We Wait no More – Christmas 2020

December 21, 2020 / John Langenstein / Leave a 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

Christmas is finally just a few hours away from us. The light of our trees and decorations shine out into the night. Our Advent wreath is fully lit, and we wait for the few scant moments that separate us from fully celebrating our commemoration of Christ’s entry into our human history. No longer separate from Humanity, but completely invested in a physical body and married eternally to our lives. The Incarnation, the irreversible unity of Heaven and Earth, is just a few hours away.

There are many things that make Jesus’s entry into creation miraculous. That God could take on Human Flesh and yet remain God. That this union could redeem our fallen state and set us right with God. That the Messiah of Judah would save not only his people but the entire world. All these are miraculous in themselves, but beyond these massive, cosmological aspects of incarnation comes some mundane miracles we cannot overlook. A baby is born, in a difficult time, to struggling parents, in a dying province of a decaying empire, and yet is still able to live and grow, to reach adulthood and follow the difficult road before them all the way to the end.

While we do not know the exact date of Jesus’s birth or the exact year, we do know enough about it to understand what kind of world Jesus was born into. Jesus’s birth falls somewhere in a fourteen-year span, somewhere between 7 BC and 7 AD. During the reign of Herod the Great, but also close enough to the reign of Quirinius as governor of Syria to allow for a census to be held at the time of Jesus’s birth. While this gives us an indeterminate span of time to say when exactly Christ entered the world, it is more than enough to sketch out what sort of world Jesus was being born into.

Jesus was born to poor parents in a poor province of the Roman Empire. While Judah had briefly known independence preceding Roman occupation, Rome was really just a continuation of the long line of Empires that had controlled the region. Assyria first held Judah as a vassal, then Babylon as a conquered territory, then Persia, then Media, then Greece. Judah had not known true independence since just after the time of King David. The food they grew sustained the local population somewhat, but much of it went to feed the Roman army. Herod and his children attempted to “civilize,” the region by building massive projects around the region. Herod the Great famously robbed David and Solomon’s royal tombs so that he could demolish and rebuild Nehemiah’s temple into a more stately building, while his sons would build fishing towns to feed the soldiers that occupied their land.

The poverty of Jesus’s family would have been exacerbated by these conditions. While an artisan and his wife were not likely to have a great deal of money, unless he did extremely specialized work, the introduction of Roman taxes around the time of Jesus’s birth ensured they would not have much money for themselves. The census executed by Quirinius to establish these taxes were opposed so openly that it culminated in one of the first of many attempted revolutions against Rome in Judah, a rebellion that was quickly put down. From this and other conflicts the Zealots were born, a guerilla group of Jewish rebels who mainly targeted Rome and their collaborators.

Jesus was born in a tumultuous time. Jesus was born to parents who could barely feed themselves, let alone a child. Jesus was born as a peasant in a no-name province in one of the largest and most powerful empires in the history of the region. “The wrong time to the wrong people in the wrong place.” That must be how the first people to hear what the gospels say about Jesus’s birth must have thought. As the titular song Jesus Christ Superstar, puts it, “Why did you [Jesus] pick such a backwards time and such a strange land?” It seems there would have been easier ways to enter the world than penniless and in danger at every turn.

Yet, Christ was not content to enter the world through easy means. A life that was to go the way that Christ’s life did was not possible to live in comfort or luxury. Christ was born into the worst parts of a suffering world, to live out a life of suffering and sorrow, and then to die a terrible death at the hands of the empire that had already caused so much suffering. Christ was not born to royalty, though he was a king, nor was he born in a temple despite being God. Christ was born into poverty, born in danger, born on the edge of oblivion, because ultimately the incarnation was God entering into humanity, the fullest expression of humanity.

Humanity, as defined by Job, are those people, “Few of days and full of troubles.” (Job 14:1) If nothing else can be learned from the year we have just seen rush by us at a slug’s pace, it is that Job was right. Life is a precious thing that we can easily see taken away. By disease, by time, by injustice and cruelty. Life is also a hard thing to stomach – because of pain, of fear, of a sense that the problems we face are simply too numerous to truly escape. Life is not easy, and anyone who tells us otherwise is selling something.

So, into the fullness of humanity, into a life that was hard from the outset, Jesus arrives. Not in a palace as a king, not in a temple as a God, but in the feed trough of a stable – perhaps walled in, perhaps in a cave, but certainly not the place for a child. Christ enters into hardship so that at all times and in all places, whatever a person may face, they can be sure that Christ has faced it as well. The biting cold of the winter winds, the heat of the noonday sun, the stinging pain of hunger, the burning of a fever – all these are things Christ experienced to share empathy and love with us. True solidarity between God and humanity, achieved through the difficult work of a child being born, and a life lived with little relief from the many problems that life presents us with.

In a difficult year, we celebrate Christmas far away from one another. Scattered once more during an important season of the Church, each of us in our own homes and all of us left wishing the world could be more like what we would want. Free of this pandemic, away from the constant precautions and worries that we face, back to a time when we can hug one another and shake hands and simply be present with one another without anything between us. We find Christmas coming to us, seemingly, in the wrong year – a year where we cannot greet it as we usually would, a year where sanctuaries sit darkened and we are all wrapped up warmly at home instead.

Yet, in the same way that the incarnation came at a seemingly inopportune time, to people who seemed ill prepared to be parents to a deity, maybe Christmas comes at just the right time to a people who are dearly in need of it. The promise of Christ coming long ago is that Christ will come again. The diseases that threaten us will eventually be done away with, all pain erased, and only goodness and glory shall remain. Today, as we gather across the void of a cold night and the warm buzz of electronics, we still somehow stand together at the manger. Like the Shepherds we see something we cannot fully understand, but that still fills our hearts with hope.

A child, shivering against a cold night, wrapped in a blanket by their teenage mother. A confused step-father, unsure how such a child could exist. A boy heralded by angels as a King and as God, but nothing more to the eyes than a child, just like any other. We are beside those inquisitive shepherds tonight, citizens of a broken and hurting world, but looking on a savior unlike any other. A savior willing to come down and get their hands dirty in human form, to live a life harder than most, simply to give us all a chance to know peace, and patience, and joy. We have waited a long time for Christmas, for Christ, for hope to spark within us once again. Wait no more, Christ is born in Bethlehem, and our salvation is made real. – Amen.

We Wait for Justice – Advent 4 2020

December 12, 2020 / John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Luke 1: 46-55.

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

Tear it all down. Deep in our hearts, in the deepest moments of our despair we feel those few words, sometimes verbatim and other times given different form. The broken world around us, aspirating under the weight of the compound sin of thousands of generations of humanity. We look at the structures that have been propped up, often against our better sense and our better angels. We see cruelty pass on from one generation to another, the seemingly endless pain caused to those in need by those who have more than they could ever want. We see the injustice of the world and find – sometimes verbatim and other times given different form – the sentiment entering into us, tear it all down.

Advent is a season of waiting, but it is also a season of penitence and of reflection. As we wait for the return of Christ, and to celebrate the incarnation of Christ in his Holy Nativity, we are supposed to look at the world around us and pray for it to be made right. Likewise, we are supposed to look within ourselves and pray, and work, to set ourselves right. We must seek out all that is wrong within us, we must dig deeper than we ever thought we could and root out evil. That sentiment which we hear in our most desperate moments, “tear it all down,” applies to ourselves as well. When we see how we have let ourselves become covetous or greedy, angry or wicked, when we see all that is wrong with us, we must turn our eyes to Heaven and ask for God to, “tear it all down.”

That particular language that I am choosing, “tearing down,” is something that I have already said we might have different language for describing. Let me now take a moment to put it other ways. A gardener in a garden who finds weeds choking the life out of their plants must uproot the weed to save the garden. A surgeon treating a disease may need to isolate and purge a portion of the body of whatever infects it. Evil, present in creation, must at time be excised.

Whatever the language used to describe it, the sentiment that our scripture today touches upon, and that we often feel when faced with the cruel and broken world around us, is that there are things that are wrong in this world, and they need to be dealt with. Sometimes the problems are obvious – personally or systemically. We know that we harbor hatred toward a single person, and so we search our heart to find how to transform our disposition from one of aggression and rage into one of love. We know that a specific policy hurts more people than it helps, and so we campaign to have it altered and for a more just solution to be reached.

Yet, as with anything, the deeper we dig the more complicated we find the situations we are in. If I dig deep in my heart, I can find that the negative aspects of my personality and my behavior are usually not to do with specific situations or people. If I find myself easily angered by a person, it is rarely because of them specifically – although one cannot deny that some people are just difficult to work with – it is usually because something about them touches a raw spot in my soul. Maybe their mannerisms remind me of someone who hurt me or perhaps I have turned them into a strawman built from an archetype which I had previously constructed for a certain kind of person.

Whatever the cause, if I do not examine my dispositions and my behavior toward other people regularly, then I may cause a great deal of harm, while all the time thinking that I am only acting naturally. Our conscience, that deep interface of the Spirit and the mind, must be examined constantly to ensure it is still aligned with the work and the will of God, the righteous things of God. Cruelty, spite, hate, arrogance, greed, all manner of other evils, can grow up in the shadows we are unwilling to examine. The unexamined heart is the breeding ground of all evils.

The Magnificat, the prayer that Mary offers in our scripture today, is one of the most profound pieces of all scripture. Offered by a poor woman struggling to survive in a world that cares nothing for her. Carrying a child who society has written off as illegitimate, engaged to a man who has had his own doubts about the child, living under the oppressive rule of the Roman empire. Mary, at the moment this prayer is recorded in scripture, has gone off to live with her cousin Elizabeth while she prepares to have her child. She escaped her hometown to protect herself, to protect her growing child, to protect the Christ.

Mary, alone like we can never understand, comes to her cousin, and finds that the stories of her own miraculous pregnancy were true. Her child, who would grow up to be John the Baptist, reacts in utero to the presence of Mary and Jesus, and Elizabeth blesses Mary as the Theotokos, the mother of the enfleshed Deity. Mary, suddenly greeted by her cousin in this manner, is given one final piece of assurance about where she is in life. She truly is the mother of the Messiah, of Jesus Christ the savior of all creation, she is truly not alone, not cursed, not abandoned. She is blessed.

In a flood of gratitude and prophecy Mary lifts up a song to God. Like us, she is aware of the world being broken around her. She lives as a minority in a backwaters corner of an Empire known for zealous revolutions. She lives as a woman who no one will believe about her child’s parentage. She has been forced away from home to see that her child is taken care of. She has suffered everything you could expect a person could, she has been pushed to the extreme, and in the same way that we often do, she longs to see all this evil put aside. Yet, her words to God are not, “Tear it all down,” they are, “God is tearing it all down.”

Every bit of evil in the Universe that has been piling itself up for centuries, God has hands upon and is ripping up at the roots. The axe is set to every tree that has produced poison fruit. The sickness of sin which has long afflicted the hearts of every soul on Earth is now to receive a physician capable of wiping it out for good. Evil is now to be excised from all the Earth.

The Magnificat is bold in its claims about God. God shows, not just mercy, but covenant loyalty and loving kindness to all generations.[1] God seeks out those who, on account of their self-love have cast others into the cold and scatters them in the same way. God dethrones tyrants who rule by force and puts the humble in their place. God cares for the poor and the hungry and God cuts off the abundance of the rich. The Magnificat is Mary looking at all those who have hurt her – the holier than thou, Caesar and Herod, the nobility that bled her town dry – and when she looks to the blessing of her child, to the Savior she will birth, she suddenly sees how God has turned the world upside down to bring about Justice.

The coming of Christ, whether in his first Advent in Nazareth or his second Advent at the end of history, is meant to disrupt the world in which we live. A savior comes to save us from all the evils of this world, and that means that a savior comes to do away with all evil. Christ the King must rule alone, not the wicked rulers of our own world. Christ the poor slave will liberate all people born of low estate, even if that upsets those who depended upon them to make their fortunes. Christ the incarnate Deity will conquer all evil in the universe, whether born of humanity or of evil itself. Everything that stands against God and goodness will be torn down. Our prayers to see our present state ended will be answered, of this there can be no doubt.

However, the Magnificat is not a simple prayer of revenge, nor should any words that leave our lips be. Lifting up our desires to God as we do, our intent should never be destructive, but redemptive. We do not want evil done away with out of spite, not out of anger, we want to have evil done away with so that good may flourish, that God may be seen in all of creation.

Whether it is evil within ourselves or within the world around us, we must trust as Mary did that God will bring about Justice. We as people of faith believe that God holds all of History in the divine hand. The arm of God is not too short to bring about justice and righteousness, nor can anything overpower God’s work in the universe. We must not despair, nor give into our own anger or hatred or cruelty. In all things we must trust that God will topple all evil and that the end of all things will set straight any crookedness that has gone unchecked.

Still, we do what we can to promote Justice in the here and now. Not through the taking up of arms or inciting violence, but through prayer and petition, through acts of mercy and of love. We must champion the oppressed, we must champion truth, we must champion the causes of God in all the world. We must love the stranger in our land, the poor at our doorstep, the enemy that spits in our face, and we must strive in all things to work alongside our God who is setting things right.

This Advent has been different than any we have celebrated before. This year has been a bunch of ups and downs that has shown us every weakness within ourselves and in the world that we live in. Pushed to the edge, forced to live in situations we never would have even dreamed of before. I hope that we stare at the accumulation of all our unwillingness to do right, at all our accumulated sin, at all the towers of injustice and scarcity we have seen, and we cry out for God to tear it all down.

Because from the ashes of the Towers and of the Asherah we have built against God will be born the promise of a new day. The hope of all ages emerging out of all the brokenness we cannot even give words for. From Bethlehem, in Judea, a light is shining dimly for all the world to see. Look now, let your heart be made glad in its weeping, Christ is coming soon. – Amen.

[1] The Greek word used for mercy in the Magnificat, ελεος, is used in Greek translations of the Old Testament to translate חֵסֵד which is a word used to describe God’s loyalty, love, and mercy toward members of the Covenant.

We Wait for Growth – Advent 3 2020

December 7, 2020 / John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Isaiah 61: 8-11

For I the Lord love justice, I hate robbery and wrongdoing; I will faithfully give them their recompense, and I will make an everlasting covenant with them. Their descendants shall be known among the nations, and their offspring among the peoples; all who see them shall acknowledge that they are a people whom the Lord has blessed. I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God; for he has clothed me with the garments of salvation, he has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels. For as the earth brings forth its shoots, and as a garden causes what is sown in it to spring up, so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations.

Sermon Text

Our first look into Advent Scripture took us to the book of Isaiah. That text sought to bridge the gap between human evil and God’s grace. God, Isaiah assures us, was not willing to let anything get in between God and ourselves. The mountains quake like a boiling pot seated over a fire, the valleys gave up their depth to become flat ground. When God arrives, we suddenly encounter every historic act of salvation.

Our text for this morning, taken from a little earlier in Isaiah, asks us to home in on another aspect of God’s work. We know that all will be set right in the triumphant return of Christ when all oppression ceases and all that remains in our actions toward one another is love and righteousness. Scarcity will no longer exist; God’s favor will be freely proclaimed to all people. Everything will be, in a word, perfect. The question that comes from such a grand vision of the end of history is what we are to do until then. If the end of all things is settled, and perfection awaits all the faithful in the world to come, then how do we spend our time on earth? How do we live out the wait before the return of Christ?

There are many passages about our responsibility to be ready for Christ upon his arrival, as well as a fair few explanations of specific behavior to be encouraged and discouraged ahead of it. However, I want to speak about what we must understand to be our general responsibility in existing as Holy People awaiting a Holy God. That is, we must be a people who grow in righteousness over the course of our life. We must become steadily more and more invested in all that God has in store for us, more in line with the vision of life which Christ has shown us. The Church, in all that it does, must become a people where-in, “Righteousness and praise spring up,” wherever they are found.

The Church grew in the early centuries of its existence precisely because it stood out from the Roman society which it inhabited. While the Roman people were certainly not some cartoonish vision of evil, there were certain societal and cultural practices which stood against the general morality of the Church. The Church, for example, was popular among societal pariahs who were not usually allowed in polite company. The Church and its egalitarian practices allowed for women, the poor, and non-citizens to participate more fully in a community than the wider culture would allow. Still more, in moments of disaster and danger – when people were sick or when children were abandoned to die of exposure on hilltops – the Church took these people in and cared for them.

Even before the inception of the Church there are stories of righteous people among the Jewish people. Such a person is often called a Tzadik – one who is righteous. Scripture captures such images of righteous people. Joseph in his salvation of the Ancient Near East from starvation, Boaz in his redemption of Ruth, Ruth as the model gentile convert, Mordecai and Esther as the model of imperial opposition. Still more we have the example of those like Daniel, and the martyrs of the intertestamental books of the Maccabees, those who lived righteously and died for their faith as a result.

Scripture, history, and all other stories that we tell record multiple layers of our understanding of the world. We record the plain happenings of an event on one level: what happened, who was there, and what came as a result of it. On another level comes our understanding of the morality of a situation. Regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not, most stories we tell take a side. Unless you find a truly great historian or storyteller, their own biases will leak into their retelling. Finally, the stories we tell, in light of our biases, usually demonstrate what aspects we as a culture value above all others – what do we value in people?

There are many more aspects of stories that demonstrate other things about us than I could ever name. However, there are also aspects of our stories which hide away rather than reveal aspects of our world. For example, the actions of villains will be inflated to fit their evil character and, in the same way, the heroes that we lift up will often have their rough edges sanded off to ensure no one is scandalized by their actions. It would be hard to deny that many of our struggles today culturally stem from our willingness to villainize and to sanitize flippantly, from an unwillingness to acknowledge good and evil and instead to paint in broad strokes those we either support or oppose.

The Biblical record is stark in that, on the whole, it does not shy away from presenting the evil and the good a person does and leaves the audience to decide what to do with that information. Those who participated in any way in our Genesis study will remember that at every turn, whether we looked at Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, or his twelve sons, the good and the bad were there for everyone to see. In some ways it keeps us grounded in understanding that our “heroes,” are just as human as we are, but in others it also made clearer that humanity contains multitudes. The great hospitality of Abraham to those in need, contrasted with his seeming unwillingness to care for his family most of the time, paints a complicated image of what it means to be a righteous person.

The promise of God, across all scripture, is a promise of redemption. The brokenness of the world is meant to be genuinely made right. This is not achieved through pretending all is well or through erasing the consequences of a person’s actions, but through genuinely transforming the heart of that person to allow them to act righteously in line with God’s will in the world. Through the slow death of evil within them and the gradual birth of goodness in its place.

The most compelling stories that we can tell as a people are those stories where someone grows and becomes good over the course of the narrative. We want to see the growth of a character, not just to have a paragon of virtue from beginning to end. Les Misérables, the book more so than the films or musical, tells us about a petty thief who becomes a noble and philanthropic father. The Lord of the Rings shows us the journey of a King who is unwilling to take the throne, slowly taking on his role as a leader to his people. Even beyond the realm of simple narratives, we crave to see in others the growth we long for in ourselves.

The life of the Apostle Paul is perhaps the most striking example of this in scripture. Raised up to be a good man by all accounts, Paul had a terminal case of hatred in his heart. While we are never given more of an example of this manifesting than his hatred toward the Christians, we can assume he probably had more than a few groups he felt this way about. His zeal for murder overcame his better angels and as he rode out to round up more victims, God intervened and started to transform him. He was healed by one of the people he had set out to destroy, and the process of making an apostle from an enemy of the church had begun.

The Church, in whatever form it has taken throughout history, needs to be more proactive about growing in righteousness. From at least the time of Constantine, and probably before, the Church has complicated its mission through entanglements with all kinds of worldly business. Wrapped up in partisan politics, in acquisition of wealth, in striving to take power over government, and even the acquisition of military might. What began as a group devoted to love of God and neighbor, to doing what was right even when and especially if it was hard, became harder and harder to pick out from a sea of socio-political groups trying to get an edge over everyone else.

The Church, as defined by Methodist doctrine, is found wherever the people of God gather, the pure word of God is preached, and the sacraments duly administered. In a place where this is true, we should see people growing more and more righteous every day. The sacraments deliver grace to us, the word of God lights our heart aflame, and our gathered prayers open our ears and our hearts to the needs of those around us. To be the Church, is to grow, because to be alive is to grow. No living creature exists that does not have some sort of mechanism to allow its continued existence, and for the Church to be alive it must continue to move forward into righteousness.

We must choose what we want to be in life. Whether it is to go about our three score and ten just checking occasional boxes and meeting the bare minimum of expectations, or if we will push beyond and really invest in the Kingdom of God which we have been called to be a part of. We should look at the kind of stories we tell and how they align or do not align with the vision of humanity which Christ offers us. Do we lift up heroes in our tales for being Christlike? Or do we lift them up for satisfying our earthly desires?

If we succeed, and if we grow more holy each day that passes, we will eventually find ourselves inching toward perfection. Not to say we will not sin, because to err is human, but to say that we are perfectly intentional in doing what is right at all times. That we stand blameless before all we know because even our failings are produced by a desire to do what Christ wills of us. If we truly wish to find our time waiting for Christ to be fulfilled and blessed, we must spend it developing our ability to do what is right.

When people tell stories about us, about the Church as a whole, we must ensure that the stories they tell are redemptive, powerful, and glorify God. We are writing a story now to be told for all time, let us do our part to make it a good one. – Amen.

We Wait for Christ – Advent 2 2020

November 30, 2020 / John Langenstein / Leave a comment

2 Peter 3: 8-15a

But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed.

Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home.

Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things, strive to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation.

Sermon Text

Impatience is a killer. Life, as short as it is, cannot be taken in a hurry. Rushing from one thing to another, grabbing onto whatever gives us the most satisfaction in a single moment, it all makes the short span we have on this Earth pass even faster. We cannot afford to be impatient people, because impatience ultimately wastes our time more than simply waiting out inconveniences.

I myself am guilty of trying to get things done quickly or with less work and instantly finding that I have trapped myself in more work that takes more time than if I had just done something simple and straightforward. Recently, my greatest offense takes the form of a pumpkin roll in which I thought that I could stop beating the eggs when they were frothy instead of stiff and that I could roll it once instead of the suggested twice. As a result I made a delicious, albeit messy and flat, pumpkin pile, rather than a tall and stately pumpkin roll. It did taste good though.

Beyond baking though, there are far more serious consequences that can come from rushing into a situation. Speaking too quickly when we are upset or angry. Rushing through important work at our job and thereby complicating someone else’s or even hurting those our job serves. Still more, there are few things that cause more strife in our hearts than the continual heartbreak that impatience can give us. When we are waiting for something and unwilling to dwell in that wait, then we find our heart broken every moment that we do not receive the outcome that we wish. An unwillingness to wait things out, produces pain, after pain, after pain.

Of course, it is not as though our impatience is always meant to be selfish or lazy. Oftentimes we become impatient for very good things, things that we must want to come as soon as possible. When we are waiting for test results to tell us what kind of or if any treatment will work. When we have a loved one who went out somewhere and we do not hear from them even as the snow begins to fall out our window. When the news is just too bad for too long.

In all these cases it would be wrong of us to be alright with the present situation. If we became complacent and apathetic to the pain of those around us, even of ourself, then we have deprived ourselves of some of our most basic and authentic aspects of our humanity. We are people born into a broken world. As we become more and more Christlike over time, it only makes sense that the broken world would break our heart as well. We are people who, for love of others and of goodness must cry out periodically, “How long, O’ Lord!”

2 Peter, the book from which our scripture comes, captures a moment in the biblical witness which is usually called, “The Delay of the Parousia,” or in other words, “The Delay of Christ’s Return.” This period marks the end of the first century in which the expectant Church, having believed that Christ would have come back to save them within a single generation, now had to accept that their wait would be much longer than that. The tone of the letters which the apostles and teachers wrote out in this period changed. No longer was their a sense that the church had only a few days to repent and to become good, but that they now had many years to remain good.

It is easy to reform one’s behavior or beliefs for a short period of time. Afterall, we can always keep to a diet for a day or two, maybe even stop cursing for a day or two. Drag that out over a few months and a few years, suddenly the struggle becomes much harder. We all can be holy in a moment, we can ever be righteous in extremis, but the lingering question must be whether or not we can endure in goodness. Can we love beyond the superficial, can we keep the faith across months and months, years and years, and disappointment after disappointment?

Our scripture today gives us a vision for how we can endure, and that is to take time out of our hands and put it into God’s. The author, looking at the Psalms for inspiration, makes it clear that God does not see time as we do. While we are fixated on minute details of every second and squeezing the most out of them, simultaneously draining them of their worth, God is invested in a larger view. The momentary troubles we face, even those that seem insurmountable, are attended to by a God for whom a thousand years are as a day, and for whom a day is a thousand years.

The brilliance of 2 Peter’s conception of God’s time is that it can be read in either direction. For God a single second lasts and eternity, and yet at the same time eternity is just a passing second. God is intimately involved in every moment of the life that we live yet is also looking decades and centuries down the road to how that moment will be played out. God is active and involved in the short and long term, and we have to let God be involved in every moment we face.

We wait for Christ every day as the Church. We wait for the Kingdom to be truly inaugurated and all things set right in Christ’s victorious return, but we also wait for the occasional deliverances we receive every day. When the power of sin is broken in our life in a new way, when our hardness of heart is melted, when the miracle we have been waiting for finally comes our way. We wait and we wait and we wait, would it not be good to know that God is not only in control, but waiting alongside us.

When God is invested, not only in the big picture, but in every passing moment as well, then we can be confident of two things. Firstly, God is not acting cruelly by making us wait, because God sees infinite number of steps down the road. Secondly, God is not disinterested with our present feelings and worries because God is actively involved in the most minute of details and the shortest increments of time.

We must develop patience, not out of an unwillingness to acknowledge the dire straights we currently inhabit, but from an earnest belief that God is with us and looking ahead of us no matter what comes our way. We are told in 2 Peter that God is not waiting to test us, not dragging feet to put off setting things right. God is taking all the time that is needed to bring about a kingdom people by as many people as possible, a kingdom founded on righteousness and imbued with all the qualities that produce true community.

We must continue to pray to God to bring about goodness. We must continue to look to the future and the goodness that God will bring. However, in doing so we must not become impatient, breaking our heart with every passing moment. We must trust in God who has given us an abundance of goodness and somehow try and take the same view of time that God has. Every second, an infinitude in itself, must be treasured as though it were a millennium. In the same way, when something drags out and takes longer than we would like or expect, we must try and put that time in perspective of the long arc of history.

We must be patient and await God’s recreation of the world and of ourselves. Patience, like anything is a skill that we must develop over time. It begins with taking time in the little things we are given, in taking time to do something right the first time. It begins in patiently waiting through whatever delays we face in life. Overtime though, we see time as God does. Every moment invested with all the importance of every decade, and all things working together to bring us into something new and sacred.

We wait now for Christ, and we pray for Christ to come near to us. – Amen.

We Wait for Redemption – Advent 1 2020

November 24, 2020 / John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Isaiah 64:1-9

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake at your presence— as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil— to make your name known to your adversaries, so that the nations might tremble at your presence!

When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence. From ages past no one has heard, no ear has perceived, no eye has seen any God besides you who works for those who wait for him. You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways. But you were angry, and we sinned; because you hid yourself we transgressed.

We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one who calls on your name, or attempts to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquity.

Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand. Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever. Now consider, we are all your people.

Sermon Text

Advent breaks upon us, like the first rays of light shining out on the horizon. Dawn is coming for the world, the arrival of the true source of all goodness. God returning to God’s people, and all things being set right in a rush of grace and justice and mercy. The dawning of a new era of God’s presence on earth with us. We look to the skies, we wait for the night to pass into the day, we wait for Christ to come and be among us. Advent, the season of arrival, is for us a season in which we wait.

Anticipating the next act of God is nothing new. From the moment that humanity first found itself apart from God, it has looked for God to come to be among them. Though we stray from God, the call of the Spirit upon our life always brings us back to looking for more of God. We long to see God here, with us, and we long to benefit from the presence of God in all the ways that we possibly could.

The brokenness of the world around us demands that something happen to set the world straight. God reaching down and scooping us out of it would be one thing, but we are offered something much better. God’s work was not to pull us out of the darkness of the world but to transform darkness into light, evil into good. God’s work in creation was to redeem it from its fallen state, not to abandon some of it and rescue others. As we wait for Christmas and for the fullest celebration of God coming to be with us, we do so with anticipation of a world set right.

Our scripture for today, from the book of Isaiah, is written after the Babylonian Captivity of Judah had ended. The Kingdom was not functioning at its fullest potential just yet, but people had returned to their ancestral home and were finding their way back into patterns of life their grandparents had known. How surprising then, that they discovered that the world was not magically made better because they moved back into their ancient home.

The final chunk of Isaiah is a mixture of prophecy describing God’s goodness and Judah’s continual failure to live as they ought to. In biting terms, the prophet describes the land of Judah as a place filled with cruelty, where the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper. Returning to the land of blessing which benefited them in the past was not enough to wash away the wickedness of the people’s hearts. Simply moving location or changing our situation will always do nothing unless our heart is likewise changed. The people, now several generations removed from the original Babylonian exiles, find themselves falling into the same pitfalls that their ancestors did.

God, the covenant partner of all the faithful, expresses frustration at this through the prophet. “Though you are free from Babylon, you are not free from your sins!” The people have been freed from the empire that had enslaved them, but they were not willing to live into the freedom that they had been offered. What was God to do? Another exile? Another punishment or plague?

God’s response to the continued rebellion of the faithful was to extend still more grace to them. The promise of the final chapters of Isaiah is that all will be made new, that the Heaven’s the Earth, and even the people themselves will be renewed. In the midst of the promises God makes to God’s people, our scripture for today breaks out. A powerful prayer to God to come and act, to come and redeem God’s people from the troubles that they face – both the problems of the world around them and that they cause for themselves.

The opening line of our scripture, “tear open the Heavens and come down, so that the mountains would quake…” Is meant to bring to mind in its hearers the Song of Deborah (Judges 5.) After overcoming the Canaanites that had threatened the Israelites, Deborah saw God as their deliverer – not her or anyone else involved. She describes God moving mountains to clear the way for God’s people. God’s love for God’s people was such that nothing – not even the mountains were willing to get in between the two.

The prophet recalls the goodness of God but identifies that things are not as they should be. While immediately recalling the Babylonian exile in citing that God became angry and, “hid” from Judah, the reality is that human sin is never tied to a single era or action. Since the Garden humanity has transgressed, and in the process of our sinning we find ourselves removed from the presence of God. Does God hide? Or do we simply cease to look? The two feel much like one another and in the prophet’s prayer we see God given particular agency over the relationship.

There are several things in life that can darken our view of God and seemingly hide God away from us. When we live our lives wrongly, chasing after darkness and not light, we will find it hard to see God. Likewise, when disaster overtakes us, and we are propelled into a place of uncertainty we can lose track of God. However, no matter how we find ourselves pushed away from the divine presence; we feel the need to find it again. God, the source of life, is what we need to truly be alive. When we feel cut off, for any reason, then we feel lesser because of it.

God’s promise then to us is that we can be made alive, that the present darkness is not forever, that redemption awaits us even when we stray as far as we could ever dream away from God’s goodness. We are offered redemption through being remade into the image of what God would have us be. No longer are we the, “filthy cloth,” but washed clean and made beautiful. No longer do we “fade away” like leaves, but we are filled with life and made to shine out in beauty. Revivification is one thing, restoration to what was, but we are pushed somehow farther and given more life and more goodness than we ever had before.

We have talked several times about the things that have happened in this year and oftentimes it seems like this is the worst year we could ever dream of. However, even in the midst of that, we must not pretend that an awful year can keep us from the love of God. Disaster shows us who we are, pushes back layers of pretention and posturing and opens us up to show the true content of our heart. For the people of Judah who had their own disasters, who found that coming home and being restored to life were not one and the same, it revealed that they were far from what they ought to have been.

The prayer of the prophet offers a final word of hope. After describing God as a potter who can reform the clay of our being into its proper shape, the prophet calls to mind one final scripture from Judah’s past. The book of Lamentations, perhaps the most barren book of the Bible, ends with a cry for help. “Restore us to yourself, O Lord, that we may be restored; renew our days as of old – unless you have utterly rejected us and are angry with us beyond measure.” (Lamentations 5:9)

The prophet’s prayer in Isaiah 64 seeks to soothe the troubled heart of Lamentations 5. God, do not be angry. God, consider that we are you people. The prayer of the prophets often contains the truth of God hidden away in their intercession. God will not remain angry. God will not forget that we are God’s people. No matter what barriers come between us and God – ones that we put up, ones put up against us – they cannot stand forever. God will not utterly reject us, but God will bring us close and set us right. As we wait throughout Advent, we wait for God. We wait for Redemption. We wait for mountains to quake as God comes running to our aid. God our maker will be God our redeemer, and our redeemer will live among us. – Amen

A Holy Kingdom – Lectionary 11/22/2020

November 17, 2020 / John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Matthew 25:31-46

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. Then the king will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’

Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’

Then he will say to those at his left hand, ‘You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’

Then they also will answer, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?’ Then he will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Sermon Text

Thanksgiving will be here in a few days, and it will be different for us in a way we have never seen before. We have never had to worry about whether family gatherings will become spreader events until now, never had to worry over whether it was safe for grandparents and grandchildren to mingle with one another. Four days away from us, the day that usually brings about feasting and celebrating, is causing an uneasy feeling in our stomachs already. How can we be thankful in so hard of a year? How can we gather in safety in the midst of an ever-worsening pandemic?

Ultimately, our answers must be developed individually by each person and family who must make them. While one family may be relatively certain of their ability to gather safely, another will know that this year must be a smaller affair, for the good of all people involved. For some of us, finding the things to be thankful for will be easier than for others. While we as a society and a community have been given ample reason to mourn, there have been flashes of hope and joy despite the darkness that overshadows us. For some of us the light outshines the darkness, for others we simply cannot pretend to be happy right now, nor should we be made to be.

Thanksgiving is weird this year, everything is weird this year. It would be wrong of us to pretend anything but that reality is off kilter. Even we who know that God has not vacated the throne, that the universe is still guided by its architect, we cannot help but be a little off balance as of late. Thanksgiving is coming, a holiday to pull us out of ourselves and to survey the bounty which God has set before us. How will we be able to celebrate in the midst of tragedy, confusion, and altered plans? We will do so by digging deeper into the faith that has saved us and in accepting that that does not mean pretending all is well.

This Sunday also celebrates the Reign of Christ, the final Sunday before Advent in which we acknowledge what the wait will be for. For four weeks we will be talking about the dawning of a Kingdom, a Kingdom we inhabit and yet have never seen. Today is the last week we count after the Pentecost, next week the first day we count down from till Christmas. On the edge of the mundane we now begin to approach the sacred and ineffable space of Christ’s arrival into the world – that which occurred long ago and that which we know not the day or hour of.

Usually, the dates of Thanksgiving and reign of Christ have a week or so between them, but not this year. Why would we think otherwise, but to have our rhythm thrown off with an early Advent? The timing, as much an accident of civic and religious calendars overlapping as anything, nonetheless has the ability to offer us something we would not otherwise immediately grasp. The order of our observances this year allow us to realize that the reality of God sitting on the throne and our ability to give thanks are connected. We are able to give praise and to give thanks in the midst of hardship because we know deep down that God is in control, and as difficult as that reality can be to reconcile with our lived experience it is an endless well of potential and hope.

God sits on the throne, and God offers us that at the end of all things there will be a setting straight of the crookedness of the world. The illnesses that keep us from our loved ones abolished, the poverty that keeps people from living to their fullest potential erased, and all hardness of heart and brokenness of spirit wiped away with the abundant grace of God who attends to the needs of all who love him. We started the month with All Saints Day, dreaming of Heaven, we will end it with Advent, God coming down to bring heaven to us, today let us find time betwixt and between to give thanks.

Our scripture today is the third in a line of texts in which Jesus explains where the Kingdom of God can be found. It is found in those who are prepared, even in the moments that they fall asleep on duty, to meet Jesus. It is found in those who steward their worldly possessions well and appropriately make use of God’s gifts. Now today we find that God’s kingdom will be peopled by those who enact the principles of the last two parables. It is all fine and good to talk about being good with money or ready to help, but to actually do things for the benefit of others – that is another thing entirely.

Christ lays out for us the difficult task of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the imprisoned. In other words, doing the work that no one else would like to do. The delicate works of love, often categorized as acts of mercy or charity, are the Church’s true mission in the world. When all else passes away, and our ability to love remains with us in the perfection of paradise, it will be these things that demonstrate whether we were able to truly take on our Christian call in this life.

Love, the oldest and most powerful of all God’s gifts. This is the foundation on which all of creation rests. Without love, we are nothing. Without love everything is left to chance and the whims of passing time. Love invests meaning into anything it touches, and our ability to act in love is ultimately the greatest sign of our adherence to a Christian life. As the hymn goes, “They Shall Know we are Christians by our… love” In the rush of the modern world, with bombardments of bad news available with just a click of the mouse or a flick of the finger, it can be easy for us to be overwhelmed. The sense of dread that fills us, of problems too big to do anything about, or too distant to worry over. Disaster around us, or disaster that happens to us, either are enough to threaten to force us from love and into despair, to lose our footing on the surety of God’s love for us and our need to love one another.

Our scripture today is not just a warning to get our life together before judgment. It is a reminder that, in the midst of our suffering, Christ is with us. While the primary message of this parable is in line with those we’ve discussed in previous weeks, namely “Be alert and be ready and be righteous,” it is also the first to show us how Christ continually appears to us. The parable is clear that Christ is somehow present when we help those in need – implicitly this means that God never leaves those who are in distress.

Much like the beatitudes, we are simultaneously given an imperative and an indicative statement. When Jesus said blessed are those who mourn, the statement stands on its own as a statement that God cares for those who suffer loss. It also inspires those not in mourning to empathize with those who are. The same can be said for the blessings of the peacemakers, the poor in spirit, and of all those blessed statuses which Christ lists in Matthew 5.

When someone is without food, without water, naked, alone, in prison, or any dire straight of life, they are especially beloved of God. Though it is not possible, nor advisable, to make a hierarchy of God’s concern for God’s creation, scripture is clear that those who are suffering are those who God desires to be near more than any others. Joy leads us to celebrate, it leads us to dance and sing, but it also risks us becoming blind to the source of our gifts. In suffering, as dark and dismal as it is, it often becomes clearer to us that the one permanent source of goodness in life is God.

As anyone of us would attest, simply knowing that God is in control is not assurance enough. We know God loves us, we know God reigns, and we know that after Christ comes again all will be set right. Knowing that and feeling it are different things, especially in the midst of a difficult year where everything is up in the air, when daily the list of worries and fears we have, have seemed to multiply exponentially.

It is not always in triumph that thanksgiving comes into our heart. The elation we feel after some great success or happenstance in our life, after good news or an addition to our life, that is a real and incredible summit from which to praise God. However, Thanksgiving can also be a quiet thing. When we find ourselves sitting in a chair late at night, unable to stop our mind from wandering and our body from rejecting sleep. When nothing has gone right, and the noise of a world in tumult threatens to overtake us. In the moment, just before our eyes shut, when we find a moment of peace – that can be a profound place to give thanks.

I often think of the song, “Hallelujah.” The song itself can be taken to mean a great many things, but the lyric that lodges in my mind, and comes to me in the darkest moments of my life, is that which describes love like this, “it’s not a cry you can hear at night, it’s not somebody who has seen the light, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.” Love, both the love we show in loving one another and that we render to God in thanksgiving, can be loud and joyful, but it can also be broken and tired.

This Thanksgiving let us celebrate not as we feel compelled to by culture – with shouts of acclaim and a blindness to our own pain. Instead, let us come to the altar as we are able. If that means we can shout out the praises of God without reservation, then we should do so. However, if it means that we can only bring ourselves to say the Lord’s prayer quietly as we lay ourselves down to sleep, then so be it. Life is never static, and life with God is the same way.

God holds us in the palm of God’s hand. Christ is beside us and the Spirit within us. God is on his throne and as we work out how we will gather with family and friends this week, let us allow ourselves to be comforted by that fact. God is near to us and God embraces us. Sometimes, that is enough. Our thanksgiving can simply be accepting the love we are offered and resting in the knowledge that – even when all is not well – something is constant. The love of God is ours forever. – Amen.

Make the Most of your Gifts – Lectionary 11/15/2020

November 10, 2020November 10, 2020 / John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Matthew 25: 14-30

“For it is as if a man, going on a journey, summoned his slaves and entrusted his property to them; to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. The one who had received the five talents went off at once and traded with them, and made five more talents. In the same way, the one who had the two talents made two more talents. But the one who had received the one talent went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money. After a long time the master of those slaves came and settled accounts with them. Then the one who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five more talents, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me five talents; see, I have made five more talents.’

His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’ And the one with the two talents also came forward, saying, ‘Master, you handed over to me two talents; see, I have made two more talents.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.’ Then the one who had received the one talent also came forward, saying, ‘Master, I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.’ But his master replied, ‘You wicked and lazy slave! You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received what was my own with interest.

So take the talent from him, and give it to the one with the ten talents. For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away. As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’

Sermon Text

We are all given certain gifts in life. Material, spiritual, or otherwise. Every aspect of our life overlaps in a way that makes it difficult to separate them out from one another. Our beliefs about faith overlap with our beliefs about politics with our beliefs about economics with our beliefs about et cetera and so on and even what-have-you. All these complex networks of belief interface with our God-given abilities and our learned skills, and then are worked out in the resources we have available to us.

In the same way that we can not separate the sapiential aspects of our life – those invisible qualities of mind and soul – we cannot separate out easily the resources that are available to us. Perhaps we have been given the gift of a good mentor, or of a family with enough money to put us into programs that let us learn more efficiently either job skills or academics. Beyond our developmental years, we have infinite junctions of providence and chance that see us to the place we are in life. Sometimes our innate abilities mesh well with the circumstances we have been handed, sometimes they do not. Think of all the mathematicians who were unable to practice their trade because they lived in subsistence farms. Think of all the amazing craftsmen who were forced to work in a gig economy.

The interface of our skills – learned or innate – and our resources to work those skills out is where our life occurs. In the liminal spaces where the world within us, encounters the world around us, through the life we live. It is impossible to discuss how we as Christian’s must act, without examining the resources available to us. The Saint with all the fruits of the Spirit, but no material wealth, will have a different role in life than the person with few of them and a great deal of wealth. The life of the Christian does not enjoy a one-size-fits-all job description but must be understood based on all aspects of our life.

Wealth, whether in the form of paper money, our credit, fiat money, or land holdings all consist of the greatest peril to the Christian life. Jesus spoke a great deal about money throughout his entire ministry on Earth. Mammon, the personification of wealth, was spoken of by Jesus as a false-God that rivaled the God of Israel. More than that, Jesus’ teaching implied that, while it was impossible to truly serve God and Mammon, most people did so. Christianity was a movement that grew primarily among the poor and disenfranchised, finding little purchase with the wealthy – except for those who gave it all away to live in poverty. Jesus was very clear – money in itself was not evil, but it was a sword hanging over the head of any Christian, at any moment threatening to take their eternal life in exchange for a love of material goods.

The Parable of the Talents is a testament to the need for careful stewardship of wealth. The scenario is drawn in which three slaves are given various amounts of talents. One receives five talents, another two, and finally another receives one. The exact measurement of a talent is unknown, but based on a composite of sources a basic estimate of 33 kgs can be made.[1] Because we are dealing with weight, the talent could be made up of any material but was usually gold or silver. For our purposes, we will assume a talent of silver – a more common currency to use.

Using this amount, we can come up with several valuations of a talent of silver. For us, in the modern world, 33 kg of silver would be worth $26,929. Not bad at all, most of a year’s wages for a good deal of people. However, in the ancient world, the silver denarius was the base currency of the Roman empire, so it would be better to see how many of those a talent was worth. A talent was worth almost 5,000 denarii, or at least 13.3 years’ worth of salary for the average wage worker. While, again, an interpolation, if we replace one denarius a day with the minimum wage in the US, we will come to $311,000.

In the ancient world, and to most of us present, to have that much money at one time would be an impossibility. Now imagine that someone else is handed $611,000 and $1,555,000. The extreme amount of money given in each case, to slaves – people with little to no property of their own – was meant to make the eyes of the crowd water. The parable of the talents is not about a small investment being handled by a few servants; it is a massive investment that is to be carefully attended to.

It seems that the amount of money, being as ridiculously high as it was, was meant to put at a distance the amount of money in the parable while simultaneously bringing the meaning closer. If Jesus had said, and I will use modern money for our example, that one person was given $75,000 the next $50,000 and the next $30,000 then we as the audience would fixate on those dollar amounts. We would say, “Well, I make $40,000 a year, so not much is expected of me.” If we made less than Jesus’ estimate, we would not even think about what responsibilities we had.

However, by making the amounts of money untenable to most people, Jesus was saying that the amount of money is inconsequential. What we receive in life, whether it be $5 or $300,000 is something we must be responsible with. We cannot waste it, but neither can we let it rot – locked away and gathering dust. The material goods we receive – whether for our wage or as a gift – all rightfully belong to God at the end of things. Not just in tithes or gifts to Churches, but in service to all of humanity, and the denial of our own selfishness.

We see in this Parable, two slaves who are able to use their money well. Though the Parable imagines a business dealing, our faith demands we see something more grounded to our daily life. The wise slaves give freely to those in need, they invest in programs that help the poor and powerless of the world. They spend their money to benefit those around them, to better themselves for ministry and service through education and training. They live their life with one hand on the pulse of the world around them, knowing exactly what it needs, and the other reaching into their pockets to make sure that that need is met.

The third slave, they are not so wise. They are afraid of mishandling money, so they store it away. We can imagine they take some out here and there, to pay for expenses or occasional purchases, but they always make sure to replace it as quickly as possible. They sit on a mound of dirt that hides a fortune, and they never let it see the light of day. The precious metals become tarnished and worn, and at the end of his time as steward he has nothing to show but the initial investment that was made.

We often tie this parable to our modern understanding of, “Talents,” that is the skills we innately have. This is apt, because the word we use today, comes from an interpretation of this parable that comes about in the middle ages.[2] However, if we remove the economic context of this parable, we miss the point of it. Jesus is using money for a reason here, we should think of the parable in economic terms, at least in part. To focus only on God’s immaterial gifts, is to deny the fact we have a financial responsibility as Christians.

John Wesley wrote a beautiful sermon on how we are to handle wealth as Christians, and it is usually summarized in three bullet points.[3] Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can. The Christian should be industrious, as much as they are safely able. They should be thrifty, enough to ensure they have the means to provide for themselves and their family. However, they must be willing to turn over their wealth to the purposes of God, whenever they present themselves. Despite receiving a salary of something like $150,000 a year, and despite handling much more than that as the head of Methodism in England. John Wesley died with about $20 to his name, if that.[4] He did not die poor, he died having wasted nothing and given much.

While a separate sermon could be given on action based responses to this parable, we will sit in the monetary considerations today. Not because I want you to tithe more, our churches are pretty faithful about that. Not because of any particular need to guilt anyone about recent purchases or bank statements, I have no idea how anyone here spends their money. However, I lift up this economical reading – that asks that, regardless of income we think of how we use our money, because it is a necessary teaching.

Jesus told us that we are to live a life divorced from love of wealth. Not only that, but we are told that it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God. While we think of ourselves as people of little means, we must acknowledge our global wealth. Very few gathered here, though I will not deny it is possible, will find themselves below the top 1% of global wealth. We are rich in terms of the world, and though we live in a society that demands much of us and our pocketbooks, we must remember that we are not people given one talent or even two. To the rest of the world, we look like we have five all together.

So, think about the weight of the money in your pocket, in your bank account. Be responsible in using it, in saving it, and giving it. However, remember that our love is not for the clinking of coin or the accumulation of wealth, but the salvation of souls and freedom of the oppressed.

[1] John William Humphrey, John Peter Oleson, Andrew Neil Sherwood, Greek and Roman technology, p. 487.

[2] “Talent” in The Online Etymology Dictionary. Available at: https://www.etymonline.com/word/talent

[3] John Wesley. “The Use of Money.” In John Wesley’s Sermons. (Nashville: Abingdon Press. 1991.)

[4] Charles Edward White, “Four Lessons on Money from One of the World’s Richest Preachers” Christian History 19 (1988): 24.

Stay Awake – Lectionary 11/08/2020

November 2, 2020 / John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Matthew 25: 1-13

“Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps.

The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.

Sermon Text

Weddings are a time for celebration. In the ancient world, the bringing together of families meant many things. It meant that heirs would be born, that business could be conducted. It meant that a feast would be held and that the community could eat and that distant relatives could gather to share news. The festivities would have involved the entire village, sometimes an entire tribe. Marriage, then as it is now, was not a small matter.

No wonder that scripture, especially the New Testament but many of the prophets, used the language of marriage to describe how things were in the world. God was often described as the husband of the faithful. Israel, Judah, the Church – all are variously described as God’s wife. The covenant of marriage, after all, is perhaps one of the closest parallels a person can have to their relationship with God. Marriage, though not a sacrament in the Methodist Church, teaches us as much about God as the Eucharist or Baptism.

The image that our scripture for today gives us stands out, because whereas most of the marriage imagery in scripture puts God in the position of husband, and the Church in the position of bride, this parable puts forward that God is indeed the groom of a wedding, but that the expectant Church is best described as bridesmaids. A strange shift to be sure! How can the beloved of God, those Covenant partners bound to God throughout eternity, how can they now be relegated to the position of bridesmaids?

We cannot approach this scripture and assume that Jesus was using the image of a groom in the same way he does elsewhere. To do so would be to miss the exact reason why Jesus is shifting the language away from the Church as bride to the church as Bridesmaid. We must accept that Jesus has changed the terms and discern why such a change might occur.

The role of bridesmaids in the ancient world differed depending on the culture they inhabited. We all have heard stories of how, in ancient Europe, bridesmaids dressed identically to the bride, ensuring that if anyone tried to kidnap the bride before the wedding, they were less likely to succeed. Some others put forward that the original purpose of these members of the wedding party was to do exactly as their name suggests. That their duty was to be a, “maid,” to the bride and serve her the day of the wedding and beyond.

Yet, in the first century the role of bridesmaid appeared to be mostly ceremonial. Though we do not have huge amounts of information directing us to the exact role of these women in Jesus’ era we do know that there were several universal features of Jewish weddings in the ancient world. among these were vows made under a canopy, the exchange of rings, singing and dancing, and a procession of light.[1]

Depending on where a person lived, this procession might take different forms. Sometimes the poor would lead the groom to the ceremony in exchange for money, sometimes a single person carrying a lamp on a pole, but in Judea the custom was for a group of women to carry torches or lamps. These women served as the escort for the husband to the bride and they carried their light proudly. They were unmarried women seemingly representing the life that the bride was leaving behind and bringing with them the catalyst to begin her new life, namely her husband. The procession carried these torches and lamps, and sometimes even danced with them.

The role that these women served, the light to guide the groom to the bride, was completely ceremonial in many respects. The groom knew where the bride was. Even if it was dark, it would not be unreasonable for him to bring his own lamp or bring someone along to carry one for him. No, the point of the lamp bearers was not to illumine the path of the groom, but to walk alongside him. They were signs of his authenticity, heralds to his coming. They walked alongside, and ahead of the groom, so everyone knew that a feast was about to begin.

The image we are given in our scripture of attendants waiting for the groom to arrive was evidently common among Jewish weddings of Jesus’ time. The “Bride Price,” a financial display by the husband to demonstrate his seriousness about the marriage he was entering, was haggled over before the wedding took place. The idea was that the longer the discussions went on, the more invested the two parties involved must have been. Because of this, it benefited a man to drag out discussions as long as possible, to show how serious he really was.[2]

The attendants should not have been blindsided by his tardiness, several of them were prepared for it in fact, bringing oil to light the lamp – not just for the time they would be walking to the feast – but also for the time they would be waiting. Others were not so prepared, they carried only enough oil to walk down the proverbial aisle. When they woke up from their nap, they found that they had burnt it all up waiting for the groom to arrive. They were forced to go off and try and buy more. When they returned, they found that the feast had begun, and they had missed out on their chance to participate. A sad end to a complicated little story, but one that tells us a great deal about our own life in the faith.

Having looked at the story, let us peel back the images it gives us and do some interpretation. If we know that the groom is Jesus, then we know that we have been waiting for a long time. Two thousand years, the church has anticipated the return of Christ to set the world right. Across the New Testament we see figures like Paul begin to understand the wait they would have to endure – changing from speaking of Christ’s return as an immediate reality to something a little ways off. We as the Church have been waiting and we have fallen asleep from time to time in the process, maybe even let our torches run out of oil.

By fall asleep, I mean that we have become complacent in our view of the world around us. We become content to sit and not seek out anything challenging or different. We sit and we wait, and doze off, and the world turn around us. However, inevitably something goes wrong. The world shutters to a stop and we are thrown from our cushy place into danger. That sudden change from comfort to discomfort, from normalcy to challenge, that defines our faith.

To build from our parable, the oil that we keep is our preparedness for God to arrive in our life. Jesus does not condemn the women for sleeping, because even those who enter into the feast fell asleep. Jesus does condemn them for not being prepared for the groom’s arrival. When God shows up in our life, we have to be ready. This is not just an eschatological vision for the end of time, but a present concern. When someone knocks on our door who needs food or gas money, Christ has shown up. When our loved one is hurting or sick, Christ has shown up. Anytime a need is made known to us, Christ has arrived. Even if that need is within our own heart, even if it takes the form of our own pain.

When we are jolted awake in those moments, we need to be ready to do something about the situation we find ourselves in. We must have developed skills through our time of peace to let us face the hardship before us. Sometimes those skills are practical, the ability to discern how and when and where to give or how to get resources that we need. Other times it is interpersonal, how to listen and encourage and build up. Still other times it is a spiritual skill, to pray, to hope, to intercede, even just to have faith.

We are not always at the top of our game. That is just a reality of life, but even a person who has fallen asleep can run from a fire when they hear the alarm. In our life, moments will spring upon us where we must act, and when they do, it is good to be prepared for them. We must anticipate the times in our life when we are lost or hurting, or meet someone who is, and we need to know how to act in that moment.

Many criticize the maids who did have oil for refusing to share with those who did not have any. If this was not a parable, I would be inclined to agree. However, you cannot share preparedness, not the sort that comes from within us. We can share material goods, money, even time – but we cannot share a mindset. We cannot care on behalf of other people. We cannot be people who think that something could never happen, we must be people who earnestly prepare ourselves to meet God wherever God appears.

Perhaps though, something could have been done to let the ill prepared women join in the feast as well.a If they had not lit their lamps quite so soon, knowing that they were tired and had some time to wait. If they had sat by their fellow maidens, and simply let their light shine on them for a moment, would the story have been different? When we find ourselves unprepared for a sudden rush of trouble, or the appearance of someone in need, we cannot loan one another an ounce of precaution. But I wonder, if we know we are not yet prepared, if we are still growing into our responsibilities as people of the faith, could we at least share the light?

Perhaps, even as we talk about our inability to share preparedness, we can talk about our need to look out for one another. To see when our friend does not have enough within them in a moment to do all that they would like to or need to. Perhaps we can shelter them, even just a little bit. And perhaps, those of us who are in need, who are sitting in the dark because we just don’t have it all together, maybe we could let them help us.

Because, if the maids, all gathered there, had stayed awake, then they might have seen they did not have enough fuel. If they were aware of themselves and one another, maybe they could have shared the lamplight until the groom came, and the procession began. Sometimes we may doze off as members of the Church, but perhaps we should stay more alert, we should stay awake. If we really care for one another, if we really want to see us all make it to the wedding feast at the end of history, then we have to look out for one another. Because sometimes Christ appears as the beggar at the door or in the sick person in a bed, but I believe sometimes Christ appears to us in a tired believer, just looking for a light to see them through the night.

Stay awake, dear siblings, share the light of God with one another, and gird yourself so that you never find yourself unprepared when Christ arrives unexpectedly. – Amen.

[1] Cyrus Adler & M. Grunwald. “Marriage Ceremonies,” in The Jewish Encyclopedia Available at: http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/10434-marriage-ceremonies

[2] Ben Witherington III. “The Final Discourse – Apocalypse Then.” In Matthew (Macon Georgia: Smyth & Helwys. 2006) 459

Hold onto Hope – Lectionary 11/01/2020

October 27, 2020 / John Langenstein / Leave a comment

The Epistle Lesson 1 John 3:1-3

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.

The New Testament Lesson Revelation 7: 9-17

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying,

“Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing,

“Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”

Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

Sermon Text

We live our life in the shadow. The light of the sun, the light of our humming electricity, all of this is just a twinkle. We look out on a world that is only a semblance of what it could be. Even the most bright and beautiful flower appears to us like a reflection in polished brass. A pall hangs over the creation, a diminution of the potential which it holds. We live our lives, full of joy and sorrow and all manner of emotions with only an inkling of what we truly could experience.

Creation, the good gift of God created long ago, suffers under the burden of its own brokenness. Death, pain, suffering, all manner of hardships – these are all symptomatic of something gone wrong. We are given in scripture, in its opening and closing chapters, as well as in parable and prophecy throughout both testaments, a dream of something else. A world where pain does not exist, where death is an impossibility, where God and humanity are not separated from one another, but live side-by-side in harmony with one another.

Any attempt to imagine such a world usually falls short. Even in our understanding of Heaven as expressed in scripture, we are forced to use finite terms to discuss something infinitely more complex than earth could ever allow for. We see precious metals and stones, we see gates and roads and walls, we conceive of the kingdom of God that will be in terms of palatial estates and material wealth. We conceive in grand terms, what can also simply be described as a garden, watered by God, and cared for by its inhabitants. A place of peace, of security, and which enjoys love in its unadulterated and freely given immensity.

All Saints Day is the day where we look around us and try and pierce the veil that hangs over us. Every Sunday is a little Easter, a moment when we remember the resurrection and find ourselves transformed. Every time we take of Communion we participate in the feast of the Lamb at the end of history, and in the Passion of the Christ long ago. Yet, today, All Saints Day, we look upward and ask God to show us a greater glimpse of what is to come.

We who are gathered here, we who live in the chaos of a broken world. We know that we are not yet in Heaven. There is no doubt, even in our brightest moments, that there is something greater that awaits us than this present existence. A rejuvenation of the world which has been drained again and again of its vitality. The moment when what is and what could be are no longer separated. When Heaven and Earth are united forever and ever, and the moment when God is no longer an invisible presence, but the light that illumines all things.

We are not alone in awaiting this reunion. All those who we have loved, and those we never had a chance to love. All those who have gone on to meet Christ ahead of us, they too live in anticipation of the day when all is settled, the day when peace returns to the universe for the first time. All our friends, all our family, even a great deal of our enemies – all who have cast themselves on the love of God – they wait for the day when the divide between the worlds drops away and all is as it should be.

The book of Revelation, esoteric and historically bound as it sometimes is, gives us several visions of what the World to Come is like. The blessed communion of the Saints, those who live with God presently, is envisioned as a great assembly clad in white. They are people from all nations, all tribes, men and women who have faced the hardships of life and come out the other side into God’s presence. They make up the bulk of the company of heaven, those who lived life, those who died, those who have been redeemed by the love of God and await the resurrection that is to come. They sing, they praise God, and they continue to love one another, to love we who are left behind, they continue to live and thrive beyond our sight.

Gathering together to worship, wherever it happens and however it happens, unites us with those who presently do so before the throne of God. When we pray for one another, we do so with the full company of the redeemed. When we praise God, we do so with choirs of believers both living and dead, and all the hosts of Heaven beside them. The love which we have for one another, the community which has begun here on Earth, can never be broken off – not even by the vicious hands of death.

Yet, we are here, and we mourn. Our recollection of our loved ones – the empty places they once inhabited – we cannot see them and pretend that we are not heartbroken to have them away from us. We, limited creatures that we are, depend on our senses to discern the world around us. Without seeing the face of our loved ones, without feeling their touch, without the sound of their voice, we are less than what we once were. John Donne, reflecting on the ringing of a church bell for a funeral, said it this way, “Each [person]’s death diminishes me, For I am involved in [hu]mankind. Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

We live in a world caught between two realities. What could be and what is. We have no means of really discerning what Heaven on Earth could look like. Our only way of seeing it is in the moments when we draw near to God, and when God draws near to us. In the deepest moments of our private prayers. In the taking of the bread and the cup. In the sad tones of our absent love one’s favorite song. In those moments, something can break through and reach out to us. We experience God, as close as out next breath, closer even than the space between one atom and another with our flesh.

The Incarnation was God’s grand gesture of outreach to us. In it humanity and Godhood could never be separated from one another. The Eternal Word of God, uniquely begotten of the Father, conceived of flesh through the power of the Holy Spirit. Heaven and Earth, together, inseparable. A foretaste of what we all might one day see played out across all of Creation. We take up bread and cup, we drink deep of the grace of God which is offered to us in this miraculous visitation. We celebrate a God who has bent Heaven itself down to bring us aid.

As we prepare ourselves to take of this blessing from God. As we lift our worries to our Redeemer and Sustainer. We should also begin to think in our hearts of those who have gone from us. Those who we know see Christ, not through obstructed as we currently do, but face to face – panim el panim. Those who loved us and who we loved, who now know the embrace of a God who keeps them from all pain and has wiped the tears from their eyes. Those who enjoy a world of bliss and peace with their Creator.

Remember them today, and let their memory inspire us to live our lives fully now. With the knowledge that they stand before God today we can draw strength that we too will someday do the same. All that we shared with them, the good times and the bad, are shining and redeemed as we can only begin to imagine now. The fragile flame of their legacy, it is in our hands now, it burns furtively in our hearts. Keep the flame lit, let us continue to make our love ones who have gone to Glory proud through our conduct, through our love of one another, our love for them.

And in the darkest moments when the shadows we inhabit seem to overtake us. When we do not seek out the light, because even it seems to mock our pain. When we lock ourselves behind the doors of our guilt, of our sorrow, of our pain. Let us hold out our hand and take a risk. Let us Hold onto Hope – the most elusive of gifts. Hope that trusts that God will reveal what we are to be. Hope that we will be reunited one day with the full company of Heaven. Hope that the long night will end, and that when the dawn comes, we will find ourselves in good company. And let our hope inspire us to pray continually for Christ to deliver us from our present condition. “Come, Lord Jesus, come.” – Amen.

The Greatest Commandment – Lectionary 10/25/2020

October 19, 2020 / John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Matthew 22:34-39

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” He said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

Sermon Text

Next week we celebrate All Saint’s Day, the day when we remember all those who have gone before us to glory. A day when, if not in actuality, then in our awareness, we can see the glory of heaven just a little bit closer to us. It is a celebration of the promise of God to be with us throughout all eternity. All Saint’s Day waits for us, just a few scant days away, to give us hope in the resurrection and in the present bliss that is given to all Saints who have left us.

The celebration of All Saint’s Day next week is a fixed point in our calendar, but equally fixed is what will transpire just two days later. “The Tuesday next after the first Monday in the month of November,” marks the day of our National Elections in the United States. This year, there seems to be an urgency in the air about an election. In a year of plague and disaster, unrest, and unrighteousness, in a year that will no doubt go down in history as the defining moment of a generation. The toll of the bells, the passing of each hour as we approach this day, ring out in silence and pulls at our hearts to give us all pause. There is an anxiety that is thoroughly thought of, and is sometimes voiced, something feels different this year.

As this is our last Sunday before the election which is not already devoted to a specific celebration, I thought it apt for us to look to scripture and see what we wisdom it can give us about our present situation. I preface this meditation by saying that this journey into the scripture to find wisdom will not, and is not intended to be, and endorsement of anything but that same scripture, of the God who illumined its writing, and of the faithful people who depend upon it. God has wisdom for every moment of our life and the more that a situation brings us to an uncertain place, the more completely we must cling to the teachings of God that are offered to us. So, anxious people of God, let us come to the scripture, to the well of God’s grace, and pull life out of the deep waters, the waters that are deeper than creation itself.

Our scripture tells us about one of several moments in which someone comes and asks a question of Jesus. The question is not asked in earnest in Matthew’s telling of this story but is meant as a trap to catch Jesus in a lie. It is the sort of thing we are accustomed to in our modern world, but we should not think that this is anything new. The “Gotcha,” question is as old as humanity itself, from the moment that Cain asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Jesus’ opposition asks a simple question, “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

The scandal of such a question can sometimes be lost to us in our Christian circles, but we must look at what this question would mean to a Jew in Jesus’ context. There were two major parties in Judaism at the time – The Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Sadducees were Biblical purists, reading only the Torah – that is Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Pharisees were more expansive – they believed in the authority of the prophets, in the teachings of ministers and sages throughout history. The two parties were highly divided, one was in charge of the Temple – the unyielding Sadducees – and the other led the people and taught them God’s word – the searching Pharisees.

The one thing that these two groups agreed on was the Torah, the bedrock of Judaism. In the Torah were all the good teachings of God. It not only numbered 613 strictures for the people to live their life by but told their story. The story of how God took a normal man in Babylon and made him the father of a nation. The story of how that nation came to live in Egypt, to become enslaved. How God lifted that nation out from under the hands of oppression and freed them to take hold of God’s promises. The Torah had all things needful within in, and to take hold of the Torah was to take hold of the sum of wisdom. The uniting principle of all Judaism was not a list of rules, it was God’s words breathed out and etched onto paper, the foundation of their faith that was their salvation.

In asking Jesus which commandment, out of something like 613 of them, was most important, the trap was meant to show him as a something other than what he was. If he prioritized one command over another, it would be easy to accuse him of all manner of wickedness. Jesus could have been written off as an anti-government radical, as an antinomian relativist, as a dangerous visionary bent on revenge. The beauty of the trap which was set for Jesus is that most people would be unable to find anything like a right answer. We as human beings are too prone to extremes, to find our favorite feature of a thing and lift that up above all others.

If any one of us were asked what the greatest commandments were, if we did not know the answer that Jesus gave, then we would no doubt find that we all have hundreds of different understandings of scripture. Some among us would emphasize purity laws and some economic ones. For some we would be caught up in esoterics of proper worship and others lost in the weeds of what constitutes someone worthy of God’s salvation. The commandments which we prioritize in our life are the ones that we not only keep, but the ones which we find ourselves searching out, making sure others are keeping to them, enforcing above all others.

The question was not being asked to just anyone though. The scripture we read today shows an oblivious party coming to God and asking God what in God’s law is most significant. The one person who could not be tricked, the one person who could give the correct answer and who we have no reason to doubt. Jesus looks beyond the intent of the question to trap him. Jesus looks beyond the opportunity this moment would give him to humiliate his opponents or to cast dispersions on them, and instead gives them the truth. A hard truth, but one that no one could deny. It rested in their soul and took root. Whether or not that root would grow into a tree, would produce fruit, well that is never answered for us.

The truth was, that if we were to truly understand God’s love and God’s instruction, then nothing would be more significant to us than Loving God and Loving our Neighbor. Nothing. It is a litmus test that is only difficult in extremity. Whenever we do anything in our life, we do so with these tests to determine whether or not we have acted properly. If I say something cruel that makes me feel good in a moment, have I honored God? Have I honored the person I spoke to? If I spent my money on the fifth or sixth frivolous expense I happened upon that month, have I loved God with that action? Have I spent my money wisely when my neighbor is living hand to mouth?

Those are two obvious examples of this metric, things that we can grasp onto and see the binary of a yes or no answer. Excessive and wasteful spending and cruelty are obviously wrong, but the question gets complicated when we begin applying it to the larger things in life. Is it a just thing to support X law or Y candidate? Is it right to buy from this brand, when so much of what they do hurts so many people? If someone who I disagree with is actively hurting people as a result of the stance they hold, when does my politeness become complicity?

The metric which Christ gives us is not meant to be glib, it is not meant to be the end of the conversation. It opens up a world of options for us to explore, a world of questions and answers that we could only imagine before. If the greatest commandments, if the sum of God’s law is that we love God and one another, then there is a great deal we have to change. As our confession before communion every month says, “We have not loved [God] with our whole heart. We have failed to be an obedient church. We have not done [God’s] will, we have broken [God’s] law, we have rebelled against [God’s] love, we have not loved our neighbors, and we have not heard the cry of the needy.

The next few weeks are going to be difficult for a great many people. The reality that politics is not just a nebulous thing that exists, “Over there,” but something that impacts every aspect of our life has become more obvious in recent years. Many will be going to the ballots knowing that, depending on what laws pass and what people take office, their life may well be in danger – if not from one thing than another. The next few weeks will be highly charged, they will be vicious, and God help us they may even be violent.

The Christian response in the midst of all this, in the middle of a world that does not know what to do, is not to shout from ivory towers about the importance of civility. It is not even to ask all people to take on a moderate attitude. That would be a dishonest assessment even of our own views on most anything. The world is as it always has been, desperately searching for an answer to the great questions of life. In a world clinging to find what is real, what is lasting, we can provide an answer, like Jesus did before us.

We can look at those we meet in our daily life, whether they be friends or enemies, and we can tell them the truth. That above all in this life, we hold two banners – we love God, and we love others. We are never called to do one or the other, but in all things, we must embody both. John Wesley put it succinctly in defining the work of the Christian as, Doing no harm. Doing good. And attending to all the ordinances of the faith. If in doing good, we cause harm, we have failed. If in doing good we fail to attend to the work of God, we have failed.

The path ahead, not only in the next few weeks, but for our entire futures, is not going to be an easy path. It never has been, and we should not pretend otherwise. However, we walk this path with the full knowledge that the one who has laid this challenge before us is the very same person who will see us through it. In the uncertainty of daily life let us learn to turn to Christ and hear his words. We will Love God and one Another we must have faith in that much. – Amen.

Teach us to Number our Days

A Walk through the Lectionary

Author: John Langenstein

We Wait no More – Christmas 2020

We Wait for Justice – Advent 4 2020

We Wait for Growth – Advent 3 2020

We Wait for Christ – Advent 2 2020

We Wait for Redemption – Advent 1 2020

A Holy Kingdom – Lectionary 11/22/2020

Make the Most of your Gifts – Lectionary 11/15/2020

Stay Awake – Lectionary 11/08/2020

Hold onto Hope – Lectionary 11/01/2020

The Greatest Commandment – Lectionary 10/25/2020