Matthew 1:18-25
Advent 4
December 19, 2010
William G. Carter
But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”
Christmas is just under a week away. The trees are decorated. The candles are lit. The carols ring out. And the angels have come. You can’t have Christmas without angels.
The angels are God’s announcers. They stand between us and the Holy of Holies, and they speak on behalf of God. Without the angels making their announcement, Christmas would be just another peasant birth. All anybody would know is that a mother gave birth to her first-born son. But then the angel speaks and we learn a good bit more about the baby.
Angels can look like us. Mark tells of an empty tomb and says, “There was young man.” He sat among the tombs and said “Why are you looking for the living around here?” Strange question from a young man. The book of Genesis says two angels went to visit a man named Lot. He received them as human visitors and gave them something to eat. In the New Testament letter to the Hebrews, the preacher says, “Some have entertained angels without knowing it.” We have every reason to think that some might be among us.
Yet the Bible is also clear: angels are not like us. Angels are not human. They belong to a different order of God’s creatures. They don’t seem bound to time and space like the rest of us. In Bible stories, they have the ability to appear and disappear. Today we learn that angels even can infiltrate our dreams. And they have the ability to terrify mere mortals. The most common response to an angel is fear, which is why most angels begin their speeches by saying, “Don’t be afraid.” And most of the time, it might not do any good. Fear does not evaporate by somebody saying, “Stop fearing.”
So today, I thought what I would do is mention three good reasons why it is risky to listen to angels. That’s what lies beneath of the Gospel lesson. Our text is Joseph’s version of the Christmas story. It is one of the few places where we actually hear something about the carpenter. It offers a three-fold warning why we have to be careful about listening to angels.
Here is the first reason: angels interrupt us. When an angel speaks, your life is going to be interrupted.
Consider Joseph. His life was going in a straight line. He had a calling as a carpenter. It was a highly regarded trade in every village. He was engaged to Mary, and probably had been engaged for a while. Quite possibly it was an arranged marriage, an agreement between two families that the local carpenter’s son would later marry a much younger daughter of the other family. If that doesn’t sound very romantic to you, there are imaginary novels you can read and movies you can watch. But the plain truth is that these were people who lived close to the soil, people whose customs were long-established, people who knew one another and lived quite close to one another. They were not strangers who met in a far-off college town. Their families were deeply invested in their mutual future within that marriage.
But then the news comes: Mary is pregnant. The child is not Joseph’s. Just when Joseph thought he knew what to do, the angel speaks in the middle of a dream. “She will bear a son,” said the angel, “and the child comes from the Holy Spirit.”
I’m sure the angel thought that was an impressive message, and to us, centuries later, it is significant in every way. But it is a disruptive announcement and hard to take at face value.
Technically speaking, every child comes from God. Each baby is a holy gift. What the angel is saying is that Joseph is unnecessary. For the child to be conceived, Joseph is not needed. On the one hand, that is an insult on his masculinity. On the other hand, God is insisting that this particular child must be born.
It is an awkward moment. If Joseph had dreamed of a perfect life, now people will perpetually whisper about him and his lady. If he had hoped for a spotless reputation, now everybody in the village will murmur that Mary and Joseph started the honeymoon a bit early. Life will be interrupted by a child. Even if the child is expected, planned, and wanted, it will be an interruption.
Just watch what happens when a young couple announces their first pregnancy. More experienced parents circle around in celebration. Congratulations float in the air. Then the old duffers turn away, wink at one another, and smile knowingly. It is a grand conspiracy of silence, and the old duffers are overheard to say, “Aren’t we glad to be through all of that?”
Two Clarks Summit professionals announced her first child was on the way. It happened exactly on their schedule. “Everything is going our way,” they exclaimed. There were lulled into thinking that the planets circled around them. And when the baby arrived, it was a new reality. That baby took a lot of work. Strange hours. Yucky-looking food. Disgusting diapers. Inconvenient illnesses. Extra expenses. Guilt that they weren’t present enough. And then the day after the mother went back to work, she was scheduled to make a presentation before the top management. She reached into the pocket of her blazer to pull out a baggie of mildewed Cheerios.
“Joseph,” said the angel, “Mary is pregnant. The Holy Spirit is giving her a baby.” The announcement came early. Joseph was not ready for it. God spoke through the angel and interrupted everything he wanted and expected. If you wish to live a perfect, calculated life, safe from every act of God, I would recommend that you pay no attention to angels.
That brings us to a second warning: be careful of listening to angels, because angels push us off the page.
The Bible offers a long record of how God gets involved in people’s lives. There are plenty of stories about unexpected pregnancies. In her old age, Sarah gives birth to Isaac. In her barrenness, Rachel is surprised with a son. In her disgrace, Hannah makes a deal to hand over to God her first-born son, if only God gives her that child. And ancient Elizabeth discovers her old husband Zechariah, a temple priest near the end of his career, finally has the ability to produce a child.
In this sense, Mary is in a venerable Biblical tradition of God’s surprising birth announcements. But she is also different – for she and Joseph are not yet married. The Bible had words about that situation, as well. What does the Bible say? It says Deuteronomy 22: “She is to be taken out and stoned to death in front of the people.” Any question? That is the rule, when a man discovers his fiancée is pregnant by somebody other than him.
For a lot of people, clear rules give great comfort. Everything is fixed and settled. Nothing is left for discussion or debate. Just open the book and follow the rules . . . except that we have a clue here that Joseph is struggling to merely follow the rules. Matthew tells us a few things about him. Joseph is a tzadik – a “righteous man.” That means he takes the scriptures seriously. But we are also told he is “unwilling to expose Mary to public disgrace” and “planned to dismiss her quietly.” That is, he is going to take a softer, more compassionate approach to the ancient rules of Deuteronomy.
But then the angel speaks and says, “Joseph, take Mary as your wife.” Even though the rule in the Bible said, “Get rid of her,” there is a higher authority than the rules. And that is the authority of the One who makes the rules.
Now, this is hard for a lot of people to understand. They read the Bible. They find direction and purpose for their lives. They trust that the world is ordered in the ways that the Bible describes. They love the commandments: “No idolatry,” “No murder,” “No coveting.” No – no – no. But then something happens, something indescribable, something spiritual – and it scares them because it’s not on the page.
It came up often in the ministry of Jesus. The Bible said, “Don’t touch a leper” – and Jesus touched a leper and healed him. The Bible said, “Don’t associate with sinners” – and Jesus invited himself to share meals with them. The Bible said, “Stop work on the Sabbath” – and Jesus labored tirelessly to preach, teach, and heal on the Sabbath. Maybe he picked up this attitude from Joseph and how Joseph treated his own mother.
As somebody notes,
“Joseph is a good man… He loves his Bible and he knows his Bible... But he reads his Bible through a certain kind of lens, the lens of the character and nature of a God who is loving and kind. Therefore he says, “I will not harm her, abuse her, expose her, shame her, ridicule her, or demean her value, her dignity, or her worth. I will protect her.” Where does it say that, Joseph? It says that in the very nature and character of God.”
He was leaning in this direction, because he was a good man. But the angel appeared in his dream and pushed his compassion even further. That is to say, if you prefer a flat obedience, a life of inflexible rules, be cautious of listening to an angel.
This brings us to the third warning: Be wary of listening to an angel, because angels call us to make commitments and keep them.
Now, I wish to sift out any casual notions that Joseph was merely being a nice guy. We have been trained to think of him as a benevolent character on the front of a Christmas card, standing silently. No, the call of God upon his life was greater than that. He was interrupted by the announcement of a baby that was not his. His view of scripture and the moral law was filtered by the love and compassion of God. Now the angel invites him to keep his engagement, to stand by his betrothed, to forgive the intrusion of God upon her womb, and to raise Mary’s child as if it is his own.
I cannot imagine anything more difficult. I have known plenty of people who prefer a lofty aesthetic, an ambiguous piety. They talk about faith in general. They discuss endlessly this idea and that. They love the decorations of Christmas, the poinsettias, the perfumed music, the high drama, the beautiful art. But ask them to pin it down and they disappear.
The angel says, “Take Mary as your wife. Take her child as your own.” Do you know what that means? It means to dig in where you are. Trust the love you have for others. Take care of the persons God has put in your life. Welcome them as holy gifts, in all their specificity – even if it means handling dirty diapers, consoling those who cry in the night, and committing all your resources for their food and safety.
There’s a woman I know. She gave birth to two boys of her own. When they were mostly raised, she agreed to take in a foster child, an infant. She fed the baby, held her close, asked her sons not feel jealous. She has since taken in a number of foster children, all of them infants, many with profound needs. Most of them, she handed back to their parents when the time was right. She has cared for those, and begun their lives by surrounding them with the care and attention they needed. “It’s what I had to do,” she said. “And with each one, my ability to love grows even greater.”
The angel said to Joseph, “Raise the child as your own.” Take care of him. Give him a home. Instruct him in the carpenter shop. Teach him how to love God. These were the specifics of his assignment.
Today I think of Joseph. He could have lived the insulated life, the inflexible obedience, the ambiguous piety. He might have coasted along for years, uninterrupted and unaffected. Instead he listened to an angel who spoke to him in a dream, and he took Mary for his wife. He made a home for an unexpected baby named Emmanuel, God-with-us. It turned his future upside-down. Ours too.
I’m OK with that. How about you?
(c) William G. Carter
All rights reserved
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Looking in the Wrong Places
Matthew 11:2-11
Advent 3
December 12, 2010
William G. Carter
When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: 5the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”
Years ago in a Christmas pageant, I discovered once again a little-known truth about God. The shepherds stood in their tinsel halos, surrounding the Holy Family. A couple of them were fidgeting. One waved to her grandmother, another elbowed his neighbor for a better view. Yet on cue, they sang the verses of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
Maybe it was the commotion of the pageant. Or perhaps the timeliness of the occasion. But I heard one of the truth about God in one of the verses of the carol: “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given. And God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven. No ear can hear his coming . . .” That is the truth: God gives in silence and nobody can hear it.
It was an ironic moment, because that Christmas pageant was not silent at all. I have never heard of a Christmas pageant that was ever silent. For that matter, does Christmas ever come silently? There is so much hustle, bustle, and commotion. The economy is shaken awake by shoppers. The clatter is everywhere. As Frederick Buechner once complained, “The lovely old carols (are) played and replayed ‘til their effect is like dentist’s drill or a jack hammer.” In some places, even “Silent Night” is played very loudly.
Remember the Grinch, up on his mountain above Whoville? His greatest protest about Christmas is “the noise, noise, noise, noise.” Christmas can be very noisy, especially if you’re not in the mood for it this year.
By contrast, when God comes, “how silently, how silently . . . no ear can hear his coming.”
I wonder about the silence. Specifically I wonder why God is so quiet. To hear some people talk about faith, God is not quiet at all. God blows a trumpet, smashes the cymbals, and announces the good news with seventy-six trombones. In some kinds of Christian churches, if there is any common denominator, it is the chatter. People give their testimonies as if they saw Jesus at the car wash or the grocery store. They go on Christian TV stations in Tennessee and speak of how the Holy Spirit has been instructing them to talk to other people. For a brief time, I lived near a Christian book store. You couldn’t go in there without some Christian trying to convert from the kind of Christian you were to the kind of Christian they think you ought to be. Chatter, chatter, chatter.
If I scrape away all the promotional talk, my actual experience of God is more like the Christmas carol: “how silently, how silently . . . no ear can hear his coming.” And I need to tell you that I have great sympathy for John the Baptist. He sends a message to Jesus to ask, “Are you the One who is to come? Are you the One or should we look for another?” Apparently whatever Jesus was saying and doing was much too quiet to convince John that the Messiah had come.
Now we remember John the Baptist as a noisy preacher. He was noisy. He had a loud voice. He preached fierce sermons. He screamed at the pious people who came to hear him speak. Then if they came forward, he held them under the river for a good, long time. John knew the Messiah was coming, that the Messiah would burn away sins with unquenchable fire. He knew the Messiah would singe people with his Holy Presence and straighten out their lives.
John the Baptist was a noisy preacher. It was his loud voice that got him thrown into prison. He mouthed off to King Herod, and publicly called him an adulterer. Everybody knew the king was immoral, but John the Baptist actually said it. Back then, politicians paid attention to the preachers. Herod threw him into a dungeon. According to one account, he still liked to hear John preach - as long as he was chained up and out of sight. John was known by his loud voice.
But for some reason, John grew disappointed with Jesus. Jesus isn’t busy enough, or Jesus isn’t obvious enough, or – most probably – Jesus isn’t loud enough. So he mouths off from the dungeon: “Are you the One? Are you really the Messiah? Are you the One that I’ve been telling everybody about? Or should we start looking for somebody else?”
I can understand this. My greatest difficulty with God is his hiddenness. I experience a God who is not obvious and does not make a lot of noise. A friend loses a job and I pray, “God, give him a job!” And there is no job; just a lot of silence. People that I love bury a child and I pray, “God, this isn’t right, make it better.” And we wait, and we wait, and it still hurts. A good man gets a bad diagnosis; he has lived an exemplary life and now he’s sick. I pray, “Lord, you are the Good Physician. Lord, in your goodness, make him well!” And there is silence and the cold wind begins to howl.
I wish it didn’t have to be that way. I wish God would do whatever I wanted God to do. I wish God would speak up on demand. I wish God took orders from me. And then I noticed – whenever I tell God what to do, it gets really, really quiet.
Just imagine John the Baptist, the greatest preacher of his day. John spoke up about the king, called him out as a two-timer. John was correct about that, and his good deed did not go unpunished. The first couple of weeks in prison, he probably felt pretty smug. He said to himself, “Self, I did the right thing. I spoke up for righteousness in an unrighteous world.” And if you know you did the right thing, you can (at least) take some comfort in your right-ness, especially as you wait for the Messiah to finally come and make everything right, especially when you know that the Messiah has already sneaked into town.
But as time passes, doubt creeps in. Is he really here? Is Jesus the Messiah? Is he really the Messiah? That’s what John wants to know. And I cannot fault him for that.
We would love for God to be more obvious. We want God to give us the old razzle-dazzle, to impress us with feats that are scientifically impossible. Wouldn’t it be great if God could cure the cancer, reverse the aging process, and compel our kids to call us every day? Wouldn’t it be beautiful for God to autograph every sunset, to feed every starving child, to bring balance to every chaotic mind? Can you imagine if God could wave the divine arms and suddenly every gun would stop firing, every greedy person would share, every lion would sing Christmas carols with every lamb? Wouldn’t it be great if the Messiah would come?
As somebody has said about our passage, “There is always enough misery in the world to believe the Messiah will come. There is always enough misery in the world to believe that the Messiah has not yet come.” (Fred Craddock) The point is this: if I believe he is still coming, I can imagine the Messiah to be whatever I want. What I might miss is what he actually is, and where he actually is working.
Maybe you saw the last issue of National Geographic. It featured a big story about King David. David was the greatest of Israel’s kings. He consolidated the monarchy, he built up Jerusalem, and he raised the nation of Israel to great wealth and prominence. Well, maybe. Now the archeologists aren’t so sure. According to the excavations, Israel was not so big, and David was not so tall. Some are wondering: was King David really so great, or was the truth more likely that the people wanted King David to be great? It’s hard to tell.
There is a gap between what we expect and what we receive. Expect the big Christmas gift; and when it comes, it’s not so big. Expect the Messiah to come and make everything right; and then Jesus appears, a peasant with a smudge on his cheek and splinters in his hands. Is this what we wanted? Is this what God sent us?
And he’s so quiet. Not that he has nothing to say; no, he has plenty to say. But it takes some work to understand him. Jesus speaks in parables and the points are not obvious. He sticks to the small towns when he could go to the city and make a bigger impact. He doesn’t spend a lot of time with the movers and the shakers, with the people of great influence. No, he wanders out into the fields and considers the lilies. And he never seems to be in much of a hurry. Ever notice that?
Do you suppose one of the reasons why we make so much noise at Christmas is because we don’t know what to do with the peaceful, slow silence of God? So we fill it with a lot of words. We make a lot of assurances. We sing a lot of songs. We spend a lot of money. We make ourselves busier than every other time of the year. Somehow we think we can outrun the silence, rather than allow to catch up to us and fill us.
After all, we remember what the rest of the Christmas carol says: “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given. So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven. No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in.”
The Messiah comes, but not with a lot of noise. He speaks but you have to lean forward to hear what he is saying. Recently I found myself in a bumpy time. My prayers were full of babbling, and I mustered up the courage to pray, “Lord, where are you? What are you doing? Why aren’t you here?”
I thought I heard something, so I leaned forward and asked again. “Where are you? What are you doing? Why aren’t you here?” I heard something that sounded like a whisper. The Voice was very soft.
I said, “Lord, I really expect you to do something. Why aren’t you doing something?” And a Voice whispered, “Because it’s not your turn. I will get to you, but I work with one at a time.”
It rings true to the scriptures. There are lots of stories about Jesus, how he heals, how he cures. But he never stands in front of a crowd, waves his hands, and instantly cures everybody. No, he blesses one, and blesses another, then blesses a third. And he doesn’t start with the famous people, so that love trickles down from more important places. He doesn’t go to the obvious places to do the obvious things. No, he takes whoever he meets, one at a time. That’s why he says to John’s disciples, “Tell your preacher what you see . . .”
“The blind receive their sight…” One day as Jesus traveled, two blind people followed him, stumbling over stones, crying out for mercy. They caught up with him at a house and he said, “Do you think I can do this?” They said, “Yes, Lord.” With that, instantly they could see and he said, “Don’t tell anybody.” And they wrote it down in the Bible (9:27-31).
“The lame walk…” A Roman centurion said to Jesus, “I have a servant who is lying down paralyzed. Say the word and he will walk. And Jesus said the word, the man got up to walk (8:5-13).
“The lepers are cleansed…” Jesus came down from teaching on the mountain, and a leper came near and fell to his knees. “If you choose,” said the leper, “you can cleanse me.” Jesus stretched his hand, touched him, and said, “I choose; be clean,” and the man was clean. Jesus said, “Keep this quiet,” and Matthew wrote it down (8:1-4).
“The deaf hear…” Something had gotten into a man who could not speak. His world was silenced. His tongue was stuck, his ears were clogged, until Jesus opened him up (9:32-33).
“The dead are raised...” A synagogue ruler found Jesus to say, “My little girl has died; would you place your blessing upon her?” Jesus followed him home, chased away the mourners, and lifted her alive. (9:18-26)
“The poor have good news brought to them…” Biblically speaking, if you don’t have the means to make yourself well, you are poor. If you cannot save yourself, that is your poverty. Yet Jesus makes his way to you. He announces that you are precious, you are not lost, your cause is not forgotten. He will get to you.
Don’t look for the Messiah among the high and mighty. Don’t look for him among the satisfied and the self-sufficient. His mission field has always been the same: the blind, the lame, the leper, the deaf, the dead, and the poor. For the Messiah, they are all in a day’s work. According to Matthew and his stories, they may be wealthy or impoverished. Some are well-connected, others are disconnected. Not one of them needs to be named, yet he knows each and every one. And he stays with them quietly until they are healed.
Tell this to John the Baptist. The Messiah is among us and he stays busy. His work will not be flashy. He will not draw a lot of attention to himself, except as people see him where he really is. Without any fanfare, regardless of whether anybody actually notices, the Messiah comes to one person at a time, restoring and curing them out of the grace of God.
“How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given . . .” This is the promise of Advent and Christmas. The Messiah comes, but faith pushes us to lean forward, to listen carefully, to watch and wait for him to come where he is needed most. Because the Christmas carol is true: “No ear can hear his coming, but in this world of sin, where dear souls receive him still, the dear Christ enters in.”
(c) William G. Carter
All rights reserved
Advent 3
December 12, 2010
William G. Carter
When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: 5the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”
Years ago in a Christmas pageant, I discovered once again a little-known truth about God. The shepherds stood in their tinsel halos, surrounding the Holy Family. A couple of them were fidgeting. One waved to her grandmother, another elbowed his neighbor for a better view. Yet on cue, they sang the verses of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”
Maybe it was the commotion of the pageant. Or perhaps the timeliness of the occasion. But I heard one of the truth about God in one of the verses of the carol: “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given. And God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven. No ear can hear his coming . . .” That is the truth: God gives in silence and nobody can hear it.
It was an ironic moment, because that Christmas pageant was not silent at all. I have never heard of a Christmas pageant that was ever silent. For that matter, does Christmas ever come silently? There is so much hustle, bustle, and commotion. The economy is shaken awake by shoppers. The clatter is everywhere. As Frederick Buechner once complained, “The lovely old carols (are) played and replayed ‘til their effect is like dentist’s drill or a jack hammer.” In some places, even “Silent Night” is played very loudly.
Remember the Grinch, up on his mountain above Whoville? His greatest protest about Christmas is “the noise, noise, noise, noise.” Christmas can be very noisy, especially if you’re not in the mood for it this year.
By contrast, when God comes, “how silently, how silently . . . no ear can hear his coming.”
I wonder about the silence. Specifically I wonder why God is so quiet. To hear some people talk about faith, God is not quiet at all. God blows a trumpet, smashes the cymbals, and announces the good news with seventy-six trombones. In some kinds of Christian churches, if there is any common denominator, it is the chatter. People give their testimonies as if they saw Jesus at the car wash or the grocery store. They go on Christian TV stations in Tennessee and speak of how the Holy Spirit has been instructing them to talk to other people. For a brief time, I lived near a Christian book store. You couldn’t go in there without some Christian trying to convert from the kind of Christian you were to the kind of Christian they think you ought to be. Chatter, chatter, chatter.
If I scrape away all the promotional talk, my actual experience of God is more like the Christmas carol: “how silently, how silently . . . no ear can hear his coming.” And I need to tell you that I have great sympathy for John the Baptist. He sends a message to Jesus to ask, “Are you the One who is to come? Are you the One or should we look for another?” Apparently whatever Jesus was saying and doing was much too quiet to convince John that the Messiah had come.
Now we remember John the Baptist as a noisy preacher. He was noisy. He had a loud voice. He preached fierce sermons. He screamed at the pious people who came to hear him speak. Then if they came forward, he held them under the river for a good, long time. John knew the Messiah was coming, that the Messiah would burn away sins with unquenchable fire. He knew the Messiah would singe people with his Holy Presence and straighten out their lives.
John the Baptist was a noisy preacher. It was his loud voice that got him thrown into prison. He mouthed off to King Herod, and publicly called him an adulterer. Everybody knew the king was immoral, but John the Baptist actually said it. Back then, politicians paid attention to the preachers. Herod threw him into a dungeon. According to one account, he still liked to hear John preach - as long as he was chained up and out of sight. John was known by his loud voice.
But for some reason, John grew disappointed with Jesus. Jesus isn’t busy enough, or Jesus isn’t obvious enough, or – most probably – Jesus isn’t loud enough. So he mouths off from the dungeon: “Are you the One? Are you really the Messiah? Are you the One that I’ve been telling everybody about? Or should we start looking for somebody else?”
I can understand this. My greatest difficulty with God is his hiddenness. I experience a God who is not obvious and does not make a lot of noise. A friend loses a job and I pray, “God, give him a job!” And there is no job; just a lot of silence. People that I love bury a child and I pray, “God, this isn’t right, make it better.” And we wait, and we wait, and it still hurts. A good man gets a bad diagnosis; he has lived an exemplary life and now he’s sick. I pray, “Lord, you are the Good Physician. Lord, in your goodness, make him well!” And there is silence and the cold wind begins to howl.
I wish it didn’t have to be that way. I wish God would do whatever I wanted God to do. I wish God would speak up on demand. I wish God took orders from me. And then I noticed – whenever I tell God what to do, it gets really, really quiet.
Just imagine John the Baptist, the greatest preacher of his day. John spoke up about the king, called him out as a two-timer. John was correct about that, and his good deed did not go unpunished. The first couple of weeks in prison, he probably felt pretty smug. He said to himself, “Self, I did the right thing. I spoke up for righteousness in an unrighteous world.” And if you know you did the right thing, you can (at least) take some comfort in your right-ness, especially as you wait for the Messiah to finally come and make everything right, especially when you know that the Messiah has already sneaked into town.
But as time passes, doubt creeps in. Is he really here? Is Jesus the Messiah? Is he really the Messiah? That’s what John wants to know. And I cannot fault him for that.
We would love for God to be more obvious. We want God to give us the old razzle-dazzle, to impress us with feats that are scientifically impossible. Wouldn’t it be great if God could cure the cancer, reverse the aging process, and compel our kids to call us every day? Wouldn’t it be beautiful for God to autograph every sunset, to feed every starving child, to bring balance to every chaotic mind? Can you imagine if God could wave the divine arms and suddenly every gun would stop firing, every greedy person would share, every lion would sing Christmas carols with every lamb? Wouldn’t it be great if the Messiah would come?
As somebody has said about our passage, “There is always enough misery in the world to believe the Messiah will come. There is always enough misery in the world to believe that the Messiah has not yet come.” (Fred Craddock) The point is this: if I believe he is still coming, I can imagine the Messiah to be whatever I want. What I might miss is what he actually is, and where he actually is working.
Maybe you saw the last issue of National Geographic. It featured a big story about King David. David was the greatest of Israel’s kings. He consolidated the monarchy, he built up Jerusalem, and he raised the nation of Israel to great wealth and prominence. Well, maybe. Now the archeologists aren’t so sure. According to the excavations, Israel was not so big, and David was not so tall. Some are wondering: was King David really so great, or was the truth more likely that the people wanted King David to be great? It’s hard to tell.
There is a gap between what we expect and what we receive. Expect the big Christmas gift; and when it comes, it’s not so big. Expect the Messiah to come and make everything right; and then Jesus appears, a peasant with a smudge on his cheek and splinters in his hands. Is this what we wanted? Is this what God sent us?
And he’s so quiet. Not that he has nothing to say; no, he has plenty to say. But it takes some work to understand him. Jesus speaks in parables and the points are not obvious. He sticks to the small towns when he could go to the city and make a bigger impact. He doesn’t spend a lot of time with the movers and the shakers, with the people of great influence. No, he wanders out into the fields and considers the lilies. And he never seems to be in much of a hurry. Ever notice that?
Do you suppose one of the reasons why we make so much noise at Christmas is because we don’t know what to do with the peaceful, slow silence of God? So we fill it with a lot of words. We make a lot of assurances. We sing a lot of songs. We spend a lot of money. We make ourselves busier than every other time of the year. Somehow we think we can outrun the silence, rather than allow to catch up to us and fill us.
After all, we remember what the rest of the Christmas carol says: “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given. So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven. No ear may hear his coming, but in this world of sin, where meek souls will receive him still, the dear Christ enters in.”
The Messiah comes, but not with a lot of noise. He speaks but you have to lean forward to hear what he is saying. Recently I found myself in a bumpy time. My prayers were full of babbling, and I mustered up the courage to pray, “Lord, where are you? What are you doing? Why aren’t you here?”
I thought I heard something, so I leaned forward and asked again. “Where are you? What are you doing? Why aren’t you here?” I heard something that sounded like a whisper. The Voice was very soft.
I said, “Lord, I really expect you to do something. Why aren’t you doing something?” And a Voice whispered, “Because it’s not your turn. I will get to you, but I work with one at a time.”
It rings true to the scriptures. There are lots of stories about Jesus, how he heals, how he cures. But he never stands in front of a crowd, waves his hands, and instantly cures everybody. No, he blesses one, and blesses another, then blesses a third. And he doesn’t start with the famous people, so that love trickles down from more important places. He doesn’t go to the obvious places to do the obvious things. No, he takes whoever he meets, one at a time. That’s why he says to John’s disciples, “Tell your preacher what you see . . .”
“The blind receive their sight…” One day as Jesus traveled, two blind people followed him, stumbling over stones, crying out for mercy. They caught up with him at a house and he said, “Do you think I can do this?” They said, “Yes, Lord.” With that, instantly they could see and he said, “Don’t tell anybody.” And they wrote it down in the Bible (9:27-31).
“The lame walk…” A Roman centurion said to Jesus, “I have a servant who is lying down paralyzed. Say the word and he will walk. And Jesus said the word, the man got up to walk (8:5-13).
“The lepers are cleansed…” Jesus came down from teaching on the mountain, and a leper came near and fell to his knees. “If you choose,” said the leper, “you can cleanse me.” Jesus stretched his hand, touched him, and said, “I choose; be clean,” and the man was clean. Jesus said, “Keep this quiet,” and Matthew wrote it down (8:1-4).
“The deaf hear…” Something had gotten into a man who could not speak. His world was silenced. His tongue was stuck, his ears were clogged, until Jesus opened him up (9:32-33).
“The dead are raised...” A synagogue ruler found Jesus to say, “My little girl has died; would you place your blessing upon her?” Jesus followed him home, chased away the mourners, and lifted her alive. (9:18-26)
“The poor have good news brought to them…” Biblically speaking, if you don’t have the means to make yourself well, you are poor. If you cannot save yourself, that is your poverty. Yet Jesus makes his way to you. He announces that you are precious, you are not lost, your cause is not forgotten. He will get to you.
Don’t look for the Messiah among the high and mighty. Don’t look for him among the satisfied and the self-sufficient. His mission field has always been the same: the blind, the lame, the leper, the deaf, the dead, and the poor. For the Messiah, they are all in a day’s work. According to Matthew and his stories, they may be wealthy or impoverished. Some are well-connected, others are disconnected. Not one of them needs to be named, yet he knows each and every one. And he stays with them quietly until they are healed.
Tell this to John the Baptist. The Messiah is among us and he stays busy. His work will not be flashy. He will not draw a lot of attention to himself, except as people see him where he really is. Without any fanfare, regardless of whether anybody actually notices, the Messiah comes to one person at a time, restoring and curing them out of the grace of God.
“How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given . . .” This is the promise of Advent and Christmas. The Messiah comes, but faith pushes us to lean forward, to listen carefully, to watch and wait for him to come where he is needed most. Because the Christmas carol is true: “No ear can hear his coming, but in this world of sin, where dear souls receive him still, the dear Christ enters in.”
(c) William G. Carter
All rights reserved
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Missing the Kingdom of Heaven
Matthew 3:1-12
Advent 2
December 5, 2010
William G. Carter
“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
John the Baptist is an awkward character for Advent. He usually shows up at this time of year to splash some cold water on our Christmas preparations.
While the shopping mall cranks up the carols before the Halloween candy goes stale, John stands up on a desert rock to shout “Repent!” At a time when people survey the catalogs and pick out nice clothes for loved ones and themselves, John simply wears the same garb – the skin of a camel, fleas and all. He will not RSVP for holiday parties. He probably won’t send a thank-you note if you send him a gift. He will sing carols at your front door.
If you want to see him, you have to travel to where he is, out in the austere desert somewhere southwest of Jericho. People speculate about him and wonder where he comes from. That’s easy: his father was an old man, a priest in Jerusalem. John takes his religion outdoors. He preaches to the snakes, both reptile and human. He has one sermon. It is very brief: “the kingdom of heaven has come near.” And all kinds of people go to hear him.
They take a bus of tourists out to see him. The road is dusty and the air conditioning doesn’t work. The fat people get off the bus, cameras around their necks. The host minister leads them in a brief prayer, and then explains that John is something of a throw-back. “He’s the last prophet of the Old Testament,” explains the minister. “Dresses like Elijah, eats like Elisha. Takes no prisoners whenever he preaches.”
The little band of tourists traipses around a large rock, looks for a place to sit, and there is no place to sit. It’s just as well. John sees them, screams at them, and condemns them for wasting money on a bus when they can walk. One of them says, “I’m glad we don’t have a preacher like him.” Pretty soon, their hair is blown backwards. So they leave to find a nice store with olive wood souvenirs.
As they leave, they pass some religious leaders on a retreat. These guys are easy to spot in their formal gowns. They have taken off time for the weekend, and gone reluctantly to hear this preacher. A few of the more-than-usually-stuffy ones are concerned about John’s rhetoric. He is preaching without a license, teaching without certification. That concerns them.
The rest of them wonder why so many people are slipping out of town to go hear John preach. They are curious. What is the attraction? What does he say? Why are so many people going to hear him? Well, they never find out. When John sees them, he picks up a rock and hurls it at them. Then he screams, “Go back to the fires of hell where you came from!” With that, he spins around and walks away.
What is the attraction of this man? Why do the Gospel writers want us to see him?
It’s not so simple to claim that John is preaching against the establishment. There is no evidence that he is taking on organized religion. He speaks of the same God. He speaks of the same Kingdom. Everybody agrees that John is grounded in the same scriptures as everybody else in Israel. “This is the one,” says Matthew, “who embodies the very promise of Isaiah – he is a ‘voice hollering in the wilderness.’ This is the one who prepares us for the way of the Lord.”
John makes that hope concrete. “There is somebody coming who is greater than me. I splash you with water, but he shall burn you with Holy Spirit. He will take a big hooked fork and separate the grains of wheat from the lifeless stalks. Then he will burn that chaff with unquenchable fire.”
You know, given the choice, I think I’d prefer John the Baptist to the One he’s talking about. With John, you get your hair blown back by a sermon and then you get wet. But to hear him speak of Jesus – John makes it sound like Jesus is going to change us.
For what does John say? “Even now the axe is swinging at the root of the tree, and the fruitless tree will be thrown into the fire.” John doesn’t have an axe – all he has is a sermon. And he points toward Jesus as the one who separates the fruitful from the dead.
Then John says, “You can’t say ‘leave me alone, I come from a good family.’” The Kingdom of God is not a status system where some people are better than others, where some people are better connected than others, where some people act more pious than everybody else. People enter only one at a time. Either they come to God, having turned away from everything else. Or they will be exposed as selfish and manipulative, trying to scam God and prove they are better than they really are.
John’s point is well taken. We cannot come to God, flash our passing report cards, and assume that we are good enough on our own to enter a kingdom that does not begin or end with us. Something else is needed. Something like faith, hope, and love.
God plants faith as a small seed in our hearts and then waits to see if it grows. Will the seed of faith grow to take over the work we do? Will it determine the ways we spend our time and our resources?
God announces hope; it’s not a hope in our own striving, not a hope in our own achievements – but rather, a hope that history is moving somewhere, a hope that God will finish everything once began, that God will transform all things with grace.
And then God surrounds us with love: there was love before we were born, there is love all around us. Every day, God comes to us as love. Then God watches to see if that love is actually shared. Are neighbors enriched by our love? Are the little ones protected? Are the hungry fed? In the ways we live and give, is there any evidence that we have been loved?
I used to think that John the Baptist was the harsh one, the demanding one. This time through the text, I realize he is pointing to Jesus. What does he say about the One who comes? Jesus will swing the axe, carry the winnowing fork, clear the threshing floor, and throw the chaff into the fire . . . Jesus is the One who will change us. Either he will make us more loving (and therefore more holy), or he will have little use for us (which would make us expendable).
The text for today is more about Jesus than it is about John. John takes his bony finger and points to a Savior who really can save us. He can save us from superficial religion that aims to merely make us feel good. He can save us from the presumption that sitting in church is all it takes to be a Christian. He can save us from ourselves and all the stupid things we do; if we hand ourselves over to him, he will not only rinse us clean, but burn away all our destructive urges.
Jesus can change us, save us, but he will not do it cheaply. Just as it once cost him his life, it’s going to cost us everything. He will do surgery on our souls, and it will take away our reputations. It will reduce us to becoming dependent, humble, and completely available. All our arrogance will need to be amputated. The path of healing will take a while, especially if it’s going to last. Yet this is the only way to keep us from missing the kingdom of heaven.
We have a God who not only wishes to untangle our crooked paths but expects us to be honest about them. This is the kind of Advent God who comes to us in Jesus. It’s the kind of God that John knows – a God with the power to raise us up from dead and lifeless stones, a God who makes us a tribe of children who hunger and thirst for the world to be healed.
Such healing will not come cheaply. We remember that, as we come to this Table and taste broken bread and the poured-out cup. And we hear the promise once again: healing can come; it can come for those who want it more than anything else.
Is this what you want?
(c) William G. Carter
All rights reserved
Advent 2
December 5, 2010
William G. Carter
“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
John the Baptist is an awkward character for Advent. He usually shows up at this time of year to splash some cold water on our Christmas preparations.
While the shopping mall cranks up the carols before the Halloween candy goes stale, John stands up on a desert rock to shout “Repent!” At a time when people survey the catalogs and pick out nice clothes for loved ones and themselves, John simply wears the same garb – the skin of a camel, fleas and all. He will not RSVP for holiday parties. He probably won’t send a thank-you note if you send him a gift. He will sing carols at your front door.
If you want to see him, you have to travel to where he is, out in the austere desert somewhere southwest of Jericho. People speculate about him and wonder where he comes from. That’s easy: his father was an old man, a priest in Jerusalem. John takes his religion outdoors. He preaches to the snakes, both reptile and human. He has one sermon. It is very brief: “the kingdom of heaven has come near.” And all kinds of people go to hear him.
They take a bus of tourists out to see him. The road is dusty and the air conditioning doesn’t work. The fat people get off the bus, cameras around their necks. The host minister leads them in a brief prayer, and then explains that John is something of a throw-back. “He’s the last prophet of the Old Testament,” explains the minister. “Dresses like Elijah, eats like Elisha. Takes no prisoners whenever he preaches.”
The little band of tourists traipses around a large rock, looks for a place to sit, and there is no place to sit. It’s just as well. John sees them, screams at them, and condemns them for wasting money on a bus when they can walk. One of them says, “I’m glad we don’t have a preacher like him.” Pretty soon, their hair is blown backwards. So they leave to find a nice store with olive wood souvenirs.
As they leave, they pass some religious leaders on a retreat. These guys are easy to spot in their formal gowns. They have taken off time for the weekend, and gone reluctantly to hear this preacher. A few of the more-than-usually-stuffy ones are concerned about John’s rhetoric. He is preaching without a license, teaching without certification. That concerns them.
The rest of them wonder why so many people are slipping out of town to go hear John preach. They are curious. What is the attraction? What does he say? Why are so many people going to hear him? Well, they never find out. When John sees them, he picks up a rock and hurls it at them. Then he screams, “Go back to the fires of hell where you came from!” With that, he spins around and walks away.
What is the attraction of this man? Why do the Gospel writers want us to see him?
It’s not so simple to claim that John is preaching against the establishment. There is no evidence that he is taking on organized religion. He speaks of the same God. He speaks of the same Kingdom. Everybody agrees that John is grounded in the same scriptures as everybody else in Israel. “This is the one,” says Matthew, “who embodies the very promise of Isaiah – he is a ‘voice hollering in the wilderness.’ This is the one who prepares us for the way of the Lord.”
John makes that hope concrete. “There is somebody coming who is greater than me. I splash you with water, but he shall burn you with Holy Spirit. He will take a big hooked fork and separate the grains of wheat from the lifeless stalks. Then he will burn that chaff with unquenchable fire.”
You know, given the choice, I think I’d prefer John the Baptist to the One he’s talking about. With John, you get your hair blown back by a sermon and then you get wet. But to hear him speak of Jesus – John makes it sound like Jesus is going to change us.
For what does John say? “Even now the axe is swinging at the root of the tree, and the fruitless tree will be thrown into the fire.” John doesn’t have an axe – all he has is a sermon. And he points toward Jesus as the one who separates the fruitful from the dead.
Then John says, “You can’t say ‘leave me alone, I come from a good family.’” The Kingdom of God is not a status system where some people are better than others, where some people are better connected than others, where some people act more pious than everybody else. People enter only one at a time. Either they come to God, having turned away from everything else. Or they will be exposed as selfish and manipulative, trying to scam God and prove they are better than they really are.
John’s point is well taken. We cannot come to God, flash our passing report cards, and assume that we are good enough on our own to enter a kingdom that does not begin or end with us. Something else is needed. Something like faith, hope, and love.
God plants faith as a small seed in our hearts and then waits to see if it grows. Will the seed of faith grow to take over the work we do? Will it determine the ways we spend our time and our resources?
God announces hope; it’s not a hope in our own striving, not a hope in our own achievements – but rather, a hope that history is moving somewhere, a hope that God will finish everything once began, that God will transform all things with grace.
And then God surrounds us with love: there was love before we were born, there is love all around us. Every day, God comes to us as love. Then God watches to see if that love is actually shared. Are neighbors enriched by our love? Are the little ones protected? Are the hungry fed? In the ways we live and give, is there any evidence that we have been loved?
I used to think that John the Baptist was the harsh one, the demanding one. This time through the text, I realize he is pointing to Jesus. What does he say about the One who comes? Jesus will swing the axe, carry the winnowing fork, clear the threshing floor, and throw the chaff into the fire . . . Jesus is the One who will change us. Either he will make us more loving (and therefore more holy), or he will have little use for us (which would make us expendable).
The text for today is more about Jesus than it is about John. John takes his bony finger and points to a Savior who really can save us. He can save us from superficial religion that aims to merely make us feel good. He can save us from the presumption that sitting in church is all it takes to be a Christian. He can save us from ourselves and all the stupid things we do; if we hand ourselves over to him, he will not only rinse us clean, but burn away all our destructive urges.
Jesus can change us, save us, but he will not do it cheaply. Just as it once cost him his life, it’s going to cost us everything. He will do surgery on our souls, and it will take away our reputations. It will reduce us to becoming dependent, humble, and completely available. All our arrogance will need to be amputated. The path of healing will take a while, especially if it’s going to last. Yet this is the only way to keep us from missing the kingdom of heaven.
We have a God who not only wishes to untangle our crooked paths but expects us to be honest about them. This is the kind of Advent God who comes to us in Jesus. It’s the kind of God that John knows – a God with the power to raise us up from dead and lifeless stones, a God who makes us a tribe of children who hunger and thirst for the world to be healed.
Such healing will not come cheaply. We remember that, as we come to this Table and taste broken bread and the poured-out cup. And we hear the promise once again: healing can come; it can come for those who want it more than anything else.
Is this what you want?
(c) William G. Carter
All rights reserved
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Nobody Knows
Matthew 24:36-44
Advent 1
November 28, 2010
William G. Carter
“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. . . Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
Today is the first Sunday of Advent. The candles are on their ring. It’s beginning to look a bit like Christmas. The church gets dressed in Hopeful Purple and Royal Blue. We pull out the hymns that we sing once a year and we sing them once again.
But did you hear the text from Matthew’s Gospel? Advent is not the favorite season for anybody who likes to be in control. It sneaks up on us when we aren’t looking. Jesus speaks of the coming of God, and does so abruptly. "The day is coming . . . and nobody knows when. "
Last Sunday, on the final day of the church year, we heard Jesus speak from the cross about the lack of human knowledge. "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing." Today, on the first day of the new church year, he speaks once again about the limits of what we can and cannot know.
The subject is the coming of the Lord. We don't know when it will happen. Three times Jesus says we will not know the time. And presumably we will not know what it's going to look like, because he is careful not to tell us.
In this section of Matthew's book, there are seven parables in a row that tell us to be alert. To stay on our toes. To keep our eyes peeled. God is on the way, and we need to be as ready as we can. Then, as soon as Jesus says this, he add, "but nobody knows -- not the angels of heaven, not the Son, only the Father."
When God arrives, it will be like the time of Noah. People were putting away the turkey, and pouring themselves another glass of wine. Their kids are home from college to announce their breakups or their engagements. Things are going on schedule, when suddenly it began to rain. And it rains and it rains, and most of them had no clue knew it was coming. When God get here, it's going to happen like that. Nobody will expect it. "Because," says Jesus, "when God comes to us, God arrives like a thief in the night."
That's the gist of what this passage is saying. And the challenge for you and me is to simply come to terms with this description of God.
In our theological galleries, we carry a lot of pictures of God. The Lord is my shepherd. God is a loving father who welcomes home every prodigal. God is a mother hen who gathers all the chicks. But today, Jesus draws a picture that I would never think to choose. According to Jesus, God is a Thief.
"Your Lord is coming," said Jesus. If the house-owner knew when to expect the thief, she would have stayed awake. But she didn't know. And thus she was prone to have her house plundered.
This is what God is like. It's not a picture that provides much comfort.
A man had his toaster stolen from his apartment. After the burglary, he did a survey. That's the only thing he found missing. So you know what he did? He changed apartments.
I can understand, can't you?
A woman I know recently lost her husband. It happened without warning. The heart attack came as a complete shock. And before the funeral was held, the first thing she did before she could sleep in her own house was to install a security system. Death broke in once; she didn't want any more intruders.
I can understand it, can't you?
Some of us remember when a thief broke into a church member's car while she was sitting here in worship. It was parked out on the edge of the parking lot. Sometime between the call to worship and the benediction, a criminal smashed into the car and stole a lot of money. That led the stewardship committee to remind everybody that it’s a good idea to bring our wallets and purses to worship. But the situation is not funny. It's not funny at all. It was a robbery. If you have ever been robbed, you know how it feels. Violated. Intruded upon. Broken into. Someone has come into a place that you held sacred, and they have plundered it against your will.
This is the picture of God on the first Sunday of Advent. God is a Thief who breaks into a place we thought was safe. And we can't protect ourselves from the plundering of our own houses.
The New Testament draws this picture on a number of different occasions. Two times Jesus speaks of the day of the Lord as the intrusion of a Thief. Twice in the book of Revelation, Jesus himself says, "I will come like a thief." The apostle Paul warned the people in one of his churches, "Don't let God jump you unawares, like a thief in the night." He had to warn them about it, for the simple fact that God is sneaky. God is not obvious. God is usually up to something when it doesn't look like God is doing anything.
In his commentary on Matthew, Dale Bruner says, "One of the most surprising facts in Jesus' end-time teaching is that the last times will be normal. According to our passage, there will be parties, gourmet meals, courtships, and weddings right into the cataclysmic coming of the Son of Man . . . The Great Tribulation occurs while superficially all seems well. To the unobservant, it's party time. Thus Jesus' teaching of end-time normalcy should move disciples to look beneath surfaces to the deep structures of life - to see what is happening at levels we do not usually think to look."
For those with eyes to see, God is always up to something. And the spiritual life begins with the practice of paying attention. Keeping spiritually alert. Asking: what is God doing around here? How has God broken into this situation? What is God up to? We pay attention to questions like that, and trust this will open us to sainthood.
And yet, God doesn't wait for us to pull together all the answers. God never waits to act until we get ready. God is free to act in any way conceivable or inconceivable. And the Thief will disrupt us.
That's how the story of Christmas began, after all. God broke in, regardless of whether anybody was ready.
Picture young Mary as a teenager. An angel arrives to say, "Mary, you're going to have a baby." She didn't ask for it. She didn't expect it. In a very real sense, God intruded on her . . . and life was never again the same.
Joseph was chopping wood out behind the shop. His arms stiffened like a timber when she broke the news to him. All his dreams of settling down to a comfortable future vanished in an instant. He loved her, but he didn't sign on for this. God had burglarized his settled household and his predictable future. And nothing would ever be the same.
That's how it is when God climbs through one of the windows after dark. Everything we thought was settled is now turned upside down. And there isn't a thing we can do about it. Nothing to do, but to get with God's program.
Now, this is hard for some of us. For most of us. I set two alarm clocks for Sunday morning because I never want to wake up late. We want to show up on time, take charge, and know what’s going on. I was sitting at a meeting in a country church last Monday night. Somebody said, “Who’s playing football tonight? I want to know if I need to go home early.” So the moderator of the meeting clicked his iPhone, and declared it was merely the San Diego Chargers. We could meet as long as we needed.
It’s nice to have the kind of information, that kind of certainty, that kind of control. Check the weather, read your e-mail in church, make sure the Lord didn’t arrive early and leave you behind. All of us do this. I do it. I picked up a used GPS unit for my car. Then I fired it up, and got directions to my parents’ house. The people in my car laughed at me, hooted at me. “But look,” I said, “it tells me the precise time that we are going to arrive!” They didn’t hear me; they were texting on their cell phones and posting on Facebook about my control needs.
Now, to be fair, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we get God to come on schedule? If we could get God to show up when we want God to show up? If we could force God to jump into those situations that we want fixed right now? It doesn’t seem to work that way. And in the absence of any real control over our lives, we manufacture all these different ways, all these different gadgets, to think we actually have control over our lives. It’s a lie.
God has the authority to turn out the lights, cut the power, and break into our house. I'll be the first to admit it. This is not a comfortable description of God. But this is the most honest picture we're going to get. God comes to us like a thief in the night.
And it forces me to face the truth about life and death. I take out insurance policies, but ultimately there's no insurance against an act of God. I'm saving money to use twenty years from now, but it may not even be necessary. Who am I kidding? My life hangs by a fragile thread. The people I love and hold so dearly are temporary residents here, as I am. All those toys I have accumulated, all those possessions I am hoarding, all those things are depreciating as I speak. And most of the gadgets that I cling to in this life are the things that give me the illusion that I don't need to depend on God. My money and my stuff tempt me to ignore the claim that God has on my life.
If I only knew what time the Thief was coming, I could stay awake and keep my house from being robbed. But guess what: I don't know what time the Thief is coming. No one knows the time, except the Thief.
I don’t have a lot on this year’s Christmas list. But I just wrote down the title of a book that I want Santa to put under my tree. It’s called Hannah’s Child and it is the memoir of a theologian named Stanley Hauerwas. He was one of Phil Muntzel’s classmates at Yale Divinity School, taught at Notre Dame and Duke. It was a single quote that caught my eye. Hauerwas writes:
For me learning to be a Christian means learning to live without answers. Indeed to learn to live in this was is what makes being a Christian so wonderful. Faith is but a name for learning how to go on without knowing the answers . . . that’s why I find that being a Christian makes life so interesting.”
I saw the quote, I wrote down the title of the book. Because I need people of faith to remind me that to trust in God is to trust in God. We don’t run the world. To honor God above everything else is to watch and wait when we aren’t always sure what is going to happen next. To honor God is to let God break in however and whenever that happens – - and in the meantime to hang on and trust in God’s covenantal love that everything will turn out well.
We do this because this is the kind of God that Jesus believed in. It’s the kind of God that Jesus reveals. God comes as sneaky as a thief. Ready or not. Advent is the season to prepare for this intrusion, and we prepare by keeping our hearts awake.
(c) William G. Carter
All rights reserved
Advent 1
November 28, 2010
William G. Carter
“But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. . . Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour.”
Today is the first Sunday of Advent. The candles are on their ring. It’s beginning to look a bit like Christmas. The church gets dressed in Hopeful Purple and Royal Blue. We pull out the hymns that we sing once a year and we sing them once again.
But did you hear the text from Matthew’s Gospel? Advent is not the favorite season for anybody who likes to be in control. It sneaks up on us when we aren’t looking. Jesus speaks of the coming of God, and does so abruptly. "The day is coming . . . and nobody knows when. "
Last Sunday, on the final day of the church year, we heard Jesus speak from the cross about the lack of human knowledge. "Father, forgive them, they don't know what they're doing." Today, on the first day of the new church year, he speaks once again about the limits of what we can and cannot know.
The subject is the coming of the Lord. We don't know when it will happen. Three times Jesus says we will not know the time. And presumably we will not know what it's going to look like, because he is careful not to tell us.
In this section of Matthew's book, there are seven parables in a row that tell us to be alert. To stay on our toes. To keep our eyes peeled. God is on the way, and we need to be as ready as we can. Then, as soon as Jesus says this, he add, "but nobody knows -- not the angels of heaven, not the Son, only the Father."
When God arrives, it will be like the time of Noah. People were putting away the turkey, and pouring themselves another glass of wine. Their kids are home from college to announce their breakups or their engagements. Things are going on schedule, when suddenly it began to rain. And it rains and it rains, and most of them had no clue knew it was coming. When God get here, it's going to happen like that. Nobody will expect it. "Because," says Jesus, "when God comes to us, God arrives like a thief in the night."
That's the gist of what this passage is saying. And the challenge for you and me is to simply come to terms with this description of God.
In our theological galleries, we carry a lot of pictures of God. The Lord is my shepherd. God is a loving father who welcomes home every prodigal. God is a mother hen who gathers all the chicks. But today, Jesus draws a picture that I would never think to choose. According to Jesus, God is a Thief.
"Your Lord is coming," said Jesus. If the house-owner knew when to expect the thief, she would have stayed awake. But she didn't know. And thus she was prone to have her house plundered.
This is what God is like. It's not a picture that provides much comfort.
A man had his toaster stolen from his apartment. After the burglary, he did a survey. That's the only thing he found missing. So you know what he did? He changed apartments.
I can understand, can't you?
A woman I know recently lost her husband. It happened without warning. The heart attack came as a complete shock. And before the funeral was held, the first thing she did before she could sleep in her own house was to install a security system. Death broke in once; she didn't want any more intruders.
I can understand it, can't you?
Some of us remember when a thief broke into a church member's car while she was sitting here in worship. It was parked out on the edge of the parking lot. Sometime between the call to worship and the benediction, a criminal smashed into the car and stole a lot of money. That led the stewardship committee to remind everybody that it’s a good idea to bring our wallets and purses to worship. But the situation is not funny. It's not funny at all. It was a robbery. If you have ever been robbed, you know how it feels. Violated. Intruded upon. Broken into. Someone has come into a place that you held sacred, and they have plundered it against your will.
This is the picture of God on the first Sunday of Advent. God is a Thief who breaks into a place we thought was safe. And we can't protect ourselves from the plundering of our own houses.
The New Testament draws this picture on a number of different occasions. Two times Jesus speaks of the day of the Lord as the intrusion of a Thief. Twice in the book of Revelation, Jesus himself says, "I will come like a thief." The apostle Paul warned the people in one of his churches, "Don't let God jump you unawares, like a thief in the night." He had to warn them about it, for the simple fact that God is sneaky. God is not obvious. God is usually up to something when it doesn't look like God is doing anything.
In his commentary on Matthew, Dale Bruner says, "One of the most surprising facts in Jesus' end-time teaching is that the last times will be normal. According to our passage, there will be parties, gourmet meals, courtships, and weddings right into the cataclysmic coming of the Son of Man . . . The Great Tribulation occurs while superficially all seems well. To the unobservant, it's party time. Thus Jesus' teaching of end-time normalcy should move disciples to look beneath surfaces to the deep structures of life - to see what is happening at levels we do not usually think to look."
For those with eyes to see, God is always up to something. And the spiritual life begins with the practice of paying attention. Keeping spiritually alert. Asking: what is God doing around here? How has God broken into this situation? What is God up to? We pay attention to questions like that, and trust this will open us to sainthood.
And yet, God doesn't wait for us to pull together all the answers. God never waits to act until we get ready. God is free to act in any way conceivable or inconceivable. And the Thief will disrupt us.
That's how the story of Christmas began, after all. God broke in, regardless of whether anybody was ready.
Picture young Mary as a teenager. An angel arrives to say, "Mary, you're going to have a baby." She didn't ask for it. She didn't expect it. In a very real sense, God intruded on her . . . and life was never again the same.
Joseph was chopping wood out behind the shop. His arms stiffened like a timber when she broke the news to him. All his dreams of settling down to a comfortable future vanished in an instant. He loved her, but he didn't sign on for this. God had burglarized his settled household and his predictable future. And nothing would ever be the same.
That's how it is when God climbs through one of the windows after dark. Everything we thought was settled is now turned upside down. And there isn't a thing we can do about it. Nothing to do, but to get with God's program.
Now, this is hard for some of us. For most of us. I set two alarm clocks for Sunday morning because I never want to wake up late. We want to show up on time, take charge, and know what’s going on. I was sitting at a meeting in a country church last Monday night. Somebody said, “Who’s playing football tonight? I want to know if I need to go home early.” So the moderator of the meeting clicked his iPhone, and declared it was merely the San Diego Chargers. We could meet as long as we needed.
It’s nice to have the kind of information, that kind of certainty, that kind of control. Check the weather, read your e-mail in church, make sure the Lord didn’t arrive early and leave you behind. All of us do this. I do it. I picked up a used GPS unit for my car. Then I fired it up, and got directions to my parents’ house. The people in my car laughed at me, hooted at me. “But look,” I said, “it tells me the precise time that we are going to arrive!” They didn’t hear me; they were texting on their cell phones and posting on Facebook about my control needs.
Now, to be fair, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we get God to come on schedule? If we could get God to show up when we want God to show up? If we could force God to jump into those situations that we want fixed right now? It doesn’t seem to work that way. And in the absence of any real control over our lives, we manufacture all these different ways, all these different gadgets, to think we actually have control over our lives. It’s a lie.
God has the authority to turn out the lights, cut the power, and break into our house. I'll be the first to admit it. This is not a comfortable description of God. But this is the most honest picture we're going to get. God comes to us like a thief in the night.
And it forces me to face the truth about life and death. I take out insurance policies, but ultimately there's no insurance against an act of God. I'm saving money to use twenty years from now, but it may not even be necessary. Who am I kidding? My life hangs by a fragile thread. The people I love and hold so dearly are temporary residents here, as I am. All those toys I have accumulated, all those possessions I am hoarding, all those things are depreciating as I speak. And most of the gadgets that I cling to in this life are the things that give me the illusion that I don't need to depend on God. My money and my stuff tempt me to ignore the claim that God has on my life.
If I only knew what time the Thief was coming, I could stay awake and keep my house from being robbed. But guess what: I don't know what time the Thief is coming. No one knows the time, except the Thief.
I don’t have a lot on this year’s Christmas list. But I just wrote down the title of a book that I want Santa to put under my tree. It’s called Hannah’s Child and it is the memoir of a theologian named Stanley Hauerwas. He was one of Phil Muntzel’s classmates at Yale Divinity School, taught at Notre Dame and Duke. It was a single quote that caught my eye. Hauerwas writes:
For me learning to be a Christian means learning to live without answers. Indeed to learn to live in this was is what makes being a Christian so wonderful. Faith is but a name for learning how to go on without knowing the answers . . . that’s why I find that being a Christian makes life so interesting.”
I saw the quote, I wrote down the title of the book. Because I need people of faith to remind me that to trust in God is to trust in God. We don’t run the world. To honor God above everything else is to watch and wait when we aren’t always sure what is going to happen next. To honor God is to let God break in however and whenever that happens – - and in the meantime to hang on and trust in God’s covenantal love that everything will turn out well.
We do this because this is the kind of God that Jesus believed in. It’s the kind of God that Jesus reveals. God comes as sneaky as a thief. Ready or not. Advent is the season to prepare for this intrusion, and we prepare by keeping our hearts awake.
(c) William G. Carter
All rights reserved
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Save Yourself – and Us!
Luke 23:33-43
Christ the King Sunday
November 21, 2010
William G. Carter
The church practices a strange kind of politics. We call today “Christ the King” Sunday. We sing of Christ as sovereign. We declare Jesus is raised in glory, higher than every authority. When the world says, “Prove it!” we point to a cross. This is strange politics.
All the other kings of the world do whatever they can to save their own necks – they lie to get elected and immediately start running for re-election. They colonize other lands and declare it is their “divine right.” They blame predecessors for all the problems, cook up crazy schemes, tax their subjects to pay for those schemes, make people fearful to keep them in power, and generally foul up the air.
Nothing new about that. In introducing the biblical books of First Kings and Second Kings, the Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann says the titles of those books should end with question marks: “Kings?” You call these ‘kings’?!?” They know nothing about governing all the people and pander only to their friends. They know absolutely nothing about the common good.
The church says, “Jesus refuses the crown that Satan offered in the wilderness” and then we point to the cross. Listen to what happens there . . . (read the text)
//
There are a lot of things going on in that story. Some of them specific, some of them symbolic. What draws my interest, again and again, is the brief prayer attributed to Jesus on the cross: "Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing."
It is a Good Friday word. When ministers in a town gather on Good Friday, sometimes they decide to preach through the seven last words of Jesus. I feel sorry for the preacher who gets picked to preach on the moment when Jesus says, "I thirst." What more can you say about that?
At least this prayer from Luke 23 gives us something to struggle with, if only because there are many people who don't think that this verse belongs in the Bible.
If you followed the reading in a pew Bible, you might have noticed there is a footnote after Luke 23:34. The footnote says these words do not appear in many early versions of the Gospel of Luke. Back when scribes had to copy the Bible by hand, some scribes left out this verse. Maybe by accident, maybe by intent; we don't know what they were doing. All we know is that they left it out.
It could be, as Raymond Brown says in his commentary on the passion story, that there were some Christians who didn't want to believe Jesus actually prayed for the people who nailed him on the cross. Specifically some in the early church thought it was too favorable toward the Jews. So they told their scribes to take out that verse.
I don't know if that's the case, but I can understand how they felt. It is one thing to hear Jesus say, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you (6:27-28)." It's another thing to see those words put into practice. It is a hundred times easier to blame somebody than it is to forgive them.
Whatever the reason for its slippery heritage, the verse belongs in the writings of Luke, because Jesus says, "Father, forgive them, they don't know . . ."
According to Luke, that is the fundamental characteristic of the human race: we don't know. In Luke's second volume, the book of Acts, he tells a story about the apostle Paul. Paul stands up in Athens and says, “I passed an altar to the Unknown God, the One of whom you are ignorant. Let me tell you who that is: that unknown God is our Creator. That unknown God is the very One we all seek. And yet, we don't know him."
What was the testimony of the early church? Listen to what Luke says in the third chapter of Acts: "You and your leaders killed Jesus, the author of life, and you did it out of ignorance. You did not know." (3:14-17)
Or in the Gospel of Luke, in the Palm Sunday story, Jesus comes down the hill, around the bend, and sees the Holy City. And he weeps, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if only you knew the things that make for peace. But you do not know."
So it’s no surprise that Luke (and only Luke) reports what Jesus said on the cross: "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. (23:34).” They are ignorant.
I don't know how you feel about that. Those of us who are parents tell our children, "Don't ever call anybody "stupid." Yet that is the blanket description given to all people everywhere. Agnostos, literally “they don’t know.”
For Luke, it doesn't seem to matter who we are. We can have doctoral diplomas hanging on the wall. Or we can graduate Magna Cum Laude from the School of Hard Knocks. Some of the people who put Jesus on the cross had advanced degrees in theology. Others were adjunct professors in Political Science. Jesus says of both, "They are ignorant." You see, it is one thing to know. It's another thing to know.
That is the ignorance of which Jesus speaks, the gap between knowing -- and knowing. It is possible to memorize all the Bible verses in the world, and still be ignorant. We can gain all kinds of practical knowledge and still not “get it.” We can enroll in Bible School and earn a four point average, and still miss the point. That is the problem.
"Forgive them . . . they don't know what they are doing." That’s the prayer of Jesus. O come on, now, they know what they're doing. They're getting rid of a trouble-maker. They knew about trouble-makers. They had a Bible. They read the prophets. They knew what happened to God's prophets, and they kept doing it themselves, in their own time and place. You see, it is one thing to know. It's another thing to know.
It’s tempting to think you and I have overcome the ignorance. This is the age of instant information, after all. We have more knowledge at our fingertips than any generation before us. If we don't know it, we can download it in a few seconds. Maybe the world’s problem is that it needs more education. What do you think?
I will never forget what they told me as they gave me a tour of the Lackawanna County prison. It was before it got a makeover, when it still looked like a scene out of a Dicken novel. The grim surroundings matched the grim looks in the prisoners’ eyes. We were told not to speak to anybody, just look at them. Back outside, one of the jailers said, "Our society needs to educate people so that they don't commit crimes and end up in a place like this."
Then we got in a van and continued the seminar in an office park. They took us to a sound-proof conference room and spoke of employees who steal computers, raid the loading docks, and take drugs. Those were white-collar problems. What is the solution? They said, “Education. Education is the answer."
Later on I began to wonder. What kind of education keeps people out of jail? When some people would rather die than give up drugs, is their problem a lack of schooling? I may be wrong, but I do not know a school in Lackawanna County that provides a class that teaches thieves to stop stealing.
Yet we keep believing the old line that we can make progress if we accumulate more knowledge, fund more research, build bigger hard drives. We stockpile our facts and nothing really changes. We know all kinds of information, but we miss the Mystery of the Gospel, that in Jesus Christ “all things hold together."
The more I think about it, the more I believe this is the crux of the matter. Jesus says, "Jerusalem, you did not know the time of your visitation." The King came into your town and you did not recognize him. You didn’t even notice him when he prayed, "Father, forgive them. They don't know."
What don't they know? They don't know who that is, hanging on the cross.
Let this be a reminder that, before we point fingers at people who did not recognize the God who came in Christ, we can miss him too. This is part and parcel of “not knowing.” In fact, there is never an occasion in the whole Gospel of Luke when a single human person affirms Jesus as the Son of God. According to Luke, the only ones who really know Jesus are the angels and the devils. Nobody else.
Luke says that, on the day Jesus rode a donkey into the city, the crowd shouted, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" (19:38) Just a few short days later, some jokers took a magic marker and wrote an inscription over his head on a two-by-four, "This is the king of the Jews." (23:28). They did not know who he was, nor did they know what kind of king God had crowned him to be.
And do we know? We cannot claim any superiority in this. The text is a warning to good, upstanding church people. We are not better than anybody else when it comes to recognizing God. If we think we are superior, we run the risk of becoming shrouded in a fog of self-importance. It is possible to become so preoccupied with expertise and spiritual success that we miss the heart of the Gospel. And the heart of the Gospel is this: God helps those who cannot help themselves. God saves those who are otherwise un-save-able.
No amount of spiritual sophistication can unveil a hidden God. No level of education will open our eyes to glory. No scientific knowledge can carry us into the presence of the Holy One. Something else is needed. All we can do is to stand bare-headed, broken-hearted, open-handed, and say with all humility, "God forgive us; we don't know."
Today, the promise is that the prayer has been answered. That's the crux of the matter, isn't it? "Father, forgive them." The gospel is defined by forgiveness. The gospel is coming home to God and discovering that, through no work of our own, all our debts have been cancelled. All our sins are forgiven. All our pettiness has been wiped away.
It’s like the story Jesus tells of the prodigal son who comes to his senses in the pig-pen. He decides to try one more time to take advantage of the Old Man. So he cleans himself up, practices a pious little repentance speech, and goes home. When he appears at the far end of the driveway, his father drops everything. The father breaks all Middle Eastern customs and runs to his returning son. The father cuts off the canned repentance speech and throws a big "Welcome Home" party before either of his two sons can do anything about it.
All the neighbors say, "Look at that! Such shameful extravagavance, wasted on a sinner!" And Jesus smiles a sly smile and says, "You’d better look, all right. That's the very picture of God's good news."
Can you believe it? The key is in the prayer of King Jesus on the cross. "Father, forgive them." In that prayer, he uses the word "aphiemi." It means "a great big cancellation." The point is: God doesn't merely forgive our sins; God cancels them. God lets them go. God sends them away, dismisses them. That’s the word “aphiemi” – to cancel, to send away, to dismiss.
This is disruptive grace. Just imagine: even in God's heavenly domain, there's a hallway of cubicles, each one filled with accountants and bookkeepers. Every day at 2 p.m., God walks down the hall, knocks on a door post , and says, "Give me the ledger book that you have been keeping on Larry Jones." And God finds that page, finds the line where every sin have been recorded. God pulls a gallon bucket of White-Out of a robe pocket and spills it all over your page. Then God says, "Well, that's that."
You never had to ask God to do that, because Jesus has already asked him on your behalf: "Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing." In that prayer is the essence of the Gospel!
I like the words of an Episcopalian priest named Robert Capon, who puts it this way:
There is no sin you can commit that God in Jesus hasn't forgiven already. The only way you can get yourself in permanent Dutch is to refuse forgiveness. That's hell. The old baloney about heaven being for good guys and hell for bad guys is dead wrong. Heaven is populated entirely by forgiven sinners, not spiritual and moral aces. And hell is populated entirely by forgiven sinners. The only difference between the two groups is that those in heaven accept the forgiveness and those in hell reject it. Which is why heaven is a party - the endless wedding reception of the Lamb and his bride - and hell is nothing but the dreariest bar in town.
Jesus died for those for whom he prayed. His love is self-giving, and it is the sign and signal of God’s heart. Our part is to trust this is true, to believe God can love us so much as to give us a fresh start, a new beginning, by cancelling the wrongs we have done and the pain we have perpetuated. “Father, forgive them . . .” This is the true King’s prayer – and we trust it has been answered.
This is a strange politics. The real ruler of the world is the One who refuses to save himself. He chooses instead to save all of us, provided, of course, that we want to be saved.
(c) William Carter
All rights reserved.
Christ the King Sunday
November 21, 2010
William G. Carter
The church practices a strange kind of politics. We call today “Christ the King” Sunday. We sing of Christ as sovereign. We declare Jesus is raised in glory, higher than every authority. When the world says, “Prove it!” we point to a cross. This is strange politics.
All the other kings of the world do whatever they can to save their own necks – they lie to get elected and immediately start running for re-election. They colonize other lands and declare it is their “divine right.” They blame predecessors for all the problems, cook up crazy schemes, tax their subjects to pay for those schemes, make people fearful to keep them in power, and generally foul up the air.
Nothing new about that. In introducing the biblical books of First Kings and Second Kings, the Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann says the titles of those books should end with question marks: “Kings?” You call these ‘kings’?!?” They know nothing about governing all the people and pander only to their friends. They know absolutely nothing about the common good.
The church says, “Jesus refuses the crown that Satan offered in the wilderness” and then we point to the cross. Listen to what happens there . . . (read the text)
//
There are a lot of things going on in that story. Some of them specific, some of them symbolic. What draws my interest, again and again, is the brief prayer attributed to Jesus on the cross: "Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing."
It is a Good Friday word. When ministers in a town gather on Good Friday, sometimes they decide to preach through the seven last words of Jesus. I feel sorry for the preacher who gets picked to preach on the moment when Jesus says, "I thirst." What more can you say about that?
At least this prayer from Luke 23 gives us something to struggle with, if only because there are many people who don't think that this verse belongs in the Bible.
If you followed the reading in a pew Bible, you might have noticed there is a footnote after Luke 23:34. The footnote says these words do not appear in many early versions of the Gospel of Luke. Back when scribes had to copy the Bible by hand, some scribes left out this verse. Maybe by accident, maybe by intent; we don't know what they were doing. All we know is that they left it out.
It could be, as Raymond Brown says in his commentary on the passion story, that there were some Christians who didn't want to believe Jesus actually prayed for the people who nailed him on the cross. Specifically some in the early church thought it was too favorable toward the Jews. So they told their scribes to take out that verse.
I don't know if that's the case, but I can understand how they felt. It is one thing to hear Jesus say, "Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you (6:27-28)." It's another thing to see those words put into practice. It is a hundred times easier to blame somebody than it is to forgive them.
Whatever the reason for its slippery heritage, the verse belongs in the writings of Luke, because Jesus says, "Father, forgive them, they don't know . . ."
According to Luke, that is the fundamental characteristic of the human race: we don't know. In Luke's second volume, the book of Acts, he tells a story about the apostle Paul. Paul stands up in Athens and says, “I passed an altar to the Unknown God, the One of whom you are ignorant. Let me tell you who that is: that unknown God is our Creator. That unknown God is the very One we all seek. And yet, we don't know him."
What was the testimony of the early church? Listen to what Luke says in the third chapter of Acts: "You and your leaders killed Jesus, the author of life, and you did it out of ignorance. You did not know." (3:14-17)
Or in the Gospel of Luke, in the Palm Sunday story, Jesus comes down the hill, around the bend, and sees the Holy City. And he weeps, "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if only you knew the things that make for peace. But you do not know."
So it’s no surprise that Luke (and only Luke) reports what Jesus said on the cross: "Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing. (23:34).” They are ignorant.
I don't know how you feel about that. Those of us who are parents tell our children, "Don't ever call anybody "stupid." Yet that is the blanket description given to all people everywhere. Agnostos, literally “they don’t know.”
For Luke, it doesn't seem to matter who we are. We can have doctoral diplomas hanging on the wall. Or we can graduate Magna Cum Laude from the School of Hard Knocks. Some of the people who put Jesus on the cross had advanced degrees in theology. Others were adjunct professors in Political Science. Jesus says of both, "They are ignorant." You see, it is one thing to know. It's another thing to know.
That is the ignorance of which Jesus speaks, the gap between knowing -- and knowing. It is possible to memorize all the Bible verses in the world, and still be ignorant. We can gain all kinds of practical knowledge and still not “get it.” We can enroll in Bible School and earn a four point average, and still miss the point. That is the problem.
"Forgive them . . . they don't know what they are doing." That’s the prayer of Jesus. O come on, now, they know what they're doing. They're getting rid of a trouble-maker. They knew about trouble-makers. They had a Bible. They read the prophets. They knew what happened to God's prophets, and they kept doing it themselves, in their own time and place. You see, it is one thing to know. It's another thing to know.
It’s tempting to think you and I have overcome the ignorance. This is the age of instant information, after all. We have more knowledge at our fingertips than any generation before us. If we don't know it, we can download it in a few seconds. Maybe the world’s problem is that it needs more education. What do you think?
I will never forget what they told me as they gave me a tour of the Lackawanna County prison. It was before it got a makeover, when it still looked like a scene out of a Dicken novel. The grim surroundings matched the grim looks in the prisoners’ eyes. We were told not to speak to anybody, just look at them. Back outside, one of the jailers said, "Our society needs to educate people so that they don't commit crimes and end up in a place like this."
Then we got in a van and continued the seminar in an office park. They took us to a sound-proof conference room and spoke of employees who steal computers, raid the loading docks, and take drugs. Those were white-collar problems. What is the solution? They said, “Education. Education is the answer."
Later on I began to wonder. What kind of education keeps people out of jail? When some people would rather die than give up drugs, is their problem a lack of schooling? I may be wrong, but I do not know a school in Lackawanna County that provides a class that teaches thieves to stop stealing.
Yet we keep believing the old line that we can make progress if we accumulate more knowledge, fund more research, build bigger hard drives. We stockpile our facts and nothing really changes. We know all kinds of information, but we miss the Mystery of the Gospel, that in Jesus Christ “all things hold together."
The more I think about it, the more I believe this is the crux of the matter. Jesus says, "Jerusalem, you did not know the time of your visitation." The King came into your town and you did not recognize him. You didn’t even notice him when he prayed, "Father, forgive them. They don't know."
What don't they know? They don't know who that is, hanging on the cross.
Let this be a reminder that, before we point fingers at people who did not recognize the God who came in Christ, we can miss him too. This is part and parcel of “not knowing.” In fact, there is never an occasion in the whole Gospel of Luke when a single human person affirms Jesus as the Son of God. According to Luke, the only ones who really know Jesus are the angels and the devils. Nobody else.
Luke says that, on the day Jesus rode a donkey into the city, the crowd shouted, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!" (19:38) Just a few short days later, some jokers took a magic marker and wrote an inscription over his head on a two-by-four, "This is the king of the Jews." (23:28). They did not know who he was, nor did they know what kind of king God had crowned him to be.
And do we know? We cannot claim any superiority in this. The text is a warning to good, upstanding church people. We are not better than anybody else when it comes to recognizing God. If we think we are superior, we run the risk of becoming shrouded in a fog of self-importance. It is possible to become so preoccupied with expertise and spiritual success that we miss the heart of the Gospel. And the heart of the Gospel is this: God helps those who cannot help themselves. God saves those who are otherwise un-save-able.
No amount of spiritual sophistication can unveil a hidden God. No level of education will open our eyes to glory. No scientific knowledge can carry us into the presence of the Holy One. Something else is needed. All we can do is to stand bare-headed, broken-hearted, open-handed, and say with all humility, "God forgive us; we don't know."
Today, the promise is that the prayer has been answered. That's the crux of the matter, isn't it? "Father, forgive them." The gospel is defined by forgiveness. The gospel is coming home to God and discovering that, through no work of our own, all our debts have been cancelled. All our sins are forgiven. All our pettiness has been wiped away.
It’s like the story Jesus tells of the prodigal son who comes to his senses in the pig-pen. He decides to try one more time to take advantage of the Old Man. So he cleans himself up, practices a pious little repentance speech, and goes home. When he appears at the far end of the driveway, his father drops everything. The father breaks all Middle Eastern customs and runs to his returning son. The father cuts off the canned repentance speech and throws a big "Welcome Home" party before either of his two sons can do anything about it.
All the neighbors say, "Look at that! Such shameful extravagavance, wasted on a sinner!" And Jesus smiles a sly smile and says, "You’d better look, all right. That's the very picture of God's good news."
Can you believe it? The key is in the prayer of King Jesus on the cross. "Father, forgive them." In that prayer, he uses the word "aphiemi." It means "a great big cancellation." The point is: God doesn't merely forgive our sins; God cancels them. God lets them go. God sends them away, dismisses them. That’s the word “aphiemi” – to cancel, to send away, to dismiss.
This is disruptive grace. Just imagine: even in God's heavenly domain, there's a hallway of cubicles, each one filled with accountants and bookkeepers. Every day at 2 p.m., God walks down the hall, knocks on a door post , and says, "Give me the ledger book that you have been keeping on Larry Jones." And God finds that page, finds the line where every sin have been recorded. God pulls a gallon bucket of White-Out of a robe pocket and spills it all over your page. Then God says, "Well, that's that."
You never had to ask God to do that, because Jesus has already asked him on your behalf: "Father, forgive them; they do not know what they are doing." In that prayer is the essence of the Gospel!
I like the words of an Episcopalian priest named Robert Capon, who puts it this way:
There is no sin you can commit that God in Jesus hasn't forgiven already. The only way you can get yourself in permanent Dutch is to refuse forgiveness. That's hell. The old baloney about heaven being for good guys and hell for bad guys is dead wrong. Heaven is populated entirely by forgiven sinners, not spiritual and moral aces. And hell is populated entirely by forgiven sinners. The only difference between the two groups is that those in heaven accept the forgiveness and those in hell reject it. Which is why heaven is a party - the endless wedding reception of the Lamb and his bride - and hell is nothing but the dreariest bar in town.
Jesus died for those for whom he prayed. His love is self-giving, and it is the sign and signal of God’s heart. Our part is to trust this is true, to believe God can love us so much as to give us a fresh start, a new beginning, by cancelling the wrongs we have done and the pain we have perpetuated. “Father, forgive them . . .” This is the true King’s prayer – and we trust it has been answered.
This is a strange politics. The real ruler of the world is the One who refuses to save himself. He chooses instead to save all of us, provided, of course, that we want to be saved.
(c) William Carter
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