Author: John Langenstein

The Lord’s Baptism – Lectionary 01/10/2021

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Acts 19:1-7

While Apollos was in Corinth, Paul passed through the interior regions and came to Ephesus, where he found some disciples. He said to them, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” They replied, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” Then he said, “Into what then were you baptized?” They answered, “Into John’s baptism.” Paul said, “John baptized with the baptism of repentance, telling the people to believe in the one who was to come after him, that is, in Jesus.” On hearing this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. When Paul had laid his hands on them, the Holy Spirit came upon them, and they spoke in tongues and prophesied— altogether there were about twelve of them.

Sermon Text

            Baptism is the first step into the church. While many people spend time in churches before they are baptized, we do not consider someone to be a member of the Church until they have received baptism. Being washed in water represents being washed in the blood, and the anointing of the baptizand with either hands or oil gives some sort of grace to the baptized. They are no longer who they were, they are someone new. God’s work through water and the Spirit allows them to start their life over, they are now a member of the household of God.

            Baptism has its roots in ancient rituals throughout the world. Every culture develops some method of washing away physical or spiritual impurities connected to their worship spaces. The Greeks would sprinkle water on themselves, or else swim through small pools connected to the temple they were worshipping in. Egyptians would wash themselves in the Nile as part of specific rituals connected to curing disease. Israelites and their Semitic neighbors all would wash in ritual baths before approaching their holy places, their sites of worship.

            John the Baptist was the first to make baptism more than just a repeated washing. While other Jewish religious figures would later adopt baptism as a means to differentiate gentiles generally from converts or God-Fearers, it was John that began the practice. The waters which were poured over a person, or which they were immersed into, marked the leaving behind of one thing and the start of another. “I baptize you with water for repentance,” was the call of John, a call for people to begin restoring their lives in line with God and God’s plans for the world. Such a call paved the way for the work of Jesus, allowing him to come into a world where people were already thinking of what they must do to be more in line with the Kingdom to come.

            Yet, despite the way we often understand John’s ministry as an antecedent to Jesus’s, the relationship between the two seems to be more complex than that. Despite the scripture’s insistence that John at several points deferred to Jesus’s authority and ministry, there were people who were committed to John’s teachings alone well past John’s death. These disciples usually worked parallel to Jesus’s disciples, not getting in the way but not helping either. By the time of Paul’s ministry throughout the book of Acts, both groups had a reputation for being troublemakers – both their leaders having been killed by Roman or Jewish authorities.

            Despite the usually parallel lives of these two groups, many of the first disciples of Jesus came from John’s sect. These “converts,” were not limited to apostles like Andrew and John, but to many unnamed servants of God. Likely among them was the teacher and preacher, Apollos. Apollos was considered by many to be superior to Paul in his teaching of the Gospel, leading to some in-fighting related to whether one should be believed over the other. Apollos himself leaves no writings for us to know how the two differed in what they taught, but a few accounts in scripture give us an idea about what these differences might have been.

            For one thing, Paul and Apollos came from separate sides of the Mediterranean world. While both were Greek speaking Jews, Apollos came from the capital of Greek Egypt – Alexandria – while Paul came from a prominent seaport – Tarsus. Both were likely trained by eminent teachers in their community, but we only know of Paul’s teacher by name, Gamaliel, the successor to Hillel, one of the founders of modern Jewish thought. These two highly educated apostles would have understood God’s word intimately and, once they had experience the saving work of Christ, been able to integrate their existing knowledge into their ministries. The two Greek Jews, Paul and Apollos, were two sides of the same coin.

            At some point Apollos began to follow the teachings of John the Baptist, although it is unclear when or how this transpired. He would eventually make his way from Egypt into Greece proper. Here he would hear of Jesus and become a minister of the Gospel. This journey took him to Ephesus where he would preach in the Synagogues. At this time, he met Priscilla and Aquilla, believers and close friends of Paul, who refined his teachings, especially regarding Baptism. We are told that Apollos only knew, “The baptism of John,” suggesting that while he was a Christian he still held a basic understanding of baptism – in other words it was an action that marked the repentance of a Jewish believer and nothing more. There was no baptism for gentiles and no giving of the Holy Spirit to the believer.[1]

            Paul and Apollos likely passed one another at sea because as Apollos left Ephesus for Corinth, Paul left Corinth for Ephesus. Paul arrived to find that the same confusion which Apollos had had about baptism was present among the disciples he had left behind. They were Christians, but they were not fully versed in the ways of Christianity. Baptism to them was what it had been to John the Baptist, and so they did not realize the fullness of God’s gift to God’s people. They did not know about the Holy Spirit visiting all the earth, about gentiles being welcomed into the Kingdom, about Christ’s plan to redeem all peoples.

            Paul came and brought this teaching and instantly growth began among the people. They were now able to minister beyond Jewish communities, and so the Church could grow. They received the miraculous gift of tongues so that they could speak to people they might not have been able to speak to before. In all things, the teachings which Paul brought opened up the eyes of the Ephesians and equipped them to better enjoy Christ and serve the world.

            The lesson for us today is that we who are baptized into the faith must not oversimplify what we are called to be and what we are called to do. It is absolutely critical that alongside our belief we have proper understanding about scripture, God, and the ways of the Church. For the people of Ephesus, learning the true meaning of Baptism was something that freed the Spirit to work among them. What sort of things can free us today? What are we missing in our understanding that might equip us better for ministry?

            That is a question we can ask ourselves as a group, but which we also must pursue personally. We who are called to be members of the Methodist Church are inheritors of a theological tradition with specific ideas about certain principles of the faith. There are Methodist views on Baptism, the Eucharist, even on what does and does not constitute Church. Yet, we oftentimes find ourselves fuzzy on these details. Matters so dear to the pursuit of a Christian life, and yet so far away from us somehow. Only through study, questioning, and fervent prayerful conversation can we really unlock the ways God is working in our lives.

            Yet, even as we are inheritors of the particular traditions, we as Christians are united with all believers through Christ’s Spirit, Christ’s teachings, and the Holy Scripture we all claim. Though every denomination, church, and parish are different, they all hold some commonality. We are not uniform, but we ought to be united. Some time after our scripture which we read today, Apollos’s followers and Paul’s followers began to fight amongst themselves over who had the definitive Christian teaching. Paul chastised both groups, “Who is Paul? Who is Apollos?” (1 Cor. 3:5.) Differences in teachings, even in beliefs on issues of faith, were secondary to the reality of a united Church which participated in Christ’s life. Our own discipline puts it this way, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, charity.”

            If we are to put a single actionable item upon our life following our look at this scripture, I would say it should be this: To examine the aspects of our faith we are confident about and that we feel we do not know much about, and earnestly study both. Where we are confident, we must make sure we are not like Apollos, preaching only half of what is truly there. Where we are unsure, we must be like the disciples at Ephesus, attentive to the teachings of those who are willing to instruct us. In this way we refine ourselves personally, in growing in a truer devotion to God, but also collectively in our ability to engage with others in the name of Jesus.

            A word of caution comes alongside this challenge of course. Not every source of information is a good one and there are many preachers and teachers who are harmful rather than helpful. So, we must be discerning in our quest to learn, that we do not go with the first answer we get, maybe not even the second or third, but with the one which aligns best with the Spirit and with what we know about God. That is a difficult task, but it is one of the reasons that we exist in community together. To be able to hear one another’s thoughts and say, with love and with growth in mind, when we seem to be wending our way in the wrong direction.

            Together, in community and with the teachers who are among us, we can grow in our knowledge of Christ and his gospel. We who received the baptism of Christ, whether as children or as adults, are recipients of the Holy Spirit and have access to all manner of holiness and guidance as a result. When we work together, when we correct one another, when we correct ourselves, we allow for the miracle of the Gospel to spread out from around us, and through the power of Christ to save the world. Not only to some, not only to one race or nation or people, but to all who believe and are transformed. Let us learn, let us change, let us embrace Paul and Apollos and move beyond our present state, and into a more blessed one. – Amen.

[1] William Paroschi. “Acts 19:1-7 reconsidered in light of Paul’s Theology of Baptism.” Andrews University Seminary Studies, Vol 47, No 1, 73 100

Return and Rejoice – Lectionary 01/03/2021

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

Jeremiah 31:7-14

 For thus says the Lord: Sing aloud with gladness for Jacob, and raise shouts for the chief of the nations; proclaim, give praise, and say, “Save, O Lord, your people, the remnant of Israel.” See, I am going to bring them from the land of the north, and gather them from the farthest parts of the earth, among them the blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor, together; a great company, they shall return here. With weeping they shall come, and with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble; for I have become a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.

Hear the word of the Lord, O nations, and declare it in the coastlands far away; say, “He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd a flock.” For the Lord has ransomed Jacob, and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him. They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again.

Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance, and the young men and the old shall be merry. I will turn their mourning into joy, I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow. I will give the priests their fill of fatness, and my people shall be satisfied with my bounty, says the Lord.

Sermon Text

            Sympathy is something we need to feel more often for the prophets and predecessors in the faith that we read about in scripture. Oftentimes we see them in the glow of stained-glass windows and figurines on our mantle pieces. Renaissance painters and iconographers throughout history have made them soft, almost otherworldly figures. They have lost their flesh and blood, their sorrow and hardships, their raw joy and piece, in exchange for gilded and comfortable visions of easy lives in the light of revelation.

            Few figures are as worthy of our sympathy as Jeremiah. Often called “The Weeping Prophet,” Jeremiah is noted for his continual honesty about how he views the prophetic call placed upon his life. He is not excited by being a vessel for God’s word. It causes him pain, it pushes him out of his comfort zone again and again, and it results in him being cast out from his people, imprisoned, and sent into exile, among many other indecencies. Jeremiah, one of the most upfront of God’s servants, is consistent in bemoaning both his position, and the position of the people he must preach to.

            The book of Jeremiah itself is roughly divided in two. The first half focuses on the various prophecies that Jeremiah received from God. These are given some framing in terms of when they were preached, who was king during that time , and what prompted God to give the message, but the book presents them without much narrative backing them. Jeremiah does not have much of a story in this section, just a string of prophecies given historical setting. The second half captures Jeremiah’s interactions with Kings, Governors, and his biggest concern and greatest critics – the people of Judah. At the turning point of the book, our scripture comes in. As we read the promises of God’s redemption, we find God turning from the mystical realm of divine prophecy to the easily seen reality of the lives of the faithful.

            As we have established, Jeremiah was not exactly happy with his role as prophet. He describes God’s words as being like a fire that burns in his mouth and nose, it churns his stomach to bring hard messages to his people again and again. He is tired, he is in pain, his eyes are swollen from constantly weeping, but still, he persists in prophesying. Why would anyone do that? We can talk of faith and we can talk of obligation, but when we get down to it, what could motivate a person to suffer so much? There has to be something other than divine coercion here, a passion sitting on Jeremiah’s heart that is greater than any pain he might suffer.

            The answer is found in two places, the first being God’s continual relationship with Jeremiah. While we tend to think of God as a static force in creation, issuing edicts with austerity and power, Jeremiah intimates a more personal and affected deity. The language of Jeremiah’s prophecies, so neatly organized in English to be words either of the prophet or of God, are actually scattered between the two in surprising ways. One moment Jeremiah will mention his pain, and then God will echo that even the Godhead is in pain thinking of Judah’s suffering. Jeremiah can take so much pain, in part, because God is experiencing it alongside Jeremiah. God wept with the prophet, God felt the pain of speaking hard words, and of churning anxiety. The eternal God of all creation loved the people of God enough to hurt alongside them.

            Secondly, God kept something important buried within Jeremiah’s prophecies. In the midst of a great deal of doomsaying, of forecasts of impending disaster and declarations that the people had simply gone too far, there was always a faint glimmer of something stronger than all that. That glimmer was Hope. The furtive and impossibly elusive thing that keeps all of humanity going. Hope that somewhere amid the turmoil of a chaotic world there might be something constant. In all the hurt of the people, the prophet, and of God – Hope alone sustained the tenuous bonds of their covenants.

            Our scripture captures the raw joy of the people being told they are to return home. They will be able to dance and sing again, to gather together and to sing the praises of God. The world which feels at times like God has abandoned it will someday be returned to an orderly state. There will no longer be the threat of empire or of disease or violence, only the perfection of God and God’s people living beside one another. There will be a return to security and peace that might even be better than what the people were to lose.

            I say, “Were to lose,” because this prophecy is given as the final one before the more biographical section of Jeremiah. This suggests, at least as the book is written, that this prophetic hope is given with another twenty or so chapters of prophecy to go. Jeremiah still has to confront the false prophets who tried to sell easy answers to the people, the officials who would abandon him, and the people who would spurn his warnings.

            We associate the good notes of life as something we put at the end of a narrative. We want happy endings and to build up to something good. Saving the best for last is not just an expression we use; it is a lifestyle we live by. Yet, as often happens, we see in scripture a subversion of how we would write the story. Scripture gives us a high point in the middle of the narrative of Jeremiah’s life when there is still a great deal of hardship ahead. Interestingly, the book of Lamentations, another book we traditionally associate with Jeremiah, does the same thing. Chapter 3 speaks to the hope of God restoring Judah, and then goes into the difficult work of processing trauma and of mourning.

            We are at the start of a year which we see as a chance to overcome the past year. However, we are really and truly in the middle of our most pressing danger. The pandemic which pushed us into the strange places we have found ourselves in is only halfway over based on our current projections. Beyond this, many of us are in the midst of personal problems that do not end simply because the calendar has turned over.

            For all of us, hope is something that comes in the midst of hardship. We can sit and wait for the moment that we suddenly find ourselves in more hopeful circumstances. Something good will come eventually, but it could be a very long time. Alternatively, we can embrace the paradox of our life – that in the middle of disaster, of pain, of broken heartedness, hope does not cease for even a moment. To borrow from John 1, our scripture from last week, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

            In the same way that Jeremiah continued his work despite how difficult it sometimes was, we can continue to live a hopeful life within our own troubles. We do not deny that we face hardships again and again, but we do not let them overtake us. We lean on one another and God when we cannot stand on our own, we look to the horizon which offers us redemption. We know that the present troubles cannot last forever, and the good things will return to our life in due time.

            Look around and find those things in life which you can celebrate. Look around and find all the troubles you cannot help but worry over. Take these in your hands and understand the way that they exist together. The goodness of life reminds us that the troubles are finite, limited in their scope. We will see brighter days; we will see the face of God in the land of the living. Our mourning will turn to laughter and the hardships that threaten us will be replaced with gentle roads leading us home. Home, not a single location or building, but the peace which comes when we are contented in God’s provision and God’s lasting love for us.  Rejoice, for we are on the road home. – Amen.

The Word made Flesh – Lectionary 12/27/2020

/ John Langenstein / Leave a comment

John 1: 1-14

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

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

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

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

Sermon Text

            The incarnation of God depends on two things. Firstly, as we discussed last week, God became fully human and lived through all the highs and lows of humanity. Now, we must look to another aspect of the incarnation: How does a human being contain Godhood within themselves. How can there be a God in Heaven, while that selfsame God walks the Earth? How could we ever understand God being among us, when even our best language tends to fall short?

            There is a balance to strike in Christianity, one that we seldom get quite right. On one hand we must be practical people who are invested in the world as it is and working toward the world as it ought to be. We do this is living out the ministry of Jesus as Jesus first lived it, preaching and healing and loving all those we can. To put it very simply, there is a clear practical element of our faith. However, beyond mere practicality is our need to, even at the most basic level, articulate our understandings of God and how God interfaces in the world. This is our theological ministry.

            Today, we focus on the theological, how the eternity of God can exist in our finite reality. Though scripture is never meant to be read as a schematic for the universe, it certainly can give us tools that we can then use to discern the shape of things. Looking at our scripture today we can begin to understand that to say Jesus is our Emmanuel, God with us, is not an attribution given following the resurrection, but is an essential and eternal reality of Christ and how Christ established creation. Jesus, the Word of God, predates everything.

            Our scripture today opens with one of the most beautiful sentences in all of scripture. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” A mentor of mine growing up, always said a person learning Greek should memorize this verse. Ἐν αρχη ἡν ὁ Λογος και ὁ Λογος ἡν προς τον Θεον και Θεος ἡν ὁ Λογος.

            The essential claim of this verse can be separated into three sections. Firstly, that at the very beginning of the Universe, Genesis 1:1, “When God was creating,” Jesus was there. Though not yet in a physical body, Christ was working in creation. When God spoke, “Let there be light,” Christ was the one who lit the flames of the primordial universe. Later in the passage John elaborates on this verse, “the world came to being through him.” However it was that God moved his dark materials to bring about order from chaos, Christ was the artisan that fashioned them. Nothing exists that does not have Christ’s fingerprints on them, we are all handiwork of God.

            This language, if left on its own, would allow for people to reduce the Word, to reduce Jesus, to a tool of God rather than an intimate partner of God’s creative work. That is where the second part of verse one comes in. “The Word was with God,” literally, the word was, “in front of God.” This relationship, face to face, means that God and the Word saw one another on equal footing. They were not just partners, one was not less than the other, but they met together and created together in perfect concert.

            Still, there is room in the first two portions of this verse to mistake John’s message about Jesus. So far, the Word is an eternal entity alongside God, one that is intimately connected to God, but in the final portion of verse one John reveals the most incredible aspect of his message. This Word, that created all things, that stood alongside God, was at the same time, God. There was a duality hereto unknown in the universe. Both God and God’s Word were somehow distinct and individual persons of a single and unified Divinity. As John explains throughout his Gospel and in his reference to Genesis 1, there is another member of this unity as well, the Holy Spirit. Three persons, one God, the root of Trinitarian theology expressed in a single verse of scripture.

            For centuries, the Church debated how to take this news, that Jesus the crucified Messiah, was also the eternal God whom they had always worshipped. Extremes were created across the spectrum of Christian belief to try and explain how this reality could be true. Some formed the belief that God the Father abdicated the heavenly throne and took on flesh, thus becoming Jesus – this belief is called, “Patripassianism,” or, “The Suffering Father.” Others decided that Jesus was not originally God, but became so after the resurrection – Jesus in this scheme was the first created thing through whom all things were made, but ultimately a secondary creature to God – this belief we now call “Arianism,” after the bishop – Arius – who popularized it.

            Hundreds of other theories and sects were created to try and explain how Jesus, the word of God, was somehow on equal footing with God the Father and God the Spirit. Oceans of ink has been spilled to try and tease out how exactly God could inhabit humanity and oftentimes the more complex an example was given, the farther away from what we know to be true about God we, as the Church, came. The mystery of the Trinity ultimately abhors complexity.

            Christ is and always has been God, as has God the Father and God the Spirit. Three full persons who are somehow one entity. Scripture uses a single word to describe this unity – Θεοτης (Theotes.) This word is perhaps best translated as, “Godhood,” or “God-ness.” The Three members of the Trinity, each one of them with their own personality and individuality, all share God-ness with one another. They move as one, they act as one, and our prayers to any member of the Trinity are heard by all three. They are the most definite vision of unity and of difference in all of existence. The simple truth of them is that they are one together God and yet always each their own persons.

            What this means for us, is what John lays out throughout our scripture. God brought John the Baptist to proclaim the coming of the Word into the world. John was a foretaste of all that Jesus would bring – baptizing with water where Christ would unleash the Spirit to all people. John lived his ministry out and was killed because of his opposition to the rulers of his day. The glory of God, which John reintroduced the world to, could not be suppressed and shone out with every action Christ took while on this Earth.

            Christ, who was from the very beginning God, entered the world as a baby and lived through every trouble and joy of life. Celebrating weddings, sitting beside the sick in their beds, talking with Mary and with Martha – no action of Christ was minor. That we participate in the divine life through living out the basic beats of our own lives is a miracle that we cannot let go of. Yet, the way we choose to live our life is often so different from how Christ lived his life, that when Christ came to be among us, we had no idea we looked at God when we looked at him.

            When Jesus worked with the poor and the outcast, we accused him of keeping bad company. When Jesus cared for the sick and the broken, we accused him of leading them into sin. When Jesus questioned the powers of this world, we accused him of being a dangerous revolutionary bent on destroying society. When we, the human race, met Jesus, we rejected him at every turn because he was a threat to our understanding of everything. Christ was the perfect person, and so showed us every way our life went astray. Christ was at the very same time God and showed us that our images of God we created for ourselves were fundamentally flawed.

            The incarnation, which we celebrate at Christmastide, is the moment when the universe began to turn in another direction. God revealed Godself in the most definite way possible, taking on human form and living among us. The life of Jesus was an example for what we might become if we lived a life in line with God, but it was also a refutation of the present life we lived. Christ came to be among us to save us from Sin and at the very same time to save us from ourselves. The kingdom came and the offer was made for us to join. What must we do now?

            The eternity of God is a promise to the eternity of the Kingdom which we are invited to join. Our salvation, given freely by a God who did so much for us, is something put in motion before even the world began. It will last for an eternity beyond our present moment. God in human form came down to save us and we now enjoy the benefit of that eternal God in Christ.

            The Word who was with God in the beginning promises that we shall be with God for eternity. The Word who stood before God at creation’s start promises that we will stand before the throne of God as Children of God. The Word who is God has equipped us to become all that we ever could be, true image bearers of God. This Word came to us at Christmas, this Word will come to save us once again, and in the meantime, we nurture the attributes of God which are shown to us in Christ.

            In a few days we celebrate the beginning of a New Year, and I don’t think we will miss the one which has gone away. Let us live into this year with the fullness of God before us. As we climb out of some of the troubles we have faced this year, let us take hold of one another and support one another. When we see problems, long standing and hard to face, let us hear the words of John echo in our mind. “In the beginning was the Word,” and in the future for all eternity. Christ our Lord, through the visitation of the Spirit, keeps us tied to all of God. We will never be abandoned, and the light will always shine against all opposition. God is with us, praise God. – Amen.

We Wait no More – Christmas 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

/ 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

/ 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

/ 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

/ 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

/ 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

/ 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.