Sermons

When Jesus is crucified in the Gospel of Matthew, the Roman soldiers put a plaque above his head that reads, “King of the Jews.” During Holy Week, we may note this in passing. There’s so much going on. Earlier that week, Pilate accuses Jesus of claiming to be the “King of the Jews,” himself.  Again, mostly, the reference tends to fly right past us.  This morning, though, I want to pause and put this accusation in context.  According to Matthew, who were the Magi looking for when they got to Herod’s court?  They were asking for the newborn King of the Jews.  That question was enough to drive Herod crazy.

I had a professor in college, Dr. Gerry Thorson, who was a sacred person in my life and a key figure in my growth as a thinker.  Dr. Thorson was an English professor who loved 19th and 20th century American literature.  Over a number of courses, we moved from the literature of a very agrarian America—people like Willa Cather and Ole Rolvaag—to the literature of the great wars—William Styron and the like.  He was an unassuming presence in class—humble and smiling most of the time, but in his own subtle way, he helped us not only become readers but grow as writers, ourselves.

Have you ever had an epiphany? An epiphany is a sudden insight into the nature of something, usually in a simple and striking way.  What I discover as true has been true all along.  What makes my discovery an epiphany is that all of a sudden, I “get it.”  “Wow,” I think to myself, “how did I not see that before?”

This morning, I would like to amplify a few of the things that I mentioned in the children’s time on Christmas Eve.  My hope is that in doing so, we can spend a few moments looking forward to the year before us with a sense of acceptance and maybe even a sense of direction.  There are so many unknowns and so many things over which we have no control.  This morning, we need to do a little inventory of what we do know and of the choices we can make.

Two weeks ago, I looked at the first of two couples who are essential in telling the Advent story:  Zachariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist.  Like several other crucial couples in the Bible, they were unable to have a child.  They were faithful people so this wasn’t some “divine punishment.” Luke goes out of his way to tell us this. Our deepest longings sometimes go unfulfilled.  Zachariah and Elizabeth accepted this and moved on with their lives. This is what really faithful people do.

Here is a popular notion that I don’t buy: “Life is fair and God is in charge of making sure it stays that way.”  The underlying conviction is that people get what they deserve.  If you do good things, good things will happen to you.  If you do bad things, you will be punished.  God keeps the score.  It’s not that God wants to punish you…but God will…to teach you a lesson, to get you to be better, to get you to change your ways.  It’s not that God wants to punish you.  It’s more like God is that reluctant parent who looks at you and whispers, “Now, look what you’ve made me do…”

Most Christians spend a lot more time thinking about Jesus than we spend thinking about John the Baptist.  We remember John when Jesus is baptized, get a little taken aback by his appearance and his diet, and move on.  After all, we know who the main character of the story is:  Jesus of Nazareth.  If anything, we move out into the wilderness with Jesus and, glancing over our shoulders, we think, “Well…that guy was a character.  Kind of weird though.”

The story of our earliest ancestors in faith is a story of liberation.  They had been slaves for generations.  Across generations, they had become very good at one thing:  making bricks, the basic building blocks that the Egyptians needed.  It wasn’t that other people couldn’t have made them, too.  Bricks are not fine art.  However, these people had made them for so long and their bricks were so reliable.  Why change a good thing?

Today, I want to begin a sermon series on gratitude.  This may seem like an odd choice at a time when so many people are disoriented and saddened and anxious about the state of our nation. It feels to some of us like we’re in exile. Here’s the thing, though:  anyone can be grateful when everything is going your way. What if it is possible to be a grateful person, whatever comes our way?

I am going to be honest with you this morning:  I am so sick of

American politics.  Understand, I love the ideal that is America:  a nation where there is liberty and justice for all; a land that welcomes the “tired and poor and huddled masses,” a land in which the constitution is upheld, the rule of law is maintained, and the will of the people is honored.  This is the land where no one is above the law, where justice is blind, and where everyone has the opportunity to pursue happiness.  In practice, America has always fallen short of that ideal but has had moments of brilliance in which we have come close, or at least caught a glimpse of, what it would mean to actually be that nation.  From the start, we came together to form a more perfect union.  This remains our struggle 225 years later.

John McCain had a pretty undistinguished early life.  He was the    son and the grandson of Admirals in the United States Navy so he did what everyone expected him to do:  he went to the United States Naval Academy.  While there, he absolutely failed to distinguish himself.  He graduated near the very bottom of his class.  The word was that he could not have cared any less about academics and military discipline, which, if you think about it, is pretty much the heart of the United States Naval Academy.

So, who’s the first generous person you remember in your life?  The first generous person when it came to cash for me was a man named Joe Schmidt.  I was getting ready to go to college.  I had some scholarship help that already made my out of state private school less expensive than my in state private university (which, of course, generous donors to the college made this possible.) Mr. Schmidt called me on the phone, asked me to come over, met me at the door and ushered me into his office, which was fancier than any office that I had ever seen.  He sat me down and asked about my college plans.  Then, he puled out what I thought was his calendar but was in fact his check register.  He wrote out a check, put it in an envelope and handed it to me.  He told me to study hard.  I opened the envelope when I got home and saw that the check was for a thousand dollars, more money than I could really imagine.  At the time, I was working three jobs, the highest paying of which paid $3.75 per hour.