Author: Steve

State after state has been lifting indoor mask mandates. Here in Oregon that is supposed to happen by the end of March. Some, like me, wonder whether that is wise even though Omicron case counts are declining. Hospitalizations for COVID-19 remain high in our county (with over half of those today being fully vaccinated people). And a new “variant of concern” has recently been reported in the news.

Yet many people, even some of those who most dutifully observed COVID-19 precautions up until now, are presently clamoring to be allowed to go unmasked. Leave aside those who have foolishly flaunted vaccine and mask advice throughout the pandemic, and there are still a good number who seem to have reached the end of their patience and desperately want to leave their faces bare in public places. And permitting them to do so fits nicely into the cycle of an upcoming election in a society in which masks and vaccines have been stupidly politicized.

Since I am one of the few who seem to be worried about lifting masks mandates and who will continue to wear a mask in the grocery store, etc., even when mandates are lifted, I continue to be sorely tempted to switch texts and avoid the epistle reading upon which I’ve planned for this coming Transfiguration Sunday, II Corinthians 3:12 – 4:2. Its talk of “unveiled faces” and freedom in the Spirit causes me great fear that some in our congregation will see it as biblical warrant for ditching masks in worship gatherings and blithely enjoying our restored “freedom.”

However, I am going to plunge ahead and try to make it clear that this text is not at all about the freedom to go barefaced and breathing out germs in what may be (but we can’t be sure) the tail end of a pandemic. Instead, it is about the spiritual act of concealing our own missing or failed glory by covering over “shameful things that one hides” as Paul says near the end of the text in 4:2.

Indeed, Paul at the beginning of the text in verse 13 doesn’t shy away from imputing to Moses, for his veil, a motivation which is not even suggested in our companion text from Exodus 34:29-35. One gets the impression in Exodus that Moses veiled his face, shining with the glory of God, for the sake of the congregation of Israelites. It intimidated them. But Paul says the veil was for Moses’ own sake. He wished to conceal the fact that the glory was ending, diminishing, that his face was incapable of holding onto that glory.

So what Paul has in sight here is not some literal, physical covering of faces, but the spiritual and social masks which we don in order to conceal our own lack of or diminished glory. It is a veil “over the minds” as he says in verse 15. It’s a veil that lets one listen to “Moses,” to the law of God, and imagine that one is perfectly good in relation to it. Yet the true source of glory is not in our own selves, hidden by the masks we use to conceal our faults, but in an unveiled acceptance of Christ, through whom we are “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another…” as it says in verse 18.

The veil to be removed, then, especially as we move toward the beginning of Lent next week, is the false appearance of our own glory. Personally, that might be our own clumsy attempts to cover sin and present a better-than-we-are image to those around us. It may be the attempts of some to cover and refuse to acknowledge their responsibility for others by downplaying the reality and seriousness of a pandemic that has killed nearly a million people in the U.S. alone.

At the end of Black History month we may want to acknowledge and forgo attempts to veil a sordid history of racism and racial violence and injustice, wearing instead a mask of “freedom and justice for all” that conceals the truth.

Here in the city of Eugene, distribution of anti-Semitic propaganda to various homes in the last few weeks reflects another ugly face of hatred which we may wish to pretend is not there, “is not us.”

In all such concealment, Christ shines forth as He did on the Mountain of Transfiguration, baffling and confusing our fumbling attempts, like Peter, to contain and control that glory as if it were our own. Instead, the voice of God, there on the mountain and here in the apostle Paul, calls us to listen to, to look to Jesus Christ and His glory, to follow Him on the next step of the journey, which is to the Cross. It is only such self-denying and sacrificial glory which will truly transform us into people who need no masks to hide behind. And such self-sacrifice may very well demand wearing literal masks to protect those around us.

I don’t think any theological work has helped me more than C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce in the work of imagining (forming an image of) what Paul is talking about in our text for this week: I Corinthians 15:35-50. I’ll come back to that book in a bit.

The text begins with the sort of question which I raised and left unanswered in last week’s message on verses 12-20 in this chapter. If the dead are raised, if our bodies are going to rise again, what will they be like? Will I look like I did when I was 20 or like I do now at 66 or even older? Will I have all my hair back on my head and maybe a bit less in other places? Will I need to sleep? To get really silly, will I be able to play the violin or ice skate even though I never could before?

Paul’s initial answers to verse 35’s question, “With what kind of body do they come?” seem reasonable and fairly easy to accept. He offers the analogy of sowing a seed which grows, is “raised,” into a rather different form than the seed itself possessed. So in verses 40 and 41 we are told that “heavenly bodies” will be different from earthly bodies. In verses 42 and 43, that difference is spelled out in several dichotomies, “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.” But the last dichotomy in verse 44 is the most difficult and is unfolded more in the following verses, “It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body.”

Part of the problem is in translation. The translation “physical” in verse 44 in the NRSV is highly misleading. The word in Greek is psychikos, literally derived from psyche, often translated with the word “soul” or perhaps “life,” thus something like “soulish” or “living.” The NIV’s “natural body” is better, but still problematic. In I Corinthians 2:14, the same word is translated “unspiritual,” which would at least make it clear that we are not dealing with a dichotomy between the physical and the immaterial. The dichotomy has much more of a moral quality to it, as it does in chapter 2:14 and 15.

Thus when we come to Paul’s conclusion (for this part of the chapter) in verse 50 that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God,” we ought to beware the danger of taking that as a contradiction to all he has already said (and I preached last week) about the resurrection of the physical body. Instead, “flesh and blood” carry their own moral meaning as the designation of the realm of human sin rather than literal, physical entities. This is quite consistent with Paul’s use of the single term “flesh” throughout his writings and it is also consistent with the use of the phrase “flesh and blood” by other rabbis of the time.

So in his answer to questions about what resurrection, “heavenly” bodies will be like, Paul is saying that they will be free from the taint of sin and death, not that they will be immaterial and less substantial than our present bodies.

Back to C. S. Lewis. In The Great Divorce, Lewis pictures the state of the blessed as more substantial, not less, than those who dwell in hell as well as more solid even than the narrator, who, we understand, is an ordinary human transported to heavenly scenes in a dream. The narrator experiences even heavenly grass beneath his feet as having more substance than himself. The inhabitants of heaven he first describes as “solid people,” in contrast to his experience of himself and his companions from hell as mere phantoms.

I could quibble with Lewis’s setting of fictional resurrection bodies in heaven rather than on the new and restored earth promised in the book of Revelation, but I believe his picture of spiritual reality as more, even physically more, instead of less than our present reality is spot on. Once again, to repeat from last week, our hope is not escape from our bodies. In this text we see that our hope is for our bodies’ transformation into something much more splendid and substantial than they enjoy now.

Thus the “seed” imagery of the text is also important for present life. What we do with our bodies now is being sown toward an imperishable body in the resurrection. Thus as Paul argued earlier in the letters, what we do in our bodies in regard to sexual morality or eating or in other ways, matters a great deal. Bodies are not merely handicaps or impediments in our attempts to be spiritual. They are the means by which we sow spiritual life and by which an eternal spiritual life will be realized. Spiritual life includes the life of the body.

We do well then to reckon what we are sowing as we engage in present embodied life, not only in relation to our own selves but in relation to the embodied persons we meet and interact with each day. Those bodies are all God’s good creation, destined to be recreated into something even greater.

I still remember the light bulb that went on for me as my eighth grade geometry teacher explained the principle of indirect proof, what I later learned is called a reductio ad absurdum in logic. In all sorts of contexts, one may demonstrate the truth of a statement by showing that its denial leads to a contradiction, an absurdity. The Greeks, like Pythagoras, used such arguments for some classic geometrical proofs, and reductio is used in many kinds of debates, including some ordinary conversation situations.

One says, “If that’s not true, then I’m a monkey’s uncle.” The implication is that, since I am clearly not a monkey’s uncle, then “that,” whatever it is, is true. The trick is to show that the absurdity actually follows from the assumption, i.e., that the falsehood of “that” actually implies that I have a simian niece or nephew or some other absurdity or contradiction.

With groundwork laid in the first eleven verses of I Corinthians 15, Paul begins to directly address the issue of the resurrection of the dead in our text this week, I Corinthians 15:12-20, starting in verse 12, “how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” followed by a chain of reasoning which teases out the absurd consequences if a Christian were to deny the resurrection of the dead. So verse 13, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then”

1) Christ has not been raised.

2) Our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain (verse 14).

3) We are even found to be misrepresenting God (verse  15).

4) Your faith is futile and you are still in your sins (verse 17).

5) Those who have died in Christ have perished (verse 18).

6) We are of all people most to be pitied (verse 19).

Paul’s argument is that 1) – 6) are absurd consequences of the denial of the resurrection of the dead. No Christian would want to assert of those statements. Therefore, there must be a resurrection of the dead after all.

Our text ends in verse 20 with the simpler conclusion, “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.” The implication is that the resurrection of Jesus brings with it and calls forth the resurrection of everyone else, “those who have died.” And Paul has already rehearsed the overwhelming evidence, the eye witnesses, for the resurrection of Jesus in the first part of the chapter. Thus a denial of Jesus’ resurrection which follows from a general denial of the resurrection of the dead is absurd in relation to that preponderance of evidence.

I am intrigued particularly by that last absurdity which Paul teases from the denial of resurrection, that “we are of all people most to be pitied.” Now, there have been those who have argued that Christians are pitiful fools from the beginning, from pagan scoffers and mockers of Christianity to contemporary atheists who wish to pin all the troubles of humanity on religious belief. And, unfortunately there is currently no shortage of pitifully foolish believers to fuel such infernal rhetoric.

But perhaps we can reduce blanket “pity” for the “foolishness” of Christianity to such pity’s own absurdity. Shall one pity Mother Teresa or Dorothy Day? Are Desmond Tutu and Francis Collins merely pathetic victims of delusion? Are we going to smirk in derision at the work of J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis? How about Madeleine L’Engle or Marilynne Robinson? No, there are bright, good, successful Christians in all walks of life, maybe especially in less notable and public arenas of life. Their joy, courage, and hope are hardly to be pitied. And neither need we deny the resurrection of the dead, a conviction from which a good deal of that joy, hope and courage derives.

Others of my generation or older may find yourself in the same situation. As I read verse 10 of I Corinthians 15:1-11, Paul saying, “But by the grace of God I am what I am. . .,” I cannot help but recall the cartoon character Popeye singing:

I’m Popeye the sailor man.
I yam what I yam and that’s all what I yam,
I’m Popeye the sailor man.

One major difference between Popeye and Paul is that the former attributes his strength to spinach, while the latter attributes it to grace. Yet both maintain, “I am what I am.” However, for Popeye, other than being a catchy line in his theme song, that tautological truth is used to assert a sort of self-satisfaction and assuredness in his own being. He is pleased and confident in what he is and wishes to be nothing else.

For the apostle, however, the statement that he Paul is what he is clearly focuses on his present state of being and distinguishes it from what he was before, as said in verse 9, “the least of all the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” The context, together with the attribution of his current condition to grace, is self-deprecating rather than self-satisfied.

The larger context of Paul’s “I am what I am” is the whole chapter’s discussion of the general resurrection of humanity to come. It begins with our text which first declares the doctrinal tradition Paul had preached in Corinth to be essential and then rehearses that tradition in verses 3 and 4, ending with Jesus being raised from the dead on the third day. Paul then turns to the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection with a list of witnesses, many of whom were still alive as Paul wrote to Corinth.

Paul then appears as the last of the witnesses, as “one untimely born” via the Damascus road experience of seeing the risen Jesus as recorded in Acts. It is at that point that Paul declares his unfitness for the role he has been given by grace, to be an apostle of the message he has just been recalling once again. At the close of verse 10 he does boast of how hard he has worked in that calling, but once again deflects the credit for it to “the grace of God that is with me.”

Paul’s use of the Popeye’s words, then, is radically different from how Popeye and many others use such assertions. Too often we can assert “I am what I am” as a kind of defiant unwillingness to let one’s mind, heart, or character be changed, even by the grace of God. Sometimes that defiance may even make a dubious appeal to divine intent as in, “I am what I am. This is how God made me, so it must be good.”

The trick is to thread through the Scylla and Charybdis of self-satisfied moral defiance and a debilitating self-loathing that fails to appreciate the hope Paul means to express in all this. In arguing for the general resurrection, Paul is de facto acknowledging human worth, including the worth of the body. Though we are unfit and undeserving, we are worth saving and raising. Paul was not fit to be an apostle but God saw in him a vessel worth pouring grace into. The same is true for all people. We are unworthy sinners but for grace, but the grace of Jesus instills a worthiness worth raising up for eternal life.

Perhaps we might all learn a little from a playground parody of Popeye’s song, which makes him a much more humble being:

I’m Popeye the sailor man
I live in a garbage can.
I eats all the worms
And spits out the germs
I’m Popeye the sailor man.

Without grace, we all belong in a garbage can and our bodies are merely food for worms. Yet by the grace of Jesus we are blessed to spit out the germs of sin and be raised into glory. Let’s receive a chastening message from Popeye and and then embrace the hopeful message of resurrection from Paul.

My wife loves the music of Richard Wagner, but–here’s the thing–she does not love Wagner. She will say herself that he wrote gorgeous music but he was a terrible man. Even as he was writing his last great opera Parsifal, which was filled with Christian imagery and ideas, including the hope of resurrection, Wagner was consumed by interest in racist, anti-semitic ideas. Thus Hitler was a great admirer of Wagner’s music and often used it at Nazi events, sometimes to the chagrin of the Nazi hierarchy who resented sitting through lengthy Wagnerian concerts.

The upshot is that Wagner is a pretty good picture of what Paul was getting at in the first three verses of I Corinthians 13, our text for this Sunday. Paul mentions various human accomplishments, all demonstrating an aspect of truly spiritual life and practice. Speaking in tongues, prophecy, understanding and knowledge, miracle-working faith, and incredibly selfless generosity and self-sacrifice. All of these, Paul says, are worthless, “nothing,” without love. The same might be said for incredibly beautiful music by a man who failed both in love for those around him (a life of sordid affairs) and in love for God’s chosen people. Though many, many people like my wife still play his music and are deeply moved, Wagner’s lack of genuine love and its true fruits suggests that whatever artistic gifts he exercised were pointless and worthless in regard to his own soul, his own salvation. Jesus asked, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?”

As I sometimes point out to young couples who wish this text to be read at their wedding, Paul wrote it to a squabbling, conflicted church. Part of the conflict was that some, at least, of the congregation was enjoying a fair amount of spiritual success. There were evidently talented, spiritually gifted leaders who taught well, worked miracles, and spoke in tongues. As the second letter to Corinth shows, there were also some extremely generous believers there. Yet they were fighting with each other. They had divided into parties and were arguing about who was more spiritual.

Paul wrote chapter 12, our texts for the last two weeks, to address some aspects of the division and to give the Corinthians (and us) a vivid image of how followers of Jesus are to live in organic unity with each other, like the parts of a single human body live and function together. Now, though, in a “still more excellent way” (12:31), he goes to the heart of the matter and holds up love as the highest of the cardinal Christian virtues. Without it, all the other virtues and gifts, including faith as in verse 2, are diminished to worthlessness.

Verses 4 to 7 offer both positive and negative characterizations of loving behavior in a personification of love as a agent doing or refraining from various attitudes or actions. These descriptions help us discern whether we might be in that dangerous situation of being without love.

In the next section love is again contrasted with a few spiritual attainments or virtues: prophecy; tongues; knowledge. The contrast this time is in regard to endurance. Love is what lasts, and in verses 9 to 12, love is in some way more complete than the cognitive spiritual virtues of prophecy and knowledge.

So that it does not remain mere wedding poetry, these thoughts on love need to take concrete form in actual human relationships, particularly in situations where we find it challenging to offer love. In our Gospel lesson from Luke 4: 21-30, Jesus is initially honored in His hometown of Nazareth until he begins to talk about God’s love toward people whom the Jewish people regarded as outside the boundaries of their own love, a pagan widow aided by Elijah and a pagan military leader healed by Elisha. Their admiration for Jesus is clearly not love as they try to throw Him off a cliff.

Likewise, we need to discern for ourselves if our admiration for Jesus includes genuine love for those we might tend to regard as outsiders, whether people of other races, political convictions, etc. If we harbor resentment and animosity and impatience toward others, especially those who are different from us, then even otherwise brilliant Christian performance will be worthless. And we may end up trying to throw the real Jesus off the cliff even while we pretend to be His disciples.

Most of us are probably acquainted with someone like the man in this picture, a person who has lost a body part. It might be a limb like his missing leg, a finger, an eye, or something less visible. Many, many of us are walking around minus various teeth or an appendix or gall bladder. I’m starting here this time, with the disturbing thought of being physically dismembered, in order to help us work backward to the incredible innovation and significance of Sunday’s text from I Corinthians 12:12-31a.

The thing is, the word “member” in relation to being part of a church has lost all its juice. You could say, all its blood. We are “members” of all sorts of things: the Wine-of-the-Month Club, credit unions, political parties, museums and art galleries, stores like Costco or Bi-Mart, and more. They all invite us to “join” and become members. So when your church invites you to become a member, maybe to take a class and submit an application, it all feels like just one more voluntary association with perhaps as little significance as that free oil change club card you carry in your wallet.

What we’ve forgotten over the course of twenty centuries of Christian history is that “member” did not always mean a person who is part of an organization. Instead, in the ancient languages of Bible times, it always and only meant a literal member of a body, typically a human body. That’s exactly how it was with the Greek word Paul used here no less than 12 times in our text. The idea of identifying human beings as parts, members literally, of a human body was not unknown but still extremely rare in the first century. It is only Paul’s adoption of the image and his picturing of the “Body of Christ” in this way that made membership in an organization the common idea it is today.

Note that even the word “organization” is not neutral to that body part image. Literally it’s a label for a functioning collection of organs, body parts again, all working together as the organs of the human body do.

I dwell on all this literal body part stuff in order to help us grasp like first century readers might have just how deep and essential is the connection Paul is describing. His humorous portrayal in verses 14-16 of body parts complaining to and about each other in regard to the various roles remains gripping. But it is even more so if we let ourselves feel the force of the basic word and idea operating in it all.

When Christians let the church be fractured and divided, it’s not merely the inevitable unraveling of some optional human social structure, it is literally the dismembering of the Body of Christ. When one Christian looks down on, humiliates, or hurts another Christian it is like cutting off an arm or leg, or gouging out an eye.

The body-member connection has another purpose for Paul. It supports and carries forward what he has already said in this chapter, as we heard last week, about spiritual gifts. They take various forms yet function together in the unity established by the Holy Spirit and reflecting God’s own unity as Trinity, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, yet always one God.

So this text calls us not only to preserve unity. It calls us to promote and celebrate diversity in the church. Contrary to a notorious church growth strategy of the late 2oth century, local churches ought not be homogeneous collections people of similar backgrounds and stations in life. Verse 17 highlights that by insisting that a human body can’t possibly exist if all the parts were one kind of thing. Neither can a church.

Struggles with racism, politics, and sexuality have all recently rubbed our Christian noses in the fact that we are still working at really grasping and living by what Paul said here. But noses are part of the body too. Sometimes they need to get rubbed in stuff.

This morning I spent an hour working with a technically gifted church member to make connections to the new screens in our sanctuary which you see pictured here. That person was also connecting and making usable a new camera for livestreaming our worship services. His technical know-how is a gift to all of us.

What you see in the picture is actually the work of many gifted church members. There are red poinsettias each donated by an individual. There are banners hung by a woman with an artist’s eye for the visual aspects of our worship, including flower arranging. There is a Christmas tree donated by one family and decorated by several. The stained glass of our denominational logo harks back decades to an elderly member’s memorial for her husband. The screens themselves were recently hung and wiring installed for them by a member with architectural and construction gifts. And of course the offering of worship in the space is a blend of musical, speaking, praying and other corporate gifts. All of those gifts come together each Sunday to bless everyone present as well as those joining us on-line for worship.

Our text for this Sunday, I Corinthians 12:1-11, explains the spiritual basis for the beautiful joining of those gifts. Verses 4 to 6 explains the diverse gifting of the church, the Body of Christ (as Paul will carry the thought forward just beyond our text in the next part of the chapter). Paul speaks of what individuals in the church do in three terms, “gifts,” “service,” “activities,” and connects each term with a member of the Trinity: Spirit, Lord (Jesus), and God (the Father). Thus the multiple offerings of human members of the church reflect the multiple persons of God’s own being as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

In this day of individualism and localism, it will good as we reflect more on this text to hunker down on verse 7, “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” Paul is addressing a congregation where it seems that individuals were celebrating their spiritual abilities for their own individual aggrandizement. To such folks, the word comes that the gifts given are not for the sake of those who have and utilize them, but for the common good. Our world desperately needs a people who live and model that desire for and mutual service on behalf of the common good.

The final verse also speaks to those puffed up in pride over their individual gifts. It’s a reminder that they are just that, gifts. They are not the product of individual merit or effort. The gifts are given to each individual by the Spirit as the Spirit chooses. They are not meant to be a source of pride, but of gratitude and a deep sense of responsibility.

I praise God for the gifts of people in our congregation! Even more, I praise God that they are exercised with genuine love for all, and great concern for the common good. May we realize what a gift that is to offer to those around us.

He woke from a coma only to discover that no one seemed to know him. That was the story of a Liam Neeson thriller from 2011, “Unknown.” Neeson’s character goes to the hotel where he and his wife were staying only to find his wife refuses to recognize him and that she is with another man who has taken on his identity. It seems that all the people who should know him do not. They all refuse to accept him for who he is.

It’s not just a movie plot. Our Gospel text, John 1:10-18, opens this week with these verses about Jesus: “He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.” Those words are a little jarring after we’ve just been celebrating the glorious arrival of Jesus in the world. Rustic shepherds and foreign magi came to see the infant Jesus. Angels sang about Him from heaven. Yet here He is, according to John, unknown among those who should have known Him, “his own.”

The lectionary gives the option of beginning the reading at verse 1 rather than at verse 10. But I’m not going to exercise that option this week because I’ve covered the opening of John in preaching many times. I should also acknowledge that many liturgical, church-year-following churches will observe Epiphany on this coming Sunday, January 2. That’s the Catholic model which allows worship leaders to “transfer” the January 6 Epiphany celebration to the Sunday between January 2 and 8, inclusive. That’s what I’ve done for years. But this year, with the nearest Sunday to Epiphany being the next one, January 9, I decided we would observe Epiphany on that nearer Sunday. This week we are reading together the assigned texts for the “Second Sunday after Christmas,” which almost always get skipped in an Epiphany transfer.

So I am particularly interested in this latter half of what is often called the “prologue” to John’s Gospel. When it’s begun at verse 1, it seems we often end at what feels like a climax in verse 14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father” (King James rendering). But four more verses are part of the opening of John and they too are worth our attention.

I particularly like verse 15 which gives us John the Baptist saying enigmatically, “He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” To us looking back with clear Christian understanding of Jesus’s divinity it makes perfect sense. The pre-existent Word appeared to the world after John but ranked ahead of John because He was always God long before John ever existed. Yet imagine the confusion of those who first heard such a statement from John. No wonder Jesus came and was not understood or recognized.

Yet another almost paradoxical part of the text appears in verse 18 as it explains that Jesus, whom His followers have seen in the flesh, has “made known” the unseen God whom, “No one has ever seen…” The same thought recurs throughout John, as in chapter 14 verse 7. Yet there is also the “subplot” that the seen and God-revealing Jesus remains unknown to many who encounter Him. Jesus turns the revealing role around in chapter 6 verses 44 and 45 to say that only those who know and attend to God will come to Him, Jesus.

In the Liam Neeson film the problem was an ugly conspiracy by those who refused to recognize his character. In the real world the failure to recognize Jesus and thereby recognize God, and vice-versa, is the result of the ugliness of sin. In His perfect humanity, Jesus Christ also reveals who we are, far, far less than perfect. Thus the fact that Jesus is often unknown can be the result of willful failure to accept and acknowledge Him. Likewise, the many sins of we who call ourselves Christians and followers of Jesus may be the result of our failure to recognize who Jesus really is and that those who truly know Him cannot continue to live in the unrighteous ways we often exhibit to the world.

So in the season after Christmas, let us do all we can to keep beholding the glory of the only begotten of the Father, the glory of God Himself. And let us live as people who know and understand what that glory might look like in our own lives.

Following the Facebook recommendation of a friend in Connecticut, Beth and I were pleasantly surprised to find ourselves enjoying a new Netflix film, A Boy Called Christmas. Part of our pleasure was probably the simple fact that, despite being a little too intense and sad at points for small children, it was free of profanity. More to the point, it was a good story which, despite being complete fantasy, approached death, suffering and even human evil in a realistic and serious way. And it ended on a hopeful note of belief in the worth of human generosity and kindness as ways to deal with the sorrows of life.

Now, if all that sounds to you as if the film were in no specific way Christian in its approach to Christmas, you would be right. The movie (and the book from which it derives) purports to tell a totally secular origin story for “Father Christmas,” beginning as a boy named, appropriately, Nikolas. The word “Christmas” appears as a sui generis, unexplained term for a joyous celebration involving the giving of gifts. There is no mention or even allusion to the story of Jesus.

Yet the connection of gift giving and generosity to a holiday whose name contains the title Christ, who is our Savior, is still quite correct. The actual St. Nicholas (though the “actual” person is surrounded in a great deal of legend) is connected to Christmas by his habit of secret gift-giving, most famously bags of gold dropped through the windows of homes of poor girls so that they might have dowries and be married instead of being sold into prostitution. The general Christian understanding is that gift-giving is appropriate at Christmas because the day celebrates God’s gift to us of Jesus.

So the epistle lesson for this Sunday, Hebrews 10:5-10, speaks about “offerings” and specifically about “the offering of the body of Jesus Christ” (verse 10). The text repeats a passage from Psalm 40:6-8, which begins with the understanding that God did not desire “[s]acrifices and offerings.” This is a frequent theme in the prophets and recognizes that the Jewish sacrificial system, which God Himself commanded, was not based on God’s need for offerings given to Him.

What the epistle reading turns on is the fact, aided by the Septuagint’s translation of “but a body you have prepared for me,” that giving begins with and remains centered in God’s own generosity. In verses 8 and 9, the passage sees Jesus as the one does away with the animal sacrifices and burnt offering, but instead does the will of God by presenting His own Body as an offering to God. And in verse 10 it is that Body of Christ which sanctifies us.

To put it briefly, the passage teaches that God both prepares and offers to Himself the offering He desires. The Incarnation is in sight here, because God takes on a human body and life in order to offer that same life and body back to God. It is God who gives God the gift (of human faithfulness and love) which God desires.

So, while it is absolutely good and beautiful to associate gift-giving with the Christmas holiday, we should keep in focus the truth that the source of that giving begins in and ends in God. If human beings have some innate disposition to generosity and giving, it is rooted always in God’s own nature and being. And that giving nature of God is what Christmas is meant to celebrate.

“So what’s with the pink candle?” Years ago visitors to our home, seeing our Advent wreath, wondered if we had run out of purple candles. Tongue-in-cheek Christian humorists imagine non-liturgical folks attending church in Advent and contemplating whether the congregation is so poor that they simply can’t afford another purple candle. The actual explanation and the larger history of Advent observance is as murky and as convoluted as any aspect of Christian worship can be.

While the making and gradual lighting of Advent wreaths is a tradition no more than a few hundred years old, the observance of Advent may date to the fourth century. A canon of the Council of Saragossa (380 AD) requires the faithful not to be absent from worship for three weeks from December 17 until the Epiphany (January 6). The first clear reference to the observance appears in the sixth century when the Council of Tours in 567 required monks to fast every day in December until Christmas.

Thus the roots of Advent lie in a penitential practice of abstinence in preparation for a feast day. That sense of somber self-denial while reflecting on and repenting of one’s sins probably drove the adoption of purple as the color for the Advent season. Although a more recent innovation in some Anglican and Lutheran churches has been to replace the more sedate purple with a brighter blue color. Blue is said to be a color of hope and the use of blue in Advent is supposed to stem from medieval practice in Salisbury Cathedral.

Which all still leaves us wondering about that odd-man-out pink candle. To start with, the color is, more properly, “rose.” It arises out of the practice of a celebratory Sunday of joy in the midst of the church’s longer times of fasting and penitence. Beginning with the fourth Sunday in Lent, Laetare Sunday from the opening words of the day’s Scripture, “Rejoice (laetare), Jerusalem!” The clergy changed from purple to rose colored vestments. The pope may have also given a rose to bishops and priests as a further symbol of joy. That joyful “break” in the Lenten fast was carried over to the Advent fast on its third Sunday and eventually became symbolized in a rose-colored candle. In Latin this third Sunday was named by another word for joy, gaudete, “Gaudy Sunday” in popular English usage. So here we are lighting a pink candle and thinking about joy this Sunday.

And, though the Gospel reading contains John the Baptist’s dire call for repentance and warnings of the consequences for the unrepentant, the other texts all speak of rejoicing and joy. Our text continues to be the epistle lesson for the week, Philippians 4:4-7 this time. Paul was able to write verse 4 even as he sat imprisoned, “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, ‘Rejoice.'”

So both our text and the very situation of this rose-colored Sunday in the larger scheme of Advent invite us to learn to rejoice in the midst of hard times. Indeed Paul goes on in chapter 4 of Philippians to say in verses 10 to 13 that he’s learned to be content in all circumstances, that he can still “rejoice in the Lord greatly” just at the concern shown him by the Philippians. Maybe it’s time for us to don some rose-colored glasses and find our own joy in the Lord. Or maybe it’s time to show some concern for those who may be finding it hard to rejoice. Either way, it’s a time for joy.

America produces 239 million tons of trash each year. In the last couple of years, the scope of recycling has declined in our community, apparently due to China beginning to limit the amount of recyclables it accepts. Setting our plastic carts of plain garbage, recyclable cardboard and plastic, and yard waste at the curb, we usually don’t give much thought to it all. It just “goes away.” Likewise for all the human waste which we daily flush away both literally and from our minds.

In one sense it is good for health that trash and waste is removed from the places we live. Accumulation of waste attracts both insect and rodent vermin, as Eugene neighborhoods have found with a rise in keeping chickens and backyard composting. Norway rats have moved in and become ugly pests even around homes without chickens or compost piles. They are attracted to collected rubbish which perhaps does not belong in the confines of a city.

In our Advent epistle lesson for this Sunday, Philippians 3:1-11, Paul is also concerned with proper waste disposal. In the second verse of the text, he warns against “dogs,” which is an ugly image for those who are advocating circumcision for Gentile Christian believers. As the text unfolds, it becomes clear that the Jewish practice of circumcision, itself a good thing of which Paul himself can boast, has become unhealthy refuse in relation to new life in Christ. Those focused on things which ought to be discarded from spiritual life became pesky and dangerous creatures in relation to new Christian believers.

So Paul enters into a discourse on all the spiritual accomplishments which he accumulated prior to encountering Jesus: his circumcision; his Hebrew heritage; his careful keeping of the law as a Pharisee; his zeal even to persecute the church when he thought Christianity was contrary to God’s will. All of it he says he now regards as loss rather than gain, even as “rubbish” in verse 8, a word which probably means dung or excrement and which suggests something which is properly thrown to dogs.

In the place of such spiritual rubbish, Paul holds up “the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” In verses 10 and 11, he says, “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” Paul understands that in order to know Jesus, he needs to discard much of what he thought he knew, what he thought he understood about place and privilege both in the world and before God.

It’s time for you and I also to begin sorting through what we imagine is important and discarding that which is simply refuse, with the aim of truly knowing Jesus. Paul’s inclusion of “and the sharing of his suffering” in what it means to know Christ makes it clear that part of what we may need to discard is a misguided notion that we are somehow as believers to escape loss and sorrow. Instead, it may be that just in such losses we discover what we actually need to know about Jesus. . . and about ourselves.

 

A few weeks ago I felt comfortable, for the first time in 18 months, inviting our church council to choose to meet in-person rather than on Zoom for our regular monthly meeting. Earlier in the pandemic, I regularly faced the question, “Why can’t we do this in person?” So I was mildly surprised when now they overwhelmingly expressed a preference for the Zoom meeting. Two council members, in particular, live 30 minutes away in the country and the ease of joining the meeting from home won out easily over driving country roads in the dark and rain of this time of year.

Yet those face to face encounters remain important. Even with faces partially covered by masks, most of our congregation has been thrilled to return to in-person worship services. It is a gift of love to be able to look into each other’s eyes as we gather, without the mediation of a camera and screen, even as wonderful as that technology is.

Without the benefit of Zoom and only the (amazing in itself) technology of writing, Paul in our text, I Thessalonians 3:9-13, was feeling that same desire for face to face interaction. Verse 10 says to the believers in Thessalonica, “Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you face to face and restore whatever is lacking in your faith.”

Just as a great deal of instruction has taken place over Zoom and other electronic media during the pandemic, Paul accomplished an incredible amount of instruction via the writing of letters. The resulting epistles still bless and instruct God’s people today. Yet even immediately engaged in the writing of what would be sacred Scripture, Paul expressed his longing to offer the Thessalonians something he felt to be lacking and which could not be restored by the writing of a letter.

I have to imagine that at least part of what Paul meant to communicate with his actual presence is what he prays for them in verse 12, “And now may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another, just as we abound in love for you.” That desire is followed in verse 13 by Paul’s petition for their sanctity and blamelessness “at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.” The thoughts are connected. It is abounding in love which will “strengthen your hearts in holiness.”

It is instructive to us that Paul connects physical presence to love and love to holiness and, finally, holiness to readiness for the return of Christ. As we in this church calendar season of Advent consider how Jesus came first in “the fullness of time,” as Galatians 4:4 says, let us think on what the “fullness of time” might be for His second Advent. At the least it seems it will be a time for Christians to renew their love, to abound in the practice of that most basic teaching of our Lord. And, it seems that now, as much as ever, is the time for love, an abundance of it.

When I came into the Covenant Church 45 years ago, it was still following an old Swedish Lutheran lectionary, which, along with the Church of Finland, identified the last Sunday of the church year as “Judgment Sunday.” In 1983 the Swedish church changed the theme of the day to the return of Christ. And with a change of hymnals in the 1990s, the Covenant adopted the practice of the Catholic church, and many others who joined in the Revised Common Lectionary, of calling that Sunday “Christ the King.”

Yet the readings for Christ the King Sunday do have elements of judgment in them. Since the focus is on Jesus’ taking up His final reign over earth and all creation, there is almost of necessity an understanding that not all will be prepared to bow the knee and accept His rule. The Gospel reading for this Sunday from John 18:33-37 reflects Pilate’s failure to acknowledge the kingship of Christ, and thus Pilate, who presumed to judge Jesus, is himself judged in the process.

One aspect of the Last Judgment appears briefly mentioned in our reading from Daniel 7:1, 9-14 for Sunday. In verses 9 and 10 we read that “the Ancient One sat down to judge,” followed by descriptions of his white clothing and hair and a fiery throne and a river of fire. He is accompanied by “Millions of angels.” Then at the end of verse 10 we find, “Then the court began its session and the books were opened.”

Last week in Esther we read how the Persian king Xerxes kept and had read to him a record of the history of his reign and that he was reminded by it of the good deed done to him by Mordecai in exposing a plot against the king’s life. Similarly, the great King of heaven is pictured with a book or books recording deeds and names of those toward whom He is favorably disposed. The book of Revelation may offer some justification for distinguishing between a “book of deeds,” recording everything which each of us has done, for good or ill, and a “Book of Life,” which seems to contain just the names of those who will be redeemed. It is mentioned several times in the Old Testament, including in Daniel 12:1.

The scene in Daniel 7 does mention “books” in the plural. And a distinction between a book of deeds and a Book of Life (which is only names and does not record deeds) may be helpful toward a basic theology of grace in which eternal life in God’s kingdom is given according to what Jesus has done for us and not on the basis of what we have done. Yet surely these “books” are simply images to aid our understanding that all of it, our entire personal histories and the status of our salvation in Christ is all held and contained without any error or loss in the mind of God.

These are days of exhaustive exposure of personal data. I was recently a little dismayed to find just how much information about me and my family is compiled on a single web page created by a notorious aggregator of digital public information. Yet the thought that God holds in His mind even more exhaustive details about my every moment of existence, is somehow reassuring. Though I may fail to remember cherished or even painful moments, or may remember them incorrectly, it is all retained for me forever in the divine memory.

And if God’s eternal retention of all the bad acts of my life is both embarrassing and frightening, the reassurance that He, by the grace of Jesus, is willing to hold me in His mind and heart in a way not finally based on my deeds is both comfort and peace. At this late date in my life I earnestly desire to and try to live in such a way that the record of me that is read out won’t all be to my shame. Yet even if it is mostly or nearly all a list of needs I would as soon forget, I am glad to contemplate that saving grace will triumph over all of that, and that my name will be in the Book of Life.

Our reading from Daniel concludes, “His rule is eternal–it will never end. His kingdom will never be destroyed.” That means that the place of those whose names are graciously inscribed in the Book of Life will also last forever. May the Lord keep you and me on that list.

In 36 years of ministry I have never preached on the book of Esther. It’s a unique bit of Scripture. Nowhere does it mention God, though one can see a divine hand guiding events and protecting Jewish people. Like the more read book of Ruth, its heroes are more the women than the men. And, as an article in the New York Times last year by Rabbi Meir Soloveichik suggested, it is strangely disturbing and unsettling in its portrayal of how fragile the Jewish position is in the world in the face of hostile forces both social and political.

Esther’s ascent to a place where she can influence the king of Persia (Ahasuerus in Hebrew, Xerxes) at first blush grates on modern, egalitarian ears. She basically wins a beauty contest which lands her first place in a harem of women who visit the king’s bed at his whim. The contest takes place because the actual queen, Vashti, is found disobedient to the king’s commands and is banished, lest women throughout Persia follow her example and become disobedient to their own husbands.

Xerxes punished his queen for refusing to attend a drunken banquet of his male buddies and display herself for them. He accepts his advisors’ suggestion of the subsequent beauty contest to find a replacement. None of Xerxes’ behavior is condemned in the narrative, but neither is it approved. There is room to see a mocking tone in the description of the lavishness of his partying and his susceptibility to manipulation by several characters in the story, including Esther herself. And in recent times, a number of biblical scholars have suggested that the pagan queen Vashti is also worthy of some respect and admiration for her stand against being exploited as a woman, despite the great cost to herself.

The text I’m focusing on for Sunday, Esther 4:1-17, dwells on Esther’s great moment of decision. Mordecai asks her to dare going to the king even though uninvited, an act punishable by death unless the king “holds out his gold scepter” in a show of mercy. Will she remain quiet about her ethnic background and remain safely in the privileged position which her beauty has obtained for her? Or will she risk the loss of position, even of life, in order to stand with her own people as they are oppressed and threatened? Her uncle Mordecai confronts her with the fact of her privilege and suggests that, if she ignores those who are more vulnerable, she herself will not remain safe.

Mordecai’s final appeal to Esther contains the barest hint of a faith in divine order of the events happening around them: “Who knows if perhaps you were made queen for just such a time as this?” A sense that God has arranged Esther’s elevation is combined with a challenge that it is her responsibility to now use her privilege for the protection of the Jewish people.

That Esther acted on behalf of her own might possibly suggest that the lesson for Christians is behave courageously to maintain our own safety in an increasingly hostile world. But as Rabbi Soloveichik wrote, the lesson is also that “The Purim tale reminds us that a government, and the society it oversees, can turn against its most vulnerable in a matter of moments.” And, one might infer, we who enjoy relative safety and privilege ought to be ready to stand with those persecuted vulnerable, whoever they might be, even at great cost to ourselves.

So Esther’s challenge has actually been the challenge for many of us over the last couple of years. Will we stand and say “Black lives matter” with Black sisters and brothers, or will we be silent in order to maintain relationship with those who, for whatever reasons, find that affirmation of black lives offensive? Will we speak out against political forces that abuse and criminalize migrants seeking asylum in this country, or will we ignore what happens to vulnerable people at our southern border so as to insure our own security? Will we advocate for vaccination and mask-wearing to protect the elderly, immuno-compromised, and children in our midst, or will we, for the sake of an uneasy “unity,” acquiesce in submission to misguided notions of personal liberty taking precedence over the good of those vulnerable people and even over the common good of us all?

Both Vashti and Esther in this story invite us to follow their examples of standing up to unjust and cruel authority when it is clearly in the wrong and in opposition to God’s love and care for all people. If we are blessed, as many of us like myself are here in America, with privilege and security, perhaps God has given us these gifts in order to now risk them in “just such a time as this.”

On April 7, 1987, members of our church gathered for the last time at the Grange hall where they had met for several years. They formed a car caravan and drove down the hill honking and shouting and into the parking lot of the new church building at 18th Ave. and Bailey Hill Rd. With Pastor Jim Gaderlund leading, they then processed in excitement and joy into the new permanent sanctuary to celebrate their first worship service there. The young congregation had been waiting twelve years for this.

Joy like that reflects the celebration of the congregation of God’s people in Jerusalem in our text this week from Nehemiah 12:27-43. After the exile to Babylon ended, the first couple of waves of returnees had rebuilt the Temple. But Jerusalem’s situation was insecure in the ancient world, where safety for a city required a protective wall. Back in Babylon under the Persian king Artaxerxes, Nehemiah was moved by the precarious situation of his fellow Jews who had returned to their land. He approached the king and was granted governorship of that area and permission specifically to go there and oversee the rebuilding of the city’s wall.

The rebuilding of the walls in Nehemiah is a wonderful story of community cooperation, with each family or district taking part. However, scoffers and enemies surround Jerusalem and wished it to remain vulnerable to raids and looting. At one point, in Nehemiah 4:3, one of these foreign foes, Tobiah, remarks that the construction being undertaken is so flimsy that it could not support even the weight of a fox upon it. Which makes it all the more wonderful that to celebrate the wall’s completion, nearly the whole city assembles atop the wall in two groups to march its circumference while making music and singing for joy.

It’s St. Augustine’s great insight to realize that as Christians we are part of and participate in the building of the eternal City of God. The bricks and boards of earthly buildings may aid in that construction, but the true structure that God enjoins us to raise is a community which is growing into His City on earth, His kingdom.

Like that ancient city of Jerusalem, God’s City in this world may often seem beset within and without by scoffing enemies. The whole thing may feel flimsy, even to us who so much believe in it and wish it to stand strong. That is why we need the moments of joyous celebration like the Jewish returnees experienced that day when the walls of their city were dedicated. Eternal joy in God’s City is our destiny. The smaller joys of worship in celebration of current blessings and victories keeps us aware of that to which we aiming, so that we might not lose heart.

A little like those builders of the wall in Nehemiah, our congregation here today is planning to make repairs next year to the walls of our nearly 35-year-old church building. The completion of that task will, I’m sure, be rejoiced in and celebrated. In so doing, we stand in the long line of God’s people who keep building joy as we look toward the completion and fulfillment of that joy in the City whose ultimate builder and maker is God.