Good Deal

Text: Genesis 9:8-17

As I said before the service, there is going to be a quiz about the first reading, the one about Noah. So, here are the questions.

Question 1. This passage describes a promise. What is the promise?

Question 2: In this passage God says “I have set my rainbow in the clouds.” What is the purpose of the rainbow?

Question 3: To whom is the promise made?

There is a fourth question, but that one will come up in a few minutes.

For the “religions of the book”—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—the relationship between God and people is based on a deal. The formal word for this deal is “covenant,” which means “agreement.” When the Bible was translated into Latin, the word used became “testament.” Testament unfortunately also means statement, as in someone’s last will and testament. But what they were getting at was not God’s will but the deal that God and people made.

The fact that we relate to God through an agreement is remarkable. Our relationship is more than just creator and creature. More than “I’m God and you’re not.” It is as if we have a contract with God. A contract implies equal respect, even in the face of unequal power or even unequal benefit. It also implies that God and we have a common purpose, a common endeavor that we agree to work on together. We are partners with God through mutual agreement. The endeavor we have agreed to work on is the good of the world, the nourishment and maintenance of all creation, and way of being or you could say a way of living that lets us walk humbly together, humans and God. We walk as two lovers walk, side by side and in harmony, step matching step. At least, that’s what we hope for in the deal.

God made three main covenants with Israel. Each is known by the name of a person, a leader. The first is the one we read about today. The covenant of Noah. The second is of Abraham, to make a great and prosperous nation. The third is of Moses, the covenant at Mount Sinai where the commandments and the other laws were given. For Christians, there is a fourth covenant, the new covenant as we say in Holy Communion or new testament as we call Christian scripture, the covenant of Jesus and God’s promise of graceful forgiveness. None of these covenants supersedes the previous ones. They are all part of and add to the relationship that God and people share.

The story of Noah and the ark is one of the first stories in the Bible. It comes immediately after the exile of Adam and Eve from the garden and the slaying of their son Abel by his older brother Cain. There is a sort of “time passes” chapter that lists the generations from Adam to Noah, Then the story of Noah begins.

You might remember the story of Noah’s Ark as a sweet tale of animals coming two by two into a great ship that Noah built. But they go into that ship because God is about to flood the whole earth and destroy almost all life on land.

It is a difficult time in the life of God and people. God has had a kind of buyer’s remorse. It turns out that the first people were wicked, and God, the Bible says, regrets the decision to create humans. So it rains for a long time, the earth floods, and the only creatures and humans that survive are the ones on the ark.

Out of this story comes the first covenant between God and humanity. Out of this story of destruction, willfulness, obedience, and salvation, comes the first deal. The terms of the deal are clear.

It is specific. Never again will all creatures be cut off by the waters of a flood and never again will there be a flood that destroys all of life. God promises no more flooding here. This is not about general affection or about preserving life in general. What just happened? says God: it won’t happen again.

It is timeless. This is an everlasting covenant, says God. It is permanent. For me and you, for all generations, says God. The waters will never again become such a flood.

It is inclusive. This deal has collateral beneficiaries. It covers all animals as well as people. Every living creature of all flesh, God says. Every animal of the earth. The agreement is with people, but the whole earth is blessed.

And finally, it is one-sided. I’ve been calling this a deal, or an agreement. But it is more like a promise that God makes and that we attend to. As for me, says God, I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendant. This is God’s work. And God takes on the task of maintaining and keeping the promise. God puts a rainbow in the sky. The rainbow is a reminder. But it is not a reminder to us. It is a reminder to God. When the rainbow is seen in the clouds, God says, I will remember this deal. The remembering is not ours but God’s.

Here is the fourth question of the quiz: In this agreement between God and the world, God agrees not to flood the earth again. In this agreement, what do we people agree to do?

Right: Nothing. This is a unilateral unconditional promise given to the world through the God’s arbitrary love, which we call grace.

This is perhaps a particularly Lutheran understanding of the story of Noah. Where others might pay more attention to the wrath of God which drowned the world in the first place, Lutherans tend to see the love of God which saved it. When others might see the wickedness which brought the flood down on them as they deserved, Lutherans tend to see the nothing that people did to deserve God’s everlasting promise of life.

This is a pretty counter-cultural notion. There must be something we can do to annoy God, you might think. I’m sure there is. I’m sure we annoy, anger, and sadden God all the time. But there is nothing we can do that will make God renege on promises made. Nothing we can do that will make God abandon us. God wishes blessings for us, God’s people and God’s children.

We are now in Lent. This season is traditionally a time of reflection and repentance. But that does not mean it is a time for us to beat up on ourselves. We do enough of that without having to create a special season for it. We do not need special coaching to see ourselves as coming up short from time to time.

Lent is a time for reflection but it is not a time to blame ourselves or others. It is not a time to find, lay, or take blame. It is a time to look at what we have been and done. But not to look with hateful or guilt-filled eyes. And though it is a time for repentance, it is not a time for shame. It is a time to consider the direction in which we are going and to consider how we might go from now on. Lent is a time of grace, not a time of wrath.

It is a time for forgiveness, forgiving others and ourselves. For sins we have done and sins that others have done against us. But we do not need to pay penance. We are given forgiveness freely. It is not necessary for us to pay for that gift. We do not need to demand penance, either. It is not our place to demand that others pay us.

It is fitting that the story of Noah appears at the beginning of humanity’s relationship with God and at the beginning of this season. It is a story of God’s intense desire to extract good from the bad. And of God’s ongoing practice of renewal and rebirth. It is a story of blessing. In this season of Lent, look back with forgiveness, look forward with confident anticipation, and be thankful.

Down to Earth

Text: Mark 9:2-9

On the cover of the bulletin you’ll see Raphael’s interpretation of the Transfiguration, the formal name for the story we just heard in the Gospel reading. This image was painted around the same time that Martin Luther was stirring up the Reformation. In real life the painting is about thirteen feet high by nine feet wide. I would guess it is a little more impressive at that size than the image on today’s bulletin.

Like many paintings of this story, this one depicts two worlds. At the top is the heavenly world, the mountain top of the story. There Jesus meets with the greatest prophets Moses and Elijah. They are all kind of floating in the air, and the disciples are just below them, terrified (in Mark’s version of the story) or asleep (in Luke’s version). Below them, in the dark, are the people of the earthly world, evidently in sin, sickness, and suffering. The split between the divine and the mundane is clear, and it is clear in whose realm Jesus belongs and is comfortable. That is one way to see this story.

The story of the Transfiguration sits in the church year between Epiphany and Lent. It is on the cusp of the two seasons. From the mountain top we look back on the stories of the ministry of Jesus. What he did, what he said, and especially the people he healed. His worldly work. And also we look forward to the story of the passion. The trial and crucifixion of Jesus and his resurrection at Easter. His heavenly work.

The story itself sits almost exactly in the middle of Mark. Right before it, Peter declares that Jesus is the Messiah, and Jesus tells Peter that he, Jesus, will be executed. So in Mark, too, it sits on the cusp, with the ministry of Jesus on one side and the passion of Christ on the other.

In the story, Jesus invites a few disciples, Peter, James, and John, to come up with him on a high mountain. James and John are silent throughout the whole episode. Peter, as usual, has plenty to say. What he says is this: Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. It is good for us to be here. How is it good? Is it good for Peter and his buddies, or is it good for Jesus, or is it good for the world? Is it a good that benefits one of those groups? Or is the fact itself that we, the disciples and Jesus, are here that is good? I have an idea about this, which we’ll talk about in a minute.

The Transfiguration is a big deal. It is one of the church’s feast days. But it was not always so, and it did not become so until just before Luther’s time, in the 15th century. The events of the Transfiguration don’t really change our picture of Jesus.

Some say that the point of the feast is that it establishes a boundary. But if so, that boundary exists already in the events of the life of Jesus. And besides, I’m not so sure that we can turn the person of Jesus into two different characters, one pre-Transfiguration and one post-.

And if the point of the feast is that Jesus is revealed to be at least closely connected—if not coincident—with God, then we already know that. Peter has just declared a few verses previously that Jesus is the Messiah. And if it is that now we know that Jesus is going to his death, we already know that, too. Jesus just told us so.

The story is powerfully dramatic. But though it seems to be about Jesus, it doesn’t add much to the disciples understanding of Jesus, nor to ours. So what is it doing here, and why does the church think this is important? Important enough to get its own day.

When you read this story, you think, at least I do: why did Jesus invite his disciples? Especially John and James, who just hang around and don’t say two words between them. But even why Peter? Jesus doesn’t need the disciples to be there. He does not teach them anything. He doesn’t even talk to them until the end, when he orders them to keep their mouths shut about all this. Which of course, they do not.

The story seems to be about Jesus, but I think it is more about the disciples, and especially about Peter. I think that Jesus brings these three important church leaders up to the mountain with him for their sake. Silent James and John and excited talkative Peter are not there just to observe and report. They are there to be changed. It is their metamorphosis that becomes the long-term result of the events on the mountain top.

Peter says, Lord it is good for us to be here. When he says “good,” he means a lot more than that things are just fine, or fortunate. He means, in the word he uses, that it is beautiful, excellent, precious, and fitting. That it fits into the scheme of creation and the universe. That it is good in the same way that God in Genesis saw things to be good when the world was created. Peter is saying something really important and crucial. World changing.

For Peter, this event with the prophets and the voice of God establishes his vocation—his calling—in a way that was, if not casual, then unconfirmed. He sees in a way that he did not see before that Jesus is from the people of Moses and Elijah, but even more: that he is like them. That he, Jesus will change the world. And that he, Peter, will be an important instrument of that change. It finally clicks. There is a conversion here in this story, and the person who is converted is Peter.

Our lives are full of moments of change. We are often on the cusp of something that was and something that is about to be. But it is rare that we see that until it is too late, so to speak. Turning points are hard to see until we realize that we’ve made the turn. It seems like all we are doing is making small decisions here or there. To confirm the path we are on for a while or to deny it. To stay the course or make a new one. And often as not, as with Peter, the path we take depends as much or more on what someone else does as on decisions we ourselves make. But occasionally, as with Peter, we do see that we are on the cusp, that it is an important moment, that something is happening right this minute in our lives, that the future is going to be amazing.

No matter which version of the Transfiguration you read, in each the followers of Jesus are surprised. That’s the way it is to follow Jesus. You go up the mountain with Jesus. Something happens. You come down the mountain. Everything is different.

The church—Christianity—celebrates this feast because it is an event in the life of the church more than it is an event in the life of Jesus. Down comes Jesus from the mountain. Down come John and James. Down comes Peter.

Down they come to the world of sin, sickness, and suffering. The world in the lower half of the painting. The place of Jesus is not after all to be in the clouds, floating above the sorry disciples. It is to be with the sorry disciples. It is clear in whose realm Jesus belongs. The ministry of Jesus does not shut down with the Transfiguration. It is conveyed to John and James and Peter, and it has been conveyed through the church to us here in this place and in this time. Where it is good for us to be.

Healing into a New Story

Text: Mark 1:40-45
Other texts: 2 Kings 5:1-14

No one emerges from an illness the same way he or she went in. Even when cured by a miracle of the spirit or by a miracle of medicine, illness changes us.

Naaman, commander of the army, had leprosy. A vaguely defined and incurable skin disease. After much drama, hurt pride, fortunate intervention, and God’s work through the prophet Elisha, Naaman was healed. He emerged from the river Jordan with skin as smooth and pure as a preadolescent’s. No sores, no scars. He was better than new. But that does not mean the experience of being ill had been undone. Could he escape the memory of the time he had leprosy? Could he forget the looks of disgust that people must have given him? Or perhaps the looks of admiration that he had become an army commander and friend of the king despite his illness. The events of his disease would remain a part of the story of his life.

What does it mean to be healed? It is tempting to think that healing means restoring things to the way they were before. Before we were injured, or before we got sick, or before we were hurt emotionally, or before we endured a major loss. In those times, we long for suffering to just go away, as if it were a bug that might fly off, leaving us unbothered and unchanged. But we are never unchanged by illness and loss.

First, we are creatures and can never be put together exactly the same way after we are broken. Second, we are creatures who move forward in time—we age—so that even if we could be reassembled, we can never return exactly to the person we once were. And third, we are creatures who remember things as we move forward in time, so that even if it were possible to undo an illness, we could not undo our experience of it. Naaman remembers himself having leprosy and having to humble himself. The beggar remembers himself being unclean, sick, and outcast, no matter what happens to him after his encounter with Jesus.

Nor does healing mean to be made perfect. As if that were possible, as if that had any meaning to creatures who are organic and complex. None of us were ever perfect. What would that mean? What would be the standard? Are we imperfect because we cannot fly? Are we imperfect because we are soft? Are we imperfect if one leg is a little shorter than the other? Are we imperfect if we are near-sighted? If we are not as smart as the next person? If we can’t run very fast? Beside all that, we are biological beings living in a biological environment. We will always be ill, more or less. Most of the time mostly less, thank God. But there is something wrong with every one of us. Partly, it doesn’t matter very much. And partly, we are used to it.

Nor does healing mean to be resigned to one’s fate. Illness and loss make us angry, disappointed, sometimes ashamed. There is not much we can do about our condition. But it is not helpful to simply suck it up, to live with anger, disappointment, and shame. Those are not good things to live with. Not good things to carry around in our heads and hearts and bodies. The beggar approaches Jesus because the beggar sees and hopes and expects that Jesus will change him.

There was once a young man named Matthew who was in a car accident when he was thirteen years old. In the accident his spine was broken. He lost control and feeling of everything below his diaphragm, including his legs. He later wrote about his experience. He said that most of the people looking after him—his mother, the doctors—wanted him to become a person with no legs. That is, they told him that he would never use his legs again and that he had to develop really strong arms and that it would be best if he somehow disassociated himself from his legs. They would be attached, of course, but not really part of his existence. He felt they wanted him to be a new person, newly born in a way, a person without working legs.

But Matthew was having no part of this. Over time, he learned that though he could not feel his legs or move them, they were clearly part of him. When he sat up, they were a counterbalance to his torso. They affected his movement, his grace and awkwardness. Not just like they did before his accident, but in a new way. His body was one body. The different parts working together, the same as everybody’s. Not the same way as everybody’s. How they worked together was different. That they worked together was the same. He wrote that when he realized this, which took years, he felt he was healed. He was healed not by becoming a new person. He was the same person as before. But he was the same person with a new story.

Illness and loss seem to be our enemies. They are outside of us, attacking our being, distorting our existence. But healing does not eradicate them. Healing brings them into our story. Healing changes the trauma into an event in our lives. Something that happened. Healing takes away the power of illness and injury. They no longer define us and control us. They are things that have happened, or are happening, to us, just like all the other more ordinary things. Healing makes them part of our story. The story we tell about ourselves. When I was thirteen, Matthew said in his story, I was in a car accident. When I got sick, we might say. When I and my spouse separated. When I lost my job. When my grandmother died. How I became weaker, slower, befuddled. We are not made into new people by such events. We are the same people. But we do have new stories.

The healing stories we’ve been hearing in Mark are stories of power. Who has the power over us. The beggar comes to Jesus. If you chose, you can make me clean, he says. You have the power, he says, to change my life.

Healing means we are freed from the power that our wounds have over us. We cannot eliminate them, ignore them, or resign ourselves to them. We can though deprive them of their power. They don’t have to be define us or be the boss of us.

The connection that Jesus makes so often between forgiveness and healing is a natural one. Sins against us control us until we forgive them. Sins we cannot forgive make us angry and resentful and do stupid things. When we forgive someone who sins against us, we don’t eliminate the sin, or forget about it, but we do weaken its power over us.

In the same way, when Jesus promises us eternal life, it frees us from the power of death. It does not eliminate death, but it weakens its power. When Jesus tells us not to be afraid but to trust in God, it does not eliminate fear, but it weakens its power.

We can place our illness, our loss, our shame at the center of our lives. We can think of ourselves as the person who is ill, the person that something bad happened to, or is happening to, the person who has been wounded. Or we can seek out another center. We can search, as Naaman did, for God’s prophet. We can call, as the beggar did, for Jesus. We can discover a new story for ourselves.

Jesus, if you choose, you can make me free.

To Be Right or To Be Good

Text: 1 Corinthians 8:1-13

Is it better to be right or to be good?

It is the question that Paul asks, in a round-about way, of the people of Corinth. And therefore asks us.

Perhaps you will say that to be right is to be good. When we act, we should act on what we know. (The Corinthians would agree). When we do, you might say, then it is likely that the outcome is best. To act in ignorance and to act against reasoned thinking is risky and foolish. Like the people of Corinth, we value knowledge. We as a culture spend a lot of energy getting, organizing, and preserving knowledge. We have knowledge workers. We weigh things one against the other and pick the best outcome, we hope, limited only by our knowledge. Practicality, expediency, and effectiveness are the children of knowledge. We judge behaviors and outcomes by them.

By this reasoning, it is OK to be good, but that is not the main point. Or to be more kind, goodness is a desirable outcome, but not always relevant. Goodness is a consideration. The CEO is a practical manager. The chief ethics officer is an annoyance.

What makes the words of Jesus, who was a visionary, and Paul, who was a lawyer, so amazing is that for both of them goodness is exactly the main point. Jesus is always getting into trouble because he breaks the law in favor of the immediate needs of people. The right thing to do is to obey the law. But when Jesus sees someone in trouble, he does the good thing whether or not it is the right thing. The sabbath is for people, not people for sabbath, he said, which pretty much sums it up. He heals people at the wrong time. He hangs around with the wrong people. He touches the wrong people. We do things, he seems to say, because they are good for people. Knowledge and all its children are a consideration. But they serve goodness. Even if when it is risky and foolish, it is better to be good than right.

Paul is unhappy with the Corinthians. He starts by telling them that they are in the right. You have knowledge, he admits. You have knowledge of Jesus and his teachings. You know what is right, what are the true facts about God and the world. But that knowledge is not causing you to do good.

When Paul speaks in this passage about what I’m calling goodness, he uses the word that is translated love. But for Paul and his listeners, that word does not describe a feeling, a sentiment. Love is not about feeling either romantically or affectionately drawn to another person. It means to act. Love works, love does things. Love works to serve others. That is what love does. It is a consequence of love and a definition of love.

But that is not what the folks at Corinth are doing. They are not acting in love. They are not making things easier or better for other people. They are making things harder. Not because that’s a good thing to do, but simply because they can. They are right, and they act as if that gives them special powers.

In fact, Paul agrees they have special powers. Our Bible calls this power liberty, or you could call it freedom, but it is translated elsewhere as authority or power. They have the freedom, or liberty, or permission, that comes with knowing that God favors them because of what Jesus did. This knowledge has puffed them up, Paul says. They have inflated egos. They are thinking a lot about themselves and not much about others.

Paul’s argument, which probably seems a little weird at first, goes like this: You and I know, says Paul to his readers, that there are no such things as idols. Idols have no power. They aren’t real. They are just made up things. There is no reason to revere them. You could spit on an idol (Paul doesn’t say that) and it wouldn’t matter, because an idol is just a manufactured item, like a shovel or a trash barrel. Paul and Paul’s compatriots know this. So if someone makes a sacrament of meat to an idol, it means nothing. It is not holy or special. It is just plain old meat. A lamb chop. Sirloin steak. So there is no reason not to eat it. Anyone with knowledge of Jesus knows this. Or should.

But let’s say that someone has a little left-over worry that maybe idols have a little divinity in them. That they are kind of holy. “Not really, you know, but, well, maybe a little. I mean, maybe.” So they think, I cannot eat this meat because it has been part of a sacrifice to a pagan god. And if they do, they feel bad—Paul says they feel defiled.

Evidently the folks to whom Paul writes have been eating this meat. Sort of flaunting it in front of others. Like when someone does something taboo because he or she doesn’t believe in the taboo, and therefore it has no power for them. You can just see them approaching the others, teasing them: Go ahead, have some of this great meat. Yum! This sure is good.

When you do this, Paul says to the Corinthians, it shows that you do not understand what Jesus was all about. You are hurting these people, making them seem foolish or sinful. And making you superior, just because you are right. It is right, but it is not good. Through your knowledge, Paul says, you are destroying your brothers and sisters. You are sinning against them, and, he says, sinning against Christ.

When we sit upon a platform of what is right and do things that harm others, we sit with the Corinthians. When we begin our discussions with words like “I know” or “it says” or “Luther said,” we are enlisting the force of knowledge. And when through that we hurt others, we are not loving them.

What Paul asks for in his letter is not a kind of sentimental fluffy embrace of all things, people, or behaviors. And he does not dismiss the power of knowledge. He agrees that knowledge of Jesus Christ is liberating and powerful. Nor does he dismiss the need to exhort people to think clearly and humbly. Paul is always doing that. He was stubborn and vocal about it. (Martin Luther was the same way; no wonder he liked Paul.) Paul’s letters, like this one, are often lists of correctives and criticisms of people doing things the wrong way.

But Paul does not lean on doctrine. Or maybe better to say that Paul finds doctrine to have a tough flexibility to conform to things new and unforeseen. And that doctrine must be based on love, the kind of love we are talking about. It must be able to accommodate real people and their real situations. And because Christian doctrine is based on Jesus, it is able to.

Right and good are not inevitably opposed. They are not the opposite end of some scale. Often they are coincident. But when there is a conflict between structure, doctrine, law, or process and love, what do we do? How do we decide? Which pulls us most strongly? Which do we trust the most?

It looks like it will continue to be stressful times for the world, the nation, the church, and individuals. In these days especially, fear tempts us to trust knowledge as our guide and not trust love.

In these days, it is helpful to remind ourselves of Paul’s answer to the people of Corinth. Knowledge puffs up, love builds up, says Paul. Love is better than knowledge; good is better than right.

Big Talk

Text: Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Other texts: Mark 1:14-20

Someone said this past week that one thing that Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama had in common was their intense belief in the power of words.

Martin Luther had the same belief. Luther was a preacher and a teacher. It is hard to preach or teach if you don’t think anything you say makes a difference. Luther said quite a few things. His collected writings, sermons, and other talks fill up a fifty-two volume set of books. I’m sure that Luther loved to talk, but I’m equally sure he loved to talk because he thought that words were a force to transform his world, a world that needed transforming.

Jonah did not believe in the power of words. But he was later convinced. Jonah was told by God to go to Nineveh and speak to the the people there. Proclaim to it a message that I tell you, God says to Jonah. God moves Jonah to action. God moves Jonah to action by saying things to him. He doesn’t poke him with a stick or pull him along with a rope. It is the word of the Lord that makes Jonah go down to Nineveh. God’s words to Jonah are powerful, and by speaking them, God prevails on Jonah to do what Jonah doesn’t really want to do at all.

What Jonah does not want to do is to speak powerfully to Nineveh. But he does. In forty days, he tells the Ninevites, things are not going to be so good around here. And, to Jonah’s surprise and annoyance, the people repent. They change their ways. A whole city is transformed. The whole city fasts, and the whole city starts wearing scratchy clothing. The whole city is transformed. And when God sees what the did, God changes God’s mind. God changed his mind, the passage says, about the calamity that God had said he would bring upon them; and God did not do it.

Jonah’s words were powerful. They changed the world. Jonah was not happy. He had wanted his words to be weak and puny, and to change nothing. Jonah really wanted to see Nineveh get it. Right after this in the story, Jonah sulks about this and complains to God. But the good has already happened, on account of Jonah’s words.

God’s words are powerful. In the book of Isaiah God says

“As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish, so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth: It will not return to me empty, but will accomplish what I desire and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.”

Maybe not all words are as powerful as God’s, and maybe not all our words accomplish what we desire, but they are pretty powerful, and they accomplish much.

Words are like filters or lenses. They make sense out of what our eyes record. They make things distinct, separating out the trees from the forest, or making a bunch of disparate trees be one forest. When we name things we see them. How we name them makes us see them as good or evil, useful or useless, indifferent or threatening, possible or impossible.

When we first moved to the city, we met someone at a party who lived near Inman Square. She loved Inman Square. We loved Inman Square. It was one big Inman Square lovefest. But then she asked about our street. What street did we live on? We live on Tremont Street, we said. Her look grew cold. Oh, she said, East Cambridge. And she walked away.

We lived on the wrong side of Prospect Street. Now I have to say that the houses one block east of Prospect. where Tremont is, and one block west of Prospect (which is called mid-Cambridge) are not all that different. Nor are the people who live on one side and the other. But in her eyes, as her eyes saw them, they were. Much as people see others who live across borders, which are often just lines on the ground, or lines of culture, religion, race, or class.

Not only do words determine what we see, they determine what we can do. They constrain us. They are like a template or a jig on a workbench. They define what is right, good, and fitting. Our friend from the party would have been unable to live on our street. The words “east” and “west” have constrained her freedom. Half the city is closed to her. Too bad for her, I’d say. But she pities us. Not only have we not seen or named a crucial difference, in our ignorance we have trespassed, sinned in her eyes. We have mistakenly gone where she could never go.

Not only do words determine what we see and what we can do, they determine what we want. Words are desire, pulling us toward one thing or another. Words are little pieces of imagination, put together to pull us to one future or another. Perhaps after we considered them, our friend’s words have convinced that we should move to mid-Cambridge, where life is grand and people are all happy. I don’t know how you feel about our new president, but by the words he uses—like courage and sacrifice and fairness—he hopes to enlist our imaginations and draw us forward. He hopes to direct our desires.

We do more than listen. We speak. Words move us. And as a result we create the words that move others. Jesus calls Simon and Andrew. But he calls them not just to hear but to say. I will make you fishers of people, he says. I doubt Jesus means that they will trap, net, and ensnare people. I suspect he means that they will gather, inform, and persuade people. That Jesus will speak to the disciples, teach them (disciple means student), and then send them out as apostles (apostle means one who is sent) to teach others, help others see things in a new way, to be free of old boundaries, and to imagine different futures.

We gather later today at Faith’s annual meeting. Why do we do that? (Besides that we have to by law.) When we meet like this, we read reports. We do that because it helps us tell ourselves who we are and what we hope for. We name our roles. The congregation of Faith Lutheran Church. But also the Community of Faith, made up of Faith Lutheran plus the Eritrean Worship Group plus Calvary Praise and Worship Center. Calvary and the Eritrean group are not guests of Faith, but we are all three of us part of one community. We are because we say so. We name it so. We do not say we are a church with young people in it but a church where many people are young. Not a comfortable home for people passing through but a worshiping community where many here are at the beginning of their life’s adventure, and who knows what’s next?

We are a church of Christ. We come here and hear the words of Jesus. And then we in turn speak them to others. We are the disciples and the apostles. The recruits and the recruiters. The guests and the servers. The eaters and the cooks, as we say at Faith Kitchen.

Talk is transforming. It transformed the lives of the people of Nineveh. It transformed the lives of Simon and Andrew. And it transformed the lives of people they talked to. And the people they talked to. And the people they talked to. All the way down, through 2000 years, to us. And the people we talk to.

Last Sunday we discussed being called and listening for God. Listening is good. A good first step. On Tuesday millions of people stood in the cold and listened, and many millions more watched remotely. Eyes filled with tears, and hearts were uplifted. But what happens now?

After listening, it is time to speak. If Jonah had never spoken, Nineveh would not be saved. If Simon and Andrew never preached, we would not be here today. God created the universe, it says in Genesis, by speaking it into existence. The future is made by what we say. Listen. Then speak.

"Don't call me late for dinner"

Text: John 1:43-51
Other texts: 1 Samuel 3:1-10

Sometimes it seems as if our destiny were in our own hands. Sometimes is seems as if we have some control of our future. But usually it isn’t, and usually we don’t. And that can be good news.

Do you remember as a child looking out the windshield of your parent’s car as it moved along the road? It seemed that the road magically straightened out. The car seemed to go straight ahead while the road came around to meet it. The magic was that the car, or your parents, or you, seem to control the world.

But as you get older you realize that the road is fixed in space, and that the driver is directing the car to follow it, rather than making the road follow the car. So some of the power of the driver—your parent—is diminished. But not entirely. The road is not a rail. A train or trolley. The road does not compel you to follow the path it lays down. It is as if the road issues an invitation. Follow me. Follow me and your life in the minutes ahead will be easier and safer. The road does not compel you to follow it. It calls you to follow it.

It calls. Jesus calls his disciples. Samuel is called by God to be a prophet. Ministers are called to serve in a church. You are called to be here, since the word for church means to be called out of one’s house into assembly with others. Calling seems to be a religious activity.

But your vocation is your work, and the root of the word vocation—the “voc”—means to call. What is your calling, people used to say about people’s careers. One can evoke a memory—same root—meaning to call up images of the past. Academics gather in convocation, meaning to be called to gather with one another.

It may be that we march through life. Bushwhacking, blazing new trails, climbing new peaks, conquering new ground. Our future, in this view, is an open, uncharted, and virgin plain, and as our life proceeds, we create its path as we go. There is no room for calling in this view.

But trying to live like this seems to me to be like trying to push a string, trying to barge into our future rather than being invited into it. It can be hard, fruitless, and lonely work.

Or it may be that we are called into the future. That God, through others and through circumstances, makes constant tiny (or not so tiny) invitations to us. God neither pushes us nor lets us figure everything out for ourselves. Instead, God beckons us. Come this way. Come and see. Come listen.

It is not that these two views bring us to different places, though I think they do. Or that the road is any easier to travel—we are called sometimes to do hard, hard things. It is that we are blessed to live as recipients of a constant gift: the gift that we are offered a future, invited into a future. That we are called. There is adventure ahead, but it is not dependent only on our own energy and wisdom and strength. Thank God for that.

Both Samuel, in the first reading, and Nathanael, in the Gospel reading, respond to the call they experience with a sense of open, trusting, and eager acceptance.

But perhaps you don’t find this prospect thrilling and comforting. Perhaps you find it scary. Or annoying. In that case, we might look for reassurance to these two stories to find out more about how God seems to work when calling us.

First, we are called in the midst of others. We are not alone when called. Samuel is not just walking down the street when God calls to him. Samuel was ministering to the Lord under Eli, it says. Samuel was supported by his history, by his parents, by his work with the priest Eli. And they in turn were supported by the history of prophets and priests and stories of Israel. So Samuel is surrounded by all these witnesses and is called out of them. We are called not at random but from the story of our own lives.

Second, we are called to be with others. We are not alone after we accept God’s call. Nathanael became one of a group of disciples. Philip, already a follower of Jesus, invites Nathanael to become part of a particular gathering of followers, including Simon and Andrew. So Nathanael will be surrounded by all these companions and is called to be with them. We are called not into lonely endeavors but into associations of new friends and colleagues.

And third, we are called unexpectedly. None of us knows how and when we will be called. It often surprises us. Samuel hears God calling three times and three times thinks it must be Eli calling. It takes Eli to point out that maybe something is happening that Samuel should attend to. Samuel does not expect to be called to be a prophet. Eli sees what Samuel does not. We are called by God who sees us better than we see ourselves.

Others may suspect you are being called before you do. You think you are the wrong person, too skeptical maybe, too young, too old, too rude, have other plans. But look: here we all are at Faith in Cambridge. How did that happen? Isn’t that amazing? Who would have guessed? One moment Nathanael was lounging under a fig tree. In the next, his life is changed.

I suspect that God has hopes for us as a world and as individuals. But that does not mean that God has a blueprint or a script that each of us must follow. Whether God knows what is going to happen is up for debate. And it is unlikely that God pushes us around like little toys for God’s own amusement, or even for our own well-being. Our destiny is more complicated. It seems that God prefers to work, as we hear from scripture and in our own lives, by making us offers. By calling us.

A call is an invitation to movement. And therefore to change something. Something in our heads, or hearts, or lives. In small steps or big ones. In the way we see or the way we act. To make different practical decisions than we have been making. To hope for different things, too.

And though the consequences may be momentous, the call is gentle. God invites Samuel: Listen. Jesus invites Nathanael: Come and see. Open your ears, open your eyes. Open your hearts. Do not be afraid.

And God demands little in the form of a reply. Only an acknowledgement, not a contract. The simplest and most basic answer we can give. Our existence. And our attention.

Here I am, Lord. Speak. I am listening.

Hooray! God is Good

Text: Sirach 24:1-12
Other texts: Wisdom of Solomon 10:15-21, John 1:1-18

We are about to emerge from the season of gifts. Epiphany marks the last of the twelve days of Christmas. As in “On the twelfth day of Christmas my true love gave to me.” Did someone give you something that you wanted this season? Did someone give you something you did not want? Some little something that you now have to store away for years. The crystal swan or the napkin holder. The something you cannot throw out or give away because the person who gave it to you loves you and you love that person. Re-gifting, a new word and an old concept, is still a little impolite and shameful. You do not want anyone to see that you have given their gift to someone else. To deny their gift to you would be hurtful and mean and harm your relationship.

The readings for today—Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, Ephesians, and John—come at this time of the church year, this second Sunday in Christmas, because they all celebrate God’s presence among us. Immanuel, meaning God with us. But they all preface that celebration with a note about the things God has given us. Gifts to us, God’s children.

For starters, the readings say, God gave us the universe. I came forth from God and covered the earth, says Wisdom. Wisdom, with a capital “W,” is a divinity in what is called “wisdom literature.” She is often considered the equivalent of the Holy Spirit. Here, she has the same role as the wind, the breath, the spirit that in Genesis moved over the waters and brought forth creation, the heavens and the seas. In the Gospel of John, the Word is the creator. In the beginning was the Word, writes John in this amazing poem, in the beginning was the Word. All things came into being through the Word. We start by acknowledging that all we are is from God.

But God did not just make us. God continues to fiddle with the universe and to interfere with history. Our god is not standoffish, shy, or reluctant to meddle in the affairs of humans and the elements. God opened the waters of the Red Sea, the reading reminds us, God guided the Israelites from Egypt—by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night—guided them from slavery to freedom. God adopted the people of Israel as God’s own. And the people adopted God and gave God a place to live among them. “In the beloved city he gave me a resting place,” sings Wisdom, “and in Jerusalem was my domain.” And John writes that the Word became flesh and lived among us. God comes to us and lives as Jesus, a human being with us.

These are God’s gifts, given to us by one who loves creation and the humans within it. They are three big gifts.

Creation. Our existence, really, and all that we see and all that we are. Our hopes and our abilities and our comforts. And all the things we love—the world, and pleasures, and other people—and the ability to love at all.

Freedom. The scripture speaks of political freedom for the Israelites. Freedom from slavery and oppression and all that includes: violence, imprisonment, exploitation, indifference to the plight of others. But we also are given through Christ the freedom from fear of death and the freedom from all the fear that keeps us from loving others, even those unfamiliar to us.

And God’s presence here with us. We are not cut loose to find our own ways in a mindless, thoughtless universe. And we are not experiments observed from above in some far off heavenly laboratory. We have not been created to see how things work out in the end. God who created us is near us, hears us, knows us better than we know ourselves, knows what it is like to be us. We are not alone.

God has made us. God has freed us. God is with us. These are the gifts that scripture tells us about. And in the best of times our hearts tell us too. They are fine gifts, one that fill the writers of today’s readings with hope and pride and gratitude.

Yet they are not always whole-heartedly welcome. They obligate us. We cannot in good conscience store them away in the closet—and there is no way to re-gift them. They are ours, given by a loving and interfering God, ours to keep. And therefore to keep care of and to use wisely. They can be mixed blessings. The Temple in Jerusalem, God’s house and resting place and beloved city, as Sirach says, has been in history and in the present also a focus of sadness and conflict. The call to Christians to treat others, even enemies, as one’s self has been a difficult standard to live up to. Walking without fear requires trust that we don’t always have. God’s presence among us means that God is sometimes closer than is comfortable. We can be selfish, violent, and nasty folks sometimes. And in those times, we don’t really want to be reminded that we are God’s favorite relative and recipient of God’s blessing.

If we see these things as God’s gifts, whether we are enthusiastic and grateful for them or not, the question is: how should we respond? Should we pretend that they have no call on us? Should we try to put them in a spiritual closet? Should we act as if we have no particular or specific responsibilities, even though we are free creatures loved by God? Does that mean anything, and if if does, what does it call us to do?

Wisdom literature is often a guide to an ethical way of living. Proverbs, for example, is part of this kind of writing. But the ethics and guides, though sensible, are not derived from common sense. They are derived from our relationship with God. Our good behavior is not a kind of ethical to-do list of chores. Not “Be good because I told you to” sort of thing. We save our aunt’s crystal swan because we have a relationship with her that we do not want to jeopardize. Even when it might be a pain to care for, we do it out of respect and love for her.

The big story of the Bible is a story of the connection people have with God. Our gratitude for what God has given us is part of that connection, both in the history of our religion and the history of our own personal faith. We can lean on that connection. But it also demands things of us, just as the connection we have with our friends and family demands things of us.

These scripture passages are ones of happy thanksgiving. Hooray! they say, God is good. We have received much. Grace upon grace, as John writes. The word he uses is the root of the word for gratitude (you can hear “grace” inside “gratitude”) and thanksgiving. How we respond to that grace is an ongoing and lifelong quest, for the church as a whole, for this church, and for each of us. But we can start, on this the second Sunday in the season of Christmas, with a simple thank you.

Thanks to God for all God has given us. Hooray! God is good.