Sermons

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Translation is always interpretation, and with regard to the bible this can be applied to choices for punctuation and capitalization, since the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts have neither. So the fact that the name of Jesus appears here twice in all capital letters (as well as twice in Luke and once in John—I did consult my concordance), was a choice by the committee that translated the Authorized Version, probably to draw our attention to the sacredness of the Holy Name in Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of the birth of Christ. (In John, it’s from the crucifixion, and presumably reflects the fact that the sign Pilate placed on the Cross would have been in capital letters.)

I find this interesting, but I have to admit that it always reminds me of a sign I see every year this time of year in front of a house in Findlay. It reads “It’s a boy, and his name is JESUS.” Just like the all caps in our translation, I think it’s meant to be emphatic in a good way, but it always strikes me as if the tone were confrontational. “It’s a boy, and his name is JESUS.” I’m sure that’s not the point, but I have thought what it would be like to ring the doorbell, congratulate the person who answers on yet another baby, and ask why they name all their children “Jesus.” Must get confusing.

On a more serious note, notice how Joseph is given the honor of giving the Christ child his name. We often forget about Joseph, consider him a figure of secondary importance. He’s a bit like Amal Clooney, working tirelessly for human rights and prosecuting the perpetrators of genocide and all the rest and then having the bad luck of being married to a movie star. I’ve heard it said before—and I whole-heartedly agree—that St. Joseph should be the patron of clergy spouses. While Mary brings Christ into the world physically and the priest does so sacramentally, sometimes there needs to be somebody there to orchestrate a flight to Egypt, or at least to hang in there through all the craziness attending a peculiar vocation.

We focus so much on how Joseph is not Jesus’ “real dad” in the biological sense, but Our Lady, while engendering in Christ his humanity, is also his mother by something-other-than-natural (which is to say supernatural) means, so perhaps we shouldn’t get too caught up in Joseph being “marginalized” or something like that. They are both parents to our Lord in a true and profound manner. I’m grateful that the lectionary has us considering Our Lord’s earthly father this year, as much as the more familiar Annunciation story from Luke’s Gospel may provide us a more romantic picture. Joseph matters, too. He provides Christ his royal lineage; notice the angel addresses him “thou son of David.” He protects the Holy Family from Herod’s wrath. He takes his part in raising the child who would become the man who would save us all. Whether he imparts his carpentry skills to Jesus as some apocryphal texts would have it or not, he raises a master builder of another sort–one who would build a kingdom.

And most importantly of all, Joseph sticks around. He doesn’t dip out to the store

for a pack of smokes and disappear. He is called a just man, but this is used in a sense which implies more than fairness. He is upstanding and long-suffering and merciful and loving. None of us is Jesus. Few of us (I’d contend none of us, but I have a high view of the Mother of God, to say the least) are like Mary, the maiden from a Middle Eastern backwater who went on to tread the ancient serpent under her feet. But we can all be a bit more like St. Joseph, following the call of God down uncertain and sometimes dangerous paths, relying on the Lord’s guidance, confident in his providential hand, and being led to love in ways we never imagined. And maybe, when his family or his fellow carpenter’s pointed at his intended, clearly by now “in the family way”, whispering amongst themselves, Joseph went up to them, not confrontationally but confidently, lovingly but firmly, and said “it’s a boy. And his name is Jesus.”

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

A friend of mine recently shared an experience he’d had which renewed his faith in Providence. He’d been trying to help a Pakistani refugee family in his parish whom he said had run up against bad break after bad break, and he (my friend) felt he was at the end of his ability to assist them very effectively. He knew vaguely of a new priest in his diocese who was also Pakistani and thought that maybe his experience meant he’d know better how to help them navigate through all the nonsense they were running up against. So he gathered them all together, and after about five minutes the priest and the father of the household realized that they new each other from working together in Campus Crusade for Christ back in Pakistan. My friend reported that the family was immediately put at ease. And I for one have no doubt that if anybody can figure out how to handle a difficult situation, it would be two people working together who had been part of an evangelistic organization in a country where “blasphemy against Islam” carries the death penalty. My colleague’s response was “doesn’t God just do it” and I say “amen!”

I think something like this providential reacquaintance might be happening in today’s Gospel. We might be confused at first, as indeed I was, that John the Baptist seems to be asking whether Jesus was who he (John) already seemed to say he was several chapters and probably only months earlier at the Jordan River. But note (and this was a point that had not occurred to me until I read a blog post from another colleague—Andy McGowan, dean of Berkeley Divinity School at Yale—a few days ago) that John doesn’t dispatch his two disciples to Jesus but to the one claiming to be Christ, the Messiah. Of course, that one was Jesus, but presumably John didn’t know that.

We don’t return to John’s prison cell in Matthew’s narrative, but we might imagine the scene. The two disciples return, and they tell him:

We saw and heard exactly what the Prophet Isaiah foretold. This should be familiar, master, since he was your favorite person to quote in your sermons. “The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.”

That fits the bill, So who is it.

A man named Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary, from Nazareth in Galilee.

That guy! I knew it!

Doesn’t God just do it!

This must have given John strength to face the martyrdom he was to receive at the hand of that wind-shaken reed Herod in his soft raiment in his palace– to know that the Messiah had come, that he had played the part God assigned to him in the great work of salvation, that his reward was to be not merely an ignoble death but a crown of victory.

I mentioned Providence a moment ago, which is basically a fancy theological term for the proposition that God controls things. All Christians believe in this to some extent, and this is what distinguishes us from Deists, who believe God wound up the universe like a clock and then stepped away. There is, however, a worrying trend among some to reject the possibility of certain kinds of divine Providential acts. At least the trend worries me, and I’m the one in the pulpit so you have to hear me worry out loud, I guess.

So, there are two sorts of Providence: General Providence and Special Providence. To affirm General Providence is to say that you believe God is sovereign over the cosmos, that natural and human endeavors are a part of his plan, and this includes the plan of salvation. Naturally, we have free will and we’re sinners, so we can try to frustrate these designs, but good luck with that. So this is God’s will for the universe seen, as it were, from ten thousand feet. As far as I know, no bona fide Christian is seriously disputing this sort of Providence.

Special Providence, on the other hand, is what God does for us on the micro-level. It’s how he breaks into our lives as individuals and communities- how he makes himself felt and known and heard among us. There are some who would dispute that God acts in this way. I clearly think they’re mistaken, but one can understand why. One might see a tragic situation in which God has not intervened (or at least has not done so apparently) and get upset at the ostensible unfairness of human affairs and conclude that “God just doesn’t work that way.”

Now, I think that conclusion is wrong, but it’s understandable. I always go back to the climax of the book of Job. Job wasn’t there when God laid the foundations of the earth and shut up the see with doors when the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy. So it was a bit arrogant for Job to get snippy and think he’d do a better job than the creator of the universe, but it was understandable, and God wasn’t going to cast Job into outer darkness just for being petulant.

That said, we shouldn’t welcome the questioning of Providence because it leads us where I assure you we don’t want to go. I’ve seen it happen. First you change your prayers of the people in church on Sunday and your own personal prayers. You say something arrogant that’s meant to sound humble: “we can’t presume to change God’s mind (as if that’s what we think we’re doing in intercessory prayer) so prayer is only about changing us.” Then whatever good works and social action and self-improving meditation we do neither makes the world nor ourselves perfect. We’re left each of us needing to be crucified, because we think Christ’s one sacrifice didn’t take. So when I say that this line of reasoning leads us to a bad place, I mean it.

The upshot here is I believe God can do a miracle if he wants to. There’s no reason in the world we shouldn’t pray for one, and if we pray for the eyes to see God’s hand at work in and among us, we will see it. I bet John the Baptist knew that (at least he did in my made up story about his two disciples’ return). I suppose he could have said, “oh that guy claiming to be the Messiah is the same one I saw at the river that day? Weird coincidence, but that must be all it is.” No. That seems as unlikely to me as eleven men cooking up a conspiracy theory about a dead friend and deciding they might as well die for it “just for the lols.” It’s not scientific proof (you’ve still got to have faith) but I contend that the preponderance of evidence is leaning more-and-more in our direction here.

So I believe that we can, along with my colleague and his Pakistani refugee parishioners, along with John the Baptist, along with so many of our own number who’ve experienced the blessings of our Lord’s providential appearing, say with confidence “doesn’t God just do it!.”

+Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

I heard on a podcast this week that Advent wreathes are “so twentienth century” and the new hotness is something called a “Jesse tree.” My only association with that term had been from medieval art—Jesus’ lineage depicted as a tree growing from the root of Jesse being a common subject found in illuminated manuscripts of that era. The image that came to mind (which was, I found from a Google search of “modern Jesse tree”, completely wrong) was influenced by John the Baptist’s preaching of the axe laid to the root of the trees in this morning’s Gospel: a tree stump with with a single shoot of green coming out. I guess that would not be a very festive decoration for your house, but perhaps a more appropriate item for this season of quiet and penitential expectation. (As a counterpoint to my pretentious bluster, read my column in this month’s newsletter—out today—in which I confess to be prematurely celebrating Christmas in flagrant fashion!)

This morning’s lesson from Isaiah tells us that salvation comes from the stem or stump of Jesse. The Hebrew here, גזע, comes from a root word (pun intended) meaning to chop down. To all outward appearances the tree which is the house of Israel seems dead. But a single green shoot appears.

You’ve heard me say before that scripture contains a surplus of meaning, which is to say that the inspired word of God can say more than one true thing at once. The identity of the rod which grows from the stem of Jesse is a perfect example of this, when mentioned in Isaiah and in Paul’s use of the reference in the Epistle to the Romans and in what we see in this morning’s Gospel and the verses which immediately follow (presumably left out so we can read them on the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord next month, since our revised lectionary seems scared of repetition). That branch growing from what was wrongly reckoned dead is Israel, God’s chosen people and it is Christ himself and it is the Body of Christ, his Church. The Holy Spirit can walk and chew gum at the same time, so we don’t have to be dispensationalists (that’s a theological deep cut, which I can go on about at length sometime if you’re interested).

I want to make two points about this. I hope you’ll forgive me that; I try to keep my sermons to one point, but I’ll be brief. First, immediately after our Gospel lesson this morning, in which John the Baptist has God felling unfruitful trees, Jesus appears on the scene, he is baptized, and we hear the Father proclaim “this is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased.” Here God is, we might say, quoting himself. In Psalm 2 we read “I will rehearse the decree; the Lord hath said unto me, ‘Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.’” And in the 42^nd chapter of Isaiah, “Behold my servant, whom I uphold; mine elect, in whom my soul delighteth.” The Psalmist and the Prophet no doubt had the entirety of the people in mind when committing these words to writing, and surely God did too, but he also planted the seed (arboreal pun yet again, very much intended) for recognizing here too a foretelling of the Messiah, the Christ, who was revealed to be Jesus of Nazareth that day in the Jordan river.

So the people and their Messiah are in some fundamental spiritual way one. The takeaway from this is more than just “so you shouldn’t be an anti-Semite” though sadly this has to be repeated from time to time, and increasingly recently. The larger point is that God doesn’t renegue on his promises, and in the Christ he has, as that hymn we’ll sing again two weeks from today “ransom captive Israel” once more and for ever. Nor does he take back that abundant life which he has promised us, no matter how often we act as if we don’t want that gift, so long as we return with penitent and obedient hearts.

The second point is found in our Epistle. Unlike his other letters, which focus on a particular issue in the community to which he’s writing, Paul has a lot going on in the Epistle to the Romans. The occasion for his writing is likely a planned journey and a desire to raise funds for the saints in Jerusalem, but he takes that opportunity to write a more fulsome, almost systematic theology than is found in his other writings. That said, he’s not unconcerned with providing some specific correction, and we can postulate from the lesson we heard a few minutes ago that the church in Rome suffered from the same conflict (if not as acutely) as those in Corinth and Galatia—namely, the difficulty of integrating Jewish Christians and Gentile converts.

Paul’s quotes from the Psalms, Deuteronomy, and (of course) Isaiah are meant, I think, both to remind the gentiles in his audience that they need to show some regard for their Jewish sisters and brothers who preceded them in the faith and to remind the Jews in his audience that these converts had a right to be there and for their opinions to be respected, too. We’re all connected, through Christ, to the root of Jesse, but the precise shape of the new growth may be surprising both to those in the old branch and to those grafted on. Letting it grow naturally with the divine vine-dresser’s care is not something either can control.

It might be tempting to approach this reality to comment upon national or global issues—international armed conflict, political polarization, and so forth—and this is no doubt relevant. But as you might have heard me say before, preachers who spend all their time focusing on that are usually grinding an axe that has little relevance to how his or her congregation actually live and move and have their being. It’s a convenient way to sidestep giving people insight into their own lives at which they might bristle far more than just realizing that the preacher has different politics than theirs.

So I simply want to leave you with something to ponder during this ponderous season. In what area of your life—family, work (both professional and voluntary), church, social groups—are you like the Roman Jewish Christian who insists that everything must be done as it ever was and where are you like the Roman Gentile Christian who insists that everything must be changed even though you’ve only been around about five minutes. Neither of these two extremes is particularly helpful, which I hope is evident.

If you want to test this, I don’t know, replace the chestnuts with jicama in your brussels sprouts this year and note who at the table thinks you’ve thereby ruined Christmas dinner and who thinks next year’s menu should be a wholesale experiment in Victorian-Latin-American fusion cuisine. Maybe neither extreme reaction is advisable, since you all presumably want to get through dinner together without a big fight.

I think calm, considered tolerance is not only preferable to being a radical or a reactionary if you want to have a merry Christmas. I believe it’s what we’re called as Christians to strive to do in our lives as a whole. Temperance is a Christian virtue, after all, and we might just need it now (in our culture, in our communities, in our hearts) more than ever.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.