The Spirit of Christmas

The scriptures referred to are Galatians 4:4-7.

There is an interesting phenomena that existed before the internet but which, as usual, the worldwide web has exacerbated. It is taking a really good, pithy, insightful quote and misattributing it to someone famous. As one meme puts it, “Don't believe everything you read on the internet just because there's a picture with a quote next to it.” And it is attributed to Abraham Lincoln complete with his picture. For some reason people cannot believe an obscure person made a succinct or witty observation that is universal. It must have been said by someone well known. Consequently, there are large sections on the Wikiquote pages of Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and C.S. Lewis listing things they supposedly said that are disputed or mistakenly attributed to them. There is even a Facebook page called Confirming C.S. Lewis Quotations.

Fortunately one of my favorite theological quotes was in fact written by C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity. He wrote, “The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.” Even so Lewis, who was extremely well-read, was probably paraphrasing Irenaeus of Lyon, a second century Greek bishop, who put it this way, “He who was the Son of God became the the Son of Man, that man...might become the son of God.” I think Lewis said it better. But both may have been thinking of a verse in today's passage from Galatians: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.”

Often we get so caught up in the idea that God became a human being that we forget that there was a reason for it and it wasn't merely to die on a cross. It wasn't merely to change our destination in the afterlife. It was ultimately to change us into children of God.

There is an idea out there that all people are automatically children of God. But that's not strictly true. We are his creations. Yes, we were created in his image but you have to admit that if you look hard at people the most you can say is that we are a caricature of God. We means we can appreciate Hamlet's monologue where he says, “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me.” The gap between what people are capable of and how they actually behave is astonishing and not in a good way.

Every good thing humans have invented has also been used for evil. The Athenians came up with democracy but then excluded women and slaves and restricted it to adult male citizens, perhaps 30% of the adult population. And in the US we did the same, adding that the males had to be white and own land. We have expanded the franchise but there are always those who fight to limit the political power of the average person. 

Inventors have come up with innumerable labor saving devices...and torture devices. Thomas Edison, in order to discredit his competitors who used alternating current rather than his direct current, invented the electric chair using alternating current! Science has made great breakthroughs that have extended lives and it also has been used to justify racism and eugenics. After World War 2 we acquired a lot of valuable data on human endurance...obtained by Nazi scientists like Joseph Mengele who experimented on Jews and disabled people. 

And of course we ended that world war by developing atomic weapons which are so horrific we have never used them again. Except in experiments in the Marshall Islands that have left the Bikini Atoll more radioactive than Chernobyl and Fukushima 60 years after the event. Oh, and the 100 above ground tests held in the Nevada desert a mere 65 miles from Las Vegas which the CDC says resulted in 11,000 cancer deaths. C.S. Lewis said, “Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.” The same goes for human beings.

And it is the gap between what we aspire to be and what we actually are that has turned many people off to the church and to God. There was actually a group called Fundamentalists Anonymous in the 1980s and 90s that was set up to help people leaving religious groups that are rigid and controlling. Worse, I just read a article in The Times that said, “Nuns running a children's home in Germany prostituted boys in their care to priests, local politicians and businessmen in the 1960s and 1970s, according to a victim who won a court fight for compensation.” This is the same church that builds and runs hospitals, homeless shelters, food pantries and aids and resettles refugees.

How does this happen? Because we cannot be what God created us to be if we try to do it on our own. Let's go back to the beginning. In Genesis it says, “...the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” As in Greek, the Hebrew word for breath and wind also means spirit. We become living beings created in the image of God, thanks to the Spirit of life God gives us. As C.S. Lewis points out, God makes us the way a human being makes a car. And just as the car is designed to run on gasoline, we are designed to run on God. Try to fuel your life with something other than God, even good intentions, and your life won't run very well or go very far. Most of humanity and sadly, some Christians are running on empty.

That's what I meant about us not automatically being children of God, but creatures. Lewis compares it to the difference between a toy soldier and a real one. And if he lived today, he might talk of the marvelous toys and robots we have now that are able to mimic human beings to an amazing degree, thanks to computers and electronics. But have you noticed that the more they look like humans, the creepier they are? Because they aren't actually human. They lack real humanity.

And when people do awful things, like abuse children, we say such things are inhuman. Except that they aren't. Humans do such things. But part of us knows that is not how humans should act. Somewhere inside us, we remember that we were meant to be like God, as Hamlet says. We have the potential. Why do we fall short? (And by the way, that is literally what the Greek word for sin means: to fall short, to miss the mark.)

We need God's Spirit. When we turn to God and accept his offer of grace, we become not merely creatures who vaguely resemble God in some ways but his children. Paul says, “And because you are his children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying 'Abba! Father!'” The Spirit that empowered Jesus in his ministry empowers those who trust Jesus to follow him and to be like him.

Christmas does not end with the baby lying in the manger, just as Christianity doesn't end with Jesus ascending into heaven. It's just the beginning of what God is doing in us. Jesus shows us how to live and then passes the baton on to us, so to speak, by sending his Spirit to us. The Son of God became a human being to enable human beings to become children of God. He did it not just by dying for us but by giving his life, his Spirit, to us. If we are God's children, the resemblance should be so strong that people will see what we do and say, “That's His kid, alright!”

There is a meme I saw and shared on the internet that has become wildly popular, especially on the Episcopalians on Facebook and ELCA Clergy pages. It shows Jesus sitting and talking to a little girl. He says, “Love, compassion, forgiveness, healing, understanding and renewal. These are the tenets of Christmas...” And she says, “Shouldn't that be year round?”

Indeed. 

All We Want for Christmas

The scriptures referred to are Luke 2:1-20.

There was no Christmas tree on the first Christmas. There were no presents. (The wise men came much later.) There were no candles. (They used little clay oil lamps.) There was no singing. (In a distant field angels praised God and, we are told, spoke to some shepherds.) There was no church service. There was no drummer boy.

There was excitement but it wasn't in anticipation of a party. It was the anxiety caused by a woman suddenly going into labor. Contrary to the traditional picture of the family being consigned to a stable, due to a mistranslation and a misunderstanding of the layout a first century house, Mary probably gave birth in the main room of a house belonging to one of Joseph's relatives. After all, he came from Bethlehem and must have had property there he had to register for taxation. So he probably had family there, however distant. And the rule of Middle Eastern hospitality would mean they would take him and his pregnant fiancée in. They had no room in the guest room (that's what Luke wrote, not “inn”) so they would have invited them into the one room where the family did all their living. It was on two levels. At night the family would bring their animals in to stay on the lower level, separated from the raised family room by a feeding trough, the manger they hastily laid the unexpected newborn in for want of a better place.

So rather than the tranquil, reverent scene we imagine, there was a frantic improvised air to what happened. It started when Mary's water broke and she started having contractions. Someone, perhaps a child, a young cousin of Jesus, would be sent for the village's midwife. What little furniture they had would be moved out of the way. Mary would be laid in the middle of the room, writhing and crying in pain. There would be amniotic fluid to be mopped up. Joseph and the menfolk and the animals would be shooed out of the house while his sister or sister-in-law or cousin and any other women present, perhaps even a older girl child, would make preparations. The midwife would arrive and take charge. She and the other women would raise Mary up and put her on the birthing stool and encourage her at the right time to push. Joseph would be outside, hearing Mary's cries, feeling useless and helpless. His brother or cousin would be trying to calm him down, cracking lame jokes or, worse, telling him horror stories of his wife's previous labors. There were no cigarettes to smoke, no coffee to drink. Joseph could only wait. And pray.

Inside all the women would be focused on Mary. Her pains would be getting stronger and closer together. It would have gone on for hours. Periodically between contractions the midwife would firmly but gently try to ascertain the position of the baby. And then it was time and the women would urge Mary to push and she would grit her teeth and push, in spite of the pain. And finally the top of the baby's head would appear and then the whole head and the midwife would ease the shoulders out and the rest of the slippery baby would come out into her hands. The midwife would take it and clean out its nose and mouth with her finger. And it would grimace and sneeze and start to cry. And the midwife would tell Mary it was a boy, tie and cut the cord and hand it off to the other women to clean. They would wash it and rub its skin with salt and wrap it tightly in bands of cloth. And just as Mary relaxed the midwife would tell her she wasn't done yet. She still had to deliver the placenta.

When all was done the men would be readmitted as well as any of the older children who had not been sent to stay with the neighbors for the night. And Joseph would see their son for the first time. He might be a little disconcerted that, in order to clean up Mary and the room, they had laid the baby in the feeding trough. The animals being brought in would be looking at it with varying degrees of curiosity or not. Some might be trying to eat the straw around the baby only to be shooed away by one of the women.

Then there would be a knock at the door. Joseph's relative would answer it only to find a bunch of shepherd boys, babbling about angels and the Messiah and wanting to see the baby. And Joseph's relative look at Joseph and Joseph would look blankly back at him. Then Joseph would look at Mary who would look back, exhausted as if to say, “You handle this.” And then with a shrug, Joseph would indicate they be let in. And the boys would come in and ooo! and ahh! at the child and the baby's cousins would show him off proudly, as if they had had something to do with it.

And then it would be time for Mary to nurse the baby and everyone would be ushered out again.

Mary's parents would not be their to see the birth of their grandchild. Nor could she call them or text them or Facetime them or put everybody on a Zoom call. Her parents, and likely Joseph's, would not know what happened for a long time.

Nor would the days to come be without anxiety. Infant and child mortality was high. 50% of all children did not make it to the age of 5. There were no vaccinations, no germ theory, nothing we would call proper medical knowledge or care. Mothers, too, died of complications or infections after giving birth. Many people knew the heartbreak of death following shortly after what should have been a joyous occasion, a new birth. Parents mourned their dead children. Husbands mourned their dead wives. Grandparents mourned daughters and grandchildren. So everyone would be watching Mary and Jesus for any signs of ill health. The midwife would make regular visits to make sure they were fine.

And that is how Jesus came into the world. There were none of the trappings of what we call Christmas these days. There were just people, anxious, in pain, separated, lonely, confused, feeling useless and helpless, in a place they hadn't anticipated being, coming together in a crisis, trying to make everything come out all right for everyone. Kinda like today.

God did not come into a world where everything was fine, where people were well off and had everything they needed and wanted. He came into a world where there were problems. He came into a world where people had needs. They needed love. They needed peace. They needed courage. They needed faithfulness. They needed healing. They needed hope. They needed God. Kinda like today.

And God came. And he came in the same messy, painful way we all come into this world. He came not as a king. He came not as a superhero. He came not as a warrior. He came as Jesus. In him we find love, we find peace, we find courage, we find faithfulness, we find healing, we find hope.

For a good Christmas we don't need all the things we have come to think we do. We need Jesus. In him we find all that we need...and more than we could ever want.

Peace

The scriptures referred to are all noted in the sermon.

The deadliest war the US has ever fought is not the second World War, not the Vietnam war, not even our longest war, the still ongoing war in Afghanistan. It was the Civil War. According to a recent study by historian J. David Hacker the previously accepted number of 620,000 dead was an undercount. Using statistical software and the US census records to see what men of military age were alive in 1860 but not in 1870 and checking it against the normal survival rates from 10 years before the war and 10 years after, he calculated the excess death toll to be 21% higher than previous estimates. He says around 750,000 people died in the war. As a percentage of the US population, it would be the equivalent of 7 and a half million deaths today. Our worst war was with ourselves.

In addition, according to the Civil War Trust, 476,000 were wounded. An estimated 1 out of every 13 Civil War veterans went home missing 1 or more limbs.

The casualties were so great that it showed what the army and the nation were lacking. There were no national cemeteries, no burial details and no formalized process to notify families of their loss. These were remedied. It also led to the reorganization of the Marine Hospital Fund into the Marine Hospital Service. Eventually this became the Public Health Service. What our bloodiest war did not do is convince the country to think twice before getting into more wars. The US has been fighting wars for more than half the time it's existed. As of 2019 we have 750 military bases around the world and troops in 140 different countries.

Peace in the Bible or shalom includes the cessation of conflict, of course. Peace between people is something that God puts a high priority on, especially between his people. Psalm 133 says, “See how good and how pleasant it is when brothers live together in unity.” (Psalm 133:1) That is why Jesus says the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor as you do yourself. (Mark 12:31) But Jesus' definition of neighbor is more expansive than just the people who live near you. It is whomever you encounter, especially if they are in need. (Luke 10:25-37) And, of course, Jesus goes even beyond that.

Almost every religion has some version of the “golden rule”: “treat others as you would like to be treated.” (Matthew 7:12) But none has the equivalent of Jesus' most revolutionary commandment: “Love your enemies.” (Matthew 5:44) But it makes sense if all human beings are created in the image of God, (Genesis 1:27) and if God truly loves everyone (John 3:16) and wants to save everyone (2 Peter 3:9). Which is why Paul said, “If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” (Romans 12:18)

This is elementary Christian ethics. What it is not is natural. Peace is not the natural order for animals. Conflict, strife and competition are. Peace for prey is the interval between being hunted by predators. Peace for predators is the aftermath of killing and eating prey. Within a troop of baboons peace is being one of the alphas who keep their place by beating down those lower in the hierarchy. Peace for those at the bottom are the moments of grooming a higher up or getting to eat the scraps left over after the others eat. There is no real lasting peace for animals in nature. They are eaters or the eaten, beaters or the beaten.

We are created in the image of the God who is love and so we are capable of cooperation across kinship lines, which scientists are recognizing is what is truly unique about humans. Other animals think, count, communicate, make and use tools, albeit with a lot less complexity. But it is rare to see the higher animals cooperate in the ways we have to build cities and nations. Meerkats and chimps and ants have wars. But they do not conclude peace treaties or trade agreements. Peace is not merely a human ideal; we have made great strides in achieving it.

But we still have wars. Currently there are 4 major wars going on, resulting in 10,000 deaths in the current or last year, as well as 14 smaller wars, resulting in more than 1000 but less than 10,000 deaths, and 22 armed conflicts resulting in less than 1000 deaths, plus numerous skirmishes and clashes. Some wars are fairly straightforward attempts to acquire land or resources or achieve other economic aims. Other warring powers pursue more intangible goals, like enhanced reputation or ideology. And yet ultimately all wars end with both parties sitting down and talking about the conditions of peace. Which makes you wonder why they don't just start with that and save all the death, disease and destruction of their respective countries.

James says, “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don't get it? You kill and you covet but you cannot have what you want...” (James 4:1-2) The image of God that is in us and that seeks peace is at war with our desires that drive us to fulfill them however we can. Thus we seek power in order to do so and we seek control, even over others, and that leads to conflict. As long as human beings can't control their desires and impulses, we will not know peace.

To truly achieve peace among us, we need peace within us. And that peace comes only from God. And that peace with God comes through Jesus. We were all of us at war with God, wanting to do things our way. Even those who say they are trying to follow God often try to do it on their own terms. We are to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. Instead we try to hold back parts of our life that we want to be in charge of and that we don't want God poking his nose into. And they may be things that in fact we put before God, little household gods like money, or power, or sex, that, when faced with a moral dilemma, we will stick with rather than God. Remember the rich young man who wanted eternal life and was following almost all the commandments? Jesus, perceiving there was one area of his life he did not trust to God, told him, “One thing you lack. Go sell everything you have, and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” And we are told, “At this the man's face fell. He went away sad, because he had many possessions.” (Mark 10:17-31) Or should we say, he was possessed by many things that he valued more than God.

Or it may be the second great commandment that we want exemptions from. Jesus told us to love both our neighbors and our enemies. And we say, “Yes,” but in our hearts we still reserve the right to exclude from that command people we just can't stomach: people we think are poor because they are lazy, people who take drugs, people who love people of the same sex as they, people who are trying to enter this country illegally, people who think our political party is evil or stupid or both. But Jesus didn't say, “Love everyone except _______.” He didn't say, “Love those people who deserve your love.” Because he didn't do that with us. Paul says, “But God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us....For if while we were enemies we were reconciled through the death of his son, how much more, since we have been reconciled, will we be saved by his life?” (Romans 5:8, 10) God loves his enemies, which included at one time us. And Jesus said, “A new command I give you; Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” (John 13:34) And he said this knowing he would die for us the very next day. God loves us all, no exceptions. We must love all, no exceptions.

When we lay down our reservations and accept God's unconditional love for us and respond by loving him back and loving other people without conditions, we find peace within us. (Romans 5:1) That peace comes from God's Spirit which now dwells in those who trust in him. Paul writes, “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.” (Romans 15:13) One aspect of the fruit of the Spirit is peace. (Galatians 5:22)

In an X-Files episode Mulder encounters a genie and wishes for world peace. He finds that the genie has eliminated all other people in the world. And, yeah, without other people, there is no war or fighting. It's not really what Mulder wants and his next wish is to reverse it. But that is the peace nations at war, as well as bigots and extremists, somehow hope to achieve: peace by killing all their enemies. But that never happens. And never will. Because in killing people's sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and friends, they make new enemies of their remaining loved ones. Violence begets more violence. Violence cannot give any peace except the peace of the grave.

And here we come to the other meaning of peace. The peace from God is not merely the absence of conflict but wholeness, complete wellbeing. That's why Jesus was not a warrior but a healer. God's peace leads to people working together in harmony because they have him and they recognize that he is what they really desire and that desire has been fulfilled by him. The gift of Christmas is Jesus, the God who is love, coming to earth, becoming one of us, ending our internal conflicts that we might find peace and end our external conflicts. That is why he is called the Prince of Peace.

Charles Williams pointed out that because we are commanded not to covet anything of our neighbor's, and since God is everywhere and therefore our neighbor, and everything is God's and so we cannot covet anything of his, the only thing that we can covet is God! Real peace comes from realizing that Jesus is our desire. He loves us in spite of our flaws and our sins and our failures and our doubts. He loves us enough to die for us. And he will never leave us or forsake us. Nobody loves us more than he does. And isn't that what we desire above all else: someone who loves us that much and will always love us? And wouldn't being wrapped in his love be all the peace we could ever desire?

Joy

The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 61:1-4, Psalm 126, and 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24.

You see the videos online: an unsuspecting child is approached from behind by a parent in military uniform. Once they turn and see them they run to them, jump into their arms and often cry. But they are obviously tears of joy. It is evident that the soldier is returning from deployment and they haven't see their spouse and kids for a while. But the kids are much more emotional because the time their parent was gone is a much bigger portion of their short life. Who knows how young they were when they last saw their mother or father? Dogs are even more demonstrative, jumping up, trying to lick their faces, wagging their tails and positively vibrating with joy. Which brings to mind another set of videos that show kids being unexpectedly given puppies as pets. In these the children do not jump or squeal but their faces distort into what, in another context, might seem to be the mask of great grief and they cry copiously. They are, however, overcome with joy in reaction to their fondest desire being fulfilled at last.

Usually we think of happiness as consisting of having all your desires granted. But happiness can be merely having your basic needs met. Happiness can come from simply having food, shelter, a good job and a loving family. Joy tends to be more intense, a response to a deep desire you have longed for being met. But sometimes joy is, as C. S. Lewis put it, an “unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” Examples would be the sweet longing to see your boyfriend or girlfriend when you are apart or the joyful anticipation when you are a kid counting down the days to Christmas. So it's appropriate that this Sunday in Advent we focus on joy.

Joy is a major part of our faith, though you would never know it from some sourpusses. Forms of the words “joy” and “rejoice” appear over 400 times in the Bible, and especially in the Psalms and the gospels. And as pointed out in the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, to which this sermon owes a large debt, while the Bible sometimes references joy brought about earthly things, like a victory or a harvest, “its overwhelming context is spiritual.”

Joy ultimately comes from being in God's presence. As it says in Psalm 16, “In your presence is fullness of joy. At your right hand are pleasures forever.” (Psalm 16:11) It can also come from God's presence in us. In Acts we are told, “And the disciples were filled with joy and with the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 13:52) In fact, the experience of joy feels like that of being filled. (Romans 15:13) Or one's heart being filled to the point where it overflows. And it often overflows into shouting or singing with joy. In Psalm 5, it says, “But let all who take shelter in you rejoice. Let them ever sing for joy, because you spread protection over them; and let those who love your name exult in you.” (Psalm 5:11) Paul says, “And do not get drunk with wine, which is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making music in your hearts to the Lord...” (Ephesians 5:18-19)

But joy can be quiet and gentle. Have you ever seen or experienced an act so good, so noble that you were moved to silent tears of joy? Or have you seen something so beautiful that your heart swelled with joy? That is how a close encounter with God affects us. We respond to God with joy because his goodness is overwhelming.

People often feel this joy when they have gone through a terrible experience only to find God's grace there. This can be bad behavior on their part as we see in Psalm 32: “When I refused to confess my sin, my whole body wasted away, while I groaned in pain all day long. For day and night you tormented me; you tried to destroy me in the intense heat of summer. Then I confessed my sin; I no longer covered up my wrongdoing. I said, 'I will confess my rebellious acts to the Lord.' And then you forgave my sins. For this reason every one of your faithful followers should pray to you while there is a window of opportunity. Certainly when the surging water rises, it will not reach them. You are my hiding place; you protect me from distress. You surround me with shouts of joy from those celebrating deliverance.” (Psalm 32:3-7)

Or the experience can be an illness or a disaster. Today's psalm is talking about the return of the captives from 70 years of exile in Babylon. They describe coming back as being in a dream-like state. It feels too good to be true. But it is true and they giggle and laugh and shout and sing with joy. Their reversal is so extreme the psalmist says, “Those who sowed with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying the seed, will come again with joy, shouldering their sheaves.”

But once back, they had the hard task of rebuilding their devastated land. That's what Isaiah is addressing in today's lectionary passage. He is giving encouragement. And Jesus begins his ministry by reading the first couple of sentences of this prophesy. It is his mission statement. He too is building his kingdom. And he does it by focusing on the people whose needs have to be addressed. Thus to the oppressed he brings good news. And what can that news be other than the end of their oppression? This is a theme that runs through Scripture, right back to the Torah where the Israelites were told not to oppress their fellow citizens (Leviticus 25:17) nor their slaves, nor resident foreigners. (Deuteronomy 24:14) For those who are relatively powerless the end of their oppression is definitely something to be joyful about.

The next bit of good news is that God through Jesus will bind up the brokenhearted. The Hebrew word for “bind up” essentially means “to bandage or heal.” Those whose spirits were broken by misfortune or malicious actions against them receive the news that God will put them back together and heal them as something to be joyful about.

Next we are told that God through Christ is proclaiming liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners. The original audience saw themselves as captives to the Babylonians. The word translated “prisoners” literally means “those who are bound or tied up.” The word translated “release” is literally “opening” meaning opening the prison doors. And the word rendered “liberty” literally means “running free.” When Jesus read this passage, he meant not repatriation of exiles but the release of those captive to sin. Jesus said, “Everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.” (John 8:34) And indeed we all find ourselves bound to keep repeating the same destructive and self-destructive actions. To be released from this painful cycle of always doing the wrong thing is something to rejoice over.

Finally, we are told that the Anointed is proclaiming the year of the Lord's favor. We should take the word “proclaim” as a royal proclamation and the image is that of the Jubilee year. (Leviticus 25) Twice each century land in Israel sold in the intervening 49 years reverted back to the original family or tribe. Those who sold themselves into slavery to pay off debts were also freed. (Of course, they could always be bought back from slavery by a relative, who is called a redeemer.) So the year of the Lord's favor or goodwill was a a year of restoration of things to how they should be and therefore a joyous one.

Jesus stops reading at this point, not mentioning “the day of vengeance for our God,” because that is not his mission this time. He is not delivering judgment but offering grace. The day will come to settle accounts and bring justice but this is not that day. This is a day of celebration and joy.

Of all of our readings this week, only the gospel doesn't explicitly mention joy. However this Sunday does have an alternate reading we could use in place of our psalm: the Magnificat, the song of Mary. We usually think of this as a joyful song, and it is, but think of the circumstances preceding it. Mary is pledged to be married to Joseph but is not actually wed to him yet. She gets pregnant despite the fact she and Joseph haven't slept together. Matthew tells us Joseph planned to divorce her albeit quietly. Luke doesn't mention Joseph's thoughts, yet immediately after reporting that Gabriel told Mary that she would bear God's son, he writes, "At that time Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judea where she entered Zechariah's home and greeted Elizabeth." An unwed girl with a mysterious pregnancy suddenly leaves town and goes to live with a relative? It sounds like Mary's family was sending her away to hide what they thought of as a scandal. Perhaps they didn't believe her. Certainly Joseph didn't believe her...until an angel reveals the truth to him in a dream. But in the meantime, Mary is facing life as a poor single mother in an honor/shame culture. So she must have been very down. Perhaps she was even doubting that God was behind all this. Why would he let this happen to her?

And then Elizabeth tells her, "Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the child you will bear! But why am I so favored, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? As soon as the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy. Blessed is she who has believed that what the Lord has said to her will be accomplished." And that affirmation from her relative, who also has a miraculous pregnancy, is just the thing Mary needs at that time. Elizabeth's words trigger a sudden swing from despair to joy and Mary sings, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant. From this day all generations will call me blessed; the Almighty has done great things for me, and holy is his Name. He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation. He has shown the strength of his arm, he has scattered the proud in their conceit. He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. He has come to the help of his servant Israel, for he has remembered his promise of mercy, the promise he made to our fathers, to Abraham and his children for ever.”

Notice she sings of the same themes of restoration we were looking at, with those who are powerless and oppressed receiving justice from our gracious Lord.

Mary's joy is sustained when Joseph tells her he believes her and takes her as his wife. Even though townspeople probably gossiped about Jesus' paternity his whole life, Mary remembers the joy of this moment and the words the Spirit gave her and she tells them to Luke when he researches his gospel. Being able to find joy in what God is doing even in the midst of adversity is a lesson we can all learn from Mary.

Therefore Paul tells us to “rejoice always.” In Advent we highlight Jesus' first arrival on earth as well as his second coming, and the mood is one of expectation. But as we are told throughout the New Testament, he could come at time, not just in this season of the year. So we should live with that fact always in the back of our mind and always as a factor in how we conduct our lives. If a loved one was expected to come home at any moment you would not slack off and not have things prepared for his or her arrival. Their room would be ready, their favorite foods in the pantry, their gifts would be wrapped, and you would be ready to drop anything at a moment's notice and greet them. And the fact that the time they would appear was getting closer would keep you in a state of joyful anticipation. You would be humming the tunes that reminded you of them and savoring the moment when you will hear their car pull up, or hear their knock. And you would run to them, jump into their arms, kiss and hug them, and you would not be ashamed to cry or to grin and giggle like an idiot. And that's how we should look forward to Jesus' return. The gray days will be over. The daily grind of our lives will grind to a halt at last. All our problems will be dealt with, all our mourning will cease and every tear will be wiped away by his hands, bearing the scars of his love. I can't wait.

Comfort

The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 40:1-11, Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13, 2 Peter 3:8-15a and Mark 1:1-8.

It is said that prophets have 2 jobs: to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. Last week all of the selections in our lectionary were uncomfortable to hear. They were about times of judgment on God's people and about our staying alert for when Jesus returns to judge the world. They were about how people's sins become their own punishments, which, quite frankly, people need to be reminded of. During the early days of the AIDS crisis, gay activist Larry Kramer was not popular for pointing out to his own community that this disease was spread by promiscuity and unsafe sex. Yet sometimes people have to hear the disturbing truth. Look at the changes that came about when women in Hollywood and in corporations shared their uncomfortable stories in the #Me,Too movement. The video of George Floyd being suffocated over an excruciating 9 minutes got white people to take seriously the stories African Americans have been telling for centuries. And let me tell you, receiving an uncomfortable or even upsetting diagnosis is better than walking around with a vague sense that something is wrong.

Today we get some comfort. The diagnosis might be hard to hear but the prognosis is not hopeless. The Great Physician has a plan of treatment, which, while not always pleasant, leads to a cure. In Isaiah this takes the form of preparing the way of the Lord. He is speaking to the exiles in Babylon. The metaphor he is using is what people would do if a king were coming to visit. They would stake out, level and smooth the rough terrain along the highway he was going to take. So Isaiah is saying “As you would do for an earthly monarch, remove all the obstacles that come between you and God.” Of course, the obstacles in this case are moral and spiritual. In the very first chapter of Isaiah, God lists what the problems are. “Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me. New moons, Sabbaths and convocations—I cannot bear your worthless assemblies. Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood! Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong! Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.” (Isaiah 1:13-17) There is a through-line between how we treat God and how we treat those created in his image. The people's worship of the God of justice and compassion was meaningless because it did not carry through to their lives and relationships with others. Their unjust and pitiless nation was easy pickings for the Babylonians. Now, after 70 years, the prophet tells the people that Judah “has served her term, that her penalty is paid, she has received from the Lord's hand double for all her sins.”

So God is restoring the nation to its homeland and expects the people to get rid of the obstacles to his work in rebuilding the kingdom. The results will be appealing. “See the Lord God comes with might, and his arm rules for him; his reward is with him and his recompense before him.” The image is that of a conquering hero, returning with bounty to share with his people. And then the prophet switches from a military image to a pastoral one. “He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.”

The idyllic picture continues in Psalm 85. “Mercy and truth have met together.” Another translation goes, “Steadfast love and faithfulness have met together.” Both are possible for the Hebrew words have different shades of meaning depending on the context. Behind the word “mercy” is the Hebrew word “khesed.” It is frequently used of God's lovingkindness towards his people, expressed in his redemption of them from their enemies and their troubles, as well as from their sins, his saving them from death and his keeping of his covenants with Abraham, Moses and David. Similarly the word “emeth” means both “faithfulness” and “truth.” The underlying sense is one of reliability and stability, which both truth and faithfulness have. We can count on God's truth and kindness to never change.

The second part of that couplet goes “righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” The word “tsedek” means both righteousness and justice. The interesting thing about justice kissing peace or “shalom” is that sometimes there is a conflict between the two. Strict adherence to righteous justice can disturb the peace of a community because maintaining the peace means showing mercy at times. In Monroe County deputies have some discretion when deciding to arrest someone, taking into account the seriousness of the offense and whether it would endanger the person to be arrested or other people in the vicinity. An example would be a kid seen committing a minor offense, where it might be better to speak to his or her parents than to haul him to jail. God is just but merciful. As the psalmist says, “If you, O Lord, kept a record of sins, O Lord, who could stand?” (Psalm 130:1) Another Psalm says, “He does not deal with us as our sins deserve; he does not repay us as our misdeeds deserve....As far as the eastern horizon is from the west, so he removes the guilt of our rebellious actions from us.” (Psalm 103:10, 12)

Only God can give us the perfect balance of righteousness and mercy, of justice tempered by love that leads to peace. Our part is repentance, turning from our sinful ways and returning to God. That's what John the Baptizer preached. Mark in his fast moving account doesn't give us much of John's message. Matthew shows how he afflicted the comfortable. “But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them, 'You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance.'” (Matthew 3:7-8) And his audience was in so much discomfort that they realized they must radically change their lives. They, Jews, so felt the need to repent that they were willing to be baptized, a rite for Gentiles converting to Judaism. They felt they must act as if they were coming to the faith for the first time.

John, however, realizes that he is just the herald of the king. The Messiah is coming and he is greater and more powerful than John. John realized that his baptism was not sufficient to really change who people were. “I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” In the Old Covenant, the Holy Spirit was reserved for people with special roles: prophets, priests, and kings. But the one who inaugurates and establishes the New Covenant will immerse all his people in God's Holy Spirit.

Because unchanged people cannot participate in the kingdom of God. You cannot have a community with a proper balance of justice and mercy and righteousness and peace and faithfulness and truth and love if the people in the community do not produce those fruits. As it is, those things develop at different rates and to different degrees in different people. How often have we seen people who had one virtuous quality or more in abundance but was lacking in certain other virtues? Most of our Founding Fathers were champions of liberty but not for African Americans or Native Americans. General Ulysses S. Grant was anti-slavery even before the Civil War and yet he issued a General Order to expel Jews from the portions of Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi under his control. That order was quickly countermanded by President Lincoln. Lincoln himself, while against slavery, did not think African Americans were the equals of Whites. Martin Luther King Jr. was a great civil rights leader and an adulterer. Albert Einstein was both brilliant and prodigiously unfaithful to his wives. We have the world we do in large part because even good people have bad behaviors and that destroys both peace and justice in our communities.

And, of course, we see this kind of moral contradiction in the church. And it goes back all the way to the beginning. Peter is the first to say that Jesus is the Messiah. But then he immediately contradicts God's Anointed by saying Jesus is wrong about being rejected and executed. (Mark 8:27-33) And he denies Jesus 3 times on the night of his trial. (Mark 14:66-72) This tendency doesn't disappear after the second chapter of Acts. Peter resists the three-fold vision of eating unclean animals that is preparing him to preach the gospel to Gentiles. (Acts 10) And at Antioch, Peter flipflops on whether he should eat with Gentile Christians and Paul calls him out on it. (Galatians 2:11-16) 

For his part, Paul has a hot temper. In the controversy over circumcision, he suggests that his opponents just go all the way and castrate themselves! (Galatians 5:12) He also falls out with his missionary partner Barnabas over his nephew John Mark, who leaves them mid-trip. (Acts 13:13) Paul will not take Mark on their next journey and so he and Barnabas never work together again. (Acts 15:36-40) Paul, who is grateful to God for forgiving his earlier opposition to Jesus, nevertheless will not give young Mark, who made a one-time mistake, a second chance. And yet later it seems that he and Mark do make up because in his second letter to Timothy he tells him to “Take Mark and bring him with you, because he is a great help to me in ministry.” (2 Timothy 4:11) The Spirit worked on Paul and helped him put his ministry of reconciliation into practice in his personal life.

Nobody in the church is a plaster saint, picture perfect. And yet God can use them and help them change into the people he created them to be. And that is a comfort to those of us who feel inadequate at times to serve God perfectly. If we let God's Spirit work in us, we will get ever closer to the person he wants us to become.

And our passage in 2 Peter gives us further comfort in that regard. At times it seems like God has forgotten about this world. It seems to be getting worse and worse and we start to wonder why God is not intervening in a major way, or at least sending his Son to wrap things up and set things right. After pointing out that the eternal God does not look at time as we do nor operate on our schedule, we are told, “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.” He's giving us the time we need to change. The early Christians seemed to think that Jesus was returning in the first century, though he said the gospel must first be preached to the whole world and to all nations. (Matthew 24:14) The first Christians can be forgiven for not realizing how big the world is and how many nations and tribes and people there were even then. God is making sure that on the last day no one has the excuse that they didn't hear the good news about Jesus. Everyone will get a fair shot at responding to God's grace.

One side effect of this pandemic is that we have been worshiping and reading the Bible online, which can be seen worldwide. In fact on Facebook Live we get more views than we would normally have people in pews at this time of year. This allows our little church to help fulfill the Great Commission in a way not possible even 40 years ago, let alone 2000 years ago.

And it looks like we are going to have a fairly stripped-down Christmas this year. There won't be as many families gathering from the 4 corners of this country. There won't be office parties. We won't be singing Christmas carols in church. Our services will be small and socially distanced if not online altogether. And maybe, not being buried under all the usual trappings that have come to be mistaken for its meaning, the real message of Christmas will be heard more clearly.

And that message is ultimately our comfort. When everything God warned us about we did anyway and it all went wrong, God came as one of us, Jesus. He came not to punish us, but to heal, and to instruct us about God and his kingdom, and to give us the Spirit that would enable us to live in that kingdom. If you think about it, abstractions can't really meet together or kiss. People can: just and merciful and faithful and truthful people. Filled with God's Holy Spirit, such people can meet and kiss and live together in God's kingdom and know true peace.

The Limits of Control

The scriptures referred to are Isaiah 64:1-9, Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19, 1 Corinthians 1:3-9 and Mark 13:24-37.

Remember Y2K? Electronic computers were a creation of the 20^th century and so the programs that were written were made for the years that began with 19. In most cases, the programmers omitted the 19 and the year was designated by its last 2 digits. As the millennium approached, people in the computing industry realized that many programs were not equipped to recognize what to do with the year 2000 and beyond. They feared the programs would read the year as 1900 and may stop working. There were articles and even books written about how, in a world largely run by computers, the electrical grid, our utilities and many of the basic technologies we rely on would cease to be functional, plunging the civilized world into a literal Dark Ages.

When January 1, 2000 came and went and we were not living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, many people thought the furor was over nothing at all. But the people in the industry did not. They knew that the warnings were true and that they had caused them to work to fix the problem in all the software programs and avert the predicted catastrophe. And I knew it, too.

It was either 1996 or 97, when, as the production director for our local radio station, I noticed something disturbing. It was the evening before Thanksgiving and I was checking that the commercials which restaurants were running for the holiday would automatically stop after that day and their new ads begin playing. Few of them would. For some weird reason what we in radio called the “kill date,” the day to stop playing a commercial, for all of the new ads had reverted to the same day in 1983! This was not something that the computer would let you do manually. You had to enter a date in the future. Ads that would go through Christmas would play but generic ads scheduled to go for a year into the future wouldn't. Playing around I found that I could get them to play for a few more months before they hit some kind of invisible brick wall and would bounce back to '83, the date I presume the software was first created. Worse than that most of our music would not play either! So I spent hours changing the kill dates to the furthest date I could so that we wouldn't go silent the day after Thanksgiving. I did that for every single element playing through the morning show and left a note for our morning man and engineer to do the same and to call the software company for a patch to fix the system. And he did. The patch arrived in a few days and he installed it and no one outside the radio station was ever the wiser. So when the panic arose over Y2K, I knew the threat was real.

We've known about global warming for decades but we didn't do much to avert it because there were no immediate dire effects, and it would cost fossil fuel businesses and our economy lots of money. And quite frankly it would necessitate changing the way we used energy and the sources we would have to develop to replace gas and oil. Now climate change is undeniable with each year getting hotter than the year before, our winters getting shorter and our hurricane seasons getting longer. Some experts think it may be too late to avert the worst, while others say we are not quite at the point of no return. But time is running out for us to change. Whether we do so remains to be seen.

I don't mean to sound gloomy but the truth is that people don't respond to slow moving or incremental dangers, even when warned, the way they do to rapid or instantly terrible or fatal ones. If smoking or abusing drugs killed everyone who tried them immediately and 100% of the time, people would treat them like live grenades. The most insidious dangers are the gradual ones with consequences due somewhere in the seemingly distant future. But the “kill date” might be upon us earlier than we reckoned.

That's what today's Old Testament readings are about. The prophet and the psalmist are dealing with days of reckoning that God's people find themselves in the midst of. What I find interesting is that God is not depicted as actively punishing his people but just hiding or turning his face from them. When people don't want any part of God, the worst thing he can do is grant them their desire. Isaiah says, “...for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.” Not into the hands of an angry God but into the hand of our own wrongdoing. In other words you have let us do what we wished, left us to our own devices and the resulting sin has become its own punishment. For instance, the person who puts the pursuit of money or power or passing pleasures ahead of God, family and friendships often finds his life empty of the love that would give it real meaning and lasting pleasure. A society that puts the prosperity of a few ahead of the well-being of all its citizens suffers instability, insurrections and eventual collapse, as we've seen over and over in history. And civilizations that exhaust their resources go into decline and disappear. Easter Island was a thriving culture until deforestation and civil war led to famine, homelessness and lawlessness. That's what happen when those with the biggest heads are made of rock.

If God is the source of justice and peace, life without him is chaos. Sure, you can try to impose law and order, but that is just trying to deal with the problems of people who can't govern themselves and aren't following God's law by outsourcing them to the other big G: government. The Nazis were big on law and order, just not morality or love for one's neighbor, key elements of God's law. Jesus had a big problem with those who substituted a rigid adherence to the rules over holiness and compassion.

So what are we to do? First we need to distinguish between what we can control and what we can't.

As infants we are totally helpless. About the only thing we can do is cry and hope that it motivates our parents to do for us what we cannot: change our diapers, feed us, show us affection, help us calm down and sleep, or get us out of this crib and stimulate us by talking or singing or just holding us. As we grow we gradually learn to control our bodies and reach for a toy or turn ourselves over or crawl. We gain some mastery over our environment. We learn to rearrange a room, though Mom may see this as making a mess. We learn to feed ourselves. Our communication gets better, more articulate and precise. We learn we can pretty much bring things to a halt by saying “No!” Which, like our crying, gives us a measure of control over others. And most of us learn the limits of what we can control.

Smart people maximize their skills over what they can control: their bodies, their knowledge, their thinking, their emotions. They recognize what they are good at and what they aren't. They learn how to navigate the parts of life over which they have limited control, such as in dealing with other people. Then there are the things we can't control. Foolish people think they can use their brains or brawn or words or wealth to control anything. Wise people learn how to deal with the things in life over which we have no control. We can, as I've said before, improve our odds. It's like the way a sailor learns how to travel on the sea. He has control of his boat, provided it's properly maintained; he doesn't have control of the tides or winds or weather. He uses his knowledge, training and skills to sail in such a way to take advantage of the wind and tides and minimize the risks. Of course, a really big storm can sink the best sailor. In those cases, he needs to do what Jesus tells us in our gospel for today: keep awake and keep alert.

A wise sailor watches for patterns that signal a change in the elements over which he has no control. Today a sailor has access to sources of knowledge, like weather reports, and technology, like GPS, that Peter, James and John didn't have 2000 years ago. They had to rely on training and experience alone. But they knew that, as Jesus said, “When evening comes, you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red,' and in the morning, 'Today it will be stormy, for the sky is red and overcast.'” (Matthew 16:2-3) Even so, we need to be able to interpret the signs of the times, as Jesus laments his contemporaries failed to do.

In the part of Mark that comes before our lectionary reading, Jesus gives us signs of the end times to watch for, like false messiahs and saviors, figures demanding the loyalty and worship reserved for God alone. We are not to fall for them. But Jesus tells us not to put much stock in the usual stuff people interpret as signs of the end: wars, earthquakes and famines. Such disasters are, he says, but the beginning of birth pangs. Labor usually takes hours and the contractions get stronger and stronger and closer together. Jesus doesn't want us getting alarmed too early and panicking, like Dick Van Dyke's Rob Petrie in the episode in which Laura gives birth.

But you should be ready. In Exodus, God tells the people to get ready to leave Egypt at a moment's notice. They know the plague is coming but the precise time they must leave is unknown. Jesus tells us his coming again will be sudden and no one knows the exact day or date.

It's kind of like hurricane season was before the technology that gives us useful estimates of when and where the hurricane will hit. In his book Isaac's Storm, Erik Larson looks at the devastating hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas in 1900. The meteorologists in Cuba were very skilled at reading hurricanes and predicted it would hit Texas. The US Weather Bureau arrogantly ignored them and said it would make landfall in Florida. Galveston's chief meteorologist Isaac Cline thought that it was crazy to believe a hurricane could do significant damage to the city and his views dissuaded Galveston from building a proposed seawall. When Cline did issue a hurricane warning it was too late for people to evacuate the island and thousands were killed by flying slate roof tiles and the flood, including Cline's pregnant wife Cora.

Even without the advance warning system we have today, there were things people could have done to prepare. Today we shutter our houses, take inside things like outdoor furniture that might become airborne, and fill up the car in case of evacuation. You can go online and find suggestions for hurricane kits to prepare beforehand. We do not know when a hurricane might pop up but we go through the season alert and prepared. And that's what Jesus is saying about his coming.

And in addition, he says here, when the master is away, the servants are to do the work assigned them. The Spirit of God gives each of us gifts and we are to use them for the good of all, to build up each other and the kingdom. (1 Corinthians 12:4-11) Our basic work is to trust in Jesus (John 6:29), spread the good news (Matthew 28:19-20) and to follow the 2 great commandments. (Mark 12:28-31) The rest of the commandments are basically examples of how to show our love for God and for our fellow human beings in various circumstances. (Matthew 22:40) And God gives us his Spirit to guide us in situations where there is no specific rule. (John 20:22-23)

Our jail has general orders and procedures for handing every kind of emergency, including hurricanes and even epidemics. In no case do they decide to abandon or not feed and care for the inmates. In fact, leave is canceled and every officer has a duty. But every year everyone who works there, including chaplains, has to read and refresh their knowledge of all the procedures and all the signs to look for that something is wrong. Awake and alert is the basic state in which we operate.

Y2K was man-made and reasonably easy to fix. Some of the messes we have made, like with the world God gave us, are more difficult to undo. Some things are beyond our control. Fortunately we have a loving and powerful God who will ultimately take control of things when they go completely off the rails and clean up our messes, especially those we have made of our lives. As Paul says, “He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful....” And when we face the thing we can never control, death, when all we can do is cry out for God, we can trust him to be there and to take us in his arms and wipe away our tears and bring us into his home to live with him forever.

Abuse and Neglect

The scriptures referred to are Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24, Ephesians 1:15-23 and Matthew 25:31-46.

A few years ago I came across a bit of medical research which has really changed the way I have thought about people. Some doctors were looking into the life histories of patients with chronic illnesses and they discovered some startling commonalities. For some diseases, you look for genetic links. Diseases like breast cancer, cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease tend to run in families. But what these doctors discovered was that adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), like abuse, neglect and household dysfunction, could be predictive of people having chronic mental and physical diseases in adulthood. They also correlated with self-destructive behaviors as an adult. Now everyone has some ACEs in their life, like divorce or a relative who has mental illness or an addiction or who has been incarcerated. Using the 10 question tool they came up, it is not unusual for the average person to have a score of between 1 and 3. But what researchers found was that above that level the more ACEs one has, the higher the person's risk of having serious problems later in life, including heart disease, cancer, and severe obesity, as well as behavior problems such as substance abuse, missing work or trouble with the law. A very high ACE score carries the risk of a much lower life expectancy. And as bad as suffering abuse is, it turns out neglect has an even greater negative affect on a child and his or her development.

Of course the more common abuse and neglect are, the greater their effect on society as a whole. It is estimated that at least 1 in 7 children in the US has experienced child abuse and/or neglect in the past year. That's more than 1 million children under the age of 18. And neglect is the most common, followed by physical abuse, sexual abuse and psychological abuse. 76% of the abusers were a parent to the victim. Given the effect on their future lives, the sins of the fathers and mothers are indeed visited upon the children.

And we see this pattern of bullying and neglect even between adults. We see it not only in marriages and domestic partnerships but also in workplaces, in social groups and even in those with positions of power. The astonishing high incidence of people using their power to sexually assault those under them has been uncovered in churches, in the Boy Scouts, in Hollywood, in corporations and in government. Anyone who has ever worked for a terrible boss has seen how he can use his power to deny promotions, show favoritism and stick employees whom he doesn't like with demeaning tasks. There was an eye-opening episode of This American Life which chronicled how the head of maintenance for a school district abused his power to the extent that he was eventually convicted of racketeering!

In today's readings from Ezekiel and Matthew, God pronounces his judgment on those who abuse or neglect others. In Ezekiel God speaks of himself as a shepherd of his people Israel. He tells of how he will find them even though they are scattered among the nations. He says, “I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.” Why will he do that? “Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep.” More powerful animals will use their strength to get their way and even harm others of their kind. But we are more than animals and God will not tolerate abuses of power or bullying in those created in his image. That is not how the kingdom of the God who is love will operate.

The parable that Jesus tells in today's gospel looks at the other more common problem we have: neglect. Essentially that is the deciding factor in the last judgment between the sheep and the goats. Some people have helped of the less powerful members of society, whom Jesus identifies as his siblings, and some have neglected them. Jesus mentions no sins of commission in this parable, only sins of omission. It's not that God doesn't care about the bad things people do; we see that he does in Ezekiel and innumerable other places in the Bible. But Jesus is highlighting something we often forget: that not doing the right thing is also a sin. Nor is this the only place Jesus shows this. In the first part of the parable of the good Samaritan Jesus makes a point of the fact that the priest and the Levite, people you would expect to be the good guys, do nothing for the man beaten and left for dead. The man most of his audience would think of as a heretic half-breed is the real hero because he actually rescues and nurses the victim. (Luke 10:30-37)

Believe it or not, some people, including Christians, have problems with Jesus' teachings on this matter. They are all for charity “in principle,” but they feel some of the people Jesus lists, like those in prison, caused or contributed to the state they find themselves in. They even suspect that a lot of the poor and homeless could have prevented their situation if they had made better choices. Now I could point out all the research that shows that abuse and neglect and poverty have a powerful effect on a child's developing brain which negatively affects decision making, among other things, but Jesus doesn't go into that. Nor does he ever use the word “deserving.” That is irrelevant to our Lord. The only criteria he gives is that the person is in need. It's the same way with doctors and nurses. I have treated people who were injured because a drug deal went bad, or because they tried committing suicide when their wife found out they were having sex with their foster daughter, or because they were driving drunk, or because their lungs were damaged from smoking. But health professionals treat every sick and injured person in their care, regardless of the moral tenor of their life. And in the same way, God does not save only those who are deserving, because in fact nobody is. He does so because he is gracious.

Which brings up something that has been debated on a clergy Facebook page about this week's gospel. A Lutheran colleague wanted to know “Where is grace in this parable?” It looks like what saves the sheep is what they did, their works. Doesn't Paul say, “For by grace you are saved through faith, and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so that no one can boast”? (Ephesians 2:8-9) Indeed, he does. And he continues, “For we are his workmanship, having been created in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared beforehand that we may do them.” (Ephesians 2:10, emphasis mine)

Some people have tried to argue that Jesus did not preach grace; he taught you must obey the moral laws in the Torah, as any good rabbi would. Grace was Paul's idea. But that is not true. When Jesus says that the rich would have a harder time entering the kingdom of God than a camel would squeezing through the eye of a sewing needle, the disciples were amazed—because in their culture, it was thought that God must like the rich because he blesses them with so many material goods. It follows that people were poor because they didn't have enough faith or didn't please God. It's kind of like the prosperity gospel that certain TV evangelists preach. Believing in this false moral meritocracy, the disciples exclaimed, “Who then can be saved?” To which Jesus replies, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:23-26) Rich or poor, we cannot save ourselves. We must rely upon God's grace.

But didn't Jesus say of people, “By their fruit you will recognize them”? (Matthew 7:20) Again, yes. But just because we are not saved by good works, it doesn't mean they are irrelevant to the Christian life. We were created in the image of God, who does good. Our sins have marred that image, including our capacity to do good. Jesus, who is the very image of God, came to restore that image in us. And the Holy Spirit, which we receive when we put our trust in Christ, gets to work sanctifying us, repairing the image of God in us and enabling us to live a godly and Christlike life, which includes, among other things, doing good. So good works don't save us; they are signs and symptoms that we have been saved, are being saved and will be saved. Like a normal temperature and good appetite are signs of good physical health, doing good works is a sign of good spiritual health. In the parable Jesus is not judging people because of their good works; he recognizes they are saved because they are impelled by the Spirit to show love for others, even the powerless who cannot pay them back.

This parable is not saying “do good works to save yourself” but “if you really are letting God's Spirit work in you, you will see it in your life and the works you do.” In the same way, I can't make myself have more energy by doing things; I happen to realize I have energy by the fact that I am just naturally doing things without thinking or hesitation. It often takes me a few hours of doing things as easily as I used to do them before I realize that I am having a good day or a good few hours. In the same way, good works don't precede being saved; they proceed from being saved by God's grace.

And just as a sudden pain or inability to do something, like breathe easily, should trouble a physically healthy person, and make them do something about it, seeing someone being bullied or neglected should trouble a spiritually healthy person and make them do something about it. God is love and “the love of God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” (Romans 5:5)

And it turns out that we can impede the Spirit's work in us. Paul writes, “Do not extinguish the Holy Spirit.” (1 Thessalonians 5:19) J.B. Phillips translates this “Never damp the fire of the Spirit.” This is similar to when Jesus says, “People do not light a lamp and put it under a basket but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before people, so that they can see your good deeds and give honor to your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:15-16) The most extreme example of resisting the Spirit is what Jesus calls the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said this because his critics were saying his healings were done in league with the devil. When someone says that undeniably good deeds done through the power of God are actually evil, they are so spiritually blind to the truth that there is no helping them. Seeing good as evil, they would reject help anyway, the way some patients reject medical treatment because they think the doctors are trying to kill them. By rejecting the source of God's forgiveness, such people render themselves unforgivable. (Mark 3:22, 28-30)

Jeremiah predicted that God would make a new covenant with his people. God says, “I will put my law within them and write it on their hearts and mind.” (Jeremiah 31:33) In Ezekiel he says, “I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 36:26) And we still say that people without empathy or compassion have a heart of stone. And anyone who bullies the weak or neglects the needy does not have the Spirit of the God who is love in their hearts.

As we've said before, parables usually have one point and are not exhaustive treatments of an issue. We are not literally sheep or goats, belonging to different species. The good news is we can be changed from what we are by putting our trust in Jesus, God Incarnate, who came to save us from our fallen natures. When we do we become a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17) and we are given God's Spirit who lives in us. (Romans 8:9-10, 1 Corinthians 6:19) He produces results which manifest themselves in our life, qualities like love and kindness and gentleness. (Galatians 5:22-23) A loving, kind and gentle person cannot bully others or neglect those who need help.

Our heroes generally are fighters who punish bad guys. Jesus did not come as a holy warrior but as a healer. He knew that people who do destructive and self-destructive things often need healing from the adverse experiences that shaped them. He showed compassion for those often rejected by society, like tax collectors and prostitutes, as well as those cut off from others by chronic illness, such as lepers and a woman with a continuous bleed that made her unclean. He forgave sinners, including the murderer dying on the cross next to him.

Today our heroes usually get rid of evil by killing bad guys. Jesus got rid of evil by turning bad guys into good guys. Some people have pointed out that if there really was a Bruce Wayne he would do more good in Gotham City by using his fortune to help the mentally ill rather than making weapons to fight them as Batman. Jesus is not the hero we want or the one we deserve. He is the hero we need, sent by a gracious God to help and heal the bullied and neglected. And if we have his Spirit within us, we will do the same. And at the last day, Jesus will not condemn us (John 5:24) but by our fruit recognize us as his own, his body on earth, filled with the fullness of his Spirit, and he will welcome us into the kingdom prepared for us from the foundation of the world.