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..."Shout out to Johannes Gutenberg..."!!!
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If last week's major message was "Keep Awake", this week's message is "Keep Humble". I honestly started writing this sermon as a sermon to encourage personal humility, a personal humility like that of John the Baptist --- but as I began writing, I saw that the major message here isn't that we should be humble, but that Christ's humility is what saves us -- and then makes us humble. I should have known that it always starts with Jesus.
;)
Image: Untitled by Marije van der Hulst @ Flickr
Text: Mark 1:1-8
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, “See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.” John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. He proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thongs of his sandals. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
Kid’s message:
You’re beautiful. You’re handsome. To all of the kids.
Do people tell you that? Do your mom and dad tell you that? It feels good, doesn’t it? Yeah it does. We like it when people tell us that we’re handsome or that we’re beautiful. Now let’s change things up a little bit. How many of you can make an ugly face? Show me. (If need be, “Here’s one that I really liked doing when I was a kid.”) Yeah, those faces are uuuugly. Well, you know what? Jesus thinks you’re beautiful, and He thinks that you’re handsome, but you know what? Sometimes we make ourselves ugly. We make ourselves ugly when we don’t do what He wants us to do or when we do the exact opposite of what he wants us to do. We make ourselves ugly when we sin. But here’s the cool part, even when we’re ugly, He comes into our lives and makes us beautiful. He does that through forgiving our sins. He wants to see us as beautiful and as handsome and because of that He died on a cross so He could forgive us. Let’s pray….
Adult message:
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, who came to us humbly that we might come to him humbly.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
There was once a Chinese emperor who built a large castle for himself with only one entrance. This entrance was 2 feet off the ground and low enough that even the shortest person would have to duck their head in order to gain access to the emperor’s castle. The entrance was dubbed “the door of humility,” because every person, in order to come through the door to the castle had to bow.
Humility is one of those things in our life that we believe we understand, but rarely learn about it through practice, but rather we just learn about it theoretically. Much like trigonometry, many of us learn the theories behind humility and understand that they are worth something, but rarely make our lives ones that actually put those theories into practice.
The experience of being humiliated is not one that we normally think of looking forward to. In fact, it’s an experience that we seek to keep away from. Much of what we do in our lives, our jobs, our school work is to keep from being humiliated. While ostensibly the goal of what we do in our jobs, or why we study for finals is to get ahead, part of the reality of those actions is that we do not want to find ourselves in a place where we are humiliated, made low, made….humble.
Sometimes the things that we spend the most time at, even the things that we are considered the best at by other people, are just the things that we’ve been trying hardest to cover up because we won’t embrace them humbly. Sometimes we even try to cover up those things in our life that we don’t like about ourselves with things that are sins, things that make us even lower, more debased, than if we had embraced who we really were.
I knew a girl in high school who sat in front of me in my algebra class freshman year. I thought she was hot. Because it was algebra class and because I never liked algebra all that much, a got to spend a lot of time looking at her. I remember she had this long beautiful curly brown hair. I even remember that it smelled a little bit like corn starch and I never knew why – but that it added to her mystique…I mean, really, what could cornstarch do for your hair? Occasionally we got a chance to talk and developed something of a friendship. We went through high school together and I was never really in her league. She was one of those pretty girls, and I was…well...I hung out with some of the dregs of high school society – the drama kids, the skate kids, the hip hop kids. But she always remembered that I was the kid that sat behind her and we would share those “eye hello’s” in the hall. Senior year came, and I couldn’t find her in the halls anymore. She had to leave because her health wasn’t doing that well. That happens when you try to starve yourself.
Instead of loving herself, her appearance, in all of its high points and low points. Instead of seeing herself the way that I did, as the hot girl from algebra class, she saw something that needed to be covered up. I wish that John the Baptist could have walked into her life.
John the Baptist was an interesting guy. He was anything but covered up. Throughout the story of the Scripture there are few people that better demonstrated a sort of transparency about who he was. Really, the guy was a miracle baby, the test tube baby of his time. His mother, Elizabeth and his father Zechariah, were…well…just think of great grandparents. But yet, as the Lord told Zechariah, Elizabeth conceived and had a child. His naming ceremony was even a shocker. Normally he would have been Zechariah the Baptist, named after his father – but his father stepped in and said, “His name will be John,” just as God had told him to name him.
They say that the early formative events of your life, even something so simple as what you are named, have a lasting impact on your personality. This John, this oddity of human nature and of cultural convention at birth, lived to be just as shocking, just as controversial as his early formative events.
The Gospel of Mark tells us that John was a wild man out in the wilderness preaching what was just as unpopular a message then as it is today, “repent!” It tells us that he had some odd habits. He wore a cloak made out of camel’s hair, like wearing an itchy wool sweater to the tenth power.
That gives us the idea that his appearance was that of a wild eyed hobo. And that may have been what he looked like, but his dietary habits were different. He ate locusts and wild honey. Now the South Beach diet may suddenly look very appealing when contrasted with locusts and wild honey for us today, but for the time period, those were both considered to be delicacy. So now, on top of your image of a wild eyed hobo, imagine that this is a wild eyed hobo who sustains himself on Godiva chocolate and Dom Perrignon. Add to that the fact that he was preaching “repent!”, a message that carries the implication that he is someone who might be doing better morally than you are, and you have a strange character indeed.
I think John gets a bit of a bad rap in our conceptualizations of him. I think we think of him as we might a homeless man muttering to himself on the side of the street. That’s not really the picture of John the Baptist. Rather, the picture is of a completely transparent non-conformist eccentric. He’s a Salvadore Dali, a Dennis Rodman, a fashion designer wearing the oddest stuff but walking confidently like the rest of the world is dressed strangely.
I think John’s confidence is important to this story, because it provides a foil, something to put his words into perspective. When you hear “There is one coming after me, more powerful than me,” you should hear those words spoken in your head by the most powerful person that you can think of. When you hear, “I am not worthy to touch the strap of his sandals”, which was something that was culturally so low that even a slave could not be required to touch the sandal of his master, you should hear it coming from the most notable celebrity you can think of.
No, John knew who he was, faults and oddities and eccentricities. He knew them very well and he probably liked them. His humility did not come out of some sort of self-abasement. His humility didn’t come from some false image of who he was supposed to be or what society expected him to be. His humility came from something else, it came from a connection with the living God that was breathing into him a knowledge of someone greater than even his own great self coming, someone who would make John’s baptism pale in comparison.
Our story doesn’t tell us about it today, but that one who was greater and more powerful did come. His name was Jesus. He came into the life of John the Baptist and spoke some interesting words to him. He told John that he should baptize him. John, sticking to his humility, his understanding of who he really was, declined. But Jesus insisted. He put himself in the care of this wild eyed eccentric. He turned the tables on John’s humility and put John on a higher level than Himself. He continued to do that throughout His life, even to the point of putting himself in the care of the authorities of that age, who hung Him on a cross. He continues to do that in our lives.
I said before that I wished that John the Baptist had stepped into the life of the girl that I knew in high school. I still think that would have been a good thing for her, to be around this eccentric who was so transparent, so accepting of exactly who he was. I think it could have rubbed off a little.
But more than that, I hope and I pray that Jesus has stepped into her life time and time again. I hope that as He stepped in, she heard His humble message, his message that although He is under no requirement to do so, He has already made her so beautiful. I hope that she hears Him say, “I love you, not as you should be, not as other people expect you to be, but now, and I will make you beautiful.”
I hope and pray that you hear that same message for you today, “I love you, not as you should be, not as other people expect you to be, with all of your eccentricities and oddities, and I will make you beautiful, I will make you handsome, I have made you Mine.”
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This week I've been playing around with my new blog, jWinters.tumblr.com, and I've also been lazy and haven't posted them here.
;)
Image: when i was a young girl by gre4eskij nos at Flickr
These are links to those posts:
+ New international "emerging" community forming
+ A great fresh quote from Seth Godin.
+ My new favorite picture of myself and Liz
+ A video of Social Distortion's "I Was Wrong"
+ Link to the University Lutheran Enews
+ Advent 2 picture
+ "Golem" from Merriam Webster repost
+ John of Damascus picture with links to old Saints and Days content
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The first week of Advent usually centers around the theme of "Keep Awake". It seems to be almost a typo in the church year, this close to Christmas talking about staying awake for Jesus to return...but maybe it isn't as odd as it appears initially.
;)
Image: Insomnia Part 8 - Count the stars by J.C. Schroder at Flickr
Text: Mark 13:24-37
“Jesus said, “In those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light and the stars will be falling from heaven and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in clouds’ with great power and glory. Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. SO also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away , but my words will not pass away. But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son but only the Father. Beware, keep alert, for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake – for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cock crow or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you, I say to all, “Keep awake.”
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Three In One who shall come again.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in here. The tree is up, the altar paraments have changed. We have perhaps battled through “Black Friday” or at least the beginning of our Christmas shopping. We’ve started to hear Christmas music invading our radio waves, and we’ve started packing on the pounds with that first holiday meal.
However, even though our surrounding culture has declared this season “Christmas”, liturgical churches like this one have stood up and said…”Uhmnn….not…quite yet.” Instead of preemptively declaring the arrival of the Christmas season, a few churches – in fact more churches this year than ever before – have begun to call this church season an old Latin name – “Advent”.
Advent, derived from the word “adventus”, the Latin for “coming”, is a season just before Christmas…leading right up to the very Eve of Christmas itself. It is a time when we think about all of the events that led up to Jesus’ birth. It is also a time when we think of all of the events that will lead up to His second coming.
It is that second coming that Jesus is talking about in our text for this morning from Mark 13. Jesus tells us to learn a lesson from the fig tree, to watch for tenderness and shoots. The whole business sounds like some sort of naturalistic fortune telling scheme. Of course, that hasn’t stopped much of our society from trying to “stay awake” to see the coming of the end of the age.
On December 12th of 2012, the world is supposed to end. 12-12-12. An entire small industry has been built around it. The theory goes like this: There is an ancient Mayan calendar that has proven to be a fairly decent time-telling device. Unlike our current Gregorian calendar, there is no need for leap years to adjust time around to make years work out correctly. Well, the end of this calendar is calculated to be the 12th day of the 12th month of the 2012th year. You can buy books on this subject, go to conferences on it, and even buy insurance against whatever catastrophe might happen in 2012….you know, just in case there is a catastrophe and the world DOESN’T end.
Of course, a few of us here are old enough to remember the other end of the world. Y2K. On January 31st, 1999, all of us listened to Prince’s classic song and partied like it was 1999. We had been warned, the end of the world, or at least the end of our computer systems was coming. Fanatics built bunkers to live in. My friend Tommy and I discussed the idea of buying firearms…not because we were afraid of Y2K, but rather because Y2K gave us a great excuse. Of course, we’re still here.
We lived through 1988, also a year predicted to usher in the end of the world. And we even lived through the administration of a certain Ronald Wilson Reagan, a man with three names each with 6 letters – 6, 6, and 6.
So of course, it must strike us as odd for Jesus to point us to the fig tree to learn a lesson about seeing when summer is coming near. It must seem even stranger when we get to the section where Jesus says that even HE doesn’t know when this time is coming. If the Son doesn’t know, but only the Father, then what’s the point in us staying awake? It’s seemingly pointless…all of this staying awake.
When I was in my undergraduate years, I had a certain roommate named Chris. Chris and I both lived through our year together and eventually we both wound up being pastors. How we ever made it through that year, however, I have no idea. You see, we hardly ever slept. In fact, we would conduct experiments, using ourselves as test subjects to see exactly how long we could stay awake and what that would do to our bodies and our minds. I ended up staying up the longest, 3 days, with only a 20 minute nap in between, while writing an assignment for my creative writing class that came out disturbingly strange. We found out what a diet of caffeine and hostess cake products do to your system. We watched a lot of Golden Girls episodes at 4 in the morning.
We also took a lot of walks. We found that physical movement was key in staying awake for the long hours and that a short walk could actually get you over the bump of being sleepy into your 2nd, or 3rd, or 13th wind. Those walks became adventures, because we were able to see things never before seen to our eyes. We were able to see when the food delivery truck brought milk to the campus cafeteria, we were able to hear the birds begin to chirp at 4:30 in the morning, we were able to watch the sun come up on untrodden snow before anyone was up to disturb the pristine landscape. We were able to meet the sort of people that are up at 3 and 4 in the morning.
In that time we were able to take in the beauty and the oddity of the world around us. This Advent season, you have the same opportunity. Instead of going along with the rest of culture in the Christmas bacchanal, you can take this time of Advent to notice the unnoticed. You can take time to think about your life, the sins in it, the great gifts that God has given you. You can take time to think about Him, what it meant for Him to come to us as a little baby, what it meant for Him to die on the cross for us.
That is what advent is about, taking time before Christmas to see the world around you.
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I remember one of my seminary profs telling me that Luther talked about the Gospel as being like a rain storm that moved from place to place. Luther apparently saw that there were areas in which the Gospel flourished and then places where the Gospel seemed to be dying.
Rick Megis, the author of the Blind Beggar blog, talks about this in a recent post where he ponders about a westward expansion of the church. This image says it all:
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You can see the Gospel moving from the middle east (I think he’s dating it back to the Israelites in Egypt, but not sure) to Europe, to the United States.
It’s an interesting though, that the “center” of Christianity has changed throughout the ages. Today the United States is considered (and to some degree, considers itself) to be the epicenter of Christian thought and life. However, it wasn’t long that Britain and France competed over the right to say they were the epicenter of Christianity.
If Rick’s theory would hold true, we would be looking to China for the latest in Christian thought in a matter of decades.
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This Thanksgiving we began our Thanksgiving-Advent-Christmas series entitled "Empty". Emptiness is something that we all deal with in our lives, sometimes more during the holidays than at other times. While we consider the emptiness of our lives, our hope is to always see the fullness of Jesus - just like this leper from Samaria did.
;)
Image: Together and Alone II by DeathWing at Flickr
Text: Luke 17:11-19
On the way to Jerusalem He was passing between Samaria and Galilee. And as He entered a village, He was met by ten lepers who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” When He saw them He said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed turned back, praising God with a loud voice and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” And He said to him, “Rise and go on your way, your faith has made you well.”
Is your thanksgiving table empty?
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Three In One who fills our thanksgiving tables.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
While I was in college in Nebraska, I had a roommate named Dusty. As you might probably guess from his name, Dusty was a Texan. He was a long way away from friends and family. Pretty soon it was time for thanksgiving. I knew that Dusty wouldn’t be making the long trip back to Amarillo, TX to spend Thanksgiving with family, so I invited him to have Thanksgiving with my family in St. Louis. To my surprise, Dusty turned me down. He had already agreed to work that weekend to give someone else the opportunity to go home for thanksgiving, and as he put it – “I’ve done this a bunch of times, I’ll just sit down and have myself some thanksgiving hamburger.”
It was hard to hear those words out of my friend, even though I knew what he was doing and that it didn’t bother him. It just seemed wrong that on a day when the rest of the nation gathers together for communal meals that Dusty would be sitting all alone in our apartment eating hamburgers and watching Braveheart (which was just about the only movie he ever watched). I made sure I called him on Thanksgiving night to make sure that he was ok (and since Dusty never cooked that often…to make sure he hadn’t burned our apartment down with a Thanksgiving hamburger grease fire).
Some of us know what it is like to spend a Thanksgiving alone, or at least without some of the people that we’re used to seeing around the table. It seems that as the years come and go, people come and go from our tables. Sometimes we move away from the table that we always gave thanks at before. Sometimes relationships have broken that have barred us from returning to a familiar table. For whatever reason, you probably know what it is like to wonder what someone who used to celebrate thanksgiving with you is doing this thanksgiving. We wonder where they will eat. We wonder if they will feel as comfortable. We wonder if anyone will ever even come close to filling that lonely place setting that they left behind.
On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus came across 10 lepers. From a distance they yelled to him, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us!” Jesus did have mercy on them, although they don’t necessarily see that at first. The Bible tells us that the first thing Jesus does is that He tells them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” Now if you were a Jew at the time, you could have read between the lines there. You would have known that the first action of someone who had been healed of leprosy would be to go and show themselves to a priest so that the healing could be ratified and you could go about living as someone who was clean, not unclean – in good health, not a leper.
However, there was a Samaritan amongst this group of lepers. Normally this sort of fraternization would be looked down upon, Samaritans didn’t like Jews and Jews didn’t like Samaritans – but hard times bring people together and that seems to be what happened in this story. A community of nine Jews and a Samaritan had been necessitated by the simple need for human interaction. A community of nine Jews and a Samaritan yelled for Jesus to heal them. A community of nine Jews and a Samaritan heard the words of Jesus. The nine Jews, as I said before, probably knew that when Jesus said “Go and show yourselves to the priests,” that they were as good as healed. Overjoyed, they probably began to run and skip and jump to the priests. They couldn’t be bothered by anything probably that got in between them and the priests.
But the one Samaritan seemed to act a little differently. He seemed a step behind everyone else. You can probably imagine him following the rest of the Jews as they danced and skipped to the temple where the priest was, a little confused about why this was such a happy event. And as he was walking, perhaps he started to glance at his hands and his feet. Maybe an epiphany started to come over him as he saw hands and feet that had been covered in sores and dying flesh, now coming to life, coming to health. You can imagine his eyes widening as he began to realize what had happened, he had been healed. As his mind worked, you can imagine him slowing down, finally coming to stop, looking at his hands in disbelief. Perhaps he uttered something, something like, “I’m….I’m being…He healed me…He actually did it!” Maybe he was left silent, dumbstruck.
Whichever it was, he probably looked at his nine friends as they raced off to the temple. Then he looked back at the master. Friends, then to the master. The friends left him in their dust as they ran to the priests. The master was still standing there.
When I was a vicar, a pastor intern, in Gainesville FL, I spent thanksgiving alone. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been invited to anyone’s house. It wasn’t that my plans fell through. It was that I was too proud to admit that I had done something really stupid with my truck and that I couldn’t get it to start without pouring $400 or more into it. I hadn’t done that yet, and so transporting myself from where I lived to wherever the thanksgiving celebration was would be a difficult process. Instead, I chose to spend Thanksgiving like Dusty – I even made sure that I had enough ground beef to make a Thanksgiving hamburger.
As you can imagine, it wasn’t the most spectacular Thanksgiving that I’ve ever had. First of all I had to spend part of the night with most of the lights off because I was afraid that someone from the church would drive by, see my lights on, and harass me about it later…or even worse, invite me to their Thanksgiving feast. As the night went on and I finished cleaning up the dishes from my Thanksgiving hamburger, I began to think about all of the Thanksgivings that I had experienced. I began to think about all the people that had been at the table with me. I began to think about where those people were now, what table they were gathered around. And then I looked at my empty table and listened to my quiet house.
I don’t recommend that you spend any more than one Thanksgiving alone. It is a tough thing to go through, and most of the time it is completely avoidable. Any more than one Thanksgiving alone will not only prove that you’re a leper, but it will turn you into one. However, if you ever do find yourself alone on a Thanksgiving, I want you to think of the leper from our story tonight.
Having experienced the same grace that the other nine lepers had, the Samaritan leper found himself alone. It is possible that this Samaritan couldn’t have even gone to the same priest that his Jewish friends were going to. It’s possible that he was left alone, separated by cleanliness when he had found community in sickness. When He returned to give thanks, Jesus rightly saw an empty thanksgiving table. He saw our unthankful hearts, concerned only with what we have or what we can get. He saw the disconnect in our brains between what He has given us and what we have. He saw us correctly for the ungrateful, unthankful people that we can sometimes be.
But this leper, this Samaritan leper also saw things correctly. He could have seen an empty table. He could have seen his friends leaving him behind. He could have seen his world emptying around him as he was set free of his disease that had put him in the midst of community. But he didn’t. Instead what he saw was one person that could fill up a room. Instead what he saw was the man who had healed him. Instead what he saw was this man named Jesus who would die on a cross for the sins of the world. He saw that and he didn’t need a full table of people. He didn’t need the other nine. His world was filled up with just one person, Jesus.
This thanksgiving may your tables be full of good food and good company. May your tables be filled with laughter and love. But above it all, even if your table is empty this year, may your table be filled with the One, Jesus Christ, who fills our lives to completion.
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