Gather the Lost: Coins, Sons, A Rancher, A Samaritan and some Green Green Grass

Imagine a lovely open field of fresh green grass, beside a clear flowing stream. In the middle of this field, stand two able-bodied men and their aged father. A few steps away, yet within easy hearing distance is a woman and many of her friends: and they are in a good mood. Also a few steps to the other side of the father and sons, there is a rancher and his sheep, a few wooly ones by his side and one across his shoulders. A bit further away beside the stream, is a Samaritan man, you know it by looking at him, and beside him sits a weak stranger, bruises on his face and his arm is in a sling. There is heartbreak and recovery, panicked despair and reckless happy abandon, and people trying to do the right thing. Why do they stand in this field at this moment? Because Jesus heard his detractors grumbling and trying to slander him by mentioning again that this man Jesus - he FEASTS with the most low life traitorous pirates of ill repute - how could he be of God? 

His response is first to tell about the rancher - well - shepherd, who loves and cares for his sheep.  Just the other day he is counting them, And whoa - one is missing. So he goes and searches over hill and dale to find that lost and poky sheep and bring it home where the rancher rejoices. Next, Jesus tells of the woman who is checking her change purse and discovers that a coin is missing. So she lifts every bit of furniture and shakes out the rug and lights a lamp to search high and low, so that she might find the coin that she has lost. When she finds it she calls all her friends and throws a party to celebrate. The point of the sheep tale is that the sheep was found and there was rejoicing. The point of the coin tale is that the coin was found and there was rejoicing. And to me lost and found should be understood as teachings about death and resurrection and eternal life. 

In today’s selection, Jesus continues the lost and found, death and resurrection series. There were two sons. Two sons of a man who has given over his life to his sons. The word that is used to speak of inheritance isn’t the bank account - the word it is substance - it can be his assets, but it can also be heard as his life. And since this is about death and resurrection - let's go with life. This man, this father, is at this point, all but dead having given away his life. The crucial point is not the division of assets or pig sty. The point is that the second son gets lost. So lost that he too might as well be dead. 

One scholar suggests that this parable should be called 'the father that forgot to count.' The rancher counted. The woman counted. The father had two sons. The older son, who stayed home and did his duty, may have been just as lost as his playboy brother, but it was harder to notice. Being responsible and sticking to the estate are good things, but not if we forget we belong to something greater than the task in front of us. And so while rejoicing that the younger son was found, the father forgot t o look around the estate and seek out and find and celebrate his older son too. 

So why you might wonder, why are the stranger and the Good Samaritan are in this field with us. It is because of the all but deadness of the lost sheep and the all but wasted of the lost coin and the all but gone father and the lost sons. The Good Samaritan is about a man who is all but dead and the entirely outcast savior - it is another lost and found story. The Samaritan goes out of his way to rescue this stranger who was left in a ditch. The question that that parable began with was who is my neighbor - which of these people do I have to love and how much do I have to love them. The answer is there is no us and them, and how do you love - you lift the lowly and safeguard the vulnerable. 

So if you gather together this whole field of lost and found things and creatures and you ask what is God’s reign like and how show we live into it - What answer do you discover? In all of the gospels, none of the stories where Jesus encounters all but dead things does he ignore it. There is judgment here, but it isn’t about lives of ill repute or numbness, the judgment here is whether or not we accept that God is raising us from all the deadness we can concoct. 

For Lent, I have been preaching through the five job descriptions of the baptized life. Continue Return Proclaim Serve Strive. This week we are on the fourth - serve.  The promise to love and serve is not just saying will be good scouts and will tolerate others because it is nice and polite. We are invited by Jesus to be making our lives an example of the love and forgiveness that is already given in his life, death and resurrection. It is a celebration of how God loves us and will send people like you and me to find all the lost. Loving service to all neighbors is the grateful response, it is the greatest command. Our loving practices and actions and attitudes for all neighbors and therefore serving Christ in all persons responds to real human needs, not just with small change, or kind thoughts.  It is instead like a rancher seeking a sheep and a woman finding a coin and a father rejoicing when his lost sons return. 

It is love that persists in following Jesus by belonging to his community and growing in Jesus by serving with his community. Imagine a field of soft green grass And clear flowing water Where all the countless lostness becomes foundness. Who and where are you in this field of lost and found, Death and resurrection? What might move you from fragmented loss to connected wholeness? 

Holy Week is coming - I invite you to come face to face with all our lostness. Easter will follow- Jesus is Sending us out To love and serve. How and with whom will you go? God’s soft green field is one of unearned foundness, selfless forgiveness, and resurrecting love. All of those stories, Good Sam and the Found Sheep and the Found Coin and the Two Sons, they are pictures of who we are supposed to be as people who follow Jesus into the lostness of the cross, and who we are to be as we go where he sends us beyond the empty tomb. Go be found by Jesus, the good shepherd. Go, Find, love, serve, and gather.  What is lost can be found.

March 31, 2019

Grace Episcopal Church

Lent 4C RCL

-the one where i had to offer it from memory cause i pushed the wrong buttons on the tablet

Infinite Ways to Pray: Pi, Promises, and Lent

If you were stuck in the middle of the ocean on a lifeboat with an animal, what animal would you choose? It is the life of pi question. A book about a young man who finds himself stranded in a lifeboat in the wilderness of Pacific ocean with a Bengal tiger in the same small boat. The part of the story I want to offer today is that what undergirds the boy in the face the danger and temptations of the 227 days in the wilderness of the ocean was his life of prayer.

Back at his home in India Pi had a childhood a lot like mine we were free-range children, and what he was doing during the day his parents had almost no idea. Pi had a deep curiosity about God and in his part of India, he was able to practice Roman Catholic Christianity and Islam and Hinduism quite freely. They all have different holy days so nobody knew about his holy hobby for a while. Pi’s bravery saves his life on the boat with the tiger in the middle of the ocean. Pi’s creativity was absolutely the tool that provided sustenance in his wilderness trial. But it is the practice of prayer that keeps him going and anchors his sanity in his extraordinary passage.

The season of Lent was originally shaped to prepare people who'd been on a journey to baptism. Each Sunday this Lent I will focus on one of the five active baptismal promises, promises that we have prayed and committed ourselves to. The renewal of baptismal vows begins with a renunciation of evil and renaming the ideas and concepts that we trust in when we say we believe in God the father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. This is followed up with five questions that are the word pictures which fill in what it means for us, as a community of people who trust in the things we just declared. It is easy to remember in five words: continue return proclaim serve strive.

The 1st of the 1st promise is will you continue in the apostle's teaching and fellowship and breaking of bread, and in the prayers. Continuing the apostle's teaching and fellowship means that you keep diving into the learning and reflection of scripture, tradition, experience, and reason in a community that is a community across time. The breaking of bread is clearly gathering for communion constantly and consistently. And the last part of the first promises is prayer.

The regular daily active life of prayer. The easiest and simplest way to think of what prayer should be is it is you and god looking at each other face-to-face it is, it is intimacy, it is candor, it is love, it is challenging, it is a relationship. Now our friend Pi the boy on the boat with the tiger in the wilderness of the ocean his relationship with God was so complex that he used 3 completely distinct traditions of religion and prayer to satisfy his longing to look at God face-to-face.

In the Christian tradition, we have dozens and dozens of ways that are real and true and holy methods of prayer. Some of them involve body movements, some of them involve reading and/or listening. Some of them working in the soil or the kitchen and some others are focused on sitting still and some of them involve lots of silence and some of them involve singing and lots of noise. If for some reason you've always thought of prayer as ___ and that fill in the blank has not held you in a regular relationship, has not invited you into that experience where you regularly look at God and God looks at you, then this Lent I challenge you to try a new kind of prayer.

The last thing I want to point out about our lesson and prayer today is that if you notice it is the spirit of God that leads Jesus out into the wilderness. And it is the Spirit of God that is calling us and leading us into challenges and the prayerful encounter with the great unknown paths that lay around of us. Prayer that is a conversation with the Lord of life will be about living more lovingly, more freely and not being stuck in temptations or selfishness or loneliness. Prayer is a deep breath of God when we are paralyzed by anxiety and fear of the future. Prayer can be the life of Jesus coming alive in you. Prayer is about living a life together in humility and reconciliation and mercy not only for yourself and others but for time and reality itself.

We promise to stick to prayer not because we get it not because we understand how it works but because we experience it as a deepening of the promises of our pledges to be with God who is here for us. Whatever your wilderness is God is with us. Whatever your ocean is, there is a practice of authentic prayer that can sustain you. Whatever the tiger in your lifeboat is, God calls us to live together in peace, whatever that takes. Continue return proclaim serve strive. Our promises are responded to with the promise of God: that we will live into this way of love with God's help forever and ever. Amen.

Grace Episcopal Church


Pemberton, New Jersey


March 10, 2019


RCL Lent 1C

Flour to Flour: Sin and the true Center

In the late 80’s I went to one of the largest schools in the country. 7th - 12th graders in one ¼ mile long school in a rapidly developing part of Fairfax County. If every student, staff, and teacher was in the building it would have been nearly 10k people. That is bigger than most colleges. When I was in 7th grade the half of the 9th-grade biology students were given a 2-week long assignment. They had to carry around a 5lb sack of flour and attend to it as if it was a child. You had to have the sack of flour with you at all times. The sack had to make it through the two weeks mostly intact and holding most of its original contents.

Some of the students decorated their bags or drew faces on them, which you could do, but you couldn’t just put it in bubble wrap. The other half of the class were given an empty real eggshell. The rules were the same. An eggshell has slightly different challenges. Where the flour was heavy and bulky, the egg is small and forgettable. Both of which are intended to highlight the difficulties of parenting. 14-year-olds sometimes need a strong reminder that they are powerful and creative, but that they are not the center of the universe.

Self-centeredness is an important developmental stage - but it is intended to be a stage. We are not supposed to stay there. ON the last day Of the assignment In a moment of adolescent merriment and jubilance, Some of the 9th graders hurled their bags of flour or eggshells at the floor of the hallways. It was quite the mess of shell and flour and paper bag shreds. It became an utter unbelievable mess. Suffice to say we didn't get any version of this assignment two years later.

Sin is a rather misunderstood word. We are quite accomplished at it, yet we don’t quite understand what it really means. We tend to think of it as little slights and large cruelties, we may have heard that sin is about perfectionism or the letter of the law. Yet in the Old Testament sin isn’t as simple as a list of don’ts. Sin is an act or attitude that betrays God’s intentions for life together. Sin is a turning away from the covenant promises - the big ones - Love God, Love all neighbors as much as God loves you. There are a million acts and attitudes that betray God’s intentions, that rebel against God. Crookedness and abuse and gluttony and isolationism. When we say that Jesus did not sin we are not saying that he never did x y or z specifically. What we are saying is that he never turned his back on God and he never turned his back on being fully human - of practicing humanity as it was intended. It is Jesus’ life and death that exposes our unfaithfulness and sinfulness.

The sin of my older classmates wasn’t the jubilant silliness of smashing egg shells and bags of flour. It was forgetting that someone had to clean that mess up. That people put their whole lives into growing and harvesting that wheat - and it was wasted. Love all others as much as God loves you. The judgment of sin isn’t a lash It is a mirror that demands our humility That we are the creature, we are not the center, that God is God. And the well being of all is the intended center. To repent and return means we turn around from the worst of our self-centeredness And embrace the humility of putting our promises of fidelity to God and therefore neighbor at the center of our lives.

We mark our foreheads with ashes of mourning and death and destruction, But we mark them in a cross. Not the cross of cruel empire But the empty cross of Easter Because ash and sin and destruction is not the end of the story. The mess is overcome by the victory of God over death and selfishness at Easter. Our hallways are a mess of broken shells and tattered sacks and dust and dirt and muck of self-centered death and destruction.

If you feel like you are the smashed bag, the flour being walked over, or the shell that will never go back together again - your message today is that God loves you and the healing presence of the Spirit is with you, and Jesus is beside you in your grief. If you feel more like the people who made the mess The call of Ash Wednesday and Lent isn’t to wallow in the worst or shame and blame, But to see the whole picture of the goodness and to confess our personal role in the messes, pursue forgiveness and to grab a broom and a mop it up with Jesus - he is here with us, for us, in the middle of the mess.

The opposite of sin is loving God and loving all neighbors with heart and mind and soul and muscle and voices. Ashes to ashes. Flour to flour. Egg shells to egg shells. Dust and messes are not the end of the story. Eternal life turning toward the center, The love of God is the center and the start and the end of the story. God’s grace is more powerful than any mess we can make.



Ash Wednesday

2019

Grace Episcopal Church

Pemberton, New Jersey

Past is not the Past: Hometowns and theoretical astrophysics and Jesus

Current theoretical astrophysics strongly suggests that time is not linear. That past and present and future are not separate, they are not in a line, they are adjacent and overlapping events That while distinct they are also not distinct. There is an Irish saying that suggests the same thing. The past is not the past is right here in the room with you right now. 

In our gospel lesson today we have layers of past present and future All living together in a vulnerable conversation That expresses deep connection and alienation and fear. Let's start with the past that is in the room. Jesus’ past. The majority of his life that we know nothing about. Unlike holiday hymns that sing of a meek and mild young Jesus, I believe that the adult we know in the gospels is much the same as the child. 

Jesus has returned to his hometown and home neighborhood. Where people have a deep love for him, and perhaps a whole set of other feelings too. Most of us know something like this scene today. When we are with our family of origin or place of origin We are there with the memories and experiences of who we once were, who they once were. The past is not the past. It is right there in the room with you. 

The present is of course there with Jesus and his neighbors and his friends and family. And the scene starts out positive. We tend to read the line about ‘isn’t that Joseph’s son’ in the doubting mode, but it could be read more in the whoa - hey - that’s Joseph’s son! way. The scene starts out warm and welcoming and it is Jesus in his upending the status quo self who riles things up. You might notice all the wonders he is known for are alluded to in his teaching here healing, cleansing - which is the free forgiveness of sins, and feeding. This is good news that isn’t heard as good news if you are trying to just keep your head down. It is Jesus’ aggressiveness with these announcements that get him run out on a rail. 

The future is also in this lesson. This Jesus movement was massively unsuccessful in Jesus’ home territory. Nazareth, Galilee, Capernaum - all missional failures. Every gospel is written in the context of and for immediate local Jesus movement communities. And it could be that this lesson is naming that heartbreaking disappointment, of failure in Jesus’ own hometown. Yet it is also a warning - that the synagogues were becoming places of confrontation and danger. These two groups were not distinct yet, but they were also deep in the pain of a growing sense different visions of what God is doing in the world. Which leads to animosity towards each other - often involving families and friends and neighbors. 

The good news here is that Jesus’ mission what we have committed ourselves to in baptism and Eucharist is one of feeding and healing and resurrection life. Be the golden rule, strength for the weak, joy for the joyful, ears for the grief. But mostly this lesson today is a bit of an ouch and oops. It hits close to home because it is about how we are not very good at living together in the context of changes and differences. That the past is always with us and the future too It is all in motion together and this makes us anxious and dizzy. We struggle to make sense of the vulnerabilities and heartaches that such interwovenness of time and experience In the context of constant change can create. 

Grace Church is certainly in one of these strange spaces of multilayered time. Feeling vulnerable about the now and what comes next and always experiencing The hope and heartaches of the past. A number of you have lived here and been near here for your entire lives. The buildings and farmlands carry memories of the past that is right here in the room with us. But it is also a basket of ways that this place may not experience again. The future is also right here in the room with us In our works of healing and feeding and discipleship. It is in the hopes we nurture and the anxieties that we are stifled by. 

The future has come home, it is right here in the room with the past and the present. Like Jesus in his old neighborhood. We cannot bury our heads in the sand We should not rush to quick fixes nor just sit on our hands and wait to see what happens. Our hard question is how do we equip the future to be a creative and compelling witness to the love of God? It may not look like the past or the present, But it can be good news. We can listen. learn. lean in to the daring flexible Grace that this parish is named for. We will be changed so…. Let this assurance of the certain love of Jesus be our motivation to meet the challenges of the whole basket of time that we are in. 

God Loves this place and all the people of this parish and neighborhood, loves your past, present and future, Whatever shape it takes. The past is right here in the room. So to is the future. And God already loves it, and so can you.  Amen.

February 3 2019

Grace Episcopal Church

Pemberton, New Jersey

RCL 4C After the Epiphany

Listen to the Other: Baptism and Old Turtle

Jesus was lived, loved, died and rose again - Jewish. All we know of his everyday life was embedded in a Mediterranean world that was a wild rumpus of religious and ideological groups. It has been for as long As there have been people and culture. There is a theory that the changes in the depiction of angels in Judaism is evidence of this cross-fertilization. The angels of prophetic and apocalyptic texts Certainly seem to more closely resemble Hindu deities than the humanoid messages that come to Abraham and Sarah. Complex religiosity is as old as trade and empire. 

Traveling preachers and activists similar to John the Baptizer and Jesus were a dime a dozen. The gospels make an effort to show us that they - John and Jesus - were not rivals And that John’s ministry wasn’t taped over but intended to be a prelude. They are closely related, cousins in life as Luke states And related in the proclamation of salvation the invitation to live in God’s way. 

The gospel of John says that two of Jesus’ disciples were originally followers of John the Baptizer. So it may be interesting for you to learn that followers of John the Baptizer still exist. Mandaeans are a distinct religious group that are ancestrally Jewish, and they believe that John was the Messiah, and that Jesus was well, a fake. Recently decimated by Isis they have survived thousands of years of religious change and political revolutions and persecutions. The very existence of the group makes me ponder religious motivation and steadfastness And what it means to live faithfully in a pluralistic religious reality where your way is sustaining but not dominant. How have you learned to share what motivates you to practice this faith so that it is deep and true and full of purpose and it isn’t just more trivia and noise? 

Every somewhat organized religion and I would argue every denomination believe two core things. Something is wrong with the world and this is the way to fix it. We believe that the creation was made in splendor and goodness and that human sin has blasted huge holes in the sculpture. The way to fix it is our returning to union with God and each other in Christ. Said another way salvation for the whole creation is made real by living together within God’s intention, like it or not. And we trust that the way to do this is to attach ourselves to the whole story of Jesus in the waters of baptism and the refreshing of our commitment in bread and wine. 

The active promises of Baptism are the instruction manual for this deep practice of belonging to God’s purposes. Continue return proclaim serve strive. It does not pretend that everything in a life of faithfulness will always be all sunshine and palm trees. It does not say we will never disagree or argue or be called to examine our shadows And change our ways. 20th-century martyr, pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer says That ‘God’s love for us is shown by lending us God’s ear, and we do God’s work when we listen to strangers, others, people who hold onto a vision of how the world is fixed that is not ours.’

The children's book Old Turtle begins in a time beyond time when all the elements of the earth could speak to each other and understand each other. And unlike our current dislike for discussing politics or religion in polite company, the elements argued about God. They expressed ideas about the ultimate that were very much like their most established selves. The mountain believed God to be firm and unmoving The water said God could take many forms and was always in motion. The snail replied no - God is slow but steady and God’s home is always with him. And so it went - a blistering cacophony of argument. 

And then the prophetic preacher divine-ish creature, the Old Turtle says stop. She doesn’t yell or demand or stay in her shell. With a voice like butterfly kisses, she says - Listen. And after a long hard time, the elements learned to listen, learned how to be a ‘we’. The rock learned to hear God’s intention in the movement of the wind, and the snail learned to see God’s will in the speed of the eagle. People who cannot listen to each other may no longer be listening to God either. Our own prerogatives and biases and perspectives: rock hard, snail steady, may have overwhelmed our promises to follow God and love all people. 

We live in rapidly changing times with Immense challenges. The baptismal promises of continue return proclaim serve strive Are not idle chatter but promises that intend to redeem the world to save all To return all to harmony with God. As the Old Turtle says - Listen. We are to be a message from God to the earth, and a prayer from the earth back to God. May we hear God’s neverending intention For us to let go of our selfish waring ways and listen for holy voices whispering through the other, whether they be river, rock, goose, squirrel. In the preparations of John in a time of wild change and fragility, may we listen and point and perhaps even let go. In a time of noise of overwhelming cruelty, may we listen to Jesus with our whole heart when he says Come and follow me. May we listen to God’s still small strong voice as he draws us into the eternal we.  Amen.

January 13, 2019

Grace Episcopal Church

Baptism of Our Lord

RCL C

Holy Spectraspecs: Do you see what God sees?

It would be fabulous if we had special glasses that showed us the way to go. What if we had special glasses that made do-gooders glimmer with righteousness, so that when we look at someone like John the Baptizer, no matter what hair shirt they wear or provocative thing they say, we would hear and see them as God intends. Maybe they could be a bit like Luna Lovegood's spectraspecs, Which make the nonsense that distracts us show up like little nats around our heads. What if we really had such lenses that could make the just glow and types who have lost all sense of the common good they could pulse with sharp red warning.

It would also be swell to have glasses that help us see the context that surrounds the scriptural texts. You could read or hear the words and look through the lenses And see the assumptions and landscapes That are completely obscured by time and distance. In the gospel today We heard the names of 7 leaders of empire and locality and religion to set the scene that John is proclaiming in. What Luke is telling us is not like a memorized list of kings and queens, But that the scene Is dark and villainous. An expanding and anxious empire led by Tiberius, a military genius who as emperor was cruel, deranged and entirely depraved. Then Pilate who is the best known and least terrible of the list. Then there is a Herod, desperate, selfish and violently ambitious. The list of names is a list of lamentations, a list of terror. If you had the glasses you would be seeing nothing but sharp red spikes.

Into this fearsome moment, John is re-introduced. The son of the priest Zechariah John goes about the waters of the Jordan with a heritage of insiderness, prophecy, and eccentricity. John was a circuit rider it seems, going to busy, populated places in the Jordan river valley, where people went to get water and so on. And right there in the middle of everyday life, John was offering freedom from the sins that bind us, an outer expression of an inner soul cleansing, Baptism in the river that is a reshaping of the heart and the mind, a transformation of life In the forgiveness of sins. John the Baptizer is offering free new lenses that prepare all to hear and know the savior when he comes. John is offering spectacles that dissolve our dualisms and enlarges our heart and unclogs our ears from all the nonsense. Would our inner and outer worlds be so embattled and so lost if everyone had been living in the way we might live if we had glasses that showed us the whole creation as God sees it?

In Advent we are offered holy spectacles to see and feel and know that God is transforming injustices, paving a path to freedom for all people - right now. Again and again, we are led to live into the vision of becoming soul free. It is interesting to me to think About Luna Lovegood and John the Baptizer In one moment. If you don’t know either, Luna is the brilliant but quirky daughter of a conspiracy theorist publisher in the wizarding world of Harry Potter. She doesn’t have any need or concern for what is conventional or expected. Maligned and dismissed a young woman deep with trust and truth. John the son of the very old priest and his plenty old wife, doesn’t seem to have any need for the conventions that prop up cruelty either. Instead, he gives free-flowing comfort and direction in the middle of terror and fragmentation. Would you show up at the river or would John just be too strange too outside too other for you to give into the divine leading questions he proclaims? If you had those holy spectraspecs who would you see very differently if you saw them as God sees them?

Do you need these special glasses? I don’t have holy rose-colored lenses. But what I do have is what Jesus offers all of us - sacred bread and wine. Outward signs of Inner light. Refreshing our baptismal commitment to Jesus’ way, truth and life. Returning to his table, again and again, is a central part of the lifelong journey to learn to look with love speak without deceit and dare with hope. Jesus is coming, and it is about God’s radical interruption into our conventional lostness with the promise of eternal connectedness. To find our way out of the depravity and twisted falsehood that lead to the cross and the tomb.

God waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. Christ is coming, to make all things free - including you. Do you see what God sees? Come o Lord and set us free, give your people peace. Come o Lord and set us free, Come o Jesus come.

Advent 2C

Grace Episcopal Church

Pemberton, New Jersey

Motivation: Scrooge and Vipers

At every turn, there is someone somewhere trying to convince you that you are not enough not smart enough, strong enough, whatever your not enough is there is someone somewhere trying to motivate you from a place of shame and darkness and doubt. Yet - you rarely hear or see you brood of vipers as a motivational speech opener. They may be much smoother and indirect about it, but they are calling you a loser just the same. 

Vipers are venomous snakes that despite the sports cars and fighter jets of the same name are actually slow for their species. In Jesus’ time, it was sometimes believed that baby vipers ate their mother. Now you see the judgment John is getting at. Having been given so much you ignore respect and deference and devour the foundations that gave you life. The notion of matricide is not true but the metaphor of infidelity remains. Being a nest of slow heritage destroying creatures is clear criticism of how we do and do not live together as God intends.

Last weekend at the basket auction I won a basket of holiday books. One of which is a Christmas Carol. I have seen most of the movies yet never stopped to read the book. I have to say I am impressed with how accurate my favorite movie version - the Muppet one - how close it is to both the text and the overall intent, even in the musical numbers. The original book truly is a well written and good story which has never been out of print for good reason. There are people who think it is a Christian allegory. And while it does include the startling intervention of the not human in a human life. And one of the most crucial turning points is Scrooge’s encounter with a vulnerable child, I am not sure I think of it as an allegory. For me, it is a strong lean toward being a Christian morality tale.

What A Christmas Carol absolutely was and is is a piece of creative common good propaganda. Scrooge isn’t just about one nasty lonely old man but about a wide swath of powerful English people in the Victorian era. The virtues it promotes - generosity, community, care for the least and last, as well as repentance are of course deeply Christian. It is a fascinating short story about injustice, hardheartedness and that what we do in this life connects to bliss or darkness for eternity. Yet reading the dickens story with today’s lessons has been enlightening. It doesn’t start with the good stuff, it dives right into the terrible. A Christmas Carol is, after all, a ghost story. It begins with 'you brood of vipers'. Here is where all your greed and selfishness and hallow guilded eggness will land you.

Dickens has two core agenda points to make: the comfortable and the poor are not different species - we are one. Secondly, the societal viciousness we are caught in is not for the common good, or our own well being. There is a third point as well - it is that Christmastime is a jolly good time and a worthwhile festival - and you should try it! Except for that third point, the core agenda of A Christmas Carol isn’t that different from John the Baptizers instructions today - care    give      make peace.

For all the wretchedness of Scrooge and our den of vipers - there is one more important facet in common. God believes in us more than we do. Our scroogeness and viperness isn’t the end of the story. The prophet Zephaniah begins his text with accusations much more salacious than John or Charles Dickens but what he comes around to is the sacred hope that such depravity does not have to be the full measure of humanity. Zephaniah is offering encouragement like a coach when the team is down but not out. Isaiah too is leading cheers and chants from the heart of God's desire for us - you go girl! And John is giving clear directions from that same holy intention: share, be honest, seek dignity for all - you can do it. Here is a community and a way - Jesus is coming. God believes in us more than we do.

Maybe the darkness of Scrooge and the shout of ‘brood of vipers’ isn’t actually motivational it is just what gets our attention. What actually motivates according to behavioral science are 3 things: belonging to something greater than ourselves, - the common good. The desire to direct our own lives - liberation. And improving at a meaningful activity - study and service. If your faith practice does not reflect those three things how can we help?

What John and Isaiah and Zephaniah are proclaiming is what Scrooge has to learn after getting shocked by his own Marley delivered you are a viper speech. Motivation toward freedom from the cruel powers that be doesn’t come to us or to Scrooge simply because we learn that chains will bind us for eternity if we keep on these cruel and selfish paths. Freedom and motivation come from belonging to a creative compelling witness of something greater than ourselves and acting for others from that belonging. In this tradition that means seeking union with God and all others in Christ. The one we flock to at the manger is the grown person who said such wonderful things and did such amazing things that it changed everything. His way is for you and for all who need community and liberation and love.

Christ is coming because the Herods and scrooge's and oppressors and shamers of the world are still darkening our future. The actions that John is calling for are not radical or new they are the bedrock of faithful and just society. Charles Dickens’ propaganda of generosity and compassion and the common good should not be radical or daring it should be as basic as ‘ring around the rosy’ but we have forgotten it around every turn. We have the chance every day to turn around and when we fall into Scrooge-like errors of selfishness and cruelty Jesus offers us open arms, the chance to repent and so to be set free in our hearts and to try again to keep the faith of Christmas in our lives each day. Come o Lord and set us free give your people peace. Come o Lord and set us free, come Lord Jesus come.

Advent 3C

December 16, 2018

Grace Church, Pemberton