Confrontation

Confrontation – that is what is at the heart of our gospel lesson today and there is possibly no more difficult skill to master than to confront others well and to be confronted in turn.  As human beings we rather despise confrontation, indeed, psychologists have discovered that confrontation can activate the same portions of the brain as actual physical pain.  If someone has ever confronted you and you suddenly feel as if you’ve been physically hit, it is because our brains interpret having our beliefs or our actions confronted in the same way it interprets a physical assault.  First there is shock and then there is the fight or flight reflex.  The adrenaline begins to pump, the senses heighten, and the heart begins to beat hard and fast so all the cells in your body will have the oxygen they need to either do battle or to runaway quickly to safety.  If after being confronted you felt yourself falling away into anger or tremendous fear, this is why.  It is your fight or flight reflex.  You see, your body considers your psychological health just as important as your physical health and so when you are being confronted; when your upbringing, your politics, all the ideas that you have absorbed into your identity, when they are being called into question your body reacts to them in the exact same manner as it would a physical threat.  It is a phenomenon called Identity Protective Cognition.

The problem is, of course, that as sinful and broken human beings we often need to be confronted.  We need to have our understandings questioned and our behaviors challenged.  Left to our own devices, human beings are an incredibly dangerous species.  We are the only creature on the planet that acts as our own population control, and as such we pose a danger not only to ourselves but even the very world around us.  Now, I don’t personally have a problem with evolution, but in my forty years of life I have never understood how professors and doctors of biology can look at such a willfully ignorant and wantonly selfish organism as humanity and dare to call it “evolved”.  If survival of the fittest was the only rule, if it was the only force acting on creation’s behalf and not Divine Grace, then quite frankly a naked ape that can’t run, isn’t very strong, and doesn’t climb trees well should have been first on the evolutionary chopping block. 

But that is the nature of the human species.  Lazy, undisciplined and blissfully stupid is in fact our preferred state most of the time.  The only time when we aren’t that way is when the situation forces us to be otherwise.  When was the last time any of us learned something when we didn’t want to?  When something came up that we really wanted and nobody was around to see us, what happened?  We did what we wanted!  Right or wrong!  That is who we are.  If we don’t have to learn something we often won’t, and unless our actions will net us punishment we will often do as we please regardless of the consequences.  We all inherently know that we are this way; it is why most parents don’t have to be told to discipline their children.  They know quite well the public consequences of unleashing a human being with no discipline, no empathy, and no understanding of consequences upon the world.  We inherently know that the human creature is not rational by its own volition; its only hope is to be raised and constantly confronted with the understanding that it has the power of choice, but that power must be used wisely and to the benefit of more than just the self.  

None of this, however, makes confrontation any easier; indeed, confrontation is such a stress that societies often develop unwritten rules of confrontation, little informal statutes about who may confront whom and when.  Most of the time these rules are benign.  If Mom does something wrong, for instance, you just live with it.  That’s the unwritten rule.  Not only should you respect the fact that you aren’t perfect either, but on a practical level the stress that the confrontation causes just isn’t worth it – and so the confrontation is avoided.  Most of the time these unwritten rules are benign, but there are plenty of instances when they most certainly are not.  Our culture can very much use things like shame to control the kinds of confrontation its willing to deal with.  1 in 5 women and 1 in 71 men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime in our country, and a third of those women will be victimized before they even reach adulthood.  And yet for both the men and the women our culture has much the same response: what’s wrong with you?  What were you wearing, how were you acting, would he have thought you were being flirty. These are questions our appointed justice system asks of our assault victims, and for the men it can be worse.  The men can be laughed right out of court because it was obvious he wasn’t manly enough to defend himself.  This is just one way that our culture uses control and shame to say who may be confronted and who not.

This is who we are:  A people that desperately hate confrontation, are in dire need of it nonetheless,  but at the same time exist in a culture that will deeply control who will get confronted and who won’t.  All of these things you will find very much a part of our gospel lesson today – except, of course, when it comes to Jesus.

So what is going on in our gospel lesson, exactly?  You may not know it, but these passages are almost a perfect example of the religious politics of Jesus’ day.  You see, both Jesus and John the Baptist would have been very controversial.  John was not only offering repentance away from the Temple and its sacrifices, but he was specifically offering it through baptism in the river Jordan – something that only gentiles converting to Judaism would have had to do.  The religious leaders of John’s day did not appreciate that, and if John rubbed them the wrong way then Jesus would have had them screaming at the very top of their lungs.  Teaching people that there were more important concerns than keeping the Sabbath; telling people that all foods are clean; freely touching lepers and hanging out with tax collectors and sinners, all while calling yourself a rabbi: the fact is all this would have upset more than a few people.  Jesus’ ministry was very confrontational.  Indeed, while in his youth he was understood as Joseph’s biological son, in his adulthood and ministry it was understood that Jesus was fatherless, born out of wedlock but got lucky.  The writings and sayings of the Pharisees that have been preserved universally call Mary a harlot and no small amount of time and effort was spent trying to find Jesus’ real father.  Not only was Jesus’ ministry inviting of confrontation, his very life was an affront to polite society.

So when the chief priests and the elders approach Jesus, asking him by what authority he is doing these things, teaching at the temple, this is not a random question – it is a direct, political attack. In this context, “by what authority are you doing these things,” is a demand of not only of diploma but also pedigree – both of which they know Jesus does not have.  “By what authority are you doing these things? How are you not the uneducated son of harlot posing as a rabbi that these people should listen to you on holy ground?  Show us where you graduated, introduce us to your human father – O right, you can’t”

It was berating, it was shaming, and it was a direct attempt to control the confrontational message that was the heart of Jesus’ ministry - that love is more important than the law.  Jesus was confronted in the most public and humiliating way possible.  Any one of us at this point would have our blood pumping, our muscles growing tight, but not Jesus.  Jesus does not do that.  Indeed, his response is nothing short of brilliant.  Jesus confronts also, but he does not confront to attack.  He confronts to reveal, and so he poses a question of his own.  “I will also ask you one question; if you tell me the answer, then I will also tell you by what authority I do these things.  Did the baptism of John come from heaven, or was it of human origin?”

And so the elders and the chief priests then immediately reveal their mindset, the very motivation for asking Jesus their question.  They could have answered Jesus honestly, they could have even answered individually, but what do they do?  They huddle together and try to cook up an answer.  Now if you are in the crowd and you see politicians make a jab and then huddle together to discuss, you know this is not going to be about truth, you know this isn’t going to be an honest attempt to understand, it’s gonna be about what – POLITICS.  Posing the question that he does, he not only deflects his opponents attempt to control his ministry but He also reveals their own selfish and political motivations for even asking it.  “We don’t know” they all say in unison.  And Jesus said unto them, neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.  A dishonest question does not warrant an honest answer.

Do you see what Jesus did there?  He didn’t fight, he didn’t flee, he didn’t pose the berating question that attacked his opponent’s identities but rather he posed the revelatory question, the question that instead unveiled motives and brought the listener to the very heart of the matter at hand.  That was Jesus’ method of confrontation, and unfortunately we don’t have a lot of experience with it, do we? 

But we were confronted with something else this week, weren’t we?  Indeed, this kind of confrontation we have all too much experience with.  Not only we as a congregation but all of America was confronted with it last Sunday night, in Las Vegas, when a white retired millionaire name Stephen Paddock opened fire upon an unsuspecting crowd at a country music concert from his room on the 32^nd floor of the Mandalay Bay resort and casino, killing 50 and wounding almost 500.  And just like the thousands of times before it, the various factions in our country will lobby for their own political ends, confronting the issue and each other after the ways of fallen human beings, berating each other and using dead mothers, fathers, and children as an excuse to attack people they don’t like.  Both sides will do this.  But we’re not going to do that today, not in here.  Today we are going to confront the issue at hand, but we are going to do so after the way of Jesus, by asking the revelatory question. 

And we’ll start with this one: How long can this pulpit avoid the issue of gun violence and maintain its integrity?  How many dead bodies DO we need before its okay to talk about it? Is the issue of Gun Violence and Gun Control so divisive, that members of a church cannot discuss it without ruining friendships or breaking fellowship?  Is political party more important than Jesus?  Is the wish to own a firearm for home defense irrational?  For poor families that need to hunt in order to eat, does owning a firearm make them evil?  With that said, is it unreasonable to screen people mentally, morally, and physically before they are allowed to purchase a firearm?  Is the 2^nd Amendment of the American Constitution Divinely Inspired Scripture?  Were Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin Apostles?  Every Amendment to the constitution has never been seen as absolute.  If someone yells fire in a movie theatre, their freedom of speech will not protect them.  If a Classic-Satanist ritually sacrifices a human being, their freedom of religion will not protect them.  Why is the Second Amendment suddenly any different?           

I can’t tell you how to answer these questions, and indeed I never will.  But as Christians, don’t we owe it to our present and future dead to at least have asked them?

John the Baptist and Radical Humility

Prophets and Baptisms, Pharisees and Sadducees; our gospel story for today is chock full of a dizzying array of terms and events.  Indeed, the more you look at this text the more confusing it seems to become.  While the story of John the Baptist has become so well read and so well loved by Christians that we may no longer notice it, the reality is Matthew is describing some genuinely strange things.  Why is this man John wandering the Judean wilderness, putting his life in danger from both the elements and robbers?  Why is he baptizing people in the Jordan River?  Religious immersion was hardly foreign for the Jews, but usually they did that in baths.  Why drag everybody out into the desert for something everybody could do at home?  And then the Pharisees get added to the mix.  Why are the Pharisees heading way out into the wilderness chasing after this man?  And why would they think that being a child of Abraham would exempt them from repentance?  It doesn’t make a lot of sense.  I mean, last time I checked the children of Abraham literally wrote the book on their screw ups so if somebody was holding a repentance tent revival out in the desert you would think they would be first in line.  And then there’s the matter of Prophecy, we are Christians seeing the fulfillment of Isaiah in this, and is some guy shouting in the wilderness really that tremendous of a prediction?  Indeed, Matthew has been well critiqued over the years for his use of the Hebrew

Scriptures and the fulfillment of his people’s prophecy, wrongfully so in my opinion.

But how do we make sense of it all?  How do we make sense of all the strange and wonderful things going on in our text today?  We can do what Christians normally do, what the Church as a whole has gotten in the habit of doing.  We can gloss over the text, ignoring all the questions and it’s strangeness. We can just talk about the need to repent because that’s the word that appears twice.  It’s nice, it’s safe.  It’s shallow, but I guess it’ll do.  But the reality while we might emerge with a nice, very forgettable lesson, it wouldn’t be all that helpful to other people would it?  Indeed, when those outside the church look at what we do with our Scriptures, when they see us ignore the questions and be content with a shallow gospel, it doesn’t paint a very pretty picture of Christianity does it?  It reinforces the image that a Christian is no different than any other religious person, someone who seeks to solve life’s anxieties by mere obedience to any old book.  When they see us unwilling to ask good questions, unwilling to prod too deep for fear we might at last pierce the illusion, well that sends a message.  It tells people that yes we believe, but only so far.  Yes, we obey, but it is out convenience and familiarity that we do so, not out of knowledge and faith.  I have been with you for over a year now and I am proud to say that I don’t think you have ever settled to be that kind of Christian, and so I will not do you the injustice of preaching that kind of sermon.  

But how DO we make sense of it all? How do we honestly wrestle with what is going on here? Why did Matthew put this account into his story, and how might this message apply to us today?  In an America where Christianity has become almost irrelevant to people’s lives, these are all questions the Church can no longer afford to avoid.

While I would absolutely agree that repentance is indeed a substantial piece of our gospel lesson, the reality is it’s not the only piece, nor, I would argue is it the most important one.  Repentance is of course essential to the Christian Life, or indeed just moral living in general.  None of us gets it right the first time through, so repenting of one’s mistakes in this life is a given.  However, there is a deeper theme in our gospel lesson, one that is very easy to miss – not only because we are not first century Jews but also because that theme is an attribute that doesn’t really come naturally to most human beings.

Now to illustrate this theme, however, we have to switch gears a bit.  It’s going to be difficult to see without a more modern day example.  Before graduating Seminary, young pastors-to-be have to find a place to intern.  The Church I had found for that purpose was a very liberal UCC church in St. Louis Park.   As a student of an Evangelical Seminary raised in Lutheranism, I wouldn’t say I was exactly welcomed with open arms by everybody there.  Indeed, as I would find out rather quickly Liberal Christianity could be just as cold and self-righteous as any other; I think it took me two years to finally convince everyone I was in fact not some sort of right wing spy and saboteur.  After all that was said and done there, however, I did learn a very valuable lesson.  I learned the problem is never the politics; people on every side or no side of every philosophy, ism, or party can and do have valuable and respectful dialogues and even friendships.  No, the problem is never the ugly politics, it’s the ugly people. And while I could go on and on about my experiences there, there was one incident in particular that I think is most relevant to our gospel lesson.

As the seminary intern I was placed in charge of a program called Theology on Tap.  It was essentially a Bible Study at a bar, and to be honest it was actually a really wonderful experience.  Many people who go to drink the night away don’t do so because they that believe God loves them.  Indeed, many of the regulars there feel abandoned, that God somehow hates them and wants nothing to do with them.  Being able to bring the gospel into their midst, the good news of God’s love and acceptance was life changing for a lot of people, myself included.  One particular session, however, we managed to attract a student from United Theological Seminary, an institution for very, very liberal Christians.  And no, he wasn’t a regular there, he came because of the Theology not the Tap.

 Lots of people came to these meeting: Conservatives, progressives, agnostics, atheists, even a modern pagan or two.  Everybody was welcome there.  And at this particular meeting we had this soon to be ordained very Liberal young man from a very Liberal educational institution and a conservative evangelical marine.  And you know what they did?  They talked.  They respectfully conversed, asking questions making points, and they walked away loving each other.  Not only that, where God was in that moment was when I saw all the presuppositions of that young pastor-in-training completely melt away.  Everything that his professor’s taught him about the opposite side he saw fell terribly short.  He was ready for an unlistening monster, stubborn and arrogant, but what he got was loving and kindly thought.  I do believe God was in that moment for him as he realized that talking about the other side in fact was no substitute for talking to the other side.  It was a baptism of the spirit, what went in was afraid and confused, but what emerged was humble and at peace.  Humility, ladies and gentlemen, that is the deepest theme that is woven into our gospel story.

St. Matthew, Jesus’ disciple, was of course a Palestinian Jew, indeed a former tax collector according to the earliest traditions, and his gospel is to other Palestinian Jews.  Now, as an American, I don’t need to explain to anyone here what 9/11 is, I won’t confuse anywhere here when I say the words, “Just do it” or “Git ‘er dun.”  These things are very well known in our culture and they are understood implicitly.  The same is true for Matthew.  Matthew doesn’t need to explain to his fellow Jews why John the Baptist is out there, he doesn’t need to waste words explaining why Pharisees would follow him out into the middle of nowhere, they already know.  They’ve lived it.  You see, Baptism in the Jordan was a common practice in first century Judea – for gentiles.  Judaism had garnered the interest of many Gentiles in the first century, they were called God fearers or Theophilus, friends of God.  Well, as a Gentile you could also take this a step further and become a fully Jewish.  You could convert entirely to Judaism and be given all the rights and responsibilities of a native born Israelite.  As part of that process you were Baptidzomai,  immersed in the Jordan just like Naaman the Syrian from the book of Kings.  Just as Naaman went in as a leper, Just as he went in full of uncleanness but emerged on the banks of the river cleansed and believing in the power of the Jewish God, so would this new gentile convert.  But John’s isn’t baptizing gentiles, is he?

John the Baptist is very controversial in the first century.  Not only is he deliberately dressing like the prophet Elijah, not only is he wandering the desert and eating locusts and wild honey just like Elijah, but he is offering repentance, indeed offering atonement, reconciliation to God apart from Animal Sacrifice, Apart from Temple, Apart from Jewish Scripture.  Do you see why a legalistic Pharisee would chase this guy out into the middle of nowhere, now, why he’d say he didn’t need to be baptized because he was a child of Abraham?  Starting to make Sense?

Now to be clear, I don’t think John’s ministry was about being disobedient.  There is nothing written about him that says he taught to avoid the temple, not to sacrifice or observe holidays; neither do we possess anything that says he taught disobedience to Scripture.  John’s ministry was not about that.  John’s ministry was about radical humility, radical repentance and conviction of sin.  John’s message was abundantly clear, that if you as a Jew cannot come before your God publicly and shout that I am no better than the unclean people I look down on, then all the sacrifices, all the Temples and all Scripture verses you can muster are going to mean exactly diddly squat.  A jew going to the Jordan to be baptized by John is no different than a Nazi undergoing a Barmitzvah or a Klan Member being baptized in a black church.  It is a heart-wrenching admission of guilt and an act of brazen, selfless humility. 

Ladies and gentlemen, John the Baptist is not some idle curiosity within the Christian faith.  Of all the factions and ministries that existed from within the Judaism of that time, when God became Incarnate this is the one He backed.  Jesus was Baptized into this ministry, and indeed, without the message of John the Baptist Christianity would have been very, very different.  John’s ministry is as vibrant, relevant, and necessary as it was two thousand years ago.  If we are not right with God here in our hearts, that if we can’t walk with our God humbly, repenting of our pride then no amount of sacrament or correct theology is going to save us.  People come up and tell me, “Keven, I can’t find God, He is missing from my life.  I can’t feel him.”  Well, if God cannot be found where you are comfortable, than the only answer is you’ll to go where you are uncomfortable to find Him.  If God cannot be found in the city then the reality is He must be somewhere in the wilderness.  If you have not felt God, if you aren’t experiencing God, the answer is not to stay where you are, to keep comfortable and feel secure, but to find that voice calling in the desert and be humble enough to follow it before it’s too late.         

Christ is coming, ladies and gentlemen, both as the babe of Bethlehem and as the Conquering Hero of Creation, and we have been called to prepare the way of the Lord in our own lives, and to make straight the paths of crooked hearts.  Let us not be so prideful as to meet him with our work unfinished.  Amen.              

Christmas in an ugly year

Christmas Eve Sermon

Christmas is always a busy and bustling time of year, but this year for my family and I it has been particularly hectic.  Not only has there been the gift buying, the dinner preparing, and the socializing in addition to the daily necessities of work and, for us at least, caring for a household with a perpetual cold, but it has also been a season of tending to the needs of others.  While care for the poor and the needy is not a Christmas only past-time, in this season of lights the needs of so many seem particularly apparent.  The sad, the lonely, the afraid, the hungry and the hurt have lined our lives, and while it saddens me to see so many in pain during this season of joy, I find myself grateful in those all too few quiet moments.  Grateful that God has not forgotten them, and that God has not abandoned them in the cold but sent them to us for the care we can provide them.

But it was in the busyness and the anxiousness that seems to have permeated this year that I was reminded of an old college professor of mine.  Her name was Faith, and she was the chair of the Legal Studies Dept at Hamline.  Feisty and Proud, and so incredibly sure of herself, Faith had a confidence about her that was, well…intimidating.  I remember being part of Mock Trial under her, an organization where mostly Pre-Law students play at being lawyers, and I remember time and time again being stranded in the snow every year. Faith was gonna have us make that mock trial competition, weather be damned.  I remember one year in particular, one of the worst snowstorms in decades.  White out conditions were everywhere and every news agency in Minnesota said for the love of everything holy don’t you dare leave your houses that weekend.  I-35 was closed, every major highway was impassable, and the authorities made it clear that we were all going to risk our lives if we went out into that storm.  We approached Faith with what we believed to be rather reasonable concerns.  She looked us straight in the eye, her face like flint.  Like a modern day Admiral Bird, she cursed us for cowards and shoved a map of side streets into stunned little hands. 

I’m happy to say that most of us made it.  I mean, nobody died, and thank the Almighty nobody got injured, but quite a few got stranded that year and could have gotten very, very hurt.  In hindsight these many years later I’m not so sure a chance for the coveted Ames Iowa Mock Trial Regional Trophy was worth the risk, but I digress.  Still, despite the emotional manipulation and the obvious child endangerment, I still remember Faith fondly.  Dauntless and completely indestructible, Faith did care about her students very deeply and we always learned a lot from her.  But, I was not to be a young Pre-Law Student forever, and Faith and I parted ways as I graduated college and stepped into those hallowed doorways of the Hamline School of Law.

I didn’t see Faith for many years, and oddly enough it wouldn’t be until I applied to seminary that we would touch base again.  As part of the application process into seminary they require four letters of recommendation from various sorts of people.  I guess I can’t blame them for not trusting me, I was trained by lawyers after all.  But it was precisely here that I ran into trouble.  My academic advisor from Law School, Professor Richard Oakes, God rest his soul, passed away years before which left me in a bit of a pickle.  Doing a little research, however, I had discovered that Faith was still the chair of the Legal Studies department at Hamline University, and so I approached her explaining my situation.  There was one problem, though.  Faith had lost her faith.  Herself a lifetime Methodist, she broke with God when she broke with her husband I think.  That woman had never failed at anything in her entire life, but when she failed at her marriage…I think a part of her just broke.

She listened to what I had to say and what I wanted her to do.  The task was simple enough and she was more than able to do it.  She knew my hard work as a student and could easily testify to it.  But then she asked me, “Keven, why?”  “Why do you want to throw away your career as a lawyer?  Why pass up the status, the respect, the money…for religion?”  Her mind could not even comprehend it.  Christianity was nonsense, stupid tales for the control of thoughtless masses.  And Faith knew me.  From day one in her Introduction to Legal Studies course, when asked why I wanted to be a lawyer my answer was always the same.  I came from a corrupt rural county in rural Texas; funds went strangely missing, drug deals went down, people were kidnapped and wrongfully imprisoned; and every time I was asked why I wanted to be an attorney I said the same thing, “I want to fight monsters.”  I was not going into seminary because I was some manipulative little rat, not fit for any other profession, I wasn’t changing careers because I wouldn’t make it as an attorney.  But still, she asked me that question, “Keven, WHY??”

And so I told her.  I was perhaps not so very eloquent in front of my old Legal Studies advisor, but what I simply said was this, “It fulfills me, Faith, and it will let me fight the good fight in ways the law just can’t.”  She stood there for a moment, silent, nodding her head.  I thanked her for her time and bid her good day, and for reasons that I will never know, she wrote me that letter of recommendation, and the results of that one act stand before you today.

It’s been about a decade since that meeting, and sometimes I wonder what that awesome and frightful old woman would think of her law student turned pastor.  I’ve done things I know she wouldn’t think pastors would do.  I’ve sat with Muslims discussing religion until midnight, has aided the helpless, fed the hungry, shoot I’ve even presented on religion at a Twin Cities pagan convention, shaking hands with the likes of elders like Oberon Zell.  I still fight monsters, indeed, I believe I fight them more effectively than I thought ever possible.  I fight the horrors of not just a handful of men, but the worst humanity has ever offered.  Pestilences like Fear and Ignorance and Apathy; Diseases like Pride and Foolishness and Hate.  My weapons are not just statutes anymore, but I fight with Knowledge and Reason, and it is my spirituality that is my shield. But still, despite all this, I still see people ask me that same question that Faith did so many years ago.  “Keven … Why?”  “Why give it up?  Why turn your back on so much?”  I’ll tell you why.

Christmas.  Not the Christmas of trees and decorations, nor the Christmas of pretty carols.  Those are all done to celebrate Christmas; but they themselves are not Christmas.  They are merely our response to Christmas, done in joyous gratitude for what God has done.  No, I am talking about the real Christmas.  The Christmas concerning the God who did not abandon His world or His people to misery.  The Christmas about the God who got His hands dirty, who came into our world of suffering to be what we could not.  He did not come with great fanfare or blaring trumpets, he did not come in regal attire, indeed his nobility would only be recognized by those who were actively looking for it.  The God who, for the Salvation of all Creation; man, woman, plant, and speck of dirt; was born to an unwed mother, who became in that culture an illegitimate child.  Born to be despised and destined to wander the wilderness homeless and destitute, preaching the good news of God’s love to a violent and uncaring nation.  Treated as a fatherless heretic his entire life only to finally, and illegally, be executed as a traitor and a criminal.  He lived the life that none of us could bear.  The king, humble and righteous, who would rather spend every waking moment of abuse teaching people to be better than give them the fate that the law demanded of them.  The God who became illegitimate, so no one could mock the illegitimate. The God who loved every single one of his children so much that he became homeless, became a refugee, became condemned in every meaning of that word, so no one could despise them without despising him, too.  That God, that all-consuming Otherworldly Reality, who steps down into our miserable, muck filled lives, whose dedication to human redemption included a death so horrific and shameful that they had to invent a new word for it.  Ex Crucio.  Out of the cross. 

IT IS THAT GOD, THAT CHRISTMAS, that I will follow to my dying breath, and even after.  It is that God that gives this old soul hope in ways that the law just can’t, because if all those things did not deter God from our redemption than I know there is nothing that ever will. 

I won’t lie to you, ladies and gentlemen.  2016 was a rough year.  Politically, this election cycle has left many of us exhausted, uncertain, and, perhaps, even morally compromised.  Socially, I have never seen a more divided America.  The rifts between Democratic and Republican, conservative and liberal, brother and sister, I have never seen them this deep or this raw.  Globally, we are becoming not a world of peace but one of almost perpetual war.  Human rights abuses thought unthinkable just a few years ago in all but in the most disturbed minds have become commonplace, and it seems that the 2010’s will be known not for advances in medicine and spirituality, its great strides in improving the human condition, but crisis after unsolved crisis.    

So I get it.  I get that this year, more than any other year, the busyness of the season may be a welcome distraction.  That you may be exhausted, that your emotional defenses are spent.  There are those dealing with grief this season, with loved ones lost.  There are those dealing with family turmoil and dissension, where the peaceful holiday meal will feel like walking on eggshells; where the family finances are strained, where new bills pile up and creditors fill your voicemail with daily reminders of your continued inability to pay them back.  All of this, this Christmas season, in a world that literally more than ever before wants to rip itself into absolute shreds, and it feels like it’s going to take you with it.  I get it.  I really do.  So believe me when I tell you…

God… is … not … done … yet.

The King of the Universe, the Almighty Redeemer of Creation became as vulnerable as you and me this night 2016 years ago, born to be despised, kicked at, and sneered to ensure us a place in paradise.  Do you really think THAT God is going to abandon you now?  Do you think He’s going to leave you like this, leave His WORLD like this?  The Infinite was born for you, lived for you, and died for you: it is not going to leave you stranded now. 

These things you see around you in here.  The trees, the candles, the tinsel.  They’re not for you.  If you put your Joy in them, they can’t give it back to you.  If you rely on Santa and Christmas Carols to bring you happiness or if you rely on a perfect family meal for your peace, then this Christmas Season is going to leave you feeling drained and miserable, so do not put your stock in them.  Everything we do here, from the songs, from the constant ups and downs on up to the Communion, it’s not about the  nostalgia, American Traditions, or even the duties of religion;  it is about helping you foster a relationship with the God who is both your Heavenly Mother and Father.  Go home tonight, be with family, both the ones present and the ones departed.  Know that God is waiting to be your peace, and the Holy Spirit is desperate to give you His Joy.  Stop relying on the world to be your light; if it could do that God wouldn’t have had to be born into it. 

Let Him bring the light into your life, and don’t think for a minute that 2017 isn’t going to be an incredible year.  Amen and Amen.