Sermons, September 3, 2000 to

Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from September 3, 2000

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX 79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)
URL: http://www.xroadstx.com/~stmarys/sermon.htm
stmarys@xroadstx.com

The page background is courtesy of Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on December 3, 2000

Advent II, December 10, 2000

John the Baptist is really the Advent personality. For two weeks in a row every year he leads us to the edge of Christmas. Today I want to look at one of the things he said.

John preached from the book of the prophet Isaiah, and from one section in particular. (In fact, we connect the words to John so much, we forget that Isaiah first spoke them, and that Baruch quoted some of them.) It was the section we just heard, “Prepare the way of the Lord. ..make his paths straight, every valley shall be filled and every mountain shall be brought low...and all flesh shall see the salvation of God”. John choose those lines very carefully. He chose them both because of their content and because of their context.

When Isaiah first preached these words, around 540 B.C., he was not talking to a group of happy campers flocking to the malls in the Jerusalem suburbs. Israel had been conquered. Isaiah was preaching to exiles whose lives had never been worse and whose dreams had all been shattered. There were some deep valleys to be filled, and some huge mountains to be brought low. God seemed far away, indifferent, even hostile. Every single person, place and thing which had given meaning and purpose to their lives had been destroyed. There seemed no good news, no future, no reason to continue to live. Yet it is at this very moment of hopelessness that God speaks His word of promise—a word about a highway through the wilderness, the lifting up of valleys, the lowering of mountains, a promise that all flesh will see the salvation of God.

Hope in the midst of disaster and despair; a promise of life when all things are coming to an end. This is the heart of Advert.

When the John the Baptist preached to Israel over five hundred years later, things were not much different from the time of Isaiah—deep valleys, huge mountains. The nation was once more freshly enslaved. This time, it was the invincible might of Rome that bled the land dry and crushed every hope for prosperity, freedom and deliverance. Those who flocked to the River Jordan to see John were, as a rule, miserable and desperate. They wanted something to happen to make things better. They wanted the pain to stop. They wanted God to do something to show that He was around and to show that he cared, even a little, for his chosen people.

Once more, hope in the midst of despair; words of promise and victory from a God who seems to have been napping during the most important of recent events. The word of God came to John, and those who heard it thought it was past about time for God to do something.

And Isaiah was right, and there was cause for hope even by the waters of Babylon. And John was right, and there was cause for rejoicing, even when the most important way to tell the date was by who was the Roman Emperor, and who was the Roman Governor.

To be sure, the fulfillment of God’s promises did not look like what anyone expected. Isaiah’s exiles wanted things back just the way they had been before disaster struck. That never happened. Instead, the nation was restored but things were different, and Israel had to reevaluate everything, and so was led to rediscover the meaning of its existence and the nature of its mission.

The Baptist’s audience wanted the Romans destroyed. Instead, God gave them a child. A child who became a king who offered something different from what they thought they needed. The promised hope was real, if surprising in form; and God continued to be with His people. We need to hear those words of hope today, and we need to realize that they are for us—for us in our real lives, for us in our real world.

After all, we do know a little bit about valleys and mountains, of what it feels like to be deserted and alone, in exile, or groaning under some sort of yoke. We do know a little bit of what it is like to hurt, and to wonder where God is, and whether God cares. We know about that—and we probably know about it with a special sharpness today because it’s Advent, and that means that it’s the holiday season.

And for many of the people we know, and for not a few of us, this can be a pretty ambiguous time, a pretty difficult time. I think we all have a special vulnerability during these few weeks. It’s a time we find ourselves scrutinizing ourselves, our lives, and our families—usually up against some totally unreal standard or another, so we usually come up short. And it’s also a time where we feel a special sting to the griefs and hurts that make up our own personal valleys and mountains.

I know I do. My dad died in Advent, several years ago—and I always think about that this week. But I suspect that I’d miss him most about now regardless of the anniversary date, and I know a lot of us are like that. And we all have a sense that this season adds a special depth to the grief and loss that Liza and her family know at the death of Liza’s daughter Sue—and I pray that this will add a special dimension to our reaching out to them in the weeks ahead. All of this is to remind us that, at their deepest levels, Advent, and Christmas—what the world calls the holiday season—at their deepest levels, these are not just for the happy young shoppers and the TV-commercial perfect families. In fact, we have lost something vital to what Isaiah, and John the Baptist, and the Lord Jesus Christ, are all about when we let ourselves fall into that trap; we have forgotten the valleys and the mountains.

After all, the best meaning of Advent is not that we will remember again that birth in Bethlehem— as important as that is. The best meaning of Advent is that God wants to come to us, and that God will come to us. It is that God wants to come to you, and that God will come to you.

For it is within us, in the stuff of our lives, as well as around us, that every path shall be made straight, every valley be filled, and every hill and mountain be brought low. God will overcome whatever is standing between us and Him. Just as God promises His salvation, His wholeness and His peace, to all of creation; so he promises His salvation, His wholeness and His peace to you. In ways that matter.

We really do not know what this will look like; and that’s alright. After all, both Isaiah and John the Baptist came bringing hope, not answers; promises, not details. That is what we are offered this Advent, and it is really what we need.

The word of Advent comes to us as the voice of one crying in the wilderness—a promise of wonderful news given at a very bad time. The news is still wonderful, whether this particular time is good or bad. God is coming to His people to set them free, and all flesh shall see the salvation of our God.

The Lessons for today: Baruch 5.1-9; Psalm 126; Philippians 1.1-11; Luke 3.1-6

A list of Sunday Scripture readings:

Advent

Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from September 3, 2000

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX 79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)
URL: http://www.xroadstx.com/~stmarys/sermon.htm
stmarys@xroadstx.com

The page background is courtesy of Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on December 10, 2000

Advent III, December 17, 2000

I saw a button a while back, and I saw it again yesterday at the Ordination in Midland—simple and clear, what it said was: “Jesus is coming back—look busy”. An interesting thought, and hardly one we want to hear as Christmas gets really close, and there are only seven shopping days left.

None the less, we hear John the Baptist again today, and I want to look at just one piece of the story about him. John is still preaching repentance, and he’s doing a really powerful job of it. He preaches so well that the people listen, they believe, and they call him on it. OK, they say, we don’t want the axe laid to the root of us, we repent, really. So, what should we do; what does this repentance look like. What are the details.

That’s really a good Advent question, both then and now. I still get it—“what are we supposed to do?” I figure folks back then, pretty much like folks today, were expecting from John, a sort of official list of ‘repentance things to do’—a bunch of holy busy work to keep them occupied, and give them a reason to wear their own button: “the messiah is coming—and I’m busy.”

What John says to all of that is fascinating. First of all, he doesn’t give any general rules—he doesn’t say, “everybody who repents has to do this, and this, and this, and this and this and so on”. He doesn’t say that. Instead, he says that what you are supposed to do will grow from your life, from where you are and from who you are. Your duty will be a function of your situation in life.

First of all, John says, if you are a person who has more than you need, you will then have a duty to share what you have with those who don’t have all they need. That is something repentance looks like. It looks like reflecting on where you are in the world—do you have, literally or metaphorically, two coats. That situation will give you a moral imperative, it will show you something you have to do. Not everyone is in that situation, so not everyone has that duty. But this is what repentance looks like for people in that situation.

John then talks with the two most unpopular groups of Jews in Palestine—tax collectors and soldiers. The tax collectors worked for Rome, the soldiers most likely for Herod, the puppet king of Rome. They were, basically, the scum of the earth, as popular as telephone solicitors, and as respectable as mafia hit-men. These are the folks who asked John what they were supposed to do. Remember, John was an anti-Roman nationalist who was also on the outs (big-time) with Herod and his whole family. So the folks who asked this probably expected John to say something really drastic (and nasty), like: ‘The best thing you can do is drop dead’, or, at the very least, ‘You gotta quit your job and do something decent people can stomach.’

Instead, John told the soldiers to be good soldiers, to cultivate the virtues, and avoid the temptations, of their profession—and to seek to be content and productive within the finest traditions of that profession. He said essentially the same thing to the tax collectors, who were even less popular than the soldiers.

Again, he didn’t tell soldiers not to be soldiers, or tax collectors not to be tax collectors. He didn’t tell anyone they had to become like him, and he didn’t give a single soul a bunch of busy-work. Instead, he said that a life of repentance begins with exactly the real life you have, with exactly the situation in which you find yourselves, with exactly the person you are right now. You begin here—you don’t have to go someplace else to start. The point is not to look busy. The point is to transform the life you have.

This means, among other things, that the Christian life is not somebody else’s life, a life that is distant and different from ours. The Christian life we are called to live is not Mother Theresa’s life, or St. Francis’ life, or the life of Peter or Paul. That was their life to live. The Christian life we are called to live is our life, our ordinary lives—lived differently, and transformed by the intention of living them wholly to the glory of God.

By the way, John’s response suggests that we look at our lives from two perspectives: the first one has to do with what we dolour professions or jobs, those regular tasks and responsibilities we have—are we educators or cooks, or engineers, whatever. That’s the first one. The second one has to do with who we are, with our situation in life: are we single or married, retired or working, healthy or ailing, (I’ve already mentioned having possessions or not having possessions), parents or children {or both}, young or old {or neither}. Who are we. That’s the second one. It is these two together that give content to what a life of repentance looks like.

Think about it. What are the duties, the temptations, the virtues and the excellencies of where you are—of what you do, and of your situation in life? John told soldiers to be good, morally good, soldiers. (They already knew what that meant, but he filled some of it in for them.) What does it mean, what does it look like, for you to be a good you, to be a morally good you, in terms of both parts, of doing and being? What is involved in that? This, John the Baptist suggests, is what you should do if you hear the word of God, and repent.

I suspect that is plenty enough for any of us. I suspect that our present lives are likely to contain all the moral challenges, all the opportunities to discern and develop virtues, all the temptations to resist, all the vices to discover, all the occasions for holiness and for growth, for generosity and for renewal, that we will need. Again, when it come to the moral life, to living out or Christianity, we don’t have to go somewhere else to start—we start right here. And we don’t have a bunch of new things to do—just what we have always have, laid before us now not as the drudgery of another day, but as the gift of God for our spiritual and moral growth. And we have no reason to postpone getting serious about our faith until something or another changes. It is precisely in our dealing with something or another that we are to discover what it mean for us, now, to get serious about our faith.

That is the moral challenge John the Baptist gives us. It really doesn’t have anything to do with looking busy, and it isn’t about what anybody else is or isn’t doing. There isn’t a single list everybody gets. Instead, it is about us, personally, about who we are and what we do. It is precisely there that we will find the details, and the challenges, of what we ought us—and it is precisely there that we will find the grace and direction to live that out, and make that real.

The Lessons for today: Zephaniah 3.14-20; Psalm 85; Philippians 4.4-9; Luke 3.7-18

A list of Sunday Scripture readings:

Advent

Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from September 3, 2000

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX 79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)
URL: http://www.xroadstx.com/~stmarys/sermon.htm
stmarys@xroadstx.com

The page background is courtesy of Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on December 17, 2000

Christmas Eve and Day, December 24, 2000

(I will be on vacation through the 1st of January, so the next sermon posted will be Epiphany I, on January 7, 2001.)

Here is an old story that turns out to be a wonderful way into Christmas:
“Once upon a time, a carefree young girl, who lived at the edge of a great forest and who loved to wander in the forest, wandered too far and became lost. As darkness came and the little girl did not return home, her parents grew very worried. They began calling for the little girl, and searching in the forest, but it grew darker. The parents returned home and called the neighbors and people from all over the town to help them search for the little girl.

“Meanwhile, the little girl wandered about in the forest and became very worried and anxious in the darkness, because she could not find her way home. She tried one path and another and grew more and more tired. Coming to a clearing in the forest, she lay down by a big rock and fell asleep.

“Her frantic parents and neighbors scoured the forest. They called and called the little girl’s name but to no avail. Many of the searchers became exhausted and left, but the little girl’s father continued searching throughout the night.

“Early in the morning, the father came to the clearing and saw where the little girl had lain down to sleep. He suddenly saw his little girl and ran toward her, calling her name, yelling and making a great noise on the dry branches which awoke the girl. The little girl saw her father, and with a great shout of joy she exclaimed, ‘Daddy, Daddy, I found you.’ ”

That’s why we’re all here tonight; because we found him.

Really, this little tale grasps the heart of our story as human beings, it tells us the story of our faith. Throughout the Bible, with all it difficulties and diversity, there runs a true thread of gold, a thread that binds together all the stuff that matters, a thread that glows in the dark and lets us follow along, a thread that gives us perspective and a criterion. That golden thread through the scriptures is the constant, unwavering, inexhaustible, passionate and eternal search of God for us. The constant love, the constant grace, that pours from the heart of God and overflows the universe, comes to us as God’s desire for us, God’s unfaltering search for relationship. That’s the thread, that’s central core of the Biblical story, everything else is commentary or culture.

The Bible is the story of God reaching to us with his protection and love. Beginning with creation itself, and moving through the covenant with Noah, the covenant with Abraham, the gift of the nation of Israel, of the law and the prophets—these are all part of a constant search for us—it’s God is trying one thing and then another, and then another, never slowing down, never letting up, coming after us the way only a lover can seek the beloved, or a loving parent a lost child. ||That quest assumes a whole new dimension and meaning on this night.

At the same time, humanity, “from the first days of our disobedience” has gone its own way, and chosen its own paths, and placed its own desires first and foremost. Once more the Biblical story tells the truth, as, over and over it shows humanity ignoring, rejecting, and abusing God’s search for us. It’s like we are so far in the forest we just can’t hear.

And then, tonight, in the songs of angels, the musings of shepherds, and the quiet ponderings of a very special heart, in those generally quiet things, we hear the ‘making a great noise’ that, in our opening story, was enough to awaken even the most worn-out of wanders.

In some important ways, that’s what Christmas is—it is humanity’s great wake-up call. It is the astonishing climax to the persistent quest of God’s love; it is the realization that the Father is no longer a faint memory, or an abstract idea, or a vague hope, or a voice in the distance. Instead the Father is right here. Really.

Suddenly, on this night, standing before humanity is the fulfillment of the hopes and fears of all the years; the true way into our deepest selves, and the only path there is out of that forest where we insist on being lost. Suddenly, God is right here in front of us, sharing our flesh, living our lives. And there is just the choice about waking up, and about what we see. ||Now, we have to admit that Humanity hasn’t done this very well so far. We seem to prefer to wander and to sleep and to miss the point. But the offer is always present, the Father stands before us, shrouded in swaddling cloths, and making all of the noise he can. The offer of safety, of a return to our real beginnings and our real home, that offer is always before us.

Of course, this is not just about the cosmic quest of God for all of humanity. It is also about us. One of the things it means for us to be here tonight, especially tonight, is that we, individually and personally, have the chance to hear the Father calling us by name, and offering us a path—the path of his life and his love—out of the forest.

I suspect that each of us knows about taking false paths, and being lost in the forest, and trying to fix that by going deeper and deeper in the wrong direction. I suspect that each of us has heard the call to come home, at least faintly in the distance. Whether we know it or not, that call has brought us here. Each of us has the opportunity once more to wake up, to embrace the gift that is offered up, and to begin our own walk back to ourselves, back to our home, and back to where we belong.

And what we learn tonight makes all the difference. What we learn tonight is the great difference between Christmas and the little story we began with. We learn tonight what God looks like when he calls us to himself. Think about it. If God had wanted us to be afraid of him, if God’s search for us and his call to us came from judgment, or wrath, or even from righteous annoyance, God would not come to us as an infant. He would have done it differently. Infants can bring out the best in us, infants invite our love; they reveal our vulnerabilities and our tenderness in special and powerful ways. They entice, they don’t terrify.

When God calls for us to wake up and come to him, when he offers to take us out of the forest, he begins that call gently, with all the fragileness of a cry. He wants us to be sure that what drives him to us, and what he desires both from us and for us, is only and exactly that love we see in Jesus—a love we first discover in the weakness and simplicity of the birth in Bethlehem, a love we gradually come to know better, in more depth and detail, as we come to know Jesus better—in more depth and detail. But we begin here, with the call of love.

So I offer you this little story, and some reflections on it, as a sort of Christmas present. Try it on and see how it fits. For tonight we hear the sounds that love makes when it pursues us, and we hear the ancient offer of new life made once more—in a unique and helpless way—and we are given the chance to wake up, to see what’s going on, and, if we choose, to say, “Yes, I found you.”

Come let us adore him.

The Lessons for today: Isaiah 9.2-4, 6-7; Psalm 96; Titus 2.11-14; Luke 2.1-21

A list of Sunday Scripture readings:

Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from September 3, 2000

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX 79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)
URL: http://www.xroadstx.com/~stmarys/sermon.htm
stmarys@xroadstx.com

The page background is courtesy of Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on December 24, 2000

Epiphany I, the Baptism of the Lord, January 7, 2001

I want to talk about the Baptism of Jesus, about what it means. Now, and the place to start, or course, is with the story we just heard. We heard the first part of it just a few weeks ago. Remember how John was at the Jordan River, (the place where the people of Israel crossed over into the promised land) and how he preached about repentance and judgment—he promised that the axe was lying at the root of the tree, and that any useless chaff would be burned with unquenchable fire—and how he told people what to do if they wanted to live out their repentance?

It was to this place, and into this context, that Jesus came to be baptized. None the less, we Christians need to remember that our basic understanding of Baptism, and of our own Baptism, comes from Jesus, and from what happened at his baptism, and from what happen after and because of his baptism—and not from anywhere else.

The first thing I want to point out is that, when Jesus was baptized, no one told him what to do. John the Baptist didn’t tell him what to do—event though John was truly delighted to tell absolutely everybody else, including the King, exactly what to do. And God the Father didn’t tell Jesus what to do. Notice that carefully. The Father told Jesus who Jesus was, and how the Father regarded him—“you are my son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”. But there is nothing in there about what Jesus was supposed to do, about what it looked like for him to be the beloved, the uniquely named Son of the Father.

Jesus had to work that out for himself; and today I want to look at some of the options and expectations that were in front of Jesus as he chose what it would mean for him to be the chosen one, to be the messiah. Remember, Jesus was a real person who had to make real decisions, just like we do; and Jesus didn’t decide what to do in a vacuum. He lived in his particular world, and that means that he was surrounded by a variety of traditions and expectations of what it meant to be the messiah. What’s more, many of these different visions are still with us, and folks are still pretending that Jesus choose some of these other options, and not the one he did choose. (More on that one later.)

When Jesus was named the beloved of the Father, here are some of the places he could have looked to determine what this might mean, what it might look like. He could have look up, and seen John the Baptist, and stopped there. Jesus could have lived a very rigid, ascetic life, ignoring or disdaining physical and social pleasures, preached a rigorous moralism, worn weird clothes, and promised that if you are not good, God was going to get you. He could have confined his ministry to the people of Israel, and waited for the wrath to come. A lot of people thought the messiah would be like that—in fact, a lot people thought John was the messiah precisely because he did these things. Jesus could have looked there.

Or, he could have looked at the headlines, at the issues of the time, and been an anti-Roman agitator—allied perhaps with the Zealots, who invented guerrilla warfare, or one of the other nationalist parties. He could have organized an army and set out to restore to God’s people their rightful heritage by force of arms. Many who claimed to be the messiah, or who were considered to be the messiah, did exactly that, with more or less success. Jesus could have promised military victory, economic prosperity, and national greatness. This was probably the most common expectation at the time—everybody knew this was what the messiah was going to do; and it was possible. Within a few years Palestine was in full military revolt against Rome. Jesus could have looked there.

Or, he could have looked to the Hebrew Bible (to the Old Testament,) and chosen one of its many and varied images of what it looks like to be the Beloved. He could have gone to the Book of Kings, and taken David or Solomon, the great Kings of ancient Israel, as his model. They were great soldiers and politicians, players on the international scene, and the symbols and constant reminders of Israel’s past greatness as an independent nation and a world power. People wanted those good old days back, and lots of them expected the messiah to bring them back.

Or, instead of Kings, Jesus could have looked to Daniel, and its apocalyptic vision of God’s triumph, where God suddenly and unmistakably appears in history and brings one horrible trial after another on to all creation, until the evil are clearly and decisively defeated and destroyed, and the chosen are give a whole new creation, as the old creation passes away. This was a popular hope among a number of small but influential religious groups that Jesus knew about and that knew about Jesus.

Or, he could have turned to Haggai, or another of the lesser prophets. They saw the messiah as the one to purify Israel, to destroy the gentiles, to cleanse and perfect the temple and its sacrifices, to bring about right worship and study, and to create a racially and religiously pure community.

Those were just a few of the choices—there were many more. All of these were popular visions of the messiah in Jesus’ day, and there were so-called messiahs who modeled themselves on each of them. In fact, these options are still with us. There are not a few who want, and who pretend, that Jesus and his Church are really all about preaching morality, or causing social reform, or getting personal prosperity, or bringing in renewed national greatness, or bringing back the good old days or just waiting until God brings down the whole shebang in one great explosion, or creating the perfect, pure, and isolated community—a group as homogeneous as it is holy. All of these are still around today, just like they were around for Jesus. They are all temptations for us, as they were for Jesus.

But Jesus choose none of them. Guided by that spirt he received at his Baptism, Jesus did go to the Bible for his vision of what it meant to be the Beloved of the Father, but he went to a generally ignored and fairly obscure part of the Bible; to a part no one much bothered with.

He went to the servant songs of the prophet Isaiah—four powerful and perplexing sections of Isaiah, (we heard the first of them this morning). In these passages, God’s chosen one is portrayed as a servant—weak, gentle, patient, and burdened with pain. He is a servant who somehow, mysteriously, through his suffering, redeems not only Israel, but all of humanity. In these passages the servant of God, the beloved, fulfills none of the popular expectations of a messiah, but instead embraces a faithful obedience that leads only through great affliction to his justification, and to the victory of God. It is interesting that we hear these reading during Christmas, during Epiphany, and during Holy Week.

When Jesus came out of the waters of baptism, he was given his identity—he was named beloved of God. He had to decide where to look to discover how he was to live out that identity. There were lots of options, there still are.

In a moment we will renew our own baptismal covenant, and remember that we, too, have been named beloved of God, and that we, too, must live that out, day to day. Jesus choose the image of the suffering servant, who gives up everything for the sake of faithful obedience to God’s word. We choose Jesus. That is our glory, and our challenge.

P. 292

The Lessons for today: Isaiah 42.1-9; Psalm 89.20-29; Acts 10.34-38; Luke 3.15-16, 21-22

A list of Sunday Scripture readings:

Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from September 3, 2000

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX 79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)
URL: http://www.xroadstx.com/~stmarys/sermon.htm
stmarys@xroadstx.com

The page background is courtesy of Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on January 7, 2001

Epiphany II, January 14, 2001

The story of the wedding at Cana of Galilee has been read in Epiphany for a very long time. That’s because the theme of Epiphany is the manifestation, the showing off to the world, of Jesus—of who he is, of what he is about. The business of changing water into wine was, in the Gospel according to John, the first of Jesus’ miracles, the first time he gave a real sign to his disciples of what was going on with him. I want to talk about that for a minute this morning, especially from the perspective of the other lessons.

Now, when it comes to theology, this reading contains an embarrassment of riches. In John’s Gospel, one of the things Jesus does is replace the Jewish feasts with the reality of his presence. Here, the Jewish rites of purification are somehow superceded, and superceded in abundance, by who Jesus is and by what he does. Also, there is a real connection between this scene and the material in Isaiah which likens the return of the Messiah to a wedding, and the joy of God’s people to the joy of a bride and bridegroom. And there is much, much more.

But it’s also a story, and a great one. Mary starts out as the real hero, telling Jesus do to something for these folks who are in really serious trouble. (By the way, there’s an ancient legend which says that Mary was the aunt of the bride and might have been the person responsible for the wedding. That would certainly explain her interest.)

Anyway, Jesus says to Mary that all of this is none of his business and that he has other plans about revealing himself. His time has not come. Mary pretty much ignores that and assumes that Jesus is going to be a good Jewish boy and listen to his mother—and he does.

Now, the folks who are experts on what society was like in those days make it real clear that running out of wine at a wedding was not a minor social inconvenience. It was not like, “Well, the wine’s gone, so we have to switch to scotch.” Instead, this was a major breach of the demands of hospitality; it was a disgrace and it would be devastating for the couple. Everywhere they went, for the rest of their married life, they would be known, ridiculed and talked about. The strain on their life together would be enormous. (After all, there wasn’t that much to talk about in Cana of Galilee.)

So, something really important—at least in the lives of the people who were there—was going on. Jesus has to decide what to do. He has to decide whether to change his time-table—whether to wait before making himself known—as he had planned, or to act right then, for that need. Jesus acts, the wedding was saved, and the bride and groom were given a new chance.

Now, this story is not about the bride and groom, it is about Jesus. It is about all that theology I mentioned a minute ago. But it is very important to realize that the first time Jesus made himself known, even to his disciples, he did so—not according to his own plans—but in response to real and important human need.

Think about it. Jesus’ first manifestation of his glory, the first of his signs, was not for or about Jesus. He didn’t throw a great big ‘Jesus of Nazareth Epiphany and First Miracle’ party, invite everyone in the neighborhood, and then haul off and do a miracle just because he could Jesus’ identity, the Father’s gift to him of who Jesus is, this was not something that Jesus had or held to for Jesus’ own sake, for his own satisfaction, or for his own fulfillment. Jesus revealed himself, indeed Jesus spent his life, for the sake of others. Who he was and what he had were not for him. It was always and only for others, from the very beginning.

Keep that in mind and turn for a minute to the Epistle. That section from Paul is about some of the interesting and peculiar things that were going on in the church in Corinth in the first century. There was some pretty weird stuff, and some pretty selfish stuff and some pretty evil stuff. In the middle of it, as is so often true when religion goes bad, there was a strong sense of who is best, and a strong sense of mine. They were having a bunch of different spiritual experiences and encounters with God—which could very well be just fine—but they were getting possessive and competitive about all of that. They were saying things like, this gift is mine, this way of doing things is mine, this spirituality is mine, this special something is mine.

What Paul says to them is what Jesus discovered when the wine gave out. What Paul says to them is “what you have is not for you. What you have is for others.” “To each is given the manifestation of the spirit for the common good.” This is a fundamental religious truth about the nature and purpose of God. Then and now. What you have is not for you. What you have is not even about you, not really.

The folks in Corinth could never get their religion right, indeed their lives right, until they realized that what they had was not for them or about them. It was given to them so they could use it to give, and to build, and to help, and to create. What Jesus had, who he was by gift of the Father, what it was that made him special, and unique, this was not given for his own sake. It was given so Jesus would have a choice, so that he could choose to give all of himself for others.

What we have is not for us. Not really. All that we have, whatever sort of thing it might be, all that we have is gift—and it is given us so we might be givers, so we might build up, so we might help, so we might be a part of something greater, so we might serve our neighbors and build up the larger body. In one way or another, that is the purpose of our lives, and everything in them.

This is good news. It is good news that we do not live for ourselves alone, that what we have is not for us.

We are not created to live closed in upon ourselves, protective, possessive and defensive. We are not at our best when we try to live that way; we impoverish ourselves when we try to live that way; and we do not have to live that way. When we live beyond ourselves, for others and for the larger whole, then something wonderful can happen, something greater can be created, and there is more of us than there could ever be otherwise.

At the wedding in Cana of Galilee, Jesus chose to abandon his plans and his schedule, and to reach out. In doing that, he shows us what human life can be like.

And there was plenty of wine at the wedding.

The Lessons for today: Isaiah 62.1-5; Psalm 96; I Corinthians12.1-11; John 2.1-11

A list of Sunday Scripture readings:

Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from September 3, 2000

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX 79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)
URL: http://www.xroadstx.com/~stmarys/sermon.htm
stmarys@xroadstx.com

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This page last updated on January 14, 2001

Epiphany III, January 21, 2001

(As I said last week) the theme of Epiphany is the manifestation, the showing off to the world, of Jesus—of who he is, of what he is about. The Gospel reading these last few weeks reflect this theme from some fascinating perspectives. On the feast of Epiphany itself, it is the Wise Men who tell who Jesus is, and what he is about. At the Baptisms of Jesus it is God the Father, (and John the Baptist), who do that. Last week’s Gospel was the story of turning water into wine. In that story, it is Mary who really pushes Jesus front and center— and who makes him known as the chosen one.

In the gospel we just heard, it’s Jesus himself who proclaims who he is. But that is not immediately obvious, and a careful look at the reading from Nehemiah really helps to see the significance of what’s going on in the synagogue at Nazareth. So we start with Nehemiah.

Here’s what’s happening. It is around the year 400 B.C. Led by Ezra the Priest and Nehemiah the governor, the Jewish exiles have returned from captivity in Babylon, and are trying to re-build both the city of Jerusalem and the nation, the culture really, of Israel. Things were not going well. The exiles expected everything to be just wonderful when they got back. Instead, there was ruin, destruction, and an unexpected lack of purpose.

The people could not get along with one another; there was no common ideal or value; and their great dreams of a renewed Israel had given way to frustration, anger, and hopelessness.

It was in order to begin to heal this absolute lack of common purpose and identity that Ezra called the people together and read to them from the Book of the Law.
It was a book they might not have heard before; a book that placed before the people the desires and demands of God. What happened—and this story is a somewhat stylized account of it—what happened was that Ezra and Nehemiah succeeded.

The exiles began to come together as a people who shared a common vision of themselves, as a community who knew who they were: They were the people gathered around the Law, the people of the Book. Their identity was to be found in a common reverence and commitment to Torah, to the Law that God gave to his people. While this is not all there is to the business of Torah becoming central to the life of the people of Israel, (and while this one event is certainly not all Ezra and Nehemiah did), none the less, this moment is central to the development and continuation of Israel’s identity after the defeat and destruction of the nation, the end of the monarchy, and the great struggles of Exile and return.

It was an identity that served Israel well, and that has persisted for almost 2,500 years. This is how you recognize the people of Israel—they are the community which gathers with the Law in the center, and which is committed by covenant to understanding both their collective and their individual lives in the light of that law. This has set the shape of the synagogue service, and it has formed the self-consciousness of a great people.

All of this is background for Jesus going into the synagogue to teach. Jesus begins as Ezra began, standing on a raised platform, with the people gathered around, reading from the sacred text. Jesus read from Isaiah, from a passage that was part of the section of that Book that was so important to him. Everyone there thought they understood exactly what was going on; that is was the same thing that had been going on for centuries.

When Jesus sat down to teach, they expected him to do what the Levites around Ezra did. They expected him to explain, to interpret, to make present, clear and relevant for the current situation both the words and the meaning of the ancient text. (Which is a big chunk of what I try to do up here every week.)

But Jesus didn’t do that. Jesus did something totally different, something new. Jesus said, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Not interpreted, not clarified, not spoken about brilliantly, not even totally figured out. But fulfilled. Think about that.

When a promise is kept, the promise isn’ t important any more. What is important becomes the keep of it. In the same way, when the Scripture is fulfilled, what is central, what is most important, what is the focus, is not the scripture, but the fulfillment.

When Jesus, fresh from the desert and filled with the Spirit, sat in Ezra’s seat and claimed to be the fulfillment of scripture, he was saying that what it means to be the people of God had changed fundamentally. He was saying that the people of God would no longer be constituted, would no longer be identified, by being gathered around the Torah, the sacred written Word. Instead, Jesus is saying, what it means to be the people of God is to be gathered around the fulfillment of that Word—it is to be gathered around Jesus, around the incarnate word. Everything was different now. Everything had changed.

That was the big shift, that was the big difference Jesus brought. It still is. This scene in Nazareth becomes the new vision, it becomes our vision, of who we are and what we are about. We are the people who are gathered with Jesus of Nazareth in the center. We are the people who find our lives, our hope, our destiny and our mission in this man who preached that day in Nazareth, and no where else.

As Christians, Jesus is the center—of our faith, of our worship, of our lives. We can come to know Jesus in a number of ways—the Bible is powerfully one of them, but the bible is not at the center. The sacraments are another way, so are the holy traditions of the church, so is the life the life we live together—together as St. Mary’s, together as the Episcopal Church; so is the guidance of the Holy Spirit and so are the teachings of the ancient Fathers and the fruits of our own prayers—all of these are ways we can come to know Jesus, and to know him better. But none of theses is at the center. None of them alone tells us, really, who we are and what we are about.

Only Jesus is at the center; and he comes to us in all these ways and more. Sometimes it is harder to see and hear him clearly than it is at other times, and sometimes we do not all see or hear him in the same way. But that is not a reason to put something else in the center, it just means we have to look and listen with a bit more energy, and a bit more charity.

So I leave you with this image, this picture from Luke’s Gospel of what it means for us to be us. It is simple, really, but not easy. For Jesus stands among us today as he did then, and proclaims himself to be the fulfillment of the hopes and dreams of the very best that humanity has ever hoped for. And he calls us to look at him, and to listen to him. And to let nothing else replace that.

The Lessons for today: Nehemiah 8.2-10; Psalm 113; I Corinthians12.12-27; Luke 4.14.21

A list of Sunday Scripture readings:

Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from September 3, 2000

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX 79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)
URL: http://www.xroadstx.com/~stmarys/sermon.htm
stmarys@xroadstx.com

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This page last updated on January 21, 2001

Epiphany V, February 4, 2001

All three of today’s lessons tell the same story—they all talk about call, and about the contrast between the way we so often see ourselves, and the way God sees us.

My favorite is the story in Judges about Gideon. (We’re doing this in EFM, too, and it’s a hoot.) Gideon lived around 1100 BC, and he started out as sort of a wimp. When the story opens he is in hiding. The Midianites—some really tough guys from the south-east who had lots of camels—have overrun his part of Israel and he is at the bottom of a hole in the ground trying to clean some wheat. He’s hoping that nobody will notice and the wheat won’t be confiscated by a raiding party of Midianites coming over the hill on those darn camels. It is this pathetic, almost comic, figure that the angel of the Lord calls a “mighty man of valor.” Nothing could be farther from the truth. Gideon was no hero—he was a frightened part of a frightened and defeated people. He was only trying to get by—and would have been quite content if he could just manage to do that. And the angel told him to go and deliver Israel. Right.

Next, Paul talks about his call. After telling how the risen Lord appeared to the disciples and to others, Paul talks about himself. He says that he is the last of the Apostles, a persecutor of the church, and both unlikely and unworthy to be an apostle. None the less, Christ appeared to him and, contrary to all good sense, called this pharisee who hated the Church to be the Apostle to the Gentiles.

Finally, there is Peter—a fisherman who had a bad day, a simple guy without much in the way of pretensions or plans; but called none the less to become a fisher of men. Ultimately Peter will be named first among the Apostles, the leader of the church, the First Bishop of Rome, and a martyr for the sake of his Lord. But you couldn’t tell it by looking at him; and he had no clue. Not one of these folks, in his wildest dreams, ever saw himself the way he was to become. As far as we can tell, each was more or less content—or resigned—to his life—and each greeted his call from God with both very little enthusiasm and a boat-load of excuses.

What they saw was their own weakness—Gideon, the least of the weakest clan in Manasseh; Paul, the least of the Apostles; and Peter, whose first words are “...I am a sinful man”. They saw their unimportance, their faults, those things that limited, and confined, and restricted them. That’s what they saw; and that’s all they saw. But God saw something else, something more. And by His grace and His love he called that something else out of them, and made it possible for them to become people they never dreamed of being.

Within their call is the model of God’s call to each one of us—within their experience is an image, almost a map, of our own experiences with God. Too often we think God only pays special attention to ‘biggies’—to folks like Peter, Paul or Gideon—and not to us. This is simply not true. We may not be called upon to defeat the Midianites, or to establish the gentile church, but God is always at work in us. We are all called, we are all drawn, by God to be more than we are now; and quite possibly to do more than we may be doing now. And with some deep part of ourselves, we know this.

This is built in to life with God. God is constantly drawing us to Himself—and in doing this He calls us out of ourselves—away from our preconceptions of what we can and cannot do—and toward some new place, some new life—which is quite likely beyond our present imagining; and which we probably don’t think we can do.

Two example of this come to mind. The first is from yesterday—several of you attended the dedication of the new building—and really the new vision and new ministry—of St. Nicholas’ Church in Midland. Their story of discerning a vison of ministry in the marketplace, then of finding the courage to try to pursue it, and finally of discovering the resources and the energy actually to build a new place, and leave the old comfortable site for a brand new life, is one I’ve followed fairly closely for the last seven years. It’s a story like Gideon’s, or Peter’s. And with the help of God they are making it happen. Now their situation, their ministry, and their vocations are not ours. We are different, and we are certainly not called to do the same thing. But I’ll bet we would be surprised today at what God has in store for St. Mary’s as we try to listen, and to hear.

That’s one example; the other is different; it’s about the way a child learns to walk. Usually it works like this. The parent stands the child up (still holding on to something), moves a few steps away, holds out his arms and calls the child by name. Finally, after some false starts and landing on its bottom—the child walks—at first a step or two, then more.

The child does not walk because he believes that he can walk, he doesn’t walk because walking is somehow automatic, or because walking is his idea—it isn’t. The child walks because the parent believes the child can walk—and by believing, the parent calls the walking out of the child. The child becomes more than he is, not because the child thinks it’s a good idea—but because the parent, out of love for the child, sets the stage and makes growth possible.

God works on us the same way. He sees in us things we do not see in ourselves; he sees in us more and better things than we can ask or imagine—and he stretches out His arms in love and calls us to this new life; a life far beyond our own visions, our own preconceptions.

This is what happened to Gideon, to Paul, and to Peter. It is what is happening—in one way or another—to each and every one of us. We can be more than we are, we can be more than we can ask or imagine; God sees and is calling out things in us we would never have thought of on our own.

A central and important part of faith is trusting enough to take that step—to move foreword in a new direction—following a voice, perhaps faintly heard, that draws us into an unknown place, into a new life. Remember Gideon, that mighty man of valor.

And we discover as we take that step that the voice is to be trusted—that we can be more than we are. The steps are often difficult, and always at least a little frightening. Sometimes we land on our ... bottoms. But that’s all right. God’s assurances are a call to confidence in Him, confidence that we will not be betrayed, that we will not be left alone and without aid. Confidence, not in our own ability or in our own worthiness, but in God’s faithfulness and God’s strength.

The Lessons for today: Judges 6.11-24a; Psalm 85.7-13; I Corinthians 15.1-11; Luke 5.11-11

A list of Sunday Scripture readings:

Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from September 3, 2000

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX 79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)
URL: http://www.xroadstx.com/~stmarys/sermon.htm
stmarys@xroadstx.com

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This page last updated on February 4, 2001

Epiphany VII, February 18, 2001

I would like to live in such a way that, if the Christian faith is false, then my life is wasted. That’s how I would like to live. I think I first heard that powerful description of a holy life from Richard Grein—my bishop back in the Diocese of Kansas. It has haunted me as much as it has attracted me. I believe it, and I think it is the single best picture of what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus I have ever heard: I want to live in such a way that, if the faith is false, my life is wasted. Think about that, chew on it.

The Sermon on the Mount, and Luke’s version of it which we heard last week and this week, is really all about this. It gives directions for life in the Kingdom, and so it shows what it looks like to live in such a way that, if the faith is false, your life is wasted.

You see, the problem with all this stuff about loving your enemies and turning the other cheek and giving to whomever asks and so on is that it makes us choose; it makes us decide what is real—what is actually out there, and so what actually matters. After all, we’re modern folks; we like to be realistic, we like to base our decisions on the facts—and I suspect we do just that—I suspect we base our decision on what we really do believe is real, and true and valuable. That’s why we find these ethics of Jesus to be strange, unrealistic, almost alien.

The other day, driving down 51st street in Lubbock, I saw this church sign (I know, picking on Church signs is really too easy to be sporting, but I just can’t resist this one, either) anyway, the sign said, “love your enemies, it will confuse them.” As if the Christian life were really all about your enemies, and what happens to them—or as if it were really all about you, and what a good job you do on your enemies. That sign is one more in an ancient and persistent attempt to establish that following the values and ethics of the kingdom will somehow lead to success in the world, or at least to the same kind of satisfaction you would get with success in the world. On this account, what Jesus is really talking about is sneaky, religious, ways to get what we would want to get if we weren’t religious. So we get to act religious and reap the juicy rewards of being vindictive, nasty, and mean.

Love your enemies, it will confuse them. That has a certain appeal. It also means that the faith can be false and you haven’t lost anything—you have still stuck it to your enemies; and you’re still a person who sticks it to their enemies—albeit in a pious, and not a secular, way.

Another way into the same sort of thing is the notion that if you try to live the way Jesus is talking about here, it will get us what we want in a different way. Maybe if you love your enemies, they will get better, or they will be nice, or they will stop being your enemies and like you, or at the very least they will feel bad about being your enemies and they won’t enjoy it so much. Or if you turn the other cheek the one hitting you, will stop hitting you, or will feel sorry about hitting you, or, again at the very least, won’t enjoy it so darn much. Again, it is as if the most real, and the most important things in the universe were you, and your enemies, and as if what really matters the most is what you get, or what happens to them.

But of course following these saying of Jesus doesn’t always work our way—in fact, it very often doesn’t work our way at all; and if we come at these words of the Lord as a clever way get what we would also want to get if were not Christians, then we will probably not get very much—except disappointment. I suspect that the key is hidden in the command to “be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” This is basic. We are not to be merciful because of them, because of the others to whom we can show mercy—we aren’t to be merciful because they deserve it, or because it would make them really sorry or really miserable, or because they are deep down really nice, or because it is good for them if we are merciful. And it’s not about us—it’s not about what makes us feel good about them or about ourselves; and it’s not about what we want to do or like to do or what we think is fair or anything like that.

We are not called to be merciful, or to love, or to turn the other cheek, or to give, or any of those things Jesus is talking about, for any of these reasons. It’s not about them, and it’s not about us. After all, if it’s for any of those reasons, then the faith can be false, and we still get something out of it.

Instead, we are to be merciful, we are to love, we are to give, and so on, because God is like that. That’s who God is, and that’s how God acts. And God the Father creates us in His image and, in Jesus Christ, God is both our model and our ideal. And God wants us to imitate his life; God wants us to be like he is; because God thinks that’s best. These commands in the Sermon on the Mount are not a bunch of impossible rules we get graded on, they are the steps to the dance of life in the Kingdom of God. That’s what they are. And that’s why we are to learn them. So we can practice; so we will know how to act when we get all the way into the kingdom of God.

Now, I’m not suddenly going to turn into a tub-thumping literalist and say that the things Jesus tells us to do are a word-for-word guide to every moment of modern life. But there is a real, constant, and vital challenge behind this. It has to do with basing our lives and our behavior on what is real, and on what matters. It has to do with living and acting as if the most real, and the most important, parts of creation are not ourselves, and what we want, and how we feel; and that the most real and important part of creation are not them, not the other guys, and what they did, and what they deserve. Rather, it has to do with living and acting as if the most real, and the most important, part of creation is God, and who God is, and who God will have us become. All of Jesus’ moral teaching is about this.

It might not confuse our enemies, it might delight them. It might not get cheek slappers to stop, it might encourage them; and it might not make us all the world would have us be. But, for sure, if we try to take this stuff really seriously at least two things will happen. The first thing is that we will be changed; in fact, we will be different at a level of depth and significance that we will never even discover until we honestly try to live in imitation of the heart of God. That’s one thing.

The other thing that will happen is that, if we try to take this stuff really seriously, and it turns out the faith be false, if it turns out that God is a delusion and a figment of our imagination, if that’s the way it turns out, then a lot of our lives will be wasted. Simply wasted. I like that.

The Lessons for today: Genesis 45.3-11, 21-28; Psalm 37.3-10; I Corinthians 15.15.35-38, 42-50; Luke 6.27-38

A list of Sunday Scripture readings:

Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from September 3, 2000

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX 79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)
URL: http://www.xroadstx.com/~stmarys/sermon.htm
stmarys@xroadstx.com

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This page last updated on February 18, 2001

Lent I, March 4, 2001

.Every year, on the first Sunday in Lent, we hear the story of the temptations. It’s a familiar story—Jesus is baptized, is named the beloved of the Father, and is then driven by the Holy Spirt into the wilderness, where he is tempted. While we are well acquainted with the story, I don’t think we have much of a sense of how dreadfully basic, how powerfully fundamental, it is.

First of all, we need to remember that, In Luke’s gospel at least, the temptations are the first time we see the adult Jesus in action; in fact, the very first words he says in the Gospel are the words we just heard. In many ways, this story lays the foundation for the public ministry and witness of Jesus.

And what does Jesus do in the wilderness? He says ‘no’. Three times. That’s just about it. He doesn’t do anything else. He doesn’t perform any miracles, he doesn’t heal anybody, he doesn’t tell any parables or stories, he doesn’t offer any teaching or put forth any profound new wisdom. Instead, he says ‘no’. Now, this is not what Jesus usually does. Most of the time he is constructive, most of the time he says ‘yes’. But not here, not first.

It is interesting to look at what he says ‘no’ to, what his temptations are; and what they are not. Notice first that they are custom-made to Jesus, to who he is and to what he is about (just like ours are.) Jesus wasn’t tempted to lie, cheat, steal, run off with somebody’s wife, or eat too much chocolate. Nothing like that—those would not have gone deep enough. Instead, he was tempted, first, by possessions (hey, besides being food, bread is the basic measure of what you have, the stuff of life, and there are a lot of stones in the desert). Second, Jesus is tempted by power—political and social power, the power to make things happen; and, third, he is tempted by religion—especially the ‘signs and wonders’ variety of religion that uses dramatic and elaborate miracles to convince people, and that claims to be able to make God do what we want God to do at the drop of a hat.

Now, none of these is obviously a bad thing in and of itself, and, again, each was aimed specifically at Jesus. And to each Jesus says ‘no’—he says ‘no’ to the security and comfort of possessions and wealth; ‘no’ to the security and certainty of the power that the world loves; and ‘no’ to the security and thrills that come both with religion made into magic, and with faith secured by signs that overwhelm all choices. It is clear that these are real temptations, and it is clear that the things he said ‘no’ to would have gotten in Jesus’ way, impeded his mission, and made it difficult, if not impossible, for him to live out fully his calling. They mattered.

Again, there is really very little constructive here at all. These strong ‘no’s do not define Jesus’ teaching and ministry, and they don’t reveal what is distinctive and particular about who he is and what he is about. In fact, Jesus has yet to say ‘yes’ to very much at all. But these ‘no’s are vital, they are like measuring and preparing the ground before you start building something.

In and through these temptations, Jesus has made his ‘yes’, the positive work he has to do, he has made that possible. He has, by what he rejects, created the context in which he can build and develop his ministry—he has made a sort of uncluttered space around himself. And it is within that space, a space free of conflicting commitments and loyalties, that Jesus will say God’s great ‘Yes’ to all of creation.

It is precisely at this point, I suspect, that Jesus’ temptations speak most clearly to our own. Our similarity with Jesus is not so much with the content of our most important temptations. Like Jesus, what we have to face, the choices we must make, will be very intimately ours, and they might not look very much like what happened to Jesus—or to anybody else.

But the real point here—and it is a very important, and yet I fear a vanishing point in our day, is always the same. It is something that is at the very core of personal integrity and religious authenticity.

The point is, most simply, that without some really basic and foundational ‘No’s, without a strong and vibrant notion of what we will not do, what we will not agree to, what we will not succumb to, and what we will not put up with, without these—there really isn’t much depth to us, there really isn’t much of the groundwork of a person—because there isn’t the place, the space, for that to happen. Without our ‘no’s, any ‘yes’ that we might say, any positive and creative things that might come, these will be precarious, and fragile, and dangerously without foundation.

I suspect this is why so many able, well intentioned, skilled and generally decent people—people in public life, and people we know in our private lives—why they are so stunned to discover how powerful their own sin can be—how totally devastating to themselves, to those they care about, and to everything they care about doing, their inability to say ‘no’ can be.

And all the good ‘yes’s in the world don’t make up for this. Having all the right beliefs, all the best ideas, all the finest goals—having the highest ideals, the purest affections, and all the correct opinions, none of these can, without the ‘no’s that are sometimes needed to define and to give us space to exist, without that, none of these can give us the shape, the character, the integrity we need. And we see, constantly it seems, the destructiveness that comes from pretending that if we are otherwise all right, if we have our ‘yes’ in line, then this (whatever ‘no’ we don’t say, or can’t say), doesn’t matter.

But the very first thing Jesus says in this Gospel is ‘no’, and it is with that wonderful, powerful, and necessary word, that his ministry of service begins.

Maybe that’s the most important thing we can learn from the temptations. (Let’s face it, nobody’s taking us to the pinnacle of the temple.) The most important thing we can learn is that the first thing we may be called to say, and the most fundamental thing we may be called to say, is exactly what Jesus said—it is ‘no’—‘no’ to our temptation, ‘no’ to whatever we may be offered that can stand between us and who we already are as beloved children of God, ‘no’ to whatever we may be offered that will get in our way, and make us less than we already are, and stand in the way of our mission.

This isn’t all that matters, it isn’t most of what matters—the ‘yes’ that we say is also vital. But sometimes the ‘no’ is first, and always it is necessary. ||That may be a pretty good place to begin Lent.

The Lessons for today: Deuteronomy 26.1-11; Psalm 95; Romans 10.5-13; Luke 4.1-3

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:

Holy Week

Eastertide

Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from September 3, 2000

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX 79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)
URL: http://www.xroadstx.com/~stmarys/sermon.htm
stmarys@xroadstx.com

The page background is courtesy of Windy's Page designs.

This page last updated on March 4, 2001

Lent II, March 11, 2001

Probably the oldest and most abiding image of what it means to be a religious person, a person really engaged in the business of being connected with God, is the image of a journey. This seems to be one of the most universally shared religious insights, (journeys, are part of virtually every religious tradition and almost every religious story). It is also one of the most universally resisted. (After all, if we are on a journey, than we haven’t arrived, and everything isn’t settled, and there are still places to go and things to discover even in our walk with God. Also, being on a journey means that if we stop, if we allow ourselves to be content with where we are now, or if we get off course, then we are lost.) So we are both drawn to this notion of journey, (it rings true); and we pull back from it; often wanting to have the travel over and the destination at hand. That’s a sign of a good image. Keep it mind.

The heart of Luke’s Gospel is a journey, it is Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. And on that journey the people following Jesus begin to learn what discipleship means; they discover what the journey with Jesus is like. In the same way, by paying attention, we can learn a bit of what our journey is like, and what it will be like.

I read the short version of the Gospel today because that sharpens the focus on one event, one thing that happened on Jesus’ journey, one thing I want you to look at carefully and with some imagination.

Luke says that some Pharisees came to Jesus and said, “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” Suddenly, the journey has become dangerous. Suddenly, there is some real risk involved—suddenly, decisions matter. Jesus had to decide what to do. He had at least three choices. He could go back, that was a real possibility. He could take a detour, he could go around where the danger was and still try to get to his destination. (Come to think of it, he could also stand still.) Or, he could hold fast and continue on his way—he could remain faithful to his journey.

The journey got dangerous. This is important. It can also be difficult to relate to, at least at first. Way back then, it was easy enough to see what it meant. Jesus had enemies who wanted him dead. Dangerous meant dangerous. Also, for first four centuries, (and in a surprising and growing number of places even today) Christians faced all sorts of persecution, some of it truly dreadful, for the sake of the faith that was in them. What it meant to them for the journey to get dangerous was also easy to see.

Now, I am convinced that even for us, and even here and now, our journey at times turns dangerous; that what Jesus and the first Christians faced we face, albeit it in a different, gentler, and more subtle way. Still, all that we hold dear is at stake. And we have pretty much the same options that Jesus did when he heard that Herod was out to get him. But this is far from clear, and far from easy to recognize.

Here are a couple of stories that have helped me get at this business of our journey becoming dangerous. I don’t know where the first story came from, (I know it was about somebody famous). Anyway, the person said that he had had a vision, and that in this vision he had finally learned what judgment was like—what it meant to be judged by the Lord. What happened in the vision was simple: At the man’s death, Jesus appeared to him and showed him those scars on his hands, and his feet, and side. Then Jesus asked him one question, the same question he will ask each of us. Jesus asked, “where are your scars?” Not, ‘what did you accomplish?’, not, ‘did you keep the rules?’, not ‘what did you believe?’, not ‘were you good?’, but simply, ‘Where are your scars?’ There is wonderful insight here. And if we do not understand, or if we have nothing to say, Jesus will ask again, more clearly. He will ask if our society was so just, and our cultural so moral, and our economy so compassionate, and our institutions so exemplary, and our world so friendly||that we could live in these, and move in these, and be at home in these for a lifetime as a baptized servant of the crucified Lord and have no scars to show for it—no signs of conflict or struggle, no marks of discord or pain.

The Lord will ask if our relationships were so undemanding, if our neighbors were so loveable, if our appetites were so mild, if our prayer was so easy, if the power of sin was so tame, and if love was so simple, that we could hear him, and follow him, and allow him to be both the source and the goal of our journey, if we could do that and bear no wounds from it.

And judgment doesn’t follow this question. This question, ‘where are your scars?’ is judgment, for by it we can see if we have lived fully—if our journey was true; or if we turned around, or took detours, or simply stood still, when things got dangerous. ||Where are your scars? Good question.

That’s one story. The other is about Justin Martyr, one of the earliest Christian philosophers, (he died, a martyr, of course, around the year 165). Justin is best known for his attempts to defend the Christian faith from the intellectual and social criticisms that were brought against it in the second century. But this story is not about that. This story is that one day a catechumen came to Justin with a problem. Catechumens were people who were preparing for baptism. In those days, the period of preparation could last for two years, or more, and during that time a person’s whole life was scrutinized carefully—to insure that he or she was living, and intended to live, in a way that was consistent with membership in the Christian community. This fellow’s problem was his job. You see, there were plenty of perfectly legal and generally respectable jobs in the Roman Empire which the Church had determined that Christians just could not hold. These included such things as the silversmiths who made the pagan gods, the bureaucrats and public officials who arranged for the pagan festivals, the soldiers, various sorts of merchants, and a host of others. We aren’t told which one it was, but the fellow who came to see Justin had one of these jobs.

So he had to decide what to do, and he didn’t like the choices. He wanted baptism, he loved the Lord and was inescapably drawn to the Church, but he needed his job. And his family needed his job, and he was doing pretty well. So he was stuck, and he was frustrated and he was angry. So he made his case to Justin, and, after giving all the arguments he could muster as to why he should be an exception, he finally offered the crowing blow, the irrefutable point: “What am I to do”, he asked, “I must live.”

And Justin answered, “Must you?”

Sometimes the journey gets dangerous. There is no telling in advance what that might look like, and there is no predicting when it might happen. But remember, the Lord wants what is really, and deeply, and honestly the best for us. He knows that, sometimes, it is best for us to get scars; and he knows that, sometimes, even our best excuses are not good for us. So he calls us to faithfulness—to courage, persistence, and perseverance, in our journey with him, and to him. For that path, and that alone, leads to life.

The Lessons for today: Genesis 15.1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27.10-18; Philippians 3.17--4.1; Luke 13.31-35

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:

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Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from September 3, 2000

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX 79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)
URL: http://www.xroadstx.com/~stmarys/sermon.htm
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This page last updated on March 11, 2001

Lent III, March 18, 2001

One of the most ancient and most powerful human religious impulses is the desire to connect, in one way or another, the notions of sin and tragedy. It is to say, or to think, or to feel, that special moral cause and effect which insists this happened because of that.

If there is tragedy, we really want to think that, somewhere, there must be a moral reason for it. If something terrible happens to me, it must be, or it should be, because I am being punished for something, even if I have no idea what that could be. If something terrible happened to him, or to her, or to them, it must be because, in some way, morally, they have it coming. After all, God is just. Of course, a part of that also says that if nothing terrible has happened to me, then I must be O.K., or at least not as bad as those who did have something terrible happen to them. It cuts both ways.

The fact is, Jesus’ the Bible, the Old Testament, has some very real support for this view. (Also some dissent, but that’s another story.) There are whole books, several whole books, that give very exact lists of the bad stuff that will happen to folks who do bad things, and of the good stuff that will happen to folks who do good things. The business of God enforcing a moral connection between tragedy and doing wrong, on the one hand, and prosperity and righteousness on the other hand, is one of the dominate traditions of the Old Testament.

In the Gospel we just heard, Jesus takes on that whole tradition. He looks at this belief in the necessary connection between tragedy and moral evil, a belief that was over 1,000 years old in Jesus’ day. And Jesus says, “no”. He says, “that’s not the way it works.” This was important, this was unexpected.

The questions are universal: “what about those Galileans who Pilate murdered?” and “What about those people who were under the tower when it fell, were they the worse sinners?” Now, I want you to think about those ancient questions. Somebody else died, rather horribly, you didn’t. Imagine that you are listening as Jesus deals with the question. What about them, what about the Galileans, the others; were they worse sinners? As you listen to that question, what do you want the answer to be? What do you want, really want, the Lord to say about them? As we sit alive and healthy, what do we want to hear Jesus say about the others, about the ones who got the disease, the ones who did not walk away, the losers.

After all, if they were worse sinners, what does that say about us? And if they were not the worse sinners, what does that say about us? Everybody knows that God is just. So we have our private conversations, and our private hopes, and we ask, with Jesus, what about them? Were they worse, even just a little bit worse?

If we listen carefully, the two things Jesus says are shocking. “No”, he says first, “they were no worse sinners than you are”. And, second, “unless you repent”, (he says this twice), “it will go at least as bad for you”. Jesus says this to the winners—to the safe ones, to the ones who got away with it, to the ones who know that if they are worse, then we are alright, if only just barely. It is to the winners that Jesus says, it will go the worse for you if you do not repent. It is to most of us.

The presence of tragedy is not a sign that the victim is a worse sinner, or a worse person, than the one who escapes totally. (This is the way it is whether the tragedy happens to us or to someone else.) Jesus insists that there is no necessary moral connection. That is what he says, twice and very clearly, and we have to deal with that. We have to deal with the other side of that, too; with the side that says the absence of tragedy, what we call good fortune, does not mean that people with good fortune, whether it is we or someone else, are any better. So where does that leave us? Where do we find comfort and hope? It is a dangerous and a scary world out there; it can be a truly horrible world out there. And it would be nice to have some guarantees, or at least some sort of an edge.|| But this story insists that one thing that is certain, one thing that is absolutely central to what Jesus is saying, that one thing is this: we cannot find our comfort and our hope in our own goodness, no matter how much of it, or how little of it, we claim; in the same way, we cannot find comfort and hope in anyone else’s sin—no matter how bad that is. In part, Jesus is taking careful aim at that lowest common denominator form of self-righteous that says, “Well, maybe I’m not perfect, but at least I don’t...(fill in the blank), or “at least I haven’t..(fill in the blank), or “at least I’m not as bad as...(fill in the blank)”. Jesus says there is absolutely no hope in that, there is absolutely no comfort in that, there is absolutely no future in that. Whatever or whoever we use to fill in the blanks, they are no greater sinners than the rest—and unless we repent....

In saying this, Jesus is challenging an important part of his own tradition; and he is striking at that basic human religious impulse to connect sin and tragedy. Jesus says “no” to all of that.

And what does he offer instead? What does Jesus present as an alternative? He offers a story about a farmer. It normally took fig trees no more than three years to mature and bear fruit. Centuries of experience had established that if there was no fruit after three years, the chances were very good that there would never be any. Barren three-year-old fig trees were parasites. They took up valuable space and used good earth that could be put to better use by something productive, something valuable. Any gardener with half a grain of sense knew that; and any gardener with half a grain of sense also knew what to do. After all, the tree had had a fair chance, and it had blown it. So, the gardener in the parable makes a stupid request. He asks to waste precious space, and precious soil, and precious fertilizer, on something that has already demonstrated its uselessness. The point here is not horticultural. The point here is not that the gardener is wise or that the gardener is just. The point here is that the gardener loves the tree. And in spite of the way the parable ends, you can be absolutely sure that a year from now, that gardener will be right back, saying the same thing, asking for one more year, and trying the same cure all over again. That’s because the gardener loves the tree. You see, the only hope that tree has is that the gardener will keep at it, and that the boss will keep listening, even if the request makes no sense, even if keeping that tree is a stupid thing to do. This story is what Jesus offers as an alternative. The gardener isn’t just.

Regardless of who we are, regardless of what we have done or of what we have not done, regardless of what has happened to us, or what has not happened to us, or what might very well happen to us;||and regardless of them, of any them out there, regardless of how bad they are, there is only one source of hope, only one possibility of comfort, (and there are no guarantees of nothing bad happening). All that matters, and the only hope we have, is the father’s love, and the father’s mercy. That’s what we have, and that’s all there is.

The Lessons for today: Exodus 3.1-5; Psalm 103; I Corinthians 10.1-13.1; Luke 13.1-9

A list of Sunday Scripture readings, with links to the Biblical Text:

Holy Week

Eastertide

Archive of St. Mary's Sermons from September 3, 2000

Click here for the Easter Season Readings

Fr. Jim Liggett
P.O. Box 2949; Big Spring, TX 79721
(432) 267-8201 (phone)
URL: http://www.xroadstx.com/~stmarys/sermon.htm
stmarys@xroadstx.com

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This page last updated on March 18, 2001

Lent IV, March 25, 2001

When you don’t get the joke, the story falls flat. Even when you know the story real well, and you follow along just fine, if there is a punch line that you miss, then the real force of the story just isn’t there.

The parable of the prodigal son is like that.

You see, the whole parable sets us up for a little speech on morality—actually it sets us up for two little speeches on morality, (one for each brother): Speeches about true religion; speeches about duties, rights, family values, generosity, the consequence one’s actions and the significance of improper behavior. The story is just full of morals. All sorts of lectures on what is right and proper are just sitting there waiting to be given. You can see ‘em coming.

The first time we’re set up for a lecture is with the younger son. He is a veritable gold mine of moral lecture-making material. First, there is the business of asking for the money before his father is decently dead. This raises concerns of right living, and of respecting one’s self, and one’s father (and no one even mentioned what all of this did to his mom.) The fact is, the son was really stretching the law even to ask for his inheritance, and the father would have been well within his rights both to refuse and to punish the little brat for asking.

But it was after he left home that the kid was a true disgrace. In fact, his poor business sense and bad planning were probably considered a much worse moral failure than the carousing the older brother imagined. And no worse a fate could be imagined for a good Jewish boy than feeding pigs for a gentile master. Can’t you see the chances for great lectures here?

And don’t forget the point about doing the right thing for the wrong reason. After all, the son came home because of one thing: he was hungry. All that fancy, dramatic stuff about having sinned against heaven and against his father, being no longer worthy, (sigh) and so on is a made-up, carefully rehearsed, job application. He is much less interested in repentance than in arranging for three square meals a day. First things first. So here the kid is, having violated just about every rule in the book, and regretting the consequences, (but probably not the motivation), of his decisions. The “morals of this story” are sitting there like over-ripe blueberries; fat and ready for the picking.

And exactly the same thing is true in the scene with the father and his older son out behind the barn. This time it is the older brother who treats his father with disrespect by refusing to use the proper forms of address. (That rude “listen”.) He also disinherits his brother (“that son of yours”) and generally acts like the east end of a west bound horse. In fact, the older son proves himself to be what Mark Twain called “a good man in the worst sense of the word”. He is stiff, stuffy, self righteous, dull, and mean. He has a dirty mind, a bad temper, a tendency to whine (“you never did that for me”) and he probably beats his dog.

What more, in the way of material for a good moral or twenty, could any story possibly offer? You can even do the neat trick of lecturing about which of the two brothers is really the worst, and have dueling lectures.

Jesus’ original listeners knew this. They knew all of the morals of this story. Just like us, they’d heard them all their lives—and they expected to hear them one more time after Jesus got through with the story. ||Probably most of them got the joke, too.

Do you see the joke? Jesus’ joke is that there is no moral to this story. The joke is that all of that preparation, all of those great lecture themes, are all for nothing. What the younger brother did simply does not matter. It is as if it never were. The father never deals with it, the father never calls the kid a jerk, the father never mentions what happened. He just invites his child, whom he loves totally, to a great party. Everything the boy did, all of that junk, all of that great material for wonderful lectures, all of that simply doesn’t matter.

And as for the stiff, prideful, self-righteous older brother; well none of that matters, either. The father never dumps on him, never corrects him, never condemns him.

The father does for the older brother exactly what he does for the younger: he invites his child, whom he loves totally, to a great party. Everything that boy did, all of that junk, all of that great material for wonderful lectures, all of that simply doesn’t matter.

The joke is that everything that seems so important, everything that seems so vital, everything that seems so religiously significant in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, all of that is unimportant, all of that is ignored. All of that, as Paul says, is refuse.

Listen, and hear: what Jesus is saying is that all that matters is the father’s love, and the invitation he offers. All that matters is a love so vast, so powerful, so honest and so real, that it can look at the very worst betrayals, the most painful rejections, the most destructive sin, the ugliest pride and the smallest, meanest spirit, and recognize all of that clearly, and still see, really, only the face of the beloved—only the face of the child he loves totally.

All that matters is the father’s love. All that was really important about those two boys was that their father loved them. They both thought there was much more at issue, but there really wasn’t.
That is Jesus’ punch line: God seems a bit of a fool.

God behaves in a way unbecoming the Lord of the Universe, and uncharacteristic of one whose justice is so well known. And Jesus is saying “bet you didn’t know that”, and Jesus is hoping that we see all of that as being as delightful and as hilarious as he does.

All that matters is the father’s love, and the invitation he offers.

Note that it is an invitation. The father could have dragged the younger son home from his journey kicking and screaming, but he didn’t.

The father could have commanded that the older son join the party. But he didn’t. There is no power here as the world knows power; no force, no coercion. There is only an invitation. Of course we don’t know whether the older son actually went inside where there was rejoicing. We don’t even know for sure that the younger one did. That doesn’t matter very much, either—except to them. It’s not an important part of the story.

All that matters, really, is the father’s love, and the invitation he offers.

So, if you have believed that some of the other stuff in the parable of the Prodigal Son, some of the “this is the moral of the story”, stuff, was really what is most important, then look again. And if you have ever wondered what God really thinks about you, then look carefully at this story. If you have felt like the older brother, or the prodigal son, or the best (or worst) of both, that’s O.K., but that really doesn’t matter very much.

All that matters is the father’s love, and the invitation he offers. Because God does now what the father did then. God invites his child, (that’s you) God invites his child, whom he loves totally, to a great party.

Easter Day, April 15, 2001

Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

The Lord is Risen Indeed, Alleluia!

This year, I moved into Easter through those three lessons we just heard. It’s a good way to get there. Those readings talk about the three things Easter is about, and we need to hear them all, all three, if we are going to grasp even the beginnings of a complete vision of this great festival. Let’s look at the lessons, starting with the Gospel, and with Mary.

All four Gospels say it was Mary Magdalene who saw it all, who was at the cross and saw Jesus die, who watched his body carried to the tomb and who came back to that same tomb and saw it empty. Mary saw it all, and what Mary saw makes very clear the first thing Easter is about. Easter is about Jesus. It is about a particular man who really lived and who really died, and who lived and died in a very particular way. Easter isn’t about Spring (by the way, do you realize that for just about a majority of the world’s Christians, Easter comes in the Fall—they are south of the Equator), it isn’t about seeds coming to life or bunnies or eggs or the immortality of the soul or any such. It’s about Jesus of Nazareth who Mary saw die and whose dead body she watched and touched (and, believe me, folks back there knew dead, they knew it real well; it is kinda hard to miss), and that same person who was alive again—not by nature, but by the supreme action of God the Father.

That’s what Easter is about first and foremost—and we have to begin where Mary began, with the acute and overwhelming particular-ness of the resurrection. God didn’t raise just anybody; God hasn’t raised anybody since. In raising Jesus, the Father is vindicating just exactly that specific way of living, and of dying, that was Jesus. There is nothing general or all-inclusive in the event of the resurrection (although there is in its consequences). It is about Jesus. That’s what the witness of Mary insists. That is the first thing about Easter that our lessons proclaim. Easter is, above all else, about this man, and no other. It is about Jesus.

That’s the first thing, the part Mary tells us. But if we stop there, all we have is history, and that’s not enough, it’s not even enough to matter much at all. So we have that wonderful section from Paul’s letter to the Colossians, where he tells us the second thing Easter is about. Paul is talking about Easter, and about Baptism, (which is really the same thing as talking about Easter) and he tells the baptized in Colossi that they have died, and they have been raised with Christ. There is an absolute reality here—through their baptism, the essence of what happened to Jesus has happened to them. (That’s why we try to have baptisms on Easter, to help us remember this).

But today Paul isn’t talking to the people in Colossi, today Paul is talking to you. He is saying the second thing that Easter is about, the second part toward a complete vision. He is saying that Easter is about you. The past cannot contain it—and that particular life and death and resurrection that happened to one man, this is also ours, not by nature or by merit, but as a pure and gracious gift of God. We have died, we are raised with Christ. That’s who we are.

But this reality can just sit there, waiting—being true, but not making any difference. So, Paul gives us some Easter orders, “seek the things that are above”. Set you mind on those things. Now, this is not about becoming some silly, scatterbrained, head in the clouds, super-pious sort of cartoon character. It is about paying real and serious attention to the spiritual realities of your world, and of your life. It is about reaching for, and embracing the reality of God’s love, and of God’s gift to you of the same new life he gave to Jesus. To set your mind on, to seek, the things that are above means to reach for the resurrection, not as an historical claim about somebody else, but as that reality which defines you, which says who you are first, before you are all the other things you also are. It is about taking it personally, and making it personal. “Seek the things that are above”, Paul demands, “set your minds there”, notice, and grab on to it as if it matters the most—because it does.

That’s the second thing Easter is about, it is about you.

But that is not enough, and if we stop there we still haven’t gone near far enough, and our vision remains incomplete. So we hear the first reading, the one from Acts, which is part of a sermon by Peter. Now, Peter was a witness to the Resurrection, he knew that Easter was about Jesus, and, finally and after considerable pushing, he also discovered that it was about him, too. But for a while Peter was pretty much willing to stop there. The resurrection might be about Jesus and Peter, and it might even be about people who were like Jesus and Peter, but that was a far as it went.

Until now; until the time of this reading. Right before this, Peter has learned—again the hard way, (which was just about the only way Peter ever learned anything)—Peter has learned that the Gentiles, the despised others, the ones outside the covenant and outside the promise and outside the limits of real human decency and discourse, these unclean gentiles are as much the objects of God’s love and concern as were Peter and the people that were like Peter and that Peter liked. So Peter, the faithful, observant, Jew who had never let anything unclean come close to him, is preaching to the gentiles, and telling them that the message sent to Israel was also the message for them, and that Jesus was for them just as much as Jesus was for anybody.

So Peter shows the third thing that Easter is about, if we are going to have a complete vision. First, Easter is about Jesus. Second, Easter is about you. Third, and just as centrally, Easter is about them. Easter is about the others, the ones on the outside, the ones who do not belong. Not just people who haven’t heard about it; but more especially the ones we would never consider telling—because they wouldn’t understand, or they wouldn’t fit in, or they just don’t belong. Easter is for them, also. And if we leave Easter with Jesus and do not make it our own, or if we make it our own and then keep it to ourselves, if we do any of those things then we have been unfaithful to this most glorious of feasts, and we have embraced an defective vision.

It’s all there in those three readings we heard—just remember Peter, Paul, and Mary, and the pieces will be there. Easter is about Jesus, it is about you, and it is about them. In other words, Easter is about history, it is about faith, and it is about mission, all of those are needed, all of those, together, begin to give us the whole picture.

Alleluia, Christ is Risen!

The Lord is Risen Indeed, Alleluia!

The Lessons for today: Acts 10.34-43, Psalm 118.14-29; Colossians 3.1-4; Luke 24.1-10