All around us, people are preparing for the public holiday known as “Christmas.” They’re preparing for parties at home and in the office, they’re hanging lights on their houses, they’re shopping for presents and food. In here, we’re preparing, too, but getting ready for Christmas as a Jesus-follower means something more than twinkling lights or our retrieving our favorite ornaments from the attic. In here, when we’re de-cluttering, we’re doing soul work. Not that physical de-cluttering can’t be good—it certainly can open up mental space as well as physical. But each of us needs to search our souls, in order to understand exactly what it is that we need to de-clutter, in here. If, in this chaotic season, we can find the space for some quiet reflection, we can discover what we need to prepare for this powerful celebration, the feast of the Incarnation—the moment when God-made-flesh appeared in the world. What does your heart need?

We Presbyterians tend to keep the coming of the Son of Man at somewhat of a remove. We focus on it, mostly at this time of year… in the kinds of scripture passages we’ve been hearing over the last three weeks, and especially, on the first Sunday in Advent. Advent is the season of preparation for our celebration of Jesus’ birth: that is true. But before we look back in remembrance, we look ahead, in anticipation. Today Jesus is talking about the end of all things, and it’s time for us to pay attention; you might say, to keep awake.

Image: P. Raube, 2014.

I’ve been using a word over and over that is a kind of Presbyterian/ Reformed catchword: “Sovereign.” A traditional understanding of this word is that God is always in control—which would go nicely with a notion of Jesus Christ as king. But the story of Jesus is not of one who chooses to exercise control, but one who yields to events, even yields to death. (See Luke’s account of Jesus weeping and praying in the garden, as his arrest and death come nearer. If he has an option to use the power of God to change the situation, he does not exercise it.) The problem with the traditional idea of God “always in control,” is that it implies God is fine with a mountain of coal refuse burying children, even that God made it happen. Any reasonable reading of scripture assures us, God is not fine with such a tragedy. So, if God exercises sovereignty, it may be that it doesn’t look like we expect it to look.

Photo by Pedro Sandrini from Pexels.

Today, the 33rd Sunday, is the second to last Sunday in Ordinary time, because a preparation season is coming: Advent is just around the corner now, our time to pray and prepare our spirits for the celebration of Christmas. But… you may have noticed this… when Ordinary Time is coming to a close, our scripture passages get… kind of funky. Kind of wobbly, this and that, highs and lows, joys and sorrows, all jumbled together.

Image: “Grapes in a Vineyard” courtesy of Pexels

Like the Thessalonians, we live in a world swirling with problems, with things that may frighten us or distress us—external threats and internal struggles that are real.

But we have something else in common with the Thessalonians. Jesus Christ is still the Lord of all and the Head of the Church And we know that the power of God is at work in our community, because every day we are working together to love God with all our heart and soul, mind and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves….

Welcome, saints of the church! Today we give thanks for and honor our membership in the household of God, a dwelling and community that transcends time and space.

Interesting, isn’t it? On this day named for saints, we have a gospel passage about a sinner.

Image: “Zacchaeus in a Tree,” William Hole, public domain

How could you practice your faith if almost everything about it was suddenly gone?

How could you learn your faith if all the teachers were gone?

How could you read or hear scripture if there were no more copies of the Bible lleft?

How could you go to your house of worship if it no longer existed?

Welcome to the time of the Babylonian Exile…

In preparation for a time of anxiety and chaos, Jesus wants to help people to find the quiet center. He wants them to stay grounded. He wants them to be able to find courage. Prayer will do all these things, and more.

But Jesus describes prayer in a fascinating way. Prayer, he says, is like a widow who takes her case before a judge who doesn't care about God, and who doesn’t care about people. Makes you wonder why this guy is a judge in the first place. But I digress…

Image: Justice as Protector by Stefan Hirsch (1899-1964), courtesy of Art in the Christian Tradition, Vanderbilt University.

Our readings this morning seem to present us with what I think of as the simultaneous “not yet” and “already” character of what Jesus called “the kingdom of God.” It is not yet here. And it is already here.

Photo by Porapak Apichodilok from Pexels.

It’s not that Jesus has it in for rich people. The whole problem is in that last sentence… the problem is when the rich have no compassion for those who are struggling. When they can walk by, almost without noticing a man at their gate who is so poor, his best friends are the local dogs who lick his sores; when they can walk by without seeing a man whose best hope of a meal is the food the rich man throws away after one of his daily lavish dinner parties.

The problem is, when the rich leave the poor waiting at the gate.

It is easy to thank God—so easy—for the people who make our life full and rich and happy and delightful. For the parents or grandparents who are good to us; for the spouses or partners who give us joy; for the children who carry our hopes and dreams to the next generation; for our friends, the people who get us, who stand by us, who show up for us, who worry about us. Of course we thank God for people like this, people who impact our lives for the better. Thank God for them!

But Paul wants us to thank God for those other people, too. The people who are not on our top ten favorite list—or even top 100. In fact, for the people who are on our top ten list of—well, people we don’t want to be with, or don’t like, or don’t get. Antagonists. Enemies, if we have them. Paul wants us to thank God for them. People who hate us, people who want to harm us. Paul wants us to thank God for them.

What does this even mean? What is he thinking?

Image: Otto Greiner (1869-1916), “Betende Hände” (“Praying Hands”)

Every Sunday we gather and we listen for the words of Jesus to tell us… what? What God really thinks? How God really feels about us? What God really wants from us? We want something real from Jesus, a real connection to God. So we listen, and it’s so hard, sometimes, to cut through the layers of tradition, and interpretation, and expectation... not to mention the layers of 2,000 years, of ancient cultural understandings, of language…

What if we could go back? What if we could be standing there, right there, when Jesus turned to the crowd, and lifted his head and spoke?

Image: P. Raube

A wise man once said, “the notion that God is absent is the fundamental illusion of the human condition.” Psalm 139 challenges that notion with a completely different vision: God knows us. God loves us. God pursues us. And wherever we are, God is there—even, the places we least expect God to be…

So, how do we experience the Holy Spirit?

Sometimes, it feels like fire has come down from heaven, and is perched, right here, on your head.

Sometimes, it feels like you’re standing in a wind so powerful it takes everything you have to stay standing.

Sometimes, if feels like your inability to express yourself, your tongue-tied-ness just disappears, and instead, words—the right words—come from you. And you suspect you had help.

Sometimes, it feels like that verse from Romans: you just can’t pray, you are beyond words, but you sigh, you know that sigh is the deepest prayer you have ever prayed.

“I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”

Image: Kossowski, Adam. Veni Sancti Spiritus, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=56946 [retrieved September 1, 2019]. Original source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/paullew/8750321716 - Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P..

What image do you see, when I say: “Jesus”?

Do you see a picture from a childhood Sunday School page? Do you see one of the actors who took on what has to be the hardest role in the world…. a Jesus who looks like Jeffrey Hunter from “King of Kings,” or perhaps Ted Neeley from “Jesus Christ, Superstar”?

Or maybe the image of Jesus that sticks with you is the famous, traditional one you can find hanging in my office, the one many of us affectionately call “Blonde Jesus.” Or, the multi-racial “Jesus of the Millennium” by artist Janet McKenzie. Or maybe the image released in 2001 by a forensic anthropologist for a BBC documentary. That image was based on 2000-year-old skeletal remains of a Galilean man, with tightly curly dark-brown or black hair, and a dark, middle-Eastern complexion.

We all grow up with our ideas of what Jesus looked like, even if we don’t grow up in church, because images of Jesus are pretty ubiquitous in our American culture. So, when we come to the part of the Apostles’ Creed that is about God the Christ, there’s a good chance each of us has a somewhat specific image in our heads or in our hearts.

Image: The Wales Window at the 16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, AL. Photographer unknown.

Every statement of faith you will find in our Book of Confessions was written to provide the church’s best answer to a question that was being asked at the time. That’s a nice way to say: the church was then, as it is now, involved in disputes. Disagreements. You might even say, fights. The Apostles’ Creed seeks to answer one of the burning questions of the second century of Christianity: Is the God of the Old Testament the same God as the God of Jesus Christ?

Image: Divine Service in the Catacombs of St. Calixtus, A.D. 50. Public Domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Jesus was praying in a certain place.

Jesus prays a lot in the gospel of Luke. He is a pray-er. He prays when he is baptized. He prays when he is healing people, before, during, and after. He prays when word starts to get out about him—when he becomes a sensation, and people start following him everywhere—sometimes, huge crowds of them.

Jesus prays after he has unsettling encounters with the religious authorities, when they tell him that his acts of healing and kindness are breaking the law. Not long after that, he tells his disciples to pray for people who abuse them, and to bless those who curse them.

Jesus prays about who he is, and what he is supposed to be doing with his life. He prays about his call to ministry, and what it means.

He prays for his disciples, his friends, that their faith will be strong, whatever may come. He tells them to pray for that, too.

On the night on which he is betrayed, Jesus tells his friends to pray that they won’t come to a time of trial. Then he weeps, and he prays the very same for himself.

And then, as he is dying, Jesus sends up two prayers from the cross. He prays, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And he prays, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Jesus prays a lot. And so, on this occasion when he is praying, one of his friends says, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

Image: Prayer Hearts, Presbyterian Youth Triennium, 2019.

We love this story. We know this story so well. We love hearing this story, because it reminds us of our calling to love one another and help one another.

Only, we don’t know this story, not really. Or, even if we do know it, it goes so hard against the grain of our basic human instincts for self-preservation, we can hardly take it in. It’s a story that wants to transform us, and that is the hardest task of all.

When you think about it, it might make more sense if we hated this story.

But wait. This isn’t even a story. Not really. It’s a parable. Stories are narratives we tell that tend to shore us up, confirm our common identities and world view. Stories often give us a feeling of security.

Parables are the opposite of stories. They destabilize us. They remove the security of what we thought we knew, and, when Jesus is sharing them, give us a glimpse of God’s view of things…

Image: Ernst Barlach, Barnherzige Samariter, 1919. Public Doman, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.