thought of. We are called to spend time thinking and innovating for peace. New frameworks are always needed. What can you think of? Prayin’ for peace. Thoughts and prayers have become cliché. After every mass shooting, murder, tragedy, people tweet or post that they are offering thoughts and prayers. I am convinced that nobody who publicly announces “thoughts and prayers” through Facebook or Twitter actually is praying at all. If they were, then God would have already moved their hearts to change policy. Amen? If they were, then war would be no more. Don’t just say you are going to pray, but actually pick a chair (prayer chair) in your house for prayer and spend five or fifteen minutes a day praying for peace. It is one thing to say that you think and pray—it is another to actually do it. Plannin’ for peace. What happens if we actually start to plan for peace? Take a pen and paper and draw the world in a peaceful state. If you are keener on prose, wrote a short story or a poem about what the world looks like when peace has come. Learn to visualize it again. Develop a master plan for peace in your own life, in our community, and in the world. If we cannot plan for peace in a real way, how can we ever hope to move towards that vision? Plan for peace. Dreamin’ of peace. This is the art of letting go. It is the art of finding a meditative practice that helps you find peace. You cannot control your dreams, but you must find a way to create a peaceful heart in your own person. Then and only then can God anticipate using you to help create peace in this world and peace on earth. If it cannot start in you and in your deepest dreams, then how do you expect to actually help create peace elsewhere? We are all John the Baptists in the Advent-Christmas-Epiphany Trilogy. We are the ones called to set the stage and to wish for, hope for, think about, pray for, plan for, and dream peace into being. The Benedictus is our song. It was sung at your birth. In this season, if you don’t know what do to do or how to anticipate Christ with intention and purpose, just think of the opening line of the song: Wishin’ and Hopin’ and Thinin’ and Prayin’ and Plannin’ and Dreamin’[3] “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel!” Benedictus Dominus Deus! To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace. Amen. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAdTsAKvVTU [2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/anticipation [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c74BSImG4xM AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page.
Jeremiah 33.14-16
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning, Plymouth Congregational UCC Fort Collins, Colorado I’m going to let you in on a secret…when we offer silent prayers, the shortcoming I confess most is impatience. I wonder if God gets tired to hearing “Lord, help me to be more patient” from the occupant of that chair behind me. I am not someone who is great at waiting, anticipating, and knowing that things will fall into place in due course. And maybe you’re like that, too. Our consumer culture is based on faster technology and immediate results, and short-term profitability. Immediate isn’t always better…think about how communications and diplomatic relations might improve if someone in the West Wing took the president’s Twitter account and said that any messaging had to come through consultation with the cabinet or communications office of the White House. Immediate isn’t always better. Sometime delayed gratification yields greater rewards. Back in the last millennium, when I was working with Apple as a communications consultant, there was a huge shift in corporate culture when Fidelity Investments became a major stockholder in Apple, and they wanted to show positive earnings each and every quarter, which meant that Apple was more risk averse and didn’t take as many chances. When Steve Jobs came back as CEO, Apple shifted their vision to risk short-term profits for longer-term gains. The long-game has worked out pretty well for Apple. And as Christians, we play a v-e-r-y l-o-n-g game. The other message our culture sends us is that “it’s all about me.” Look at the first-person pronouns in trade names of apps: MyHealthConnection, MySwimPro, MyFitnessPal, MyRAC, iPhone…and those are just what’s on my smartphone! It’s all about me and my needs and wants. If you want to do an experiment, see how many apps start with “my” and how many start with “our.” You’ll see my point. So, you and I find ourselves on this first Sunday of Advent in a culture that says fast is good and immediate is better and that it’s all about me, my needs, my wants. And we find ourselves in a spiritual tradition that says emphatically that it’s not all about me — it’s about all of us — and it’s a tradition that especially during Advent relies on waiting, anticipating, longing, yearning for a promised future and a change in God’s world. Martin Luther King, Jr., quoting Theodore Parker, said, “The arc of history bends toward justice.” But, dear God, does that arc bend slowly! The text from Jeremiah comes from a period when many of the best and brightest of Judea were taken captive and exiled in Babylon. Jeremiah, though, stayed in Jerusalem, but eventually fled to Egypt. The Babylonian exile is a story about refugees, immigrants, and exiles, and a prophet who declares that things will get better. (I know that sounds totally unfamiliar…) Jeremiah conveys the words of God in declaring, “The days are surely coming, says, YHWH, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.” Jeremiah is adamant; there are no “mights” or “maybes” in his prophecy…the days are surely coming! The characteristics of this new ruler from the lineage of King David will be justice and righteousness, which are nearly synonymous. That rootedness in the Davidic line must have seemed like dreamy wishful thinking to some of the Israelites, perhaps like the vision of the kingdom or realm of God seems unattainable to some of us. You and I find ourselves in a nation that seems quite different that it did even five years ago: a nation in which truth gets branded as false news, in which journalists are labeled as traitors, in which demagogues abroad are seen as friends and our closest allies are treated as enemies, in which federal immigration agents have shot tear gas across the border at refugees and children. This is not the America many of us know and love. And the death of President George H.W. Bush on Friday underscores the contrast. We yearn at the core of our being for something different than what we currently have. “The days are surely coming, says the Lord,” when we will get a new branch of the Davidic line, who will be a voice for justice and shalom. That new branch stems from the root -– radix in Latin, from which we get the English word, “radical” –- that stem is Jesus…that’s why Matthew’s gospel has that enormous unpronounceable genealogy of Jesus –- to show that he has descended from David. Jesus came to proclaim the good news of God’s kingdom, a realm of righteousness and shalom, an alternative reign to the empires of this world. That is a radical notion. Sometimes, you hear me use a phrase, “the kingdom of God, here and now and still unfolding.” The kingdom we pray for twice in the Lord’s Prayer was initiated by Jesus and was central to his teachings and his presence with us today, even though that kingdom is not there in its completeness. The kingdom is still unfolding. I grow impatient for the coming of the fulfillment of the reign of God. I see too much injustice, too little peace in the world. Too much greed, to little generosity in the world. Too much violence, too little love in the world. I spent a night last week at a Jesuit retreat center near Denver to have some quiet time to reflect and write about Advent, and I found the words of a wonderful Jesuit who died in the 1950s, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and it helps me to balance my sense of urgency with these words of wisdom: Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something new. And yet it is the law of progress that it is made by passing through some stability -- And that it may take a very long time. Really meaningful, isn’t it? Yeah, well, Teilhard was a paleontologist, and using his timeframe, Jeremiah’s prophecy seemed like it was just yesterday and Jesus was born this morning. Impatient people like me have a lot to learn from paleontology. I yearn deeply, I long for, a day when families no longer have to sleep in churches, because everyone has a home; when teens no longer sleep out on the front lawn of Plymouth in the winter, because there is no homelessness to make people aware of. And in the meantime, those hosts and cold teenagers give me hope. What do you yearn for, long for most deeply this Advent? What do you long for to come about in God’s world and with your help? I invite you to reflect on that in the time you spend in prayer this week: What are your deepest longings? The kingdom coming requires our faith to know “it is surely coming.” It requires our full participation…every one of us…it requires our hands, our voices, our prayers, and our imaginations. We need to be able to envision a new world order that Jesus proclaimed is we are to be co-creators for the new realm, a kingdom radically rooted in Jeremiah, in Isaiah, in Jesus, in God, and in you. As we begin walking through Advent together, I leave you with these words of longing and waiting from UCC minister and theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr: Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. May it be so. Amen. © 2018 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will typically be granted for non-profit uses. AuthorThe Rev. Hal Chorpenning has been Plymouth's senior minister since 2002. Before that, he was associate conference minister with the Connecticut Conference of the UCC. A grant from the Lilly Endowment enabled him to study Celtic Christianity in the UK and Ireland. Prior to ordained ministry, Hal had a business in corporate communications. Read more about Hal. AuthorThe Rev. Hal Chorpenning has been Plymouth's senior minister since 2002. Before that, he was associate conference minister with the Connecticut Conference of the UCC. A grant from the Lilly Endowment enabled him to study Celtic Christianity in the UK and Ireland. Prior to ordained ministry, Hal had a business in corporate communications. Read more about Hal.
Luke 1.46b–55
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning, Plymouth Congregational UCC, Fort Collins, Colorado 17 December 2017 Those of us who come from an Episcopal background know this text well by its Latin name, the Magnificat, because it is part of the service of Evening Prayer every week, and the sung Evensong has some incredibly beautiful choral settings of this text. Magnificat simply means “magnifies,” and it refers to Mary’s declaration that her soul magnifies the Lord. Think about that image for a moment: a magnifying glass that makes God even larger in our field of vision. Mary’s soul makes God come into clearer view for us. [Pull out magnifying glass] Sometimes with a magnifying glass you need to pull it closer or draw it farther away for the object to come into focus. And not all of us have the same visual acuity…some people see really well up close, and people my age tend to want to extend their arms so things are clearer. And some of us have different magnifying glasses that enable us to pull God into view. For some of us, the lens is nature, and for others it is working for justice and peace, and for yet other people it is contemplation and prayer, and for still others the optics of fellowship and hospitality provide the best view of God. What is it that magnifies God for you? How do you catch a glimpse of the sacred? Sometimes we have trouble bringing the Holy into focus. Our nation is in a time of deep anxiety, and it is more important than ever to keep the sacred in view. In a time when we’re not able to get away to the mountains, if that is our magnifying glass, it can be soul-killing. Or if we have an illness that prevents us from social contact, if that is our lens, it can make contact with God elusive. And at those times, we need to adjust the focus or even try switching to a new lens for awhile. For me, the ocean is one of the places in nature where it is easiest to sense the presence of the Holy…and beachfront access is somewhat limited in Colorado. And so, I changed my lens a few years back and started fly-fishing so that I could be out on the water. It isn’t the same as sea kayaking, which I dearly love, but it works. And sometimes God is just plain hard to see, no matter how hard we seem to try. That’s when faith (our relationship with God) and perseverance come into play. [Bring out binoculars] Not everybody sees the Holy through the same lens, but all of us have access to multiple lenses. Perhaps even trying out a different way to see God would be a useful exercise. So, if you find God only in solitary moments, perhaps singing together in church or engaging someone at coffee hour or teaching Sunday school would open a new vista.
Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps someone sees God through you and your life? I’m not saying that any one of us is a carbon copy of God, but rather that there is a spark of the divine mixed in with all our human foibles and shortcomings that might just awaken the Spirit within another person. You might act as a lens through which someone can catch a glimpse of God!
Sometimes, at this time of the year when the nights are longest and the daylight is brief, we most need to find the bright spark of the holy. And then we need to find tinder and blow on the spark so that it illumines and shines all around. By our standards, Mary was a “nobody.” She was a Judean peasant woman in backwater of the Roman Empire. She herself says that God “looks with favor on the lowliness of his servant.” So, how might God be looking at us this morning? How might God be looking at you? If God could favor Mary with being the bearer of Christ, why couldn’t God regard us similarly? Meister Eckhart, the great14th century mystic, wrote, ”We are all meant to be mothers of God. What good is it to me if this eternal birth of the divine Son takes place unceasingly but does not take place within myself? And, what good is it to me if Mary is full of grace if I am not also full of grace? What good is it to me for the Creator to give birth to his Son if I do not also give birth to him in my time and my culture? This, then, is the fullness of time: When the Son of God is begotten in us.” So, what can we do to be the bearers of Christ? What can we do to carry Christ within us and help him to be reborn not just 2,000 years ago in a faraway land, but here, now, again and again? We don’t know very much about Mary, neither from the gospel record, nor from first-hand historical accounts. But one of the things we must certainly realize about this woman from the child she bore and raised is that she must have been extraordinary. If Jesus reflected something of Mary, it may have been her faith and compassion. Whether you take the birth narratives literally or figuratively, Jesus definitely had some of Mary’s DNA and she had the opportunity to nurture and shape the boy who would become the messiah. In other words, her soul magnified God. So, I was thinking about this: what is it that my soul magnifies? What is it that the core of my being as well as my daily activities amplifies and projects? Does my soul magnify God, or does it magnify my own needs and wants? Can someone ever see a reflection of the divine through something I do, or is it all so much “other stuff” that the Christ-light is obscured? What does your soul magnify in the ways you spend your time, and exert your power and influence? What does your soul magnify in your interactions with others? What does your soul magnify in what you pray about or for? I imagine that when clients for the Homelessness Prevention Initiative come through Plymouth’s doors each Friday or when guests of Faith Family Hospitality Network enter our church tonight, they sometimes get to glimpse the sacred in the faces of the volunteers who are here to greet them and connect them with assistance. And when an ill or homebound parishioner receives a visit from Jake or Jane Anne or me or receives a meal from another member, I imagine that is a lens through which they experience God’s love is in a very human form. We all have that capacity. As I was driving on College Avenue awhile back, a woman with a broad smile offered to let me go ahead of her when I was turning onto Drake Road. It was a simple act of kindness, but I read into it a sense of Christmas grace: a moment of unearned kindness given to me by someone I don’t know and may never see again. And I thought to myself, what would the world be like if all of us allowed our lives to magnify the Lord – in greater or lesser ways, in simple acts or in mighty ones? What if we all acted from grace and faithfulness and compassion? Maybe we’d have fewer political tweets and a Congress to does something that isn’t in the interest of the wealthiest among us, but of people like Mary and Jesus. We may not read about it on Facebook or see it in the headlines (especially those from Washington), but the world is populated by a portion of people who intentionally bring God into clearer view through prayer, action, compassion, investment, service, and helping others to find access to the sacred. It is almost as if there is seldom-visible queue of people who line up to help others see the divine more sharply. When was the last time you encountered someone who offered you a moment of grace or insight or inspiration? And did you take advantage of the opportunity to thank them or maybe even follow their example? I have seen angels right here at Plymouth…and none of them has wings. Amen. © 2017 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved AuthorThe Rev. Hal Chorpenning has been Plymouth's senior minister since 2002. Before that, he was associate conference minister with the Connecticut Conference of the UCC. A grant from the Lilly Endowment enabled him to study Celtic Christianity in the UK and Ireland. Prior to ordained ministry, Hal had a business in corporate communications. Read more about Hal.
Mark 1: 1-8
Second Sunday in Advent 12/10/17 The Rev. Jake Miles Joseph Plymouth Congregational UCC, Fort Collins, Colorado Will you pray with me? May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be good and pleasing to you, O God, our rock and our redeemer. Amen. Merry Christmas, Plymouth... at least according to the Gospel of Mark! In today’s Scripture passage, we find the opening remarks of the Gospel According to Mark foretelling the birth of Jesus through the mixing of the story of John the Baptist and verses cited from Isaiah. This lectionary reading brings us Mark’s Christmas even though we are in Advent. What is particularly interesting is that, while it doesn’t sound like it on first reading, Mark 1: 1-8 is in fact this Gospel’s entire Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany Story combined in shorthand. Some like to simply ignore this Gospel by saying, “Oh Mark doesn’t have a Christmas story,” but that is simply because we don’t like what we find. Yes, I know that sounds impossible, but it is true: Merry Christmas, and I bet many of you haven’t even finished your Christmas shopping. From this point where our reading left off in this Gospel, we jump right into the baptism of Jesus and the start of his ministry! Mark does Christmas a little differently: no angels, no manger, no magi, no star, no Mary, no Joseph, no shepherds, no Santa Claus, no presents, no cookies, no tinsel, no mother-in-laws visiting, no nothing! Nada! Right about now, my guess is that might sound good to many of you. This season is stressful and lonely for many. Mark is sort of the Grinch of the Gospel writers. Merry Christmas (early) today from the Gospel of Mark! Sort of feels like we all just got coal in our Christmas stockings, right? Where did the glamor go? Mark is the oldest of the Canonical (or narrative) Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Matthew and Luke were written later and were based, in part, on the outline and organization of Mark. This is uniformly accepted in Biblical Studies academic circles. Studying these distinctions is an entire field of Biblical study called “Gospel Parallels.” This is the study of the slight and significant differences between the four Gospels and the three canonical ones in particular! It is also the best topic to bring-up if you want to be the most awkward person at a cocktail party! The Gospel of Mark allows us the opportunity to rethink Christmas because Mark offers us a stripped down version—A back to basics lesson. There are several important things that, if we take Mark seriously, we learn about the Christmas Season that we might forget once we read Matthew and Luke’s elaborate versions of the start of Jesus’ life. Mark grounds the entire story of Jesus in Prophesy of Isaiah. Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark’s entire Jesus narrative remains rooted squarely with the ancients as an outgrowth of older tradition. Verse 2: “As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of the one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.’” Then in verses 4-8, Mark elaborates and says that John the Baptist was the one whose job, whose sacred mission it was to create a world that is ready for Jesus Christ—the Prince of Peace—to enter. “John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness [wham, voila, poof], proclaiming [screaming, yelling, preaching, extolling] a baptism of repentance and a forgiveness of sins [renewal, peace, restart, hope… hope]… He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming* [hey y’all… even as awesome as I am … just wait]; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals [which by the way is the most lowly, dirty, and stinky thing you could do for someone in the ancient world]. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” *This is interesting because why would God need any help from people, from humans, especially this mountain-man John who would fit in better with us rock climbers and backpackers of Colorado than the city dwellers of New York or Jerusalem? Why would God need to wait for the world to be ready for Jesus, and then why would God want someone who is verily an outcast from the places of power and culture to do it? This raises the question: Who are we in this story? I think we are John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness—for crying out loud in a world that can’t seem to get it! Crying out loud—doesn’t that seem to be most of our work as Christians these days? We are John the Baptist in this Christmas Story as we enter Advent in 2017. Plymouth, are you ready to get real with me? Let’s talk about our “crying out loud.” Because Mark’s Gospel offers us one heck of a Christmas Story in only a couple of verses that calls us to the mat—us powerful, comfortable, mainline old school Christians. Church, Christianity, congregation is all about journeying through Scripture, tradition, and faith exploration together. Every single year in our liturgical context, we take a slow tour through the Bible, and that tour always begins with this weird thing called Advent. Advent is the first stop on a tour of wonders. Have you ever been on a tour of the Avery House here in Fort Collins? It is a really cool place for weddings and part of the Poudre Landmarks Foundation. Where is the first place you go? You start in the lobby of the house, and what is the first thing they tell you in the Advent of your old house tour? First they will ask you nicely to please not touch anything… please do not break the Avery House collection and keep your kids close as you do the walk. “Fort Collins has Franklin Avery to thank for the wide streets in Fort Collins; he took advantage of the open spaces when he surveyed the town in 1873. Avery later founded First National Bank and was instrumental in developing water projects that enabled agriculture to flourish in northern Colorado. In 1879, he and his wife Sara built a family home on the corner of Mountain Avenue and Meldrum Street and raised their children, Edgar, Ethel, and Louise, there. The original two-story home consisted of two rooms on the first floor, now the entry area and dining room; three bedrooms upstairs; and a basement. Constructed of sandstone from local quarries, the house cost $3,000 when it was built. During the ensuing years, the Averys added to the house several times; the final addition included the distinctive Queen Anne tower…” [PLF website] That is all well and good and exactly what a tour of an old house should be, but is this also how we experience our annual church tour through Scripture? “Hi I’m Jake and I will be your tour guide this year through Scripture. First Jesus was born in a manger to really cool young parents Mary and Joseph (you would have liked them), then he did a lot of miracles, made friends, told great stories, and had a tough death because of some political misunderstandings…but its all good, you see, cause there is Easter, resurrection, and ascension and potlucks… and endowments now in his honor.” Is this also how we read the Bible…as a casual walk about tour through quaint old facts and anecdotes of ancient times: Queen Anne towers and dust collectors? If the lectionary cycle lulls us into an old house walking tour where we are scared to break things, something is wrong. I love the Avery House, but I think we mistake our annual tour through the Bible for an antique house tour. It is time to shake the dust off. Since Advent is like our lobby talk where we set our values for the coming year Bible tour, lay-out the rules, it is my job as your tour guide to inform you that this year… please PLEASE break some sh… stuff this year! For crying out loud! Adventing is weird and highly dangerous walking tour of history where we are called to be the John the Baptists crying out in the wilderness for a new time declaring: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love to a world that doesn’t remember how to do these things and frankly is threatened by them for good reason! Being John the Baptists in Advent is more about being like Indiana Jones in a dangerous adventure of caves and mystery than being Hyacinth Bucket (Bouquet) keeping up appearances in an old British Castle. If you got that second reference, then there is a prize waiting for you in the gift shop. Think about it—how dangerous are the Gospel truths of Advent: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love! Love would mean giving-up hatred that maintains political order. Hate and fear is how the world works politically speaking. Do we really want love? Wouldn’t it be anarchy? Peace would mean that weapons manufactures would lose countless sums of money and contracts and people might even lose their jobs. What about security firms and lawyers? Violence is how our economy works. Do we really want peace? Wouldn’t it be bad for the economy? Joy would mean that the pharmaceutical companies would need to rethink their business models and the all the people who spend their days (some of you my friends) writing to the comments section in the Coloradoan about how mad they are at CSU would have to find something more productive to do with their time. A lack of joy and perspective on the miracle of life is how we know how to use our time. Do we really want joy? Wouldn’t we be bored? Oh, and hope would mean that we might support affordable education or real healthcare, housing, and food for our world! Do we really want hope? Wouldn’t that be unfair for the nations and individuals who inherited so much blessing from a benevolent prosperity God? Wouldn’t the world be unjust or ungovernable with too much hope? See how truly dangerous Advent is for the status quo! But then we say… again… with confidence and true belief—“World, hey you, you haven’t seen NOTHING yet! Just you wait until the love and the peace and joy and hope of God gets ahold of you through the Christ Child. Just you wait!” How hard is that for us to do? Maybe the reason it hasn’t happened yet, is we (Christians) don’t really believe it anymore ourselves… it is just something we repeat because we were brought-up to come here on Sundays and pay ministers salaries. Do we believe what we proclaim in Advent on this Gospel of Mark Christmas? Maybe that is the only way to start inviting God back to this planet—if the Christians themselves learn to believe in these again: Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. If we are honest with ourselves, can we overcome our despair and liberal pessimism long enough to even believe these things are possible for a split second? It is only by believing that they were possible that voting rights came for all, slavery was abolished, that apartheid was no more. If you don’t really believe we can do it together, humanity, then don’t take the Gospel in vain for crying out loud. Adventing is not just the lobby (opening intro) for an old house museum tour stroll through the Bible anymore. Advent isn’t the lobby introduction to your grandmother’s old house museum tour. We are called to be the John the Baptists proclaiming that something new is coming—something bigger than ourselves or our imaginations. We are, as Mark implies in his Christmas story, called to be prophets. Now, while I am your tour guide, I am not your John the Baptist. I don’t even own a Subaru. You are John the Baptist in this Advent time of preparation. There is this myth, and I see it play out with the prayer tree that because you have paid professional clergy, we are the ones called to proclaim and you are the ones to follow. Plymouth, however, is a Calvinist-rooted Congregational Church, so you don’t get off that easy. :) Today, Mark drops a lump of coal in our Christmas plans. He is the Grinch to Luke and Matthew’s idealist Santa Claus. Mark calls all us to the mat to advent with him. Advent in Mark consists solely of us crying out loud…wailing in the desert. In Mark our role is to reveal God’s reign, for maybe… I propose, the reason these things are not realized or realizable, the reason the world doesn’t change, the reason Jesus has yet to repeat radical transformation and return in our midst is because we think we are on an old house tour of the Bible (admiring knick knacks covered in dust) rather than a religion (that word has power) of belief and action! This year, for the sake of peace, it is time for us to break some stuff… and believe something again. This year, we need to be religious, and believe something ancient, brooding, and dangerous for a change. No more safe Christianity for 2018. We tried that already in 2017, and how did that work out for us? Merry Christmas, for crying out loud, from the Gospel According to Mark! AuthorThe Rev. Jake Miles Joseph ("just Jake"), Associate Minister, came to Plymouth in 2014 having served in the national setting of the UCC on the board of Justice & Witness Ministries, the Coalition for LGBT Concerns, and the Chairperson of the Council for Youth and Young Adult Ministries (CYYAM). Jake has a passion for ecumenical work and has worked in a wide variety of churches and traditions. Read more about him on our staff page.
Isaiah 40.1–11
The Rev. Hal Chorpenning, Plymouth Congregational UCC Fort Collins, Colorado December 3, 2017 I’d like to start with a question: What is the primary medium through which you get the news? Perhaps if I asked this question even five years ago, I would get a different answer. How many of you read a newspaper either in paper form or online? How many of you consider a news magazine like Time or The Week as the primary way you get the news? How many of you listen to radio as your primary news source? How about television news? How about from on online-only source like Buzzfeed or a news aggregator like Flipboard? How many of you rely on social media like Facebook for your news? I’d like to ask another question: How many of you find the news more upsetting, disquieting, overwhelming, anxiety-inducing, and downright scary than you did, say, two years ago? One of the things I notice in myself as I have shifted from sitting down at breakfast with the morning paper…a physical paper…and reading it online is the pace and flow of my consumption of the news. When you read a newspaper or a news magazine you are entirely in control of the pace of your reading. If you start to feel overwhelmed by the grief or anger of yet another woman who has been subjected to sexual harassment, you can pause, ponder, think about its context, and come back to the story. But if you are getting your news online and have sat down at the computer to read a story in the New York Times, you are less likely to take a pause to think, to consider, and to finish your cup of coffee. Electronic media -– even good journalism, which seems to be in decline -– stream at you and demand your attention in the way that paper sources do not. And that likely results in a sense of being overwhelmed by sensationalism, by inflammatory tweets, and by “entertainment” news that doesn’t really matter. And no matter how we get the news, the content itself seems more daunting every day. In her address accepting a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Award, author Annie Proulx last month offered a stinging and truthful summation of what we together confront: “We don’t live in the best of all possible worlds. This is a Kafkaesque time. The television sparkles with images of despicable political louts and sexual harassment reports. We cannot look away from the pictures of furious elements, hurricanes and fires, from the repetitive crowd murders by gunmen burning with rage. We are made more anxious by flickering threats of nuclear war. We observe social media’s manipulation of a credulous population, a population dividing into bitter tribal cultures. We are living through a massive shift from representative democracy to something called viral direct democracy, now cascading over us in a garbage-laden tsunami of raw data. Everything is situational, seesawing between gut-response ‘likes’ or vicious confrontations. For some this is a heady time of brilliant technological innovation that is bringing us into an exciting new world. For others it is the opening of a savagely difficult book without a happy ending. “To me the most distressing circumstance of the new order is the accelerating destruction of the natural world and the dreadful belief that only the human species has the inalienable right to life and God-given permission to take anything it wants from nature, whether mountaintops, wetlands or oil.”1 You may be wondering what this has to do with Advent. Listen to how one Old Testament scholar describes the setting for today’s scripture: “Events moved at a dizzying speed for the Jewish people between 550 and 515 BCE, the period of thirty-five years that produced” this section of the book of Isaiah. You will remember that this is the period when a significant number of the best and brightest of the Jewish people were taken into captivity and exile in Babylon. “The crises of those years would have tested even the most robust and secure of communities. But the Jewish community of”2 that time was neither robust nor secure. Even though they may have had been economically prosperous during that portion of the exile, their spiritual alienation was profound. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel!” It doesn’t sound so very far off from where you and I find ourselves as we begin this trek through Advent this year. Some of us are enjoying a record-setting stock market; some of us will benefit from the tax plan the Senate passed yesterday, whether or not we oppose or support it; Colorado has a historically low 2.7% unemployment rate. But we all understand in our gut that something is not right. We are a people in exile. “O come, O come, Emmanuel!” Many in our nation may be enjoying material prosperity, but it comes as we face an environmental crisis of unparalleled proportions and it comes on the backs of those laboring in sweatshops in China and the developing world and in fields from California to Florida. We have a profound spiritual problem in this nation if we think the situation is acceptable. So, where do we turn? Where do we find comfort and joy in the face of a tsunami of bad news and injustice? Listen to the prophet: “The grass withers, the flower fades; but the word of our God will stand forever. Get you up to a high mountain… lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, ‘Here is your God!’ “See, the Lord GOD comes with might…He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.” I was struck by what I heard in two separate conversations last week with members of our congregation. One woman, who is quite politically active, told me that Plymouth is the one place in her life that is a source of strength right now. One man who is experiencing a rough time with his family said that he comes to worship because it is the one hour a week when he can calm himself and just be at peace. “O Come, O come, Emmanuel!” And when I see our teens sleeping out on Plymouth’s front lawn for the 13th consecutive year to raise funds and awareness, I am warmed and given hope. Their efforts have an immediate impact, and the sleep-out also helps to inform who these young people are becoming and where their priorities lie. Whether they know it or not, our teens are bringing us and others comfort and joy! When we are planning worship at Plymouth, we don’t use a whole lot of electronic media, especially in the morning, in part because we want it to be a time when spiritual renewal can take place. So welcome to live, handcrafted, artisanal, free-range, no hormones added worship! I hope that it brings you joy! I know that part of the DNA of our congregation is doing and acting for justice, and I also hope that each of us can take comfort and deep joy from our faith and from the presence of God within and among us. “O Come, O come, Emmanuel!” In their dialogic Book of Joy, the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu conclude that our pursuit for outward happiness based on things and accomplishments ultimately results in dissatisfaction and suffering. And that joy is something far more profound than happiness. The archbishop compares joy to a mother coming through the pain of childbirth and how that pain is transformed into the joy of bringing new life into the world. It is a metaphor with deep resonances in this Advent season as we prepare for the arrival of Christ once more. May you find a few deep breaths of peace even if you are overly busy. May you find comfort and joy in your faith, even if you are overwhelmed by the news. May you find a refuge and a sanctuary here at Plymouth to shelter you, to inspire you, and give you hope. O Come, O come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel, who mourns in lonely exile here; until the son of God appear. Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel! Amen. 1 reprinted at http://www.vulture.com/2017/11/annie-proulx-national-book-award- speech.html 2 Paul D. Hanson, Interpretation: Isaiah 40–66.(Phila.: WJK Press, 1995), p. 1 © 2017 Hal Chorpenning, all rights reserved. Please contact hal@plymouthucc.org for permission to reprint, which will happily be granted for non-profit uses. AuthorThe Rev. Hal Chorpenning has been Plymouth's senior minister since 2002. Before that, he was associate conference minister with the Connecticut Conference of the UCC. A grant from the Lilly Endowment enabled him to study Celtic Christianity in the UK and Ireland. Prior to ordained ministry, Hal had a business in corporate communications. Read more about Hal. |
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