Friday, December 7, 2012

“The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup, you hold my lot.  The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; I have a goodly heritage.”  Psalm 16:6

“The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places,” writes the Psalmist.   

Several years ago, as I planned the readings for our 25^th wedding anniversary, these words jumped out at me.  The operative word, for me, was then and is now, the word “fallen”.  The boundary lines in my life have simply fallen in place in spite of my determined attempts to control their placement.

For many years I spent much time and effort planning and constructing the boundaries of my life, sometimes even using Scripture or church teachings as the cement to keep the walls secure.  These walls were built for a variety of reasons; to keep my family safe, to keep out signs of imperfection, to hide social injustice from my view, to defend my beliefs, and (I’m embarrassed to admit) sometimes even to climb up on, so as to be able to look down on others whose lives seemed “out of bounds”.

But, in the words of Robert Frost, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that sends the frozen-ground-swell under it, and spills the upper boulders in the sun. “ Slowly but surely the boulders toppled and the boundaries moved as my children questioned their placement, EfM (Education for Ministry) challenged my doctrine, and people refused to fit their assigned stereotypes.  I found myself wondering  “what I was walling in or walling out and to whom I was like to give offense.” As the boundary lines began to fall in new and unexpected places, I found that the people, places and ideas they encompassed enriched rather than threatened my life.

Some call it karma and some call it fate, and Frost even suggests elves as the culprit responsible for the chances and changes in our lives.  I can’t help but think it might be the work of our surprising infant king whose love knows no bounds.

RC

Thursday, December 6, 2012

I have never been one who likes to look ahead to the end of a good story.   So I find it challenging, at the beginning of Advent, to be contemplating the incident related in today’s gospel reading (Luke 2:27-40), which takes place very near the end of Jesus’ mortal life.  He is addressing questions from the Sadducees about marital status in the life to come. The Sadducees were clearly trying to trip Jesus up, catch him in a lie, or find a flaw in his teachings. In his response, Jesus distinguishes between life in “this age” and “that age,” and implies that familial relationships do not really exist in the resurrection.  One enters “this age” by the sheer fact being born, and “that age” through death and resurrection.  Jesus concludes his argument by reminding his audience that God has been God in all generations, and will be God for the ages to come.  

As we begin preparations for the celebration of Jesus’ birth, talking about death and resurrection feels a bit like skipping ahead.  But it is important, of course, in a big-picture way.  Jesus was human, and the story of his birth and humble childhood makes him so approachable to all of us.  Even the recently renewed speculation about his having a wife brings him down to our level, so to speak.  His humanity - the way he lived his mortal life and faced some very ordinary, human problems – is what connects us to him, and by extension to God.  But his humanity is also exactly what made him “worthy of a place in that age,” and sets an example for us to follow in order that we may also be considered worthy.

In Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, he exhorts his readers – who are new Christians – to “stand firm in the Lord” and encourages them to follow Jesus’ example of love.  Which is a lesson we all need reinforced, even during “the most wonderful time of the year.”  At Christmas we all tend to get overwhelmed by details and obligations.  Don’t misunderstand me.  I LOVE the details and obligations of Christmas.  I love the connections I am making with my own childhood Christmas celebrations and the traditions Phil and I are creating with our children.  But big-picture wise?  Paul tells his friends, “May the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you.  And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.”  Words to live by, and an example to follow, this holiday season, and always.  

(Leigh Russell King)

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Today’s Readings: Psalm 119:1-23, Isaiah 2:1-11, I Thessalonians 2:13-20, Luke 20:19-26

For my meditation I’ve decided to focus on today’s Gospel reading - Luke 20:19-26. It must be one of the most well-known Bible readings. It contains the verse “Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s”. I’ve heard sermons that say this explains the distinction between Church and state, Jesus’s position on taxes and/or our responsibilities to God.  All these opinions make sense, but I’ve never thought  Jesus was addressing the 1^st two points.

Jesus was in this world but his Kingdom was not and as his followers we are in this world but not of it. I believe that Jesus came to save us and explain His Kingdom to us, He was not sent to clarify the world we live in. In the verse Jesus could have said “Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s” in a very dismissive, I really don’t care tone. Then “and to God the things that are God’s” in a very serious tone. This makes more sense to me as Jesus is much more concerned with our eternal life versus the blink of an eye we spend in this world. In my interpretation Jesus emphasizes where our concerns and priorities need to be.

I don’t mean to imply that Jesus is okay with tax evasion, anarchy or He doesn’t care about our earthly issues.  Jesus knows and acknowledges in the Bible how hard it is to be a Christian in this world. In His wisdom He’s telling us if we put God^'s wishes first, then our role and responsibilities as Christians in this world will become easier to understand.  

(Tom Wilson)

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Psalm 11 reflects upon the story of David, after he has defeated Goliath and is living with King Saul. The idea that is often connected with the story of David and Goliath is the concept that God provides for those who believe in him and that he will punish his enemies. 

 

Having grown up in the Church I have heard this idea proclaimed since my youth, but it was not until I was teaching the Preschoolers in my Sunday School class the story of David and Goliath that I was able to fully appreciate the meaning behind the words. To me, the idea that God will provide has always seemed rather abstract and it did not seem to apply to my life. However, when I was explaining to the kids that God helped David defeat Goliath and was providing for his followers and punishing his enemies it finally hit me. God does provide for those who ask him to help. 

 

As I taught the children, God was teaching me to trust in him to help me defeat my own personal Goliath of college and adult life. As a senior in high school I am confident that I can go into the scary battle that  is college applications and planning a future because I will have God on my side.

~Jacqueline

Monday, December 3, 2012

Psalm 1, 2, 3, 4, 7; Isaiah 1:10-20; 1 Thessalonians 1:1-10; Luke 20:1-8

"We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly remembering before our God and Father your good work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ." (I Thessalonians 1:2-3)

 

I tend to be a glass half-empty kind of person.  I see all I don’t have instead of all that I do and at this time of year when I am bombarded with advertisements for things I don’t have, my glass half-empty attitude only gets worse.  After all, all I have to do is turn on the television and the ads tell me all the things I need in order to be a more whole and complete person.   I am told that without this or that product or service I am not good enough and so I need to obtain it in order to achieve the wholeness of life that their product or service offers.

But then I read today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians and I am reminded of a need to see things differently.  Paul begins this and his other letters to Christian communities he has founded with a thanksgiving for them – for who they are and what they do.  In essence, Paul gives thanks for them being enough.  He gives thanks that they have followed the example he, Silvanus, and Timothy set for them and that they now have become an example for other believers in Macedonia and Achaia.  Paul gives thanks that in spite of the persecutions the Thessalonians have faced, in spite of challenges that have most likely left them being less than could otherwise be, they have done well in accomplishing the work of God. Even in the face of their persecutions Paul commends the Thessalonians as faithful witnesses who have received the word with joy and have accomplished much, even becoming examples to other believers. 

In this reading I hear Paul calling me to see my own world in this way.  To see and give thanks for the “enoughness” of what I and those around me have to offer.  To recognize what is available and being offered up around me as full of possibility; instead of looking at it for what it’s not and will never be.  To recognize and give thanks for God making perfectly good and useful what I can only see as imperfect and useless. 

As we watch and wait for Christ’s coming this Advent season Paul’s letter is a reminder to look around and see all the ways Christ is already here and alive in our midst even in the people and the places that are imperfect.  After all, if God thought it was enough to have God’s only Son born in a stinky stable to homeless teenage parents, then maybe I too am enough for God to use.  Maybe it is just in those imperfect people and places where I can’t seem to see enough, those places where I last think to look, that Christ is bursting forth into the world. 

(Karen Safstrom)

Sunday, December 2, 2012

The Lord sets the prisoners free;
⁸   the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
   the Lord loves the righteous.
⁹ The Lord watches over the strangers;
   he upholds the orphan and the widow,
   but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin. (Psalm 146)

As Advent begins, we will have numerous readings (like today's Gospel) about keeping awake and alert, like those wise bridesmaids. Eschatology is a big Advent theme.

Even so, I'm drawn to the psalm appointed for today and in general to the songs of Advent, which Karen and are going to be preaching on this year. Starting on "Black Friday" (and even before) our culture keeps singing about how "it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas." We come to worship, however, and find that these great Advent hymns invite us into a counter-cultural conspiracy.

The psalmist knows that the Lord really does have a preferential option for the poor. The Lord takes the side of the prisoner, the blind, the humble, the righteous, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow. Why? Because again and again, the world pushes them to the side. But that isn't all: God also thwarts the plans of the wicked and the powerful. God, in other words, levels the playing field. Makes the hills low and the rough places even.

We'll see this theme woven throughout the season that lies before us. Mary's Song (The Magnificat) speaks of this same kind of change: "casting down the mighty from their thrones" even as God "lifts up the lowly." Like Isaiah before him, John the Baptist will be out in the wilderness also working to level the playing field by preparing a way in the desert. Mary and John are the two "stars" of Advent.

And of course after that little baby is all grown up, it will be hard to read this psalm without thinking of him too, and ultimately about his ministry for the sake of the Reign of God: of his dying, and his rising again to new life. Eventually these songs of Advent lead us to another song: O for a thousand tongues to sing my great redeemer's praise / the glories of my God and king, the triumphs of his grace!

(Rich Simpson)

Shame-filled Advent?

I came across this post today on The Episcopal Cafe, just days before Advent begins and daily meditations begin to appear on this site. As we prepare our hearts for the season that lies ahead, I hope you find it, as I did, a helpful reminder. (The Episcopal Cafe posts edited and digested versions of blog posts; if you wish to read the full, original post, written by J. Mary Luti, you can find it here).

In particular, I commend the words reproduced below to you - and quite frankly to myself as a preacher. How can we speak the deeper truth of this season and challenge one another in love, without falling into the trap that Luti (rightly, in my view) names? Can we find a way to have a shame-less Advent toward the goal of entering more deeply into "the drama God sees, the drama in which the Incarnation is the daring protagonist, the drama in which God and humans and all creatures are unaccountably finding each other, groping weirdly in the human dark by the light of desires great and small, guided and misguided, but desire for each other all the same?"

(Rich Simpson)


Too often I’m left feeling shamed and abandoned by the church in this season, because I’m a human being like the ones I hear derided from the pulpit. I may not line up at 12 midnight on Black Friday, but I do get all caught up in commercialism and I am needy and I do want things and I do feel pressure to spend and I am certainly no Virgin Mary in Advent, rapt in pregnant contemplation in the quiet candlelight of my room during these four weeks. And if I, being a committed religious professional and all, feel shamed and condemned by anti-consumerist, world-deriding sermons, I can only imagine how it feels to a secular person who wanders into the pews to be told with divine authority that their secularity has rendered them unfit for Christmas.

Pray tell, dear preachers, where is that ‘other world’ in which people are pure and focused on the heart of the matter? (Certainly it’s not the church, which is as busy and as unfocused in this season as any heedless secularist or frantic shopper bent on the latest gadget at a door-busting price. Let the one who is without sin cast the first Christmas tree ornament.) Which world is it in which people do not need or want or try to get and try to please and try to make themselves feel better and try to escape the inevitability of their deaths? Is any of us who preaches against that bad world a citizen of some other country? No, because there is no such other world. There is only this one. And we are this world too. And we had better be. Because it is the world in which God finds us. God won’t find us anywhere else, so we ought not try to go someplace else, or lead others astray either, by telling them that the so-called secular, consumerist, commercially driven world is bad and wrong, or soon to be forsaken by God if we don’t shape up and stop buying things and having wild holiday parties.

It’s the world we have, the world we are given; and it’s a world of human creatures full of longings deep and powerful, longings for God, I would say, but so overlaid with weakness, frailty and the nagging effects of sin that we fix ourselves on needs and things that are not God. Things that are not against God, mind you; just not God. And because they are not God, our desires cannot be wholly satisfied by them. And so we keep going after other things and acquiring more things (you know how this goes—it’s your story too). 

But to say it is un-Christian to live like this is simply wrong. To say we have fallen into the hands of some consumerist Satan and are screwing everything up is wrong; even more, it is to miss the deeper drama. The drama God sees, the drama in which the Incarnation is the daring protagonist, the drama in which God and humans and all creatures are unaccountably finding each other, groping weirdly in the human dark by the light of desires great and small, guided and misguided, but desire for each other all the same.