Sermon Advent 4A St. Barnabas, Greensboro

Matthew 1: 18-25

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, one God and mother of us all. Amen.

    I’m feeling a bit off-kilter just now, and I imagine you might be feeling that way too.. As churchgoing Christians we have one foot in the church world and the other foot in the world of our culture. Sometimes we’re not particularly bothered by it. But at this time of year we really feel the tension between the two.  In both worlds it’s almost Christmas, and the church calendar tells us that today is the fourth and the last Sunday in Advent.  The culture tells us that there are three shopping days til Christmas if you count this afternoon.

    What increases our sense of disconnect is that the various stores we visit have been slowly bringing in Christmas merchandise since after Labor Day.  After Halloween they moved the Christmas decorations and gift displays front and center.  I’m pretty sure that’s when the piped in music took on Christmas themes as well.  These things happen before the church calendar has even reached Advent yet. That’s one reason we can feel a bit off.

    The culture keeps bombarding us with its messages.  Hallmark’s been after us for years, not only through its card shops but through its movies and other media.  When I took my car in for service a couple of weeks ago the dealer kindly provided  me with a loaner vehicle.  The car’s radio was tuned to a satellite radio channel that was all Hallmark Christmas music all the time.  I couldn’t figure out how to get another station, so I listened to quite a lot of Christmas music that day.  My takeaway was that Christmas is “the most wonderful time of the year,” and that it has little to do with the birth of Jesus.

    Instagram is my personal guilty pleasure.  If you’re not familiar with it, Instagram is an app on your smartphone that gives you access to pictures of just about anything you could imagine.   Many accounts depict an idealized version of Christmas. The decor is perfect, the gifts are beautifully wrapped, and the food is elegantly prepared.  Many pictures feature a large family composed of extremely well-dressed and very happy, relaxed people.  Conflicts and worries are nowhere to be seen. Now over the sixty-five years of Christmases I’ve known, very few have borne any resemblance to these scenes.  Preparations have been done hastily, roasts have gotten burned, recently deceased family members were sorely missed, and much fretting went on behind the scenes over the bills that would arrive after the first of the year. 

    But the biggest source of holiday apprehension concerned just what would happen when the motley assortment of folks we called family got together in one house.  Would Aunt Sally criticize our daughter’s purple hair and her tattoos? Poor girl is struggling as it is.  Would Grandpa drink too much and fall asleep at the table? Probably.  It’s even more likely this year. Since Grandma passed he’s been self-medicating his sadness.  Would our cousin Sue ask our gay son if he has a girlfriend?   Wish she would both get a clue and mind her own business.  Would Uncle Bill wear a certain red hat to the family gathering, and would that start a fight? Someone at the table would be only too happy to take him on.  Would our cousin Bob tell an ethnic joke that just happens to concern the ethnic background of some of the family members present? It wouldn’t be the first time.  Some of these things may have actually happened in my extended family.  Names and details have been changed to protect the guilty. Some of these things may have happened in your family too.

    Our families aren’t perfect.  We ourselves aren’t perfect.  Many of us are distressed because our country is less perfect than it has seemed in a long time or maybe ever.  This year we may be finding hope for ourselves and for the world around us in very short supply indeed.  We may find ourselves sorely in need of good news.  And there is good news, right here in today’s short Gospel lesson from Matthew.  We’re going to have to look for it, and we’re going to have to look a bit before what the lectionary gave us  today, but the news is good indeed.  Not only is the news good, but a look at today’s Gospel lesson shows us how God works for good in the most unpromising of situations.

    Before we get to the text itself, let’s consider for a moment the world that Jesus was born into.  If we’re unhappy with our political situation, first century Palestine was infinitely worse.  The Jews were an oppressed people living under Roman rule.  The local king, Herod, was in the pocket of the the Romans.  He was no friend at all to the Jews.  Herod was known not for justice but for his ruthlessness and paranoia. This King Herod is the same nasty fellow who in Matthew’s next chapter will be murdering all the boys aged two and under to because he fears losing his kingdom.  The humble and poor Jewish family into which Jesus was born would have been at the mercy of both the government’s tax collectors and the Temple hierarchy, which made the obligatory sacrifices  barely affordable.  Life for Jews in Palestine was difficult for Jews at best and yet more problematic if they were also poor.

    And let’s not forget, as we approach our text, that the circumstances of Jesus’ conception were murky at best.  Mary is engaged to Joseph  but not yet living with him, yet she is already expecting a baby.  If we borrow from Luke’s gospel, we know that she has been visited by an angel who tells her that the child she carries is the son of God.  Now times may have changed quite a bit, but the news would have been greeted with the same disbelief then as it would be today.  Mary’s pregnancy would have been attributed to unfaithfulness, not divine intervention. Such a pregnancy ordinarily would have resulted in the ending of the engagement and Mary’s public disgrace.  In fact, Jewish law required this kind of action on Joseph’s part.  Under certain circumstances the mandated punishment would have been death by stoning. However, Joseph was a kind man, and he decided to end things quietly.

    But as Matthew tells, us as soon as Joseph had decided what he would do, an angel appeared to him in a dream.  The angel said to Joseph, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.  She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 

    Now we need to consider a couple of things about Jesus’ name.  The name Jesus is from the Hebrew name Yeshua, sometimes written as Joshua.  It was a very common name at the time, and the name means “God saves.”  The idea of the son of God being given a common name seems odd.  Except in Latin cultures, and I may be wrong but it may just be in Latin American cultures, the name Jesus isn’t generally used for ordinary human beings but is reserved only for Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ.  The point of giving this baby a common name is to unite him with the rest of humankind, to unite him with ordinary people rather than to set him apart.   According to the angel in the dream this baby will also have another name, Emmanuel, which means “God with us.”  The person of the baby Jesus unites the ordinary with the extraordinary.  The person of the baby Jesus unites the human with the divine.

    Another thing about this dream and the naming of Jesus.  The angel addresses Joseph as “Joseph, son of David.”  This connection of Joseph to David—yes that David from the Old Testament—links Joseph and Jesus to a long line before them that stretches all the way back to Abraham.  Now this genealogy is explained in the verses preceding our lesson today, verses that the lectionary left out.  The genealogy is sometimes referred to as the “begats,” from the word used in the King James Bible.  I’m guessing the lectionary folks omitted this section because the reading of it can be somewhat tedious.  But even if tedious it contains some things for our consideration. 

    If you’ve been bemoaning not only the folks who will be attending your Christmas dinner but also the sketchy composition of your own family tree that you’ve unearthed on ancestry.com, you might be interested to know about Joseph’s and Jesus’ forebears. They include Tamar, who was raped by her father-in-law, who then tried to burn her alive.  There was David, whose famous adultery with Bathsheba produced his most famous son, Solomon. Let’s not forget that David sent Bathsheba’s husband Uriah to certain death in battle just to cover up his own sin.  Uzziah was struck down by God for his arrogance.  And then there was Manasseh, who restored idol worship and the cult of Baal, and who is known as the worst of the Biblical kings.   We could reach all the way back to Jacob, who cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright.  There are more examples of bad deeds by members of this line, but we don’t have the time right now to examine their manifold sins and wickedness. We’d be here all day.

``    The point is, if God has chosen this wildly dysfunctional—and worse—family as a vehicle for redemption, there’s hope aplenty for us and for our families.  If God can save humankind through this family, just think what God can do with us and ours. Maybe we think we ought to be perfect, or at least better than we are, but we don’t need to be.  God doesn’t require us to be holy.  God just asks that we be human, with all that being human entails.  To think otherwise is to misunderstand the significance of the Incarnation.  To think otherwise is to misunderstand what it means for God to have taken on human flesh in the person of Jesus, a poor Palestinian Jewish baby born in the first century. God took on the whole business of what it means to be human, from the messiness of human birth to the painfulness of death and everything in between. 

    Let’s remember today as we leave the Advent season and move into the Christmas season, the meaning of Jesus’ two names, Jesus and Emmanuel. Forget about the Hallmark and Instagram versions of Christmas. The first Christmas wouldn’t have had a chance of measuring up, but who needs picture perfect when you’re welcoming a savior?  Let go of your expectations for a perfect celebration. We won’t find good news in the culture but we’ll find it in the Gospel. After all, the word “gospel” means good news.  The good news is that Jesus is coming. He came and he comes to be one of us.  God’s got this.  God will save us.  God is with us.  Amen.

RIP Dad

https://ballarddurand.com/obit/edward-j-kanze-jr/

Sermon 5 Epiphany Year A

Below is the sermon I would have preached at St. Stephen's, Durham today if I had not been felled by a nasty stomach virus.

 

The Rev. Maggie Silton

St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church

Durham, NC

The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany,

            Year A

February 5, 2017

Matthew 5:  13-20

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

            When my children were preschoolers in the 1980s building children’s self-esteem was considered very important.  If you too had a preschooler at that time, or if you were a preschooler yourself, you might remember this.   TV shows such as Sesame Street and Mister Rogers Neighborhood were geared to nurturing self-esteem.  The message to children was, in the words of Fred Rogers’ song, “You Are Special.”  The preschool that my children attended designated a week for each child in the class to be Student of the Week.  The school sent home a piece of poster board, and the parent was supposed to fill it with pictures of the child and his or her family.  I still remember my first encounter with this assignment.  It was a good thing my daughter was happy about it, because I was less than enthusiastic about pulling pictures out of an album that had taken me many hours to put together. Remember, this was before the age of digital photos.  I suppose if I’d been a super mom I’d have planned better and had extra pictures made just for that purpose.  No such luck.  Still, when we’d finished mounting her pictures, Kate was thrilled with the result.  She toddled off to school with her poster, and at the end of her week, she brought home her poster and her Student of the Week construction paper crown.  Life went on.  We repeated the exercise a year later.  I have no idea how much this activity made her feel good about herself.  What I didn’t think about then, but what I invite you to think about today, is the question of where our self-worth really comes from. 

As Christians, we have a somewhat different take on self-worth than the secular world.  We understand our self-worth to come from God—we are God’s children, and we are made in God’s image.  But that doesn’t mean we don’t need reminding from time to time, as we see Jesus do in today’s lesson from Matthew’s gospel. This reminder isn’t given to make us feel good about ourselves.  We’re reminded so that we can be who God created us to be. 

Jesus first says to the crowd, “You are the salt of the earth.”  We need to talk about what he meant by “salt of the earth” for a moment.  The way we understand this phrase is not the way Jesus understood it.  When we say that someone is the salt of the earth, we usually mean to say that they are real, down to earth, unpretentious people.  It is definitely a compliment.  But Jesus meant to say much more than that.  Salt had a different meaning for Jesus than it has for us.  Today we think of salt as a very common and easily available substance.  Salt is the stuff in the shaker on our tables at home and in restaurants.  Salt may have a negative connotation for us if our doctor has told us we must avoid it.   That’s what salt is for us in our time.  But in the ancient world, salt was one of the most valuable substances there was.  It was even used as currency; salt was that valuable.  Salt made it possible to preserve food, which in turn made it possible for people to progress from a hand to mouth existence to a more settled life.  It’s not too big a stretch to say that salt made civilization possible.  So when Jesus said, “You are the salt of the earth,” he told the people that they were of very great value indeed.

Jesus didn’t stop there.  He went on to say, “You are the light of the world.”  Now to say that someone is the light of the world is unmistakably a very high compliment indeed.  If we say we love someone very much, we might very well say that he or she is the light of our life.  I think most of us can name at least one person who is the light of our life.  If we’ve been lucky we know we’re the light in someone’s life too.  Take a moment to feel how powerful that idea is. It affects us in our very souls.

  Now let’s go in a theological direction and take a quick look at what light is in the Bible.  In the very beginning of the creation story in Genesis, God’s first act is to say, “Let there be light.”  Light is God’s presence in the world.  When Jesus says to us, “You are the light of the world,” he tells us that we too are God’s presence in the world.  Just take a second or two to think about that.  Those words hold amazing weight and power.  Those words hold responsibility as well.

Jesus makes it very clear that that we need to do something with this incredible worth God has invested in us.  It isn’t enough just to sit there and be pleased with ourselves. It isn’t even enough to huddle into our little family or circle of friends or even our church community and be pleased with each other.  We can’t hide this light under the bushel basket; we can’t let our God-given saltiness go to waste.  Jesus tells us we need to keep that salt salty.  Jesus tells us to let our light shine. 

Jesus words sound fairly simple in the saying but for us they might not be so simple in the living.  For one thing, we might not feel like we are, deep down, either the salt of the earth or the light of the world.  Maybe we haven’t been treated like we are people of value.  Maybe our early experiences in our families, in our schools, and in our churches didn’t leave us feeling like we are the people of value who Jesus says we are.  I have a story to share about someone I knew who discovered her saltiness and her light, and who worked hard to bring out those qualities in others.

I first met Donna Bradley—this is her real name—at the IFC Community Kitchen in Chapel Hill, where I still serve as a volunteer chaplain, and where Donna served until her too-early death last year.  Donna had come into IFC years earlier as a client at the Women’s Shelter.  At that point Donna was pretty broken, alcohol dependent, and though she mightn’t have used these same words, had no sense that she was the salt of the earth or the light of the world.  IFC’s services and a recovery program helped Donna get clean and sober and recover her sense of worth as a human being.  By the time I met Donna she was the manager of the Community Kitchen and responsible along with her staff and volunteers for providing meals for 120 or so people served at the kitchen every day.

As the kitchen’s volunteer chaplain I quickly observed that Donna did much more than plan, cook, and serve meals.  Donna had a reputation for toughness with everyone; with those who knew her well, she had a reputation for tough love.  It didn’t take long to see that by insisting that the shelter clients who were assigned chores actually did them, she helped them live up to their potential.  She insisted that those who ate in the Community Kitchen’s dining room treat each other with respect.  Donna also insisted that people treat themselves with respect as well.  I watched her give many a pep talk to shelter and kitchen clients going out on job interviews.  I watched her share her own experience with getting sober and convince her listener that if she could do it, so could they.  Donna helped to restore a belief in self-worth to many folks who didn’t believe they were worth anything at all.  Without doing it consciously, Donna let people know that they had the qualities of salt and light that Jesus talked about in our reading from Matthew’s gospel.  Without doing it consciously Donna helped people let their light shine in the world.

            I realize that in the world’s eyes, the people who eat free lunches in community kitchens don’t appear to hold the qualities of light or salt.  Those of us who enjoy much greater privilege might have a hard time seeing the light of the world or the salt of the earth in the poorest members of our society; we may even have a hard time seeing those qualities in ourselves.  But if we glance back to last week’s gospel reading from earlier in the same chapter, we will see that these are indeed the very people Jesus is talking about.  Didn’t he say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit?”  Didn’t he say, “Blessed are the meek?”  Didn’t he also say, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness?”

My prayer for us today is that we might live into our God-given salt and light.  I pray that we might value this great gift that comes to us from God through Jesus. So instead of hoarding that salt in the cupboard, sprinkle it around and let it bring out the flavor of those around us.  Instead of hiding that light under a basket, let it shine and help find the light in others.  Let us be that city on a hill, a place where our light shines and a safe place where the light of all of us, especially the least among us, may shine too.  Amen.

Memorial Day Weekend 2016

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."  Remembering those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

Wednesday Hodgepodge January 27, 2016

Also known as the Hodgepodge after the Snowpocalypse.

1. Share a winter memory from your childhood. 

My most vivid memories involve sitting in the house listening for the school closing notice on the radio.  Although my father taught in the same district, the radio often told us that school was closed before the phone tree reached him (old technology....).  Once closing was announced, I remember discussions with my brother about where to sled.  Good thing our parents didn't know about some of the places we went.  As a parent and grandparent myself I can't believe we went down some of those hills! I still have my old Flexible Flyer!

 2. What was on your blog this time last year? (Besides the Hodgepodge of course!) If you weren't blogging, what in the world were you doing with all that free time? 

I didn't have this blog this time last year. What was I doing?  Reading y'all's blogs, of course!

3. Ellen Goodman is quoted as saying, 'We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives...not looking for flaws, but for potential.' 

Do you see more flaws or more potential in your life at the start of a new year? Have you done anything specific this month to address either one? Does the new year truly begin for you on January 1, or is there some other month of the year that feels like a fresh start and new beginning?

This year I've begun to address the many pounds that have crept on over the last twenty years or so and have finally jumped on the high protein/low carb bandwagon.  My inspiration was a book called Always Hungry by David Ludwig, MD, PhD.  It's not as hard as I thought, but I'm only in the first week.  Time and the scale will tell.





4. Who's an athlete you admire or respect and why?

I'm not a big sports fan, but I admired the late Arthur Ashe.




5. Do you like cream in your coffee? Whipped cream on your pumpkin pie? Cream cheese on a bagel? Sour cream on a baked potato? Cream of wheat for breakfast? Have you ever had a scone with clotted cream? Of all the creamy foods mentioned, which one sounds most appealing to you right this very minute?

A great benefit of my new eating regimen described above is that cream is actually allowed.  Unfortunately, the bagel, baked potato, and the scone aren't.  However, I could totally get behind some unsweetened whipped cream on my berries for dessert.




6. Where were you last kept waiting for 'hours on end'? Or for what felt like hours on end? How well did you cope?

I had to wait a good hour for maybe ten minutes of actual contact with the orthopedist last week.  Most of it was in the exam room.  I think I'd rather wait in the waiting room, because being confined in a small windowless room is no fun.  Unfortunately, I didn't bring enough reading material.



7. Believe it or not, when next week's Hodgepodge rolls around it will be February. Huh?!? Bid adieu here to January in seven words or less.

See ya next year!



8.  Insert your own random thought here.

I'm going to keep my random thoughts about politics to myself (aren't y'all glad?).  What I will say is that having taught myself magic loop knitting from a YouTube video this afternoon, I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself.  

Hat for My Little Frozen Fan

I made this hat and one just like it for my younger granddaughter from a kit which supplied the yarn and the cute little snowflake topper.  The cold never bothered her anyway; it will bother her even less now.

Wednesday Hodgepodge January 13, 2016

1. Share one thing that really makes your day.

Getting a text with a picture of my granddaughters really makes my day!  They are the cutest girls ever--and I'm not in the least biased.




2. Lots of these kinds of lists out there, but one found here says the fifteen most colorful places on earth are:

Vernazza, Cinque Terre, Italy~Burano, Italy~Havana, Cuba~Rio de Janiero, Brazil~Chefchaouen, Morocco~Balat, Istanbul, Turkey~Menton, France~Jodhpur, India~La Baca, Buenos Aires, Argentina~Guanajuato, Mexico~Capetown, South Africa~Valparaiso, Chile~Wroclaw, Poland~San Francisco, California~and Pelourhino, Salvador, Brazil.  

Of those listed which would you most like to see up close and in person? Of all the places you've seen or traveled in your own life, what would you say was one of the most colorful?

I think I'd like to see Havana before it gets completely commercialized.  I've been to San Francisco, and while I think it's a very colorful place, I'm surprised at the places that aren't on this list.  If I were compiling a list I would add Santa Fe, NM and Victoria, BC to the list.



3."Everything you want is on the other side of fear." Jack Canfield  In general, would you agree or disagree with that statement? Why?

I'd have to agree with this statement.  Everything in life I've done that matters most--marriage, parenting, ordination--has involved conquering fear.  Someone wrote a book years ago with a title that was something like Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.  Maybe I'll get around to finding it and reading it one of these days!





4. Imagine you're stranded on a desert island and dessert appears...what do you hope it is? Do you ever struggle to remember which spelling is desert and which is dessert?

I certainly hope it's bread pudding, my current favorite dessert.  The difference is spelling between desert and dessert is no problem for me, but I'm a bit of a nerd :)




5. What song almost always makes you cry?

Once in Royal David's City makes me cry every time I hear it or sing it.  I love it's description of the Incarnation.



6. January is National Soup Month.  Everything from soup to nuts, in the soup, thick as pea soup, souped up...which saying most recently applies to your life in some way? Explain.

I LOVE soup--for me it's the ultimate comfort food.  And I have spent many hours over the years volunteering in soup kitchens, first as a meal preparer and server and later as a chaplain.



7. Write a two word note to your younger self. What does it say?

The note says "Don't worry," not because there isn't anything to worry about, but because much of the worrying I've done during my life was completely unnecessary.



8. Insert your own random thought here.

Lately I've been thinking about the next decades of my life.  Of course I don't know how many are left (I'm 61) and for how many of them I'll enjoy full vigor.  My mother began her ten-year decline in her mid 70s, which for me is not all that far away.