Author: John Langenstein

The Household of God – 01/23/22

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Acts 2: 43-47

Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

Sermon Text

This week and next week we resolve to do something that is essential, but extremely difficult. That is, we are going to talk about what the Church could be and how we can help to take that potential and make it a reality. In the modern parlance of organizational planning and leadership this first step that we are taking this week is called “Casting Vision,” and it is integral to any initiative that wants to exist beyond the immediate present into the future. When we fail to project what we would like to be, we sometimes fail to meet even our present expectations for ourself, and so we must keep the banner high in front of us of what we could become.

In my mind, few images of the Church are more powerful than the one given in the scripture we read a moment ago. The apostles, full of the Holy Spirit, are at work among the people – healing, preaching, and bringing people out of all manner of oppression. The people gather together and meet one another’s needs, selling their possessions in order to make sure no one goes hungry within their community. The people go beyond providing food and shelter for one another, they meet together in the Temple, in their private homes, they sit at the table and talk and pray and learn. They add more people to the community of the faith with every passing day, they make the Kingdom of God visible to anyone who is willing to look for it.

The Church can see its duty on the earth in those general categories which are expressed in this scripture. We are people who speak to and demonstrate God’s glory. We do this in testimony, we do this in prayer ministries, and we do this through attending to the sacraments. We are people who care for one another – we do this through feeding ministries, through clothing those in need, through caring for the material needs of anyone and everyone who we meet. We are people who meet together and who share our lives. We are people who grow the community of the faith beyond those presently with us to include all we possibly can.

There was a movement in the United Methodist Church to define these ministries in the general terms of Nurture, Outreach, and Witness. N.O.W. While we often joke about the many committees which we as Methodists form, there is some sense to appointing people who spend all their time envisioning and reviewing how we meet expectations, or fail to meet expectations, in these fields. We need to reflect on our conduct frequently, not just as individuals, but as a corporate body. The individual Christian must work toward perfection and alongside them the community of the faithful must strive to be more perfect together. We can only truly flourish as a congregation when we work with one accord, so that even when we fuss and fight, we do so in service of the same goal – the glory and mission of Jesus Christ.

Even beyond individual congregations, the wider Church is beholden to coming together to achieve its vision for the world. Just this past year we have seen ourselves reaching out to the Methodist Parish, one of our members serves as the president of that group. I am a member of the Homeless Collaborative. Our congregation is connected to many others through formal and informal means. Saint James, Emmanuel Baptist, Duff Street and Stealey, St Mark’s, and all others who gather under the banner of Christ’s salvific work are all part of the same body we are. We gather in this building, we cast a vision for what God is calling us to do. We then gather with the wider bodies of the Church, in the UMC or otherwise, to see how God is calling us all to come together in service to the Gospel.

In our own Wesleyan circles we call this, “Connectionalism,” but I prefer to think of it in Biblical terms. We are all of us striving for κοινωνια (Koinonia,) or “Communion.” It means a gathering of people on one level and it also means to share on another. Specifically, it is often used in the context of the Church to describe the complete unity of God’s people. The people of God held all things in common, giving to each according to their need, they lived as one body with many members.

The unity of the Church is a precious thing, and it has been at risk since those first 120 disciples gathered in the upper room of a house in Jerusalem. There have always been those who want to put themselves first or those who get tangled up with one idea over and above the general call which is on us all. For many reasons, legitimate and illegitimate, the Church can find itself faced with fracture and schism. However, one of the best ways to maintain a sense of community to be frank in our conversation with one another, and to be constantly taking stock of where we are and where we are going. Transparency and clarity allow us to keep moving without misunderstandings causing unnecessary friction.

When I came here in July of last year, I saw immediately that this was a Church that was determined to do work. The ministries that already existed were vibrant and there was a steady undercurrent from those I spoke to that desired to keep expanding the work we were doing in new directions. There were and are substantial obstacles, there is much to build back up and much to build from the ground, but there is a desire to do, and where there is such a desire the Spirit can and will lead us to the actions we have to undertake to see them done. This Church is alive and well, and while I have heard stories of a golden age in the past that outshone our present reality, I personally see much more potential in what is to come than in what was.

You see, the general pattern of the Church right now is in contraction. Congregations are shrinking as people move to larger cities and as older generations go on to glory. There are less young people staying in the Church and fewer still being raised in the Church. The Church as the default social structure a person is part of is a thing of the past. The Church therefore must seek to chase after that essential spark it had in its earliest days – when it was an innovative and welcoming place, born out of nothing but the Spirit working among people who wanted to see God’s will done in the world.

We are at an advantage too. We have the entire history of the Church behind us to learn from even as we pave the way into the future. We can see the dangers that came from getting too buddy buddy with power. We can see the way that schism begets schism, one denomination splintering again and again until it is a small sliver of people with overly-specific doctrine and prohibitively stringent membership criterion. We have seen the rise and fall of ministries and movements and stand with that entire heritage at our disposal. We have all the past to learn from and all of eternity to look forward to when we plan out the ministries of the Church.

I want to share with you now what I see this Church doing in the next few years. I see us becoming more connected to one another, more intentional about the way we relate information and conduct business. We will have committee meetings at minimum once a quarter. Those committees will draft minutes and reports which will be published for the larger church to see the ways that the ministries of this church are being conducted. We will join closer to our neighboring churches and their ministries. Regardless of denomination or locality, we will see each other as siblings and co-laborers seeking the same good – the salvation in physical and spiritual terms of all people in Clarksburg.

We as a congregation will expand the ways we care for one another. We will be more intentional in offering times to gather to pray and study scripture. We will celebrate the highs of our lives and mourn the lows. We will welcome children into our pews and we will find ways to engage people of all ages in meaningful ways. We will become a community that attests to the glory of God, that serves the needs of all who pass through our doors, and that makes people feel like they have found a true family in the people of this congregation. We will become a community, a Koinonia, led by the Spirit wherever we need to go.

Now, none of what I have said is going to be simple. We are going to have to take my pastoral vision and see how it builds off of existing vision here in the congregation. The reality of our Methodist system is that I could disappear at any time, moved to another congregation as the Spirit guides the cabinet to decide. The initiatives and the vision of this Church cannot just be the things that I see or want, it must begin and end with the vision of you all gathered here. You will be in these pews long after I am gone, and you will carry on the work of the Spirit for generations to come here in North View.

We are going to be spending the next few months digging in deep, we will be devoting ourselves to really understanding what our community needs and how we have been called to meet those needs. With the full support of one another, our Parish, our Conference, and all the body of Christ, we will go on to achieve God’s will here in Clarksburg, in West Virginia, wherever we are able to reach out and act. I hope that you all will be willing to embark on this journey, because it is not always going to be simple or easy. Sometimes we’ll probably quite honestly get well and truly upset with one another if we do it right. Still, it will be worth it to take the trip forward.

Next week, we are going to go beyond vision to talk the hard and fast numbers behind our operations. That is right, we’re going to be talking about money and the ways its spent. I know that that is always a favorite in churches, but we gotta talk about it at some point. We’ll be honest and direct as we delve into the nuts and bolts. Till then, join me in letting God write the dreams of this congregation, and trust that God will give us the means to get there. – Amen.

A Worthy Sacrifice – 01/16/2022

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Amos 5: 18-24

Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord! Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, not light; as if someone fled from a lion, and was met by a bear; or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall, and was bitten by a snake. Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light, and gloom with no brightness in it?

I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies. Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them, and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals I will not look upon. Take away from me the noise of your songs; I will not listen to the melody of your harps. But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Sermon Text

Tomorrow we mark, on our secular calendars, the work of a man who was committed to justice for all people. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a minister like his father before him. His father had changed his own name, and that of his son from Michael to Martin Luther in honor of the reformer who, to him, reflected resistance to the evils of the world no matter the cost. The Kings were both ministers, tending to their flocks, but they also cast their eye beyond the needs of the local church to the needs of the culture in which their flock lived. It was not enough to offer pastoral care to people grieving under the weight of oppression, it was necessary to work to remove that oppression from their life. King was a diligent participant in the Civil Rights Movement, an advocate for the abolition of people of color from the tyranny of the Jim Crow South, and from any and all discrimination.

Growing up, we learned about Rev. Dr. King in school. Some of you here might remember the news covering his marches and speeches as they happened. Yet, most people who cover his work do so as though he was merely a secular thinker, an offshoot of the enlightenment that was bringing social change through political action. But Rev. King was not just that, his political advocacy was a ministry in itself. His fight for the rights of all people was rooted in his Biblical convictions about human dignity, and his overwhelming desire was to see God’s glory reflected in the conduct that one person showed another, regardless of appearance, circumstances of birth, or country of origin.

            This mission worked against centuries of human conflict, but especially in the United States. It would be hard to deny that there has always been a tendency for people to fight amongst themselves and against those they write off as members of out-groups. The first thing humanity did outside of the Garden was to kill – Cain slaying Abel out of jealousy.

            Despite what we may think, our modern conflicts are different from the forms of conflict which were experienced in antiquity. While it would not be fair to say there were never ideological conflicts in the ancient world, far more battles were fought of resources than they were for ideas. As empires developed more distinct cultures and exclusionary ideas of in and out groups, conflicts rooted in issues outside of the need to survive became more common. I admit this simplifies human history a great deal, but I am willing to make this sort of statement generally if not specifically.

            The key moment that shaped our modern world in terms of how we formulate ideas like “race” and “ethnicity,” those key places where we choose to favor or discriminate against others, or worse yet to plot violence, was the expansion of European powers into the Americas and into the African Continent. The discovery of the “New World,” led to the enslavement of local populations by Spanish colonizers. Christopher Columbus, governor of Barbados was so cruel in his governing of the colony that a monk reported him to the Spanish Throne and he was repatriated to Spain to stand trial for “tyranny.”[1]

            At the same time, German activity in Africa and on the European continent began to form the first concepts of “race,” as an essential quality of a person. While there had always been general categories of people, usually based on ethnic and cultural groups, the Dutch were the first to make a science of racism.[2] They began to rank the races, the Nordic peoples were the top of the great chain of creation, and as skin got darker and culture became less Germanic, the dignity of people eroded along with it. The Dutch influence would spread to other imperial powers and before too long, a concept of racial superiority undergirded much of European activity in the world.

            Again, I am simplifying the story a little bit, drawing from writers and historians who are infinitely better versed in the subject than I am. However, when we look at the current conflicts in the United States, indeed in any former colonial power, we have to understand that there was a very particular mishmash of philosophic ideas that led to where we are. Slavery existed throughout human history, but chattel slavery and the triangle trade were the first to enslave people exclusively by the criteria of race and to regard the enslaved as having no rights except which were given to them by their “owners.” The abolition of enslaved people in the United States after the Civil War did not cease the problems we had inherited from this mindset, shifting the problem over to segregation, Jim Crow laws, and civilian violence against people of color –  more properly described as lynchings.

            The Church, sadly, through all of this was a supporter of the popular perspective that the enslaved, and more generally people of color, were lesser than white free persons. John Wesley was an outspoken critic of this perspective in the Church, arguing that all people – regardless of race or nation – had equal dignity under God and demanded the end of slavery wherever it was practiced. American Methodists, after the Revolutionary War, buckled to the demands of influential slaveholders, allowing the practice among its members. It was only after a Bishop refused to manumit his slaves that the American Methodist Episcopal Church stood up in any capacity for the enslaved as an institution. The Methodist Episcopal Church split, the North rejecting slavery in all forms, the South insisting it was a right. This happened only a few years before a war would be waged over the same principles.

            The Northern Methodists were not much better than the Southern ones. They joined in with the opinions of people like then President Abraham Lincoln, arguing that people of color could never live among whites as equals. They were some of the staunchest advocates for Liberia, seeking to remove people of color from their midst rather than seeking true peace. It is because of this failure to see all people as equal that prominent figures like Frederick Douglass left the Methodist Church, and that Bishop Richard Allen separated from the Church to form his own denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

            Even after the Northern and Southern Methodist communions came together again in the 1920s they did so as a segregated body. Black Methodists were part of their own conference, the “Central Conference,” distinct yet connected to the wider Methodist General Conference. This term, it should be said, is still used for any Methodist Conference outside the United States. It was only in the merger of 1968, when the Evangelical United Brethren joined the Methodist Church, that the Church formerly integrated – and only then because the wider culture was now accepting of the idea. The Church, the champion of God’s justice, has often failed to uphold its high calling.

            I could talk about a dozen more denomination who faced similar troubles. I could also point to the persistent drum beat underneath the “civilized” veneer which the Church had put on in its tolerance and support of oppression. The constant beat of the drum of justice. There were always the abolitionists, always those fighting for integration in every aspect of life, always those rejecting any definition of a people that denied them being made in the image of God. These people were the ones who defied the Spirit of the Time, who prove that those who lived before us were not above reproach, that showed that morality is more timeless than we might think.

            It is in that tradition of justice workers that our opening subject comes into view. Rev. King was one of those people who fought for Justice no matter the cost. He was imprisoned multiple times, he was written off as a rabble rouser, accused of starting riots, and would ultimately go on to be murdered for the work he did. In fact, it is one of the letters he wrote from jail which makes the above deluge of history necessary. In King’s Letters from a Birmingham Jail, he lays out the framework he uses to plan his political actions. More than that though, he names the most dangerous force working against his ministry. It is not in the racist mobs, not in the Klu Klux Klan, but in the white moderate Christian, that King sees the most danger for America.

            As I mentioned a moment ago, King was often accused of causing unnecessary trouble. His methods disrupted public transportation, they prevented people from going about daily life, they forced people to see and hear the cries of those in need around them. These disruptions are at the root of protest – a protest that does not inconvenience people has no teeth, it does nothing other than make the people protesting feel good about themselves without actually causing any changes in the world around them. Yet, people insisted King was wrong to disrupt, wrong to rock the boat, wrong to speak up because everything would get better if they only waited.

            Yet, as King pointed out, there was never a time that people of color would get their fair share unless they made a fuss. To quotes him directly, and I use his exact words so excuse the antiquated language:

“We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct-action movement that was “well timed” according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “wait.” It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This “wait” has almost always meant “never.”[3]

            The United States is a place of untold potential, it is a place of abundance, and it is a place that we are all here proud to be a part of. Yet, we cannot deny the legacy which we all carry with us. While we are not responsible for the sins of our ancestors or for the sins that led to the unfair systems that live on into today, we are responsible to do are part to help break every chain that keeps people from living a full life. There is still prevalent racism in this country. There are still people discriminated against, bullied, and killed because of the color of their skin. Until such a day where we erase any image of humanity that denies the image of God from our hearts and minds, we will always find ourselves guilty – not of the sins of our fathers, but of our own inaction.

            Our scripture today is one of my favorites because it opens with a powerful warning to God’s people. “Woe to you who seek the Day of the Lord!” The day that God is coming to set everything right, the day when all wickedness is cast down and the righteous uplifted. “Woe to you!” Because we are unrepentant in our wanderings away from God, unrepentant in our support of injustice, unrepentant in our stopping up our ears to our neighbors. “Woe to you!” because we cannot see that God does not want prim and proper people respecting the status quo, but a community that is willing to stand up for the least of these, even when they look nothing like us.

            The sacrifice we offer to God, in faith and in prayer and in ministry, is a sacrifice of our own feelings of superiority and apathy. Superiority that makes us doubt the intentions of anyone outside ourselves, and apathy that makes us unwilling to help anyone who is not directly tied to our own interests. God forgive us of our inaction and God free us from the brokenness which has plagued this nation from its inception. Let every person be as a sibling to us, let every barrier we erect between one another be cast down, and let love be the banner we are willing to fight for the rights of all people under. Let us see justice roll like water, and righteous flow like a stream. – Amen.

[1] Giles Tremlett. “Lost Document Reveals Columbus as Tyrant of the Caribbean.” In Madrid. Reprinted in The Guardian.7 Aug. 2005.  Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/aug/07/books.spain

[2] Again, this is a simplification of a very complex dynamic, but more information on this can be found in.
Josiah Young. Dogged Resistance in the Veil. (Norcross, Georgia: Trinity Press International. 2003)

[3] Martin Luther King, Jr. Letter from Birmingham Jail. August 1963. Available at: https://www.csuchico.edu/iege/_assets/documents/susi-letter-from-birmingham-jail.pdf

Adoration – Epiphany 2022

/ John Langenstein / 1 Comment

Matthew 2:1-12

In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.” When King Herod heard this, he was frightened, and all Jerusalem with him; and calling together all the chief priests and scribes of the people, he inquired of them where the Messiah was to be born. They told him, “In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it has been written by the prophet:

‘And you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah, are by no means least among the rulers of Judah; for from you shall come a ruler who is to shepherd my people Israel.’”

Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” When they had heard the king, they set out; and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen at its rising, until it stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw that the star had stopped, they were overwhelmed with joy. On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, they left for their own country by another road.

Sermon Text

Epiphany is one of my favorite holidays of the Church. We celebrate the moment when people outside of the immediate path of Jesus’s entry into the world come to acknowledge the incarnation of God on earth. The magi make their long journey from the East and come into Judea. The brief portrait we are given of that journey is that they followed a star, came to the Herodian palace, and from there found their way to Bethlehem. It was in Bethlehem that they found the Christ. This was not immediately after Jesus was born, as we often depict it, but probably a few years later. Jesus was not an infant, but a toddler, perhaps even walking, by the time these strange wanderers arrived.

The title given to these visitors is “Magi,” or singularly, each one was a “Magus.” This term is where we derive our modern word “Magician.” While this term could indicate any number of people, from court wizards to street entertainers, it is generally understood that these Magi were likely tied to Persia and its mystical traditions. This would not be idle sorcery but was an official position similar to that of a priest. These would be doctors and astronomers, soothsayers, and miracle workers. The people, far removed from Judea and its ancient Israelite religion, were among the first to discern that a savior was coming into the world.

The fact that these travelers were not Jewish revealed a truth about Jesus that even his followers would not understand until some time after Jesus’s resurrection. This truth was that God was not coming to save one people alone but was beginning work that would eventually bring the entire world into the Kingdom of Heaven. The first to proclaim the gospel were a few shepherds in Bethlehem, but the first Gentiles to be welcomed in were these travelers from far outside the Judea’s boundaries. We never get the full story of their life, what this visit ultimately meant to them, but it cannot be denied that they left an impression that we celebrate to this day.

The exact number of people who came to give Jesus gifts is not given in the Gospel. Not only do we not know the number of Magi present, but we do not know who they brought with them. A group of officials like this would probably have a full entourage trailing behind them. Retainers, servants, armed guards, you name it, they would have brought it. This huge group would have snaked their way across the ancient highways of the world, leaving Persia and coming into the Levant. When they arrived in Jerusalem it would have been the talk of the town for weeks. “Remember when those dignitaries came through! They were following some star apparently! Who’d have thought?!”

Their arrival was not announced ahead of actually entering the city, and so it did not take long for the King to hear what was going on in the city. Herod the Great, the ruling monarch, had stayed on the throne through a delicate dance of placating Roman power and appealing to his Jewish subjects. He himself was Idumean, or to put in Old Testament terms, he was an Edomite. This group had a consistent rivalry with Judea before the Babylonian Exile, and so many would have been suspicious of him when he took to the throne. He tried to secure some favor with the people by rebuilding the Temple, but to fund it he pillaged the tombs of King David and Solomon. He was a ruthless man, and he had several family members killed to maintain his power.

So, when these foreign dignitaries arrive telling him that a new King has been born in Judea, Herod would instantly see this as a threat. A foreign power was acknowledging someone other than himself as the legitimate power in his Kingdom. Herod spoke sweetly to the visiting Magi, but he was already plotting murder the moment he heard a threat was brewing just a little south of his capital city. He sent them off with a few kind words and the promise that, if they found the child, he would follow behind and worship him also.

It is this visceral political drama that sets the stage for the Magi to give their gifts to Jesus. This small child receives gold and frankincense and myrrh. While these are sometimes written off as symbolic gestures – Gold for a king, incense for a God, and myrrh for a burial – it is more likely that these were purely practical gifts. Gold allowed the family to survive the uncertain times ahead, the incense would be used in the home and for worship, and myrrh could be used both religiously and medicinally for any number of purposes. The three gifts given were not meant to be symbolic portents of Jesus’s future, but a present provision for his life in the moment.

When the Magi left, they were warned not to go back to Herod. It would not have taken the King long to realize that they had caught wise to his plans. Not long after the Magi are warned, Joseph and Mary would also be warned of Herod’s plans. The family would suddenly become refugees, fleeing into Egypt like Abraham and countless others before them. Herod would follow behind, killing many innocents in the name of his own claims to power. A hollow action for a seventy-year-old man who would die only a year or so later.

The epiphany captures such highs and lows of humanity. The pure expression of adoration from the Magi is contrasted by the darkness of Herod’s murderous rage. When we look at these three statues over here, we should see the weight they carry. They are the first to acknowledge the divinity of Christ outside Judea, but they unwittingly bring death to Bethlehem in their visitation. The Kingdom of God is breaking out in the most unexpected places, and the powers that be are unhappy to see that they are not included in that estimation. God is shaking things up and whenever there is a shake up, those with everything to lose are usually the first ones to start fussing over what comes next.

In our own lives we are constantly given the choice between responding to Jesus like the Magi or like Herod. If we act like Magi, then we see Jesus appearing among the unlikely people of the world and rejoice. We seek out God in the places we do not expect to find God – the poor, the oppressed, those with no money or power in the world. Jesus is not hiding in the halls of congress or the throne rooms of Kings, Jesus is in the presence of all the poor and powerless of the earth.

We could also respond to Jesus like Herod did, seeing Jesus as a threat. To do this is to define the Kingdom of God in our own terms. Jesus is found among those who act the way we would like them to. Those with money and power and influence that we can benefit from are welcomed in, while the poor are left out in the cold. We define neighbor as those, not who share the world with us, but who offer opportunity to us. The Kingdom of God, as we imagine it in this vision of the world, would be a continuation of the World we currently live in. The rich get richer, the poor keep pulling on bootstraps that just get longer and longer, and no justice ever manifests but the cold indifference of a fallen world.

The Magi teach us what it is to adore Jesus. To come before the throne and truly offer up all that we are to a power beyond ourselves. These men who had everything in the world were willing to make an expensive journey, to cover hundreds of miles with hundreds of people, all so that they could worship the God they had known was being born into the world. As difficult as it was to make the journey, the duty they held toward God was enough to keep them pushing forward. The gifts they gave were what saw Jesus and his family through their time in Egypt, they were a provision for the needy family as they fled over borders to avoid the dangerous of their homeland.

The Kingdom of God is still bursting into life all around us. For all of us here there are opportunities for us to join in the adoration of Christ or to join in the glorification and continuation of our own sinful ways. Do we want the world in its present broken form, or in the form that Jesus promises to us? I for one put my money on the King of Kings leading better than any leader that comes or goes in this world. Herod fought long and hard to take the throne, selling out his people to an oppressive empire whenever he could to stay there. Jesus gave up everything to live among his people, and even when they repaid his love with murder, he did not cease in advocating for them, rising up to prove even death could be overcome.

Epiphany is the day that the powerful laid down all they had to glorify the lowly child that had come to save them. Once a year, as Christmas fades away and we count the days till Lent, we take a moment to realize the stakes that were laid out for us at Christmas. This was not just a day to celebrate a birth or to welcome in Winter, Christmas is a season to count the cost of our salvation. The cost to the people of Bethlehem, to the Magi, to the Holy Couple, and most of all to God in Christ. We are saved for a terrible price, and that price needs to be lifted up and remembered.

Today, we adore the author of our salvation. Today we count up all that was given to see us freed from our sin. We all see in the revelation of God on earth something profound, and we see in this appearance of perfect holiness on earth the beginning of something we cannot even understand. The world of God, perfect and new, breaking out in the furthest corner of our world. God is bringing Heaven to Earth, let us come and worship the one who brings us into this new existence. – Amen.

All the Ordinances of God – 01/02/2022

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Deuteronomy 31:9 –13

Then Moses wrote down this law, and gave it to the priests, the sons of Levi, who carried the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and to all the elders of Israel. Moses commanded them: “Every seventh year, in the scheduled year of remission, during the festival of booths, when all Israel comes to appear before the Lord your God at the place that he will choose, you shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Assemble the people—men, women, and children, as well as the aliens residing in your towns—so that they may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God and to observe diligently all the words of this law, and so that their children, who have not known it, may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God, as long as you live in the land that you are crossing over the Jordan to possess.”

Sermon Text

 Today our service centers mainly around prayer. We commit ourselves on this first Sunday of the year to remember what it means to be a Christian. While it is our faith alone that saves us, we accept a great deal of responsibility in accepting the divine calling we have been offered. Regularly it helps for us to take time to intentionally remember all that God has set before us. Like the Israelites at Sinai, like those who celebrate Sukkot into today, we must recount the covenant we are part of and re-affirm our desire to be part of God’s kingdom.

Normally I would take ten or fifteen minutes for us to review our scripture and engage with it on a deeper level. Today, I want our covenant prayer to speak for itself. Written by John Wesley long ago, this service has been performed since then by many in the Wesleyan tradition. It is not scripture, and so is not essential to salvation. Yet, it is dripping with the truth of the Gospel, and our recitation today will cover a great deal of what God has done to set us on our path of righteousness.

If you have ever been a part of a service like this, rejoice in being able to once again recall all that God has done for us. If you have not been a part of this sort of service before, listen carefully and weigh carefully the burden of the faith which we all take on every day. Though far lighter than the burden of sin and death, it is not something to be taken lightly, and we should not commit today to something we will be unwilling to do tomorrow. Today, we reconfirm our love of God through the rejoining of our Covenant with God. Let us approach in joy and solemnity the altar of God which welcomes us all home. – Amen.

The Covenant Service Can be Found Here:
https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/book-of-worship/covenant-renewal-service

God With Us – 12/26/2021

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

John 1: 1-18

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world.

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (John testified to him and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’”) From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

Sermon Text

            If you were told today that tomorrow there would be no Bibles left in the world, what scripture would you want to memorize? Is it John 3:16, short and sweet but clear in what it tells us about Christ? Or perhaps Matthew 25, less salvific, but more definite in explaining what is expected of us as Christians. There are plenty of good Psalms, maybe even the ten commandments, but how can we ever choose what we would want to save if all of scripture were to disappear tomorrow?

That question is probably more daunting than any of us are prepared to face. However, if we think of it from the opposite direction, we can see what life was like in the early Church. Jesus was born between six and four BCE, his ministry spanned from somewhere between twenty-seven and thirty-three CE. The letters of Paul were written not long after this, but the earliest Gospel would not be written until the year sixty-five or seventy – thirty years after Jesus’s death and resurrection. While some pre-Gospel texts probably existed, the bulk of correspondence among Christians would be word of mouth, small snippets memorized and recited or sung together.

The opening of John is one of these early fragments that was likely passed among the early Church. The community which gives us John, the Johannine epistles, and Revelation is markedly different from the other New Testament communities. They were mystical Christians, focusing as much on God’s mission on this earth as they did God’s divinity in Heaven. It is this community that gives us the first concrete understandings of the Trinity which is only hinted at in other Gospels and Epistles. Likewise, John is the one to wrestle with Christ’s dual nature – human and God all at once. This deeply reflective tradition is reflected in this hymn which we read a moment ago.

The opening question I gave you, which scripture you would choose to memorize if you had no Bible, is important to consider when you see something like today’s scripture. As long as this passage may seem to us to read all at once, it would not take much to memorize. From learning it, a person would be able to quickly state some of the essential points of the Christian faith. The eternal Word of God, who is God, came to be with humanity, taking on flesh and bringing light into the dark world. Though this arrival was heralded by a prophet, this God was rejected by the people he had created, cast away. Yet, those who did accept this God were given a new life, one that made them part of the household of God.

That’s not bad for a page or so of memorization. You may not be able to write a systematic theology with it, but it will get the Gospel out and ultimately that is better than any ten-cent word we might chase after otherwise. John gives us, as an introduction to his Gospel, a summary statement of what we can expect to find within it. More than that, his audience probably knew the hymn even if they had not heard any other part of this gospel. By opening his telling of Jesus’s life in this way, those who heard it would be more familiar with what followed. Think of how much better engaged we all have been since the worship team has steered me away from unknown opening hymns – when we come into worship with something familiar, we are better prepared to see the details within.

The key focus of this passage is that God became human. Throughout all the Johannine writings there is a constant return to the reality of Jesus’s humanity. While we today tend to accept Jesus as fully God and fully human, that was not always the case. Some people denied Jesus’s divinity, saying that he was God’s best creation, but not God in himself. Others denied Jesus’s humanity, the most extreme among them, the Docetists, insisting Jesus was a Spiritual presence rather than a physical one. A Holy Ghost pretending to be a human.

John may have been primarily concerned with letting people know that God really had become human in the person of Jesus, but he was equally concerned in letting people know that Jesus was not a distinct being from God. The riddle that opens the Gospel is something which carries the weight of all our faith. In the beginning, before anything had been created, there was the Word. The Word was with God, standing face to face with God. And that Word was, somehow simultaneously distinct and united, also the same God. The Greek of this passage is one of the first things which is used to teach new Biblical Language students how to differentiate parts of Grammar, and it is a handy verse to memorize for parties. (Ἐν αρχη ἠν ὁ Λογος και ὁ Λογος ἠν προς τον Θεον και Θεος ἠν ὁ Λογος. “In arche ain ha Logos kai ha Logos ain pros ton Theon kai ha Theos ain ha Logos”)

 To identify the Word as being God would mean nothing without the further development of the chapter, namely that that word dwelled among us, taking on full humanity. This God was not someone who just stood on high and cast a judgmental eye of the fallen world, but was willing to be rejected if it meant giving us another chance. Even though the incarnate Word had made all things, nothing accepted their participation in the world. Even the disciples, close as they were to God’s presence on earth, ran away when the going got rough – all but a single, devoted follower.

In the close of this opening hymn, we are given the final bit of information we need to understand what this Gospel is all about. This incarnate Word had a name, had a personality, had a person that could be met and talked to – Jesus Christ, the only Son, who has made God known to the world. As abstract as John sometimes can be, and as philosophical as this opening passage may seem, it all ties into a single earthly reality – Jesus walked this earth and Jesus was the image of the invisible God made manifest in our lives.

For the early Church, recitation of this hymn allowed them to keep the essentials close at hand. It isn’t very different from humming your favorite hymn or sing it when you want to engage with the truth of God directly. The prayer which I most frequently pray, and which I have brought up a few times since coming here is another example of this kind of rehearsing God’s truth. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” As short a prayer as that is, it hits the same points that John 1 does. Jesus is the Christ, the Lord of all. Jesus is the son of God, divine from before creation. Jesus is a savior, and I am in need of salvation.

The simplicity of our salvation is that there is no need for long complex explanations. They can come in handy, and when we get down into the particulars of any given issue we are bound to have more and more to talk about. Yet, even for long winded people like myself, the more we stray from the essential claims of our faith the more we open ourselves up to blunder into something we do not intend. I love a complex theological conundrum, I love to wax poetic about incarnational theology, but at the end of all things my love of making things complicated cannot get in the way of the simple truths of God.

The opening of John is poetry, perhaps to help it be more easily remembered, perhaps to simply attest to the beauty of God’s entrance into human life. The metaphorical and artistic aspects of this story are often treated as obfuscating of some of the plain truths of Jesus’s presence on earth, but I think the opposite is true. Art is how we engage with the plainest parts of our life. If you think to any part of your life, one of the key things that you’re going to think of alongside anything that happened is the songs you listened to while it happened. The movies we love, the paintings that speak to us, we engage with the world around us through art. How fitting then that John’s summary of the Gospel is a song sung for thousands of years.

As we continue on in the Christmas season, twelve days which spans two Sundays this year, we remember the fullness of God which chose to dwelt among us. The simple truth of our faith, expressed in just about a page, is that we do not worship someone who is far off and away from us, but up close and personal. Jesus could have stayed up in Heaven, or maybe even have come to earth as a king living among nobility. Instead, Jesus chose a normal life, more than that a hard life among the poor and downtrodden. God became human, and God became a poor human at that.

We carry with us the simple truth of Jesus’s presence on the earth. We do not need long complicated formulations to understand what it means for God to have come to us, we only need to acknowledge that God made that trip down to us. Why would God do this? To bring us closer to the divine presence we long ago threw away. We were no one’s family, but now God has made us part of God’s own family. That transformation, that unity which we are all invited to, that is the essence of our faith. When we acknowledge that God is with us, that God is here to save us, then the rest finds its way bit by bit.

This does not mean we cannot be intellectual, or that we cannot study hard both the scriptures and the world around us. It simply means that we do not need to complicate the world as we do so. We are not saved by the mental tap dances we put together, but simply by faith in Christ. As we enter a New Year, let us commit ourselves to love and service, to study of scripture and prayer in the Spirit. Let us proclaim the Gospel, accepting that we are not only qualified for the job, but perfect for the job. The truth is simple, God is here to save us, let us all tell that story simply, well, and often. – Amen.

Christmas Eve 2021

/ John Langenstein / 1 Comment

Luke 2: 1-20

In those days a decree went out from Emperor Augustus that all the world should be registered. This was the first registration and was taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. All went to their own towns to be registered. Joseph also went from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, because he was descended from the house and family of David. He went to be registered with Mary, to whom he was engaged and who was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for her to deliver her child. And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn.

In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.

This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.” So they went with haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the child lying in the manger. When they saw this, they made known what had been told them about this child; and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds told them. But Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen, as it had been told them.

Sermon Text

The past four weeks we have been exploring, through our Sunday services, the various members of the Holy Family. The parents of John the Baptist, Zechariah and Elizabeth, and the Holy Couple themselves, Mary and Joseph. Today we gather on this cold winter evening to celebrate the final member of the Holy Family, the one that sanctifies all others mentioned and each of us gathered here today – our Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God. The great drama of human history has finally met its main protagonist. God, the creator of all things and the author of every story, now has come to dwell among us as a human being. Born in a stable, laid in a food trough, the eternal Word of God now knows what it is to be cold, to be hungry, to feel the prick of straw bedding.

Christmas is the day we all take a moment to remember that the story of our salvation began with mundane pieces. A government official wants to collect more taxes, and so he calls for a census to be taken in order to determine exactly what amount he might begin taking in. A couple, unmarried and yet expecting a child, make their way from the small village of Nazareth to the slightly more cosmopolitan Bethlehem, as near to a suburb of Jerusalem as the ancient world could muster. There a child is born; there a mother falls asleep with her husband and child nearby. There, somehow against all odds, the salvation of all humanity was set in stone.

As with everything surrounding Christmas, we don’t know much about the night Jesus was born. We celebrate it on December 25th, but there are many reasons behind that, few of which have to do with Jesus’s actual birthdate. Some people do the math to say he was born in March, some others insist December makes equal historical sense. Yet, the actual date doesn’t much matter. While this day is fixed in our calendars, plenty of other important ones are not. Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Vernal Equinox, and yet that day is still important to us as though it were the actual moment Jesus rose from the dead. In the same way, today is, to us, the day Jesus was born, because we celebrate it as such.

Today the walls between Heaven and Earth lose all meaning. God sits among us. The long separation between God and humanity is finally erased. God is a human being. The long wait for salvation is finally ended. God has come down to save us. Christmas is the celebration of love, manifested in the most fragile of forms. An infant, born into a world where not many children lived to even be named. A child named “Salvation,” a child named Jesus.

The story of those who brought Jesus into this world are simple stories. A couple who longed for a child finally having one. A couple due to be married when a surprise pregnancy threatens everything they thought they had known. A loving cousin who keeps the young girl safe, a gentle angel that assures that boy that he is doing the right thing in going on loving his fiancé and her unborn child. The set pieces, minus perhaps the angels involved, are not unlike something we might see right here in North View. God could have made a grand entry into the world, but God chose to make a much more gentle one.

A hundred million lessons are set out before us when we pick up this story. The importance of worship, the power of family, the significance of a mother’s love. Yet, if we have been paying attention to the past few weeks we have spent together, I hope we can see that the real lesson of Christmas is in the simplicity of it all. Normal people worked to bring salvation into the world, and that remains true for us today. It is not the work of politicians and kings and rich donors that brings about the Kingdom of God. It is the work of the everyday person, of the poor and the disgraced, the cast aside and the unhoused, the lowest of the low. God came down on Christmas and God, who was owed a chariot of gold, came down in rags.

Though in the distance, foreign magicians were making their way across Arabia to visit Jesus, the only witnesses that night were shepherds. Unwashed, uneducated, rough and tumble shepherds were the first to attest to the glory of God’s salvation. How strange it would have been to see them dancing in the streets singing the songs the angels had taught them. They pointed to a distant stable, perhaps attached to a house and perhaps set into a stone wall, and they insisted “God is in that manger, cradled next to his mother, and God is here to save us.” Lunatics, madmen, or perhaps the first people outside of Mary to bring the truth of Jesus into the world.

As brief as our time together tonight is, it is a reflection of that night long ago. Unassuming though that night was, unremarkable in any of its features except to those who knew what it brought. A light, furtive and small, bursting out in the darkness of a sin-sick world. A light, blazing truth through the lies that we had built up around ourselves. A light that flickered, and threatened to go out, but would not be snuffed out just yet. The light of Christ, the shining love of God on display for all to see.

The work begins, once we leave here, to make sure that that light is allowed to shine. It is a light spread not with cruel flames that cut through the world, but with the gentle smoldering of our hearts. Love is like a fire, that jumps between the embers within us, alighting and bringing yet more light into the world around us. The simple message of Advent is summarized in Christmas, that God is coming to be among us, and God is already here. So go out tonight, to be with family and friends, and go out tonight in the knowledge that salvation truly is here with us. Go forward and love the world, love each person like they are family and protect them, feed them, house them, however you can. Christ is born in Bethlehem; Christ lives among us. The glory of God now must cover the earth, and all the world proclaim the glory of our salvation. Today we celebrate a world that will never be the same. Today we say, Merry Christmas. – Amen.

The Holy Family: Joseph – 12/19/2021

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Matthew 1: 18-25

Now the birth of Jesus the Messiah took place in this way. When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child from the Holy Spirit. Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly. But just when he had resolved to do this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet:

Sermon Text

Sometimes you have to preach a sermon for yourself, or perhaps a sermon that you would have liked to have heard sometime in your life. Today we celebrate Joseph, Jesus’s earthly father and the one who raised him up in Nazareth. Like the rest of the Holy Family, Joseph is mostly known to us in legends and stories, and not so much as a person revealed in scripture. We know that he was engaged to marry a young woman named Mary, that he was kind and wanted to resolve the scandal of her pregnancy in a way that honored her, and that once an angel set him straight, he was committed to his wife and child.

The only other detail of Joseph’s life which we can say with some certainty is that he died either at the start of or right before Jesus’s ministry. This is revealed to us in his disappearance from scripture after Jesus’s visit to Jerusalem at age 12, and the fact that Mary eventually joins Jesus in his cross Judean ministry. She would only do this, following her itinerant oldest son, if the responsibility for caring for her had been transferred to him after Joseph had passed away. So, anything we say about Joseph has to be fairly abstract. However, as the last few weeks have shown us, the length of a person’s description on a page is not all that there is when it comes to understanding what they meant to those around them or as examples to us today.

Joseph is a pinnacle of love. It would have been easy at any point in his story to jettison himself from the situation he found himself in. When Mary was revealed to be pregnant, he could have publicly announced the reason for breaking off an engagement, but he instead planned to let her go quietly. When he was visited by the angel and told that this pregnancy was an act of God and that he was to raise the savior of humanity, he could have run away, but he submitted himself immediately to this work. Joseph had every chance to be callous, but he always chose love.

There are several legends about Jesus growing up in Nazareth and while some are quite fanciful, there is one that stands out in my mind. The author, imagining what it would be like to have a teenage Jesus around, described Joseph making the wrong cut on a piece of wood he was working on. Jesus, the faithful son, then miraculously lengthens the wood to account for this mistake.[1] While this story is only that, a story, it does let our imagination go a bit more freely. To see the way that Joseph would have embraced Jesus as his own, teaching him wood working and apprenticing him in his artisan shop. Jesus, in turn, using the powers he has as Son of God to help his earthly father. There is something beautiful to this sort of story.

Raising Jesus up probably wasn’t always easy. He had siblings after all, brothers and sisters born to Mary and Joseph after Jesus. We know the names of the boys: James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas (not that one,) but sadly none of the sisters are named. Jesus’s siblings did not always understand him, once actively telling him to stop being such an embarrassment when he came home preaching his message. Jesus then seemed to refuse to go along with the family on pilgrimage. (John 7: 1-10) Scripture only speaks of when Jesus and his siblings were adults, it is hard to imagine what they were like as kids. More than that imagine if your eldest sibling was actually the son of God, and it wasn’t just what your mom thought about them!

Joseph had a big responsibility in raising Jesus. I’m not sure how much of Jesus’s earthly self was reflective of the way he was raised and how much was from his essential God-ness. I do like to imagine that sometimes he would say things that made his neighbors eyes roll, “Say what you want about the kid, he’s Joe’s boy now!” There must be something in the humanity of Jesus that reflected the man who raised him, and I often wonder what that looks like. Of course, I’ll be wondering until the day of resurrection about that, we just do not have information otherwise on that kind of mystery.

As with much of scripture, the thing that Joseph did, loving a child that was not biologically his own, was not unique. The miraculous quality was not in the act itself. Instead, the grace and mercy of Joseph is shown in the example he gives to us today, to love people even when we do not have an immediate relationship with them. We can count people as family without them sharing genomic markers with us, we can love people we have only just met because they bear within them that image of God we discussed last week in Elizabeth’s story. Joseph does something mundane; he loves a child he is raising, but the example he sets echoes through eternity and equips us to do the same.

In particular, I want to take time today to speak to blended families. They are so often left on the sidelines of church discussions of “Family.” We still treat as normative the idea of a father and a mother and their children and act as if any deviation from that is not worth talking about or somehow a diminishment of what could otherwise be. Perhaps to an idealist that is true, but in my own life, both as someone who grew up in a blended family, and as someone who knows a great many blended families, I do not think it is worth speculating on ideals when the beauty of what God can do in what is, is right in front of us. There is a blessed quality to blended families, a lesson and a blessing innate to them, that is not worth ranking above or below any other arrangement.

To speak to my own experience, I am blessed to have loving family on all sides. I have a loving mother, a loving father, and loving grandparents all by blood. I was raised fairly normally by sometimes normal people. My parents split up when I was ten and while that caused its fair share of trouble, it also introduced a blessing. Sometime after my parents had parted ways, my father met and married a woman named “Robin.” She had two kids of her own, a son named Brady who was a year and half older than me and a daughter named Jordan who was about a year younger than I am.

A lot changed with the expansion of my nuclear family. I came to live with father and stepmother and now shared a room with a brother, something I had never had before then. I was introduced to new grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles that were now, fully mine. All of this was an addition into my life and while it all caused some friction like any change will do, it was ultimately a blessing revealed again and again. It was this move that saw me attending church for the first time. First United Methodist Church of Berkeley Springs became my home and soon enough I was deeply involved in that congregation and well… The rest is history.

I can point to a lot of things about my blended family that made me who I am, however, there is one thing that no one can deny. That it that my stepmother is one of the best influences I’ve ever had. Beyond getting me into the church, Robin immediately showed she was an overwhelmingly loving person. She never for one moment treated me like I was any different from her own children. Sure, she knew them longer and did birth them, so things were never going to be identical. Yet, there was never any doubt in my mind that she saw me as her child, and that she wanted everything good for me that she could possibly give. She got me active in my school and in my church in ways I don’t think I otherwise would have. Things were never perfect, and I will never claim to have been a perfect child to any of my parents, especially perhaps her, but the sainted qualities of my stepmother is something no one will ever deny.

We who live in blended families know that it is not always easy to keep a balance going. We bristle at each other; we negotiate custody when kids are too young to drive themselves places. Holidays are divided up and negotiated over. You will never know anything messier than a blended household. Yet, when we take on stepfamilies, the attitude we should have is that the family we are taking on is just as important as the family we already had. We marry into, not just the person we love, but all the people attached to them. Children are, of course, less involved in that decision, and so it falls on adults to accept that reality and work to make it come true.

Blended families are the primary thing that comes to mind for me, but it goes beyond this particular kind of family dynamic. In-laws are also people we bring into our family, and we should treat them like family. That may get more difficult as the circles go wider and wider, but generally the pattern we put forward should be a more expansive definition of family. My siblings have married two wonderful people, my wife has two wonderful siblings, one of whom got married very recently. All these people are my family. Likewise, I have friends who are family to me, people who might as well be my sisters and brothers, whom I love fiercely.

Family is what we make of it, no matter how people come to be a part of it, we celebrate them. The Church is, in itself, people who found one another and decided to live as siblings, united in the identity Jesus has given them as Children of God. Today we celebrate Joseph, and by extension we celebrate family.

I speak so openly about my own family and experience today because Joseph will always be near to my heart. I love this member of the holy family, because every Christmas my stepmother’s eyes would light up when he was mentioned. The ultimate stepparent, who raised Jesus as his own, was the one she most aspired to resemble year after year. I can tell you today, she did that and then some. So let us all follow the example of Joseph, and as Christmas bells ring, only a little way off, let us see our family all around us. – Amen.

[1] The Infancy Gospel of Thomas. XIII

12/12/2021 – The Holy Family: Elizabeth

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Luke 1: 24-25, 39-45

After [Zechariah received his vision in the Temple] Elizabeth conceived, and for five months she remained in seclusion. She said, “This is what the Lord has done for me when he looked favorably on me and took away the disgrace I have endured among my people…”

[After her own annunciation,] Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”

Sermon Text

If I were someone who wanted to build suspense. We might have talked about Elizabeth before we talked about Mary. It seems that we are taking a step down from the miracle of the incarnation to the annunciation of a perfectly normal human pregnancy. While Elizabeth’s child, John the Baptist, would certainly go on to do a great deal in the history of God’s kingdom, he was not the Word made flesh. I’m not here for suspense though. Narrative arcs are for television, the pulpit is for the truth of God revealed through the scriptures and lived through our life.

We step back from Mary and her pregnancy, to look at Elizabeth and her own, to discuss another aspect of our life in Christ. Mary is a model of evangelism for us, she tells us how we can accept Christ into our being and then share Christ with the world. Elizabeth tells a different story through her life, one of the long suffering nature of faith, and of the difficulties that can come from living in a world that is not what we wish it was, not just yet at least.

Elizabeth is, like many of Jesus’s relatives, given little to tell us about who she is. She and Zechariah together are meant to be clear parallels to Abraham and Sarah, but outside of the general similarities we might see between a story in Genesis and a story in the Gospels, there is not much to glean about who they are. We know she is older than someone would usually be when they would become pregnant. It is hard to say how old this would be exactly. We know nowadays when menopause usually occurs, but it seems unlikely to me that that would not be impacted by environmental factors. Likewise, we know that Elizabeth was someone who struggled with fertility. We never know if that was because of something stemming from Zechariah or her own physiology. The ancient world always assumed women were somehow the deciding factor. Beyond these two truths, and her relation to Mary, not much is known about her.

We see in our scriptures, and we briefly discussed when we looked at Zechariah, that the ancient world often saw the ability for someone to have a child as a moral quality. Good people have kids, bad people do not. The impetus was placed on anyone struggling with fertility to invest a great deal into getting right with God. Sometimes this took the form of sacrifices or devotion, but whatever the form it took, the burden was on the couple, and especially the woman to somehow make the impossible come to pass.

As with anything, miracles are always possible, but the thing that defines a miraculous event is that it is not common. For many people who struggled with fertility in the ancient world, they were stigmatized as though they had done something wrong. Elizabeth, having realized that her dream of having a child was coming true, mentions this explicitly – pointing to the fact that she has suffered public ridicule because of her infertility. This mindset, unfortunately, was not ended with the fall of Jerusalem or the Reformation or any movement of the Church. Only recently have we begun to understand fertility for what it is – a complicated matter of genetics, physiology, and environment.

Much like Zechariah before her, Elizabeth asks us to consider the ways that we neglect to empathize with one another. With Zechariah we saw how accessibility is only something that comes to mind when we no longer have everything we are used to. Elizabeth asks us to think beyond our usual premises of how we define “fairness,” in the world. The fact that both she and Zechariah are presented as righteous in all ways a person can be, and yet as suffering what was considered one of the cruelest fates in the ancient world, proves to us that life is much more complicated than good things happening to good people and bad things happening to bad ones. Elizabeth, more than just being a story of a miracle, is a story of how we, the people of God, must be better than passive judges of all who suffer.

When Elizabeth is given the news that she is going to have a child, she is not able at first to enjoy what this child will add to her life. Her first thought is what the child has finally freed her from, the judgment of those around her. We are seldom better than the people who judged Elizabeth when we react to trouble in the world around us. While we can often be deeply sympathetic toward people we know and the problems they face, the further outside of our own sphere of influence a person is the less sympathy and the more skepticism we apply. Sometimes that skepticism is toward the person, “If they had done this that never would have happened!” or “Serves them right for getting wrapped up in what they were!”

If we cannot justify blaming an individual, we might look to a darker form of magical thinking. We start seeing malice in other people that somehow caused this event to take place. Rather than blaming an individual we look at those around them. We implicate certain people and things as bad influences or treat the difficulties a person faces like a puzzle to be solved. On grand scales these take the form of conspiracies, but on more personal scales they manifest in finger pointing that does anything but address the actual root of a problem.

This is not to say that there are not sometimes causes to a problem that exist within a person or within their surroundings. There are problems that are systemic and some that are personal. Yet, I would also say that some problems are just that, problems. They are things that emerge in the world around us. We can sit and try to explain the why and how of them, and if we can find something actionable to prevent or remedy them all the better. Yet, sometimes we come to a great wall, the wall of “the world as it is.” In this kind of situation, we do not do ourselves any favors by trying to explain what brought someone to the place they are in, it only matters that we support them and help them however we can through it.

Elizabeth was in a situation that only God could bring her out of, but that situation could have been made bearable if not for the callousness of her peers. It is hard enough in life to struggle without people accusing you of every possible reason why, if you only tried a little harder, you wouldn’t have that problem. Sickness and pain is written off, “You just need to try this supplement?” “Have you tried exercising?” “You should be eating at least three of these a day!” We wrap up our experience of the world so that there is always an answer to explain why someone suffers and we write off the continued suffering of others as a failure to adapt and adjust to those pressures.

Today a lot of people still face scrutiny for their struggles with fertility. We refuse to acknowledge their pain, pushing it far away from public view not for the sake of their privacy, but because we cannot stomach grappling with that kind of pain publicly. It is a common problem, that only recently has made its way from behind closed doors and into communities willing to support people as they face it. Like so many things that we as a culture decided was nobody’s business but our own, stigmatizing anyone who sought help or support and who disrupted our vision of a just world because of it, the plight of Elizabeth has seldom truly been heard when others cry out with it today.

But it is not just fertility. Chronic pain, lasting bouts of disease, chronic and congenital illnesses, sexism, racism, and all manner of bigotry – these are ailments to individuals and to society that we either make so broad we can do nothing about them, or so personal we write them off as someone else’s problem. If there is a trouble in this sin-sick world, then there are people tracing red threads through every aspect of a person’s life to explain why they have come to the place that they have come. Shutting up the doors of God’s mercy and opening up the floodgates of human judgment.

I’m not going to claim I’m not at fault for this either. There have been plenty of times in life where I see someone, obviously struggling, and I take time to justify why that might be. The mother with more kids than it seems she can handle, the panhandler who has given you a different story every time you have talked to them, the rough looking guy in a gas station that seems just a little off to our critical eyes. There is an essential and flawed part of us that wants to organize people into boxes. Those boxes make it easy for us to not feel responsible for their livelihood, maybe even to feel the troubles they face are appropriate given some imagined sin they may have committed.

The Arbinger Institute, in their book The Anatomy of Peace separates the kind of judgments we make in these circumstances in four categories.[1] The judgments we make are to preserve our feeling of superiority, of worthiness, of public perception, and even of our own insecurity. We look at the person who suffers and say, “I am too good to help them.” Or “They do not deserve my help, they can fix it themselves!” Likewise, we might say, “If I help them, people might start associating me with that kind of person.” or “I am in no place to help them, surely it is someone else’s job.”

The difficulty with any of these hypotheticals is that they are necessarily hyperbolic. I have never walked up to someone and thought, “I am too good to help them.” But I might think that the appointment I’m going to is too important to miss. The solution to all of this speculating about people, is to remove people from the category of item in our mind, to that of person.

It might seem strange, to say that people are people and then pretend some grand statement has been made. However, we very often do not think of other people as existing in the same way we do. While we can acknowledge the rich world of thought and nuance and emotion that encompasses our own heart and soul, we only see other people as things we interact with. Background characters in our life’s own narrative.

This has manifested in a bizarre way in certain groups online where people they run into in their daily life are called NPCs. Anyone know what that means? An NPC is a Non-Player Character, a term originating in role-playing games and most widely used in video games for anyone the player does not control. I love a good video game, but the moment I refer to the cashier at Kroger as an NPC is the moment, I have made myself so central to the story of life, I am no longer grappling with the reality that we are all of us here, equal in dignity and importance. Using NPC online is mostly a joke, but I think it has a kernel of truth about how people generally, not just the occasional OP, see the world around us.

When you meet someone, you meet an image bearer of God. That person bears the same imprint of the divine that you do. That means their soul, their inner-life is just as complex and beautiful. The troubles they face hurt them as much as anything that has ever hurt us. There is never a moment where we are not talking to someone just as complicated, as worthy of love, or as unfittingly suffering as ourselves. If we see the world, not in terms of who deserves what, but in terms of all people deserving the same goodness then we will come a long way toward a better world. Elizabeth suffered because other people were unable to see her as anything but the barren woman up the street, but if they had let themselves really get to know her, they would be pleasantly surprised.

They would know the devoted wife of a temple priest. A faithful woman who trusted that God would deliver her someway or another. She was a woman who, when she heard that her cousin was suddenly pregnant with her own miraculous child, she quickly called for her to come and take shelter away from the judgmental eyes of her neighbors in her own home. She cared for the expectant Mary and kept her safe in those first few, treacherous months of pregnancy. Elizabeth confirmed the message God had given Mary, she let her know that she really was going to be the one to bring salvation into the world. Elizabeth let Mary know that just because people say all manner of evil against you, it doesn’t mean that you are not deeply blessed by God.

Elizabeth teaches us about how God keeps a promise. God promised Elizabeth a child and she got one. Yet, I think that it would be a shame if we only looked to that part of her story. Like all of Advent, God asks us to look at the world in a different way. The Kingdom is breaking out all around us, and it is breaking out among the people we would least expect. The mute priest, the scandalous unmarried pregnant girl, and the old childless woman down the street. In our own life, we must accept that the kingdom will only grow if we can accept others as readily as we accept these figures we have lifted up the past few Sundays. The Kingdom of God is at hand, and it is to be a kingdom of misfits and weirdos, of people on the fringe of respectability, and those who have made their fair share of mistakes. The kingdom is a place we are all transformed, so let us be transformed into more loving, welcoming people.

The rumbling of a New World is upon us. Our third week of waiting is drawing to a close. Where does our salvation come? With loud trumpet and the cries of an army? No, but in the distant sound of labor just beginning, and the advent of a child, not yet born. – Amen.

[1] The Arbinger Institute. The Anatomy of Peace. (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler. 2020)

The Holy Family – Mary

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Luke 1: 26-38, 46-55

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came to her and said, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you.” But she was much perplexed by his words and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. The angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David. He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.” Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” The angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God. And now, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son; and this is the sixth month for her who was said to be barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.” Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her…

And Mary said,

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed; for the Mighty One has done great things for me, and holy is his name. His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts. He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.”

Sermon Text

 Our second week of Advent brings us to reflect on Mary, the Mother of God. She was a poor woman, from a four acre town in what was once called Israel. We know very little about her family, only that she had a cousin named Elizabeth who we will talk about next week, and another cousin named Zachariah who we already talked about last week. Little else is known about the woman who brought Jesus into the world. We do not know how old she was when she conceived, we do not know what she did with her daily life outside of raising Jesus and his siblings, and we do not know what happened to her after the close of the first few chapters of the book of Acts.

Despite this relative obscurity, Mary has captivated the Church for centuries. Legends describe her lineage, her battles with dragons and with demons, and in certain traditions her eventual ascension into Heaven. I do not think that Mary was likely taken up into Heaven like Elijah or Enoch, but there is no doubt that the Mother of God made her way to be seated in the company of Heaven. Wherever her grave may be, it goes unmarked and unremarked upon in the modern day. We do not know where Mary ended up, and so we are left with the few pieces we can be certain of. The most comprehensive narrative we are given in scripture to tell us about Mary are the one’s which we have read today, the annunciation – where Jesus’s entry into the flesh was announced – and the Magnificat – where Jesus’s life was foretold.

When we are told that Mary was visited by an angel, the exact stakes of what she is being told may not snap into our minds immediately. When an angel comes and tells you that you are going to be miraculously pregnant, that can be very good news. Zechariah was excited to hear he would have a child even though he had previously thought such a thing would be impossible for him. Yet, to have this kind of birth foretold when you are not married carries different kinds of baggage with it. The angel was not just telling Mary she was going to carry a child, but that she was about to become an object of public interest, of ridicule, and perhaps even an object of violence.

Formally, Roman rule in Judea had discouraged capital punishment among Jewish citizens. While Rome had the right to kill non-citizens for any number of crimes, local governments were more limited in their ability to execute criminals. Add to this the general perspective among the prominent rabbis of the time that capital punishment was needlessly cruel, “increase[ing] the number of murderers among the Jewish people,” and you get an environment where capital punishment for crimes outside of Roman law was unlikely.[1]

Now, why is this relevant to Mary and the news that she was going to conceive a child? Well, she was an unmarried woman in first century Judea. To an outside observer that would suggest that Mary had had relations outside of marriage. That in itself was not necessary a problem, assuming that this was a matter between herself and her betrothed Joseph. While probably a faux pas and certainly something discouraged, relations of this kind were not considered beyond the pale in the society of the time.[2] However, we know from other places in scripture that Joseph had considered breaking off the engagement before he fully understood what was happening. If that had happened, or if that had gotten out, Mary could have been in big trouble.

An unfortunate truth, as true today as it was in Jesus’s time, is that even when those with the theoretical authority to pursue death sentences have given that power up, people in communities will place that supposed power upon themselves. Mob violence, or even just an individual with the wrong sort of sense of superiority, could have caused great harm to Mary in the months leading up to her giving birth to Jesus. It is my earnest belief that, one of the reasons we see Mary move in with her cousin Elizabeth during the early part of her pregnancy was to protect herself and her unborn child. Something she was able to do even better once Joseph was fully on board with what was to come, but something that still took several months to sort out.

The blessing the angel brought, of Mary being able to carry the incarnate Word of God into the world, was therefore not a small thing for her to take on. She was being asked to face immediate danger for the sake of her child. A child who, we know from reading ahead in this story, she would ultimately have to give up to death on a Roman cross. The grief of a mother who had to face public scrutiny before their child was born, be jeered at by those who misunderstood his work during his life, and then pitied her after he died a criminals death, it is all just unimaginable to me.

Yet, the image we get of Mary is not of a broke woman grieving, but of a strong and confident prophet proclaiming the salvation of God to anyone who is willing to hear it. Mary takes on this assignment, not with apprehension or fear, but with a desire to understand more. “How can this be?” quickly transforms to, “Let it be with me as you have said.” I’m not foolish enough to say that Mary probably did not have any worries or fear, but her faith was sufficient to overcome them. She did not know everything coming down the line, but she sure did know that God was going to see things through to the end.

This is made most clear when she arrives at her cousin’s house. Elizabeth, as we will see next week, greets Mary and confirms that she isn’t just dreaming. She really is carrying a savior, one that will turn the world on its head. Mary does not miss a beat from the moment she receives this confirmation. The quiet and thoughtful Mary launches into her longest recorded speech – what we now call the “Magnificat.”

Following the example of prophets like Miriam before her, Mary describes the faithfulness of God throughout history. She begins with herself, saying that God’s actions even up to this point have shown her to be blessed. She is blessed to be the bearer of God into the world, she is blessed to be a mother who is going to go through Hell to bring Heaven to Earth, she is blessed in a way that no one will be able to deny in the future. She then speaks to God’s more general goodness. God takes the proud and knocks them off their pedestals, but God lifts up the lowly who know their real worth. God feeds the hungry and denies the rich. God brings justice wherever there is injustice, and God settles the score wherever earthly courts fail.

Mary is someone who we in the Protestant church too often neglect. While I understand some of the hesitancy we tend to express, I think that it is to our detriment. We may not regard Mary as the sinless mother of God, immaculately conceived and bodily assumed into Heaven, but she is still the mother of God and worthy of our respect. We can learn a lot from her, even just by thinking about what it means for her to have taken on her role, to have been the first evangelist in history. Some may point to John the Baptist, or to any of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible as the first bringing of good news, but I am admittedly being a bit more specifically Christian in my argument. If we define evangelism as bringing the Word of God, and the salvation that Word brings, to all the world, then I cannot imagine a better prototype than Mary.

She carried that Word of God within her for nine months. She gave birth to a child, naming him “God is salvation,” and then raised him up to love the scriptures and to be a part of the community he lived him. She gave him up to his ministry, eventually joining him in his travels when her husband died. Then, worst of all, she gave up her Son to the cross, standing beside him as he breathed his last breath. Even the resurrection, the confirmation that her prophecy before his birth was spot on and that she would see her Son again rightfully seated on the throne of Heaven, meant that she had to send her beloved child away, far from where she could see him or hear him call for her when he needed her.

We are all of us imitators of Mary. Though we do not suffer our separation from Jesus in just the same way, we still can feel some of what she feels. We come into the Church and accept the Word which is given to us. It grows within us, transforming us into people who more resemble the one who saved us. We then share that Gospel with all we can, through love and service as well as through proclamation and testimony. We wait earnestly the day we see Jesus face to face, and for the work to be concluded and our rest to truly begin. We imitate Mary in every step of our spiritual journey, and so to not give her, her due is a shame.

In a moment we will celebrate Holy Communion. Here we receive the gifts of bread and the vine, here we proclaim all that Christ’s salvific work has done for us, is doing for us, and will do for us. Then we all take it, and we receive it into ourselves. We grow strong through this gift of God and then go forward into the world in that strength to share the grace of God with all the world. Each action of the Church, as it pursues service to Christ, calls us to remember some aspect of those who knew Christ while he walked this earth, and few people know any person better than their mamas. On this, our second week of Advent, let us remember the fearless evangelist who brought our savior to the world. Let us all consider, and imitate, Mary in our devotion to the Gospel. – Amen.

[1] Mishnah Makkot. 1.10 Available at: https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Makkot.1.10?lang=bi

[2] Genesis 24: 67 captures one such instance of relations preceding any formal marriage.

The Holy Family – Zechariah – Advent 1 2021

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Luke 1: 5-23, 57-80

In the days of King Herod of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah, who belonged to the priestly order of Abijah. His wife was a descendant of Aaron, and her name was Elizabeth. Both of them were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord. But they had no children, because Elizabeth was barren, and both were getting on in years.

Once when he was serving as priest before God and his section was on duty, he was chosen by lot, according to the custom of the priesthood, to enter the sanctuary of the Lord and offer incense. Now at the time of the incense offering, the whole assembly of the people was praying outside. Then there appeared to him an angel of the Lord, standing at the right side of the altar of incense. When Zechariah saw him, he was terrified; and fear overwhelmed him. But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink; even before his birth he will be filled with the Holy Spirit. He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. With the spirit and power of Elijah he will go before him, to turn the hearts of parents to their children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” Zechariah said to the angel, “How will I know that this is so? For I am an old man, and my wife is getting on in years.” The angel replied, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. But now, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.”

Meanwhile the people were waiting for Zechariah, and wondered at his delay in the sanctuary. When he did come out, he could not speak to them, and they realized that he had seen a vision in the sanctuary. He kept motioning to them and remained unable to speak. When his time of service was ended, he went to his home…

Now the time came for Elizabeth to give birth, and she bore a son. Her neighbors and relatives heard that the Lord had shown his great mercy to her, and they rejoiced with her.

On the eighth day they came to circumcise the child, and they were going to name him Zechariah after his father. But his mother said, “No; he is to be called John.” They said to her, “None of your relatives has this name.” Then they began motioning to his father to find out what name he wanted to give him. He asked for a writing tablet and wrote, “His name is John.” And all of them were amazed. Immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue freed, and he began to speak, praising God. Fear came over all their neighbors, and all these things were talked about throughout the entire hill country of Judea. All who heard them pondered them and said, “What then will this child become?” For, indeed, the hand of the Lord was with him.

Then his father Zechariah was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke this prophecy: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them. He has raised up a mighty savior for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old, that we would be saved from our enemies and from the hand of all who hate us. Thus he has shown the mercy promised to our ancestors, and has remembered his holy covenant, the oath that he swore to our ancestor Abraham, to grant us that we, being rescued from the hands of our enemies, might serve him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days. And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go before the Lord to prepare his ways, to give knowledge of salvation to his people by the forgiveness of their sins. By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.”

The child grew and became strong in spirit, and he was in the wilderness until the day he appeared publicly to Israel.

Sermon Text

 Today begins a new year in the Church. While our secular calendar turns over from the 31st of December to the 1st of January, the Church begins its year with advent. The celebration of Christ’s coming to the earth in flesh, and the celebration of Christ’s eventual return in the glory of his Father to set the world right. As we make our way through the next few weeks celebrating Christ’s presence with us, we will be looking at the people who raised Jesus up in the faith. Jesus was blessed to have two loving parents, Mary and Joseph, who we will talk about in later weeks. However, before Jesus was born, his mother was cared for by his cousins, the parents of his other cousin John the Baptist, and today we have heard the story of Zechariah. Comical as it is wonderful, terrifying as it is comforting, we look to a silent father from long ago to learn what God can teach us now.

We are introduced to Zechariah as a priest in the temple. Though practice shifted from time to time in the temple’s history, priests were ideally members of the tribe of Levi. These Levitical priests would take on their role based on a rotating shift, and our story opens when it is Zechariah’s turn to serve. He is described as “blameless,” not to say that he never sins, but that he is a reputable person and that he is by all accounts a “good and faithful servant.” This is important, because the first readers of this story might try to blame him or his wife for the next detail we learn, that they have no children.

While we now know that much more goes into fertility than a person’s morality, the ancient world saw fertility as a gift from God given to the righteous. Specifically, deities were described as “shutting wombs,” as punishment for sins. In the general pattern of the New Testament, Luke takes time here to remove this stigma from infertility. It is not a moral failing to not be able to have children, and Zechariah and Elizabeth epitomize this reality.

God still has power to bring the impossible to pass. Zechariah goes in to offer incense, a visible and fragrant representation of the people’s prayers, and finds an angel standing beside the altar of incense. The angel, later revealed to be Gabriel, brings him the good news that he will have a child. Zechariah, like Abraham long before him, cannot believe that someone as old as he and his wife would be able to have a healthy child. Gabriel responds by taking away Zechariah’s speech. While I’m not sure exactly how much public speaking Zechariah did, I can only imagine that a mute priest would have trouble with certain aspects of their job – not even considering how exhausting daily life would suddenly become. We only appreciate how easily we can communicate with one another when our ability to do so it suddenly snatched away from us.

Nine months pass with no one being able to know what Zechariah saw in the temple. His child is born and only after he affirms Elizabeth’s naming of the child “John,” (which means “God is gracious,”) does his speech return. The mouth which had been glued shut for that time now ran over with praise of God. Zechariah was now able to show the world just what he thought about God’s gift of a child. He calls on Abraham who God had also promised a child to, and like him lifts up his son and asks for God to bless him. Zechariah sees the future of John, to be the one who would clear the way for God’s redemption in the world, a source of hope and repentance unrivaled since the days of Elijah.

While it may seem that this is just a historical account of the time before Jesus’s birth, I think we can take some lessons away from Zechariah and what happened to him. Firstly, we must see that God kept a promise. We talk a lot about the promises of God, we just sang a bit ago about how we “Stand” on God’s promises. However, in our daily life the promise of God is not always at the forefront of our minds. Perhaps, in part, because we do not have angels telling us that we are going to receive the full benefit of God’s goodness.

If our scripture today proves anything, it’s that even the truly miraculous cannot always convince us God keeps God’s promises.. Zechariah spoke to Gabriel, a literal angel, and his response was still to be uncertain. “You may say I’m going to have a kid, but how do I know that I will have a kid?” The answer for him was, of course, “When you hold John, you’ll know it’s true” For us today, in the times we find ourselves waiting for God, the answer is not always so clear. With rare exception, we live into general promises of God, not particular. What I mean is that God promises to meet our needs, to save us from sin, and to love and care for us. We are seldom given a word from God that a specific event will happen, or a specific gift will be given to us. Because these promises are more general, we sometimes lose track of them.

When we wake up in the morning and find food in the cupboard, we might not think of God as being the one who put it there, and so we forget we are taken care of. When we get a call from a friend that uplifts us, we may forget that God has given us the gift of one another’s support. When we can go to sleep at peace that we are loved with an eternal love, we may forget just how amazing a thing that is. The promises that we live into everyday are commonplace in how they appear, but that does not make them any less spectacular. The problem becomes that we only notice how important our daily provision is when suddenly it becomes endangered.

We have all had times in our life where something upsets the balance of our life. Someone dear to us dies, we get a bad diagnosis, a bill comes in we simply cannot pay, an endless litany of problems stands just in the wings of our relatively blessed and privileged lives. In those moments, we suddenly realize how good the mundane things of life are. The cupboard that is suddenly sparce, the phone that does not ring with a loved one on the other end, the cold night where we cannot find any rest. In those moments we realize that we live each day by the grace of God, and that that same grace has to sustain us even when material comforts seem far away from us.

Zechariah experiences a particular promise at the same time he loses something he had always taken for granted. God tells him he will have a child, despite all logic to the contrary. God also robs him of his speech, making him suddenly much more dependent on others than he had been before. I described Zechariah’s story as comical in some ways, to think of how he would possibly describe, only by gestures, that his wife was going to have a baby. However, there is also something scary about it. The fear in that same man’s eyes as he realizes just how long the next nine months are going to be.

For many of us here, we have probably had these sorts of moments. We are going about life normally, and then all of a sudden, we have something snatched away from us. Maybe its mobility, maybe its dexterity, maybe our sense of hearing or taste or sight. In that moment we realize that we have been blessed up to this point simply to have these things. More than that, we realize just how little is done to make the world accessible to people with disabilities. Next time you’re at a store, see what is being done there for disabled people – do they have braille? Ramps? How can people reach things on shelves if they lack mobility? The same thing is important to ask here in this sanctuary.

As part of our next year of ministry, the trustees and I are going to do an audit of this church to see how accessible it really is. We have some things in place, but I know we aren’t doing all we could be. We all know that. The steps we take to make this sanctuary more accessible will be more than just clearing walkways and marking entrances and exits, it will be making this sanctuary more welcoming and useful to all people. Imagine, more accessible audio recordings of services that we could distribute to those who want to hear the service but don’t have internet. Better written and formatted text documents for us all to navigate more clearly. A cleaner, more carefully put together Church to gather and worship in.

Beyond accessibility, Zechariah’s story brings to mind some of the events of these past two years. When the pandemic set in, and all of us locked ourselves away to prevent viral transmission, we saw what it was to lose community. We could not gather in-person, we could not celebrate or mourn together. While our lips were not sealed as violently as Zechariah’s, we lost a large part of what it meant to be the community of God. We were forced to adapt, to improvise, and to trust that God was still working even when things seemed different than we expected. Good things came of being forced into this place: more care for shut-ins developed as we realized the struggle that comes from living apart from one another, we realized the ways we neglected online ministry opportunities, we proved the Church exists beyond our buildings, but, silver linings aside, the difficulties we faced also made it clear how blessed we were in more normal times.

Unlike Zechariah, I don’t think God sent this particular trouble to wake us up to our blessings. That would be cruel, to cause so much trouble and death simply to make a point. No, I think our awareness is a consequence of the pandemic, not its purpose. To find purpose in a disaster that widespread would-be dangerous thinking. Instead, I think that what Zechariah gives us in this story is an example of how to respond to the loss of something and to its eventual return. There was a particular promise to Zechariah, that he would have a child. While there is no specific or general promise from God that we will retain all our bodily autonomy in all aspects of life, we trust God generally seeks our good, and so even in the loss of some ability we have, we trust God will answer our needs somehow.

I believe that provision can come in multiple ways. Sometimes it is in the full restoration of our faculties, sometimes in those around us making the world more accessible to us in the face of our disabilities. Regardless of how relief comes our way, we are shown just how precious everything we enjoy is, when we are able to experience some measure of it after having lost it. God’s goodness, God’s commitment to promises, is shown most clearly on the return from trouble.

When Zechariah speaks after his long bout of silence, he has nothing but praise and prophecy to offer. Likewise, we should freely praise God whenever we can, even in the midst of trouble. We do not do this to deny the trouble we are in, or to pretend that it does not matter. We do it because regardless of the particular circumstance we are in, God has promised to take care of us, to save us from the darkness and from death. That promise sustains us even in the moments we are deprived of its benefits, and it sees us to the other side. In the same way that we make the world more accessible, we must also make it more grace filled. Those of us who are able must support those who are suffering, to make God’s sustaining presence clearer through the love and support of the Church.

Zechariah speaks to the promises of God by showing us that they are still true even when we cannot speak to them. Zechariah was not willing to believe God meant what he said in promising him a child, but over the course of his nine months of silence, God revealed truth above and beyond his initial promise to him. In the same way, the hard times between a promise being made and a promise being fulfilled, can make it even clearer how robust and wonderful God’s promises are. Does that baptize our suffering to make it good? Of course not, but it does mean that in the midst of silence a great deal more can be said than in the heights of celebration.

So, as we welcome Advent. Let us close our mouths, let us look to the troubles we presently face. Let them be a lesson to us about what God will remedy in all the world. Let us also try and lessen the troubles of those around us, so that when the time of our troubles is over, all of us may celebrate the birth of something new and the fulfillment of all God’s promises. – Amen.