A week ago tonight my third godchild was born. Kai Gajilan Fowler, born on Wednesday, February 15th at 6:09pm. In her short week on earth, she is already the subject of hundreds of photographs, and each one convinces me that she is the most beautiful little girl I have ever seen. I felt exactly the same last year when my godson, Gabriel Benfield, was born; and I felt the same way almost 24 years ago when my first goddaughter, Katie Russell, was born. To be honest, each time I have the privilege of baptizing a child – infant or adult – I am struck by how beautiful they are.

In the first reading appointed for Ash Wednesday, the prophet Joel describes a moment of terror in the life of Israel, a day of darkness and gloom. His response is to urge the people to call an assembly and sanctify a fast. He says, “gather the people. Sanctify the congregation; assemble the aged; gather the children, even infants at the breast.” (Joel 2:16)

The infants show up again in Psalm 51, traditionally attributed to King David and associated with a moment of confession when he’d been caught in his wickedness. He writes, “Indeed, I was born steeped in wickedness, a sinner from my mother’s womb.” (Ps. 51:5) Though this Psalm is written from the perspective of one person, when we sing it as an assembly we put King David’s words on our own lips and we are drawn into consideration of our own sinfulness.

Were we born steeped in wickedness, sinners from our mothers’ wombs?

I recall an evening almost a decade ago, sitting around a table in a pub back in my hometown of Des Moines, Iowa with a friend from childhood who’d grown up in the church, but who was not raising her children as Christians. In particular, she objected to this idea that her children – who are every bit as beautiful as my three godchildren – were somehow born in sin. She said, “look at them! How can you ask me to believe that these beautiful children were born with any kind of taint at all?! They are pure. They are goodness and joy, and I want to keep them that way as long as I can. I want to protect them from all the negative messages they’ll one day internalize, starting with this one.”

That desire to deny the presence of sin in those we love the most – our infants, our children – is so understandable. They are the closest we may ever come to pure love or pure joy. They are the essence of purity, and any attempt to assign sin to them seems like the real blasphemy.

As I sat in the waiting room with my goddaughter’s two mothers and one of her grandmothers, I pulled out my favorite book of Irish blessings and read one to my friend as she finished her final hours of labor. The book is To Bless the Space Between Us, by the Irish poet and author John O’Donohue. It was a gift to me one Christmas from my own mother. I was able to read the blessing For a Mother-to-Be, but before I could read the blessing As a Child Enters the World, the doctors came in and the heavy labor began. If I could have read the blessing to Kai on her birthday, she would have heard these words,

If my destiny is sheltered / May the grace of this privilege / Reach and bless the other infants / Who are destined for torn places.

If my destiny is bleak, / May I find in myself / A secret stillness / And tranquility / Beneath the turmoil.

May my eyes never lose sight / Of why I have come here, / That I never be claimed / By the falsity of fear / Or eat the bread of bitterness.

In everything I do, think, / Feel, and say, / May I allow the light / Of the world I am leaving / To shine through and carry me home.

That rich Irish blessing is, perhaps, the most beautiful meditation on the sinfulness of our world that touches even the lives of our infants as they are being born. Some are born sheltered, others into bleakness. And in truth, each of us will experience shelter and bleakness in our lives, but not equally. We are born into a world of inequalities and injustices. We are born into a body of life already broken, a fabric of being already torn. None of us comes into the world whole.

I have been meeting with more visitors to St. Luke’s in the last six months than I did in the entire previous year. Many of them have children they are looking forward to having baptized. I’m looking forward to baptizing them – though not until Easter comes. These forty days that begin tonight have been used by the church over the centuries to prepare people for baptism in a process called the catechumenate. We’ll be recapturing that emphasis on baptismal preparation throughout the season of Lent on Sunday mornings as we study portions of Luther’s small catechism each week, beginning this Sunday with Luther’s teaching on the Holy Sacrament of Baptism.

As we journey these forty days to the cross, you will be encouraged to keep up the disciplines we adopt tonight – the ancient Christian traditions of fasting, prayer and almsgiving. Too often, I think, we reduce these disciplines to a kind of renewal of our New Year’s Resolutions – a commitment to a kind of self-denial as a practice in empathy for the self-denial of Christ. That is fine and good, but I think the emphasis on the self misses the essence of what these disciplines are trying to shape in us.

These three disciplines are not separate options on a menu of spiritual practices, but rather pieces of a whole. During the season of Lent we are drawn to consider how, in the poet’s words, “the grace of this privilege [may] reach and bless the other infants who are destined for torn places.” We make the idea of that privilege concrete and real by choosing something common from our routine habits and fasting from that item throughout these forty days. In my case, I might choose coffee or dessert – but not because they are bad for me – instead because they are luxuries I take for granted. Then, as the forty days progress, each time I crave the cup of coffee or the dessert, I use that desire to remind me to stop and to pray for those whose lives do not afford the luxuries I take for granted. Finally, I give alms, I make an offering, I give the equivalent of what I would have spent on coffee or dessert (you fill in the blank here) to help create relief for those who suffer.

Do you see the difference? We’re not commending fasting, prayer and almsgiving as a self-oriented exercise in willpower. We’re inviting one another into these disciplines as a tangible exercise in compassion. What if I slip up and buy a cup of coffee, or dessert after dinner with friends? There is no failure of character here, no judgment of weakness. Instead there is simply an opportunity to be reminded, even then, of the ease with which we forget the suffering of those other children – young and old – whom God loves.

That, finally, brings us to the heart of these forty days. So often we do forget the suffering of those other children whom God loves. Not so for God. In the coming weeks we will follow behind Jesus, remembering his unwavering commitment to the poor and the suffering people of this world, a commitment that took him straight to the cross. As we purge our kitchens, as we silence our sanctuaries, as we empty out our lives; we are creating the space, the silence and the stillness in which we may be able once again to hear God’s voice calling us back to ourselves.

The time is now. Enter these forty days of Lent and return to the Lord your God. Return to yourself. In the stillness of this night, remember who you are and how deeply you are loved. As you are marked with these ashes, the sign that all life is fleeting, remember what you have been called to do with the time given to you, to “allow the light of the world [you] are leaving to shine through and carry you home.”

Amen.

It’s felt this past week like the seasons are changing. This is odd, because it’s February and we’ve enjoyed such a mild winter so far. But, as Joyce and Tina and I stood in my study earlier this week, watching the snow fall, we couldn’t help but feel a little bit sad that the warm weather, which had been such a welcome guest, had decided to move along.

The seasons in the church are about to change as well. Following the twelve days of Christmas that culminated in the festival of Epiphany, we’ve been enjoying a short season of Ordinary Time, a brief window of green in the Church’s annual cycle that will come to an end a week from this Wednesday when we enter into the season of Lent. Like the warm weather this winter, the Time after Epiphany has been a welcome burst of green during grey days and long nights. During this season we’ve heard how Jesus called his disciples together and guarded them while at sea. We’ve seen Jesus healing – in the synagogue and in the home.

Today, as we begin to pivot from a season filled with the green of new life into the deep purples of Lent, and the mysterious majesty of Christ’s suffering with the world, the colors begin to blur together. Healing and suffering begin to trade places.

The story from Mark is quite short, only six verses. We’re told that a man with leprosy comes begging to Jesus for healing, and Jesus heals the man. Jesus then sends him off to the temple so that the priests there can certify that he has been healed, and commands the man to tell no one else what has happened. The man does not obey Jesus’ command however, and tells everyone what has happened to him. Not surprisingly, people from all over begin coming to Jesus to be healed.

Like many Jesus stories, there are some features to this one that don’t immediately make sense to us. We’ve been taught since Sunday School that Jesus is a healer, one of his traditional titles is “the Good Physician.” Why then would Jesus command the person he has healed to remain silent?

This is not the first time Jesus commanded silence about his identity and his work. If you were here last week, you’ll remember that after Jesus healed Peter’s mother-in-law people began to bring the sick and the possessed from all around. The gospel reading for last week concluded, “And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.”

If that had been the only time Jesus had commanded silence, we might have been left to assume that his actions were connected to demonstrating his power over any force that moves against God’s purposes of healing and reconciliation. But then we get this story. Jesus heals a man with leprosy and commands him to tell no one what has occurred. His warning not to speak comes after he has been healed, so we know Jesus is not addressing an unclean spirit, but the man himself. Why would he do this?

This theme in Mark, Jesus’ emerging pattern of performing significant actions that reveal his power and then commanding those who witness his actions to keep their silence, has a name. It’s called the “Messianic Secret,” and it’s a subject that fascinates both casual readers of the bible and those who spend their whole lives studying it, because it runs so contrary to what we see in the world around us. The morning paper and the nightly news are filled with accounts of people doing great things, for themselves and for others. People who are in the habit of doing great things often have press agents who help get that story out. People who do great things are quickly elevated to positions of power and authority so that they can do even greater things.

So, what is it about Jesus that compels him to try and keep people from sharing too quickly who he is and what he’s about? Is it humility? Is Jesus like the everyday hero who performs acts of great courage or compassion, but shirks away from congratulations? Is this Jesus’ version of, “aw shucks, it was nothing…”?

We suspect that there’s something else here, something more than simple modesty. Something deeply connected to who Jesus is, and what he’s about. You recall from last week’s gospel reading that after healing many of the people who’d been brought to him, Jesus retreats to a deserted place to pray. He seems to be spending time in communion with God, looking for the best next step. We all expect him to return with the disciples to the crowd of people who are now searching for him. Instead he says, “let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may also proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.”

So this is what Jesus is trying to accomplish. He wants to get into the cities and towns so that he can proclaim the reign of God come near.

But to get into the cities, he must first pass through the wilderness outside the cities, and the margins where those not allowed into the cities are forced to dwell. People like this man with leprosy, a person who was called a leper.

He was a person with leprosy, but they called him a leper. I wonder if you’ve ever known what it feels like to have one aspect of your life become your entire identity, to have your whole existence reduced to one fact of your life. Is anyone just sick? Is anyone just young, or old? Is anyone just a woman, or a man? Is anyone just poor, or rich? Is anyone just Black, or White, or Latino, or Native, or Asian, or African? Is anyone just an addict? Is anyone just gay or straight? Is anyone just unemployed? Is anyone just a victim, or a survivor?

Every identity carries with it its own peculiar perspectives on life, but some are privileged and others are stigmatized. In Jesus’ time, to be a person with leprosy meant you were not allowed to live within the walls of the city. When clean people approached, you were required to loudly announce that you were unclean so that you would not infect them. No one expected a leper to become clean, so having leprosy was often a lifelong exile from family, friends, and community. Only if the priests in the temple examined you and found you to be clean could you re-enter the city, rejoin the world of the clean.

And Jesus wanted to get to the city. He had a message to deliver there, a message about a new way of ordering life together that he called, subverting the language of his day, the kingdom of God. But what kind of messenger would he be if he came with news of an in-breaking equality, but passed by the human beings suffering at the margins of society.

So he stops what he is doing. He wants to get to the city, but he stops what he is doing to deal with the human being in front of him. This human being says, “if you choose, you can make me clean.” And Jesus’ response is the good news that he has come to announce to the whole world. He says, “I do choose. Be made clean!”

Sisters and brothers, if you’re wondering what this good news is that we keep talking about in church, this is it in its simplest form. The God revealed in Jesus does choose. God chooses you. God chooses us all.

Maybe you know what it’s like to live in the margin, but the good news is, God’s movement doesn’t pass you by. God stops and God sees and God hears your prayer, “if you choose you can make me clean. You can heal my life. You can restore my faith. You can mend my heart. If you choose…” And God in Christ Jesus replies, “I do choose.”

If you’ve lived in the margins then you know it’s hard to trust these words. It’s hard to believe that power would ever choose to give up power. It’s hard to believe that anyone would leave the safety and comfort of the city walls to dwell in the wilderness with you.

Let’s read closely though. Jesus is trying to get to the city, but he stops at the margins. He chooses to stop in the margins, and he chooses to heal those who are living there. He wants to get to the city, but when the word gets out the scripture says “Jesus could no longer go into a town openly, but stayed out in the country.”

The healing exchange between Jesus and the man with leprosy goes deeper than we first notice, as the man runs back into the city, reunited we can suppose with his family, restored to his community. Now who lives in the wilderness, in the margins, outside the city? It is Jesus, taking his place.

This is where we see the greens of this season beginning to bleed into the purples of the next. The green of new life mixed with the regal violet reserved for kings. This is what the kingdom of God looks like. This is why God, revealed in Christ Jesus, is a different kind of king. The majesty of God does not live in a castle, behind a city wall, but dwells in the wilderness, joining us and all who suffer. Taking our place.

And this all sounds like very nice sermonizing, except that I’m still wondering how that actually happens. How is it that Jesus, in his solidarity with our suffering, takes our place? I suppose I can understand what we mean when we say that Christ demonstrates God’s priority or preference for those who are poor, or those who are ill, or those who are oppressed (all three usually going together in this world), but how is it that we can say that Jesus takes our place?

This is a part of the Messianic Secret that will unfold over the season of Lent, so I don’t want to give too much away too soon, but I think the first clue is found in the last half of the last verse of our very brief Gospel reading this morning. Jesus heals the man with leprosy, and instructs him to tell no one. I think perhaps Jesus instructs him to tell no one because he knows, once the word gets out, he will never get into the city. He will remain always in the wilderness, at the margins. How will he accomplish what he was sent to do? But the last half of that last verse glimmers with the light first seen at Epiphany. It reads, “and people came to him from every quarter.”

Jesus Christ, whom we have celebrated as the Light of the World, whose Transfiguration will fill our sanctuary next Sunday, shines brightly here again. The one who is a light to the nations illuminates even, and especially, those without a nation – the dispossessed, the disowned, the displaced, the diseased. And where Jesus is, a new nation, a new kingdom, a new family, a new body, a new creation is coming into being.

Here’s what happened. Here’s what happens. Jesus takes our place, and builds the new community in the countryside. Jesus occupies the margins until they become the center. All of you, all of us, each part of us, our whole selves, finally and at last at home.

Amen.

It’s hard for us to remember, when we gather in such a beautiful, majestic sanctuary that for the first three centuries of the church, we Christians met for worship in people’s homes. In fact, the oldest known site of Christian worship, which was discovered almost a century ago by French and American archaeologists in eastern Syria – just over the border from Iraq in the ancient city of Dura-Europus, was a house church.

The Dura-Europus house church is a significant archaeological find because of what it teaches us about early Christian worship. The building was first and foremost a home. A family lived there. Joined to the family home was a separate gathering hall, which would have been the gathering place for the Christians of that community. There was a baptistry attached to the main hall, and the painted frescos in that room are very likely the oldest Christian paintings in existence – sort of like our version of the Paleolithic cave paintings in Lascaux, France. These paintings depict Christ as the Good Shepherd, the stories of the healing of the paralytic, Christ and Peter walking on water, and the Samaritan woman at the well – wonderfully appropriate paintings for a place where baptisms take place, reminding us that Jesus came to tend for the lost, heal the sick, strengthen faith and reconcile divisions.

The gospel of Mark seems interested in what goes on in people’s homes as well, as this morning’s reading demonstrates. Following directly from the text we read last week, where Jesus entered the synagogue to heal the man with the unclean spirit, Jesus moves immediately to the home of Simon Peter and his brother, Andrew, where Peter’s mother-in-law is sick in bed.

You’ll remember that in last week’s text, people marveled at how Jesus taught with authority, though we aren’t told just what it was that Jesus was teaching. Something similar happens here. Jesus enters Peter’s home, and is told that the woman of the house is ill. He takes her by the hand and lifts her up and she is healed. Immediately she begins to serve him. Word gets out and by evening every sick or possessed person in town has been brought to Jesus for healing, and Jesus is seen working overtime to meet the needs of the people.

The next morning Jesus has to get up early to find a moment of solitude so that he can pray. When his disciples finally track him down and tell him that there are still people looking for him, presumably seeking the same healing Jesus gave to so many others, Jesus says, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also.” As in the synagogue, we still haven’t heard what the message is. Jesus is teaching by his actions. Where he is, the powers of evil are pushed back and people are healed. It is all the preaching anyone seems to need.

So the story so far in Mark’s gospel is that Jesus has gone to the synagogue only to find people suffering there under the power of unclean spirits, and Jesus has gone into people’s homes where they are suffering under the powers of sickness and death, and wherever Jesus goes people are healed. This isn’t the last time Jesus enters private homes to teach and to heal (which, in Jesus’ classroom seem to be tightly related). Soon afterwards he returns to Capernaum and word gets out that he is home and people are drawn to him for healing. Then Jesus is seen dining in the home of Levi, the tax collector, with many sinners and tax collectors in his presence. In the 7th chapter of Mark, Jesus enters a home in Tyre and the gospel says, “he entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice…” and what happens next changes the course of his ministry. A Syrophoenician woman brings her sick daughter to Jesus for healing, and Jesus is challenged to make the blessings of his healing ministry available to all people, regardless of their background, ethnicity or nationality.

These things all happen in homes, not in synagogues. The frequency with which the home is depicted as the site of Jesus’ ministry has led some biblical scholars to speculate that Mark’s gospel was written among and directed toward the many early Christians gathering in house churches throughout the ancient Roman world. Over and over again, Jesus is seen challenging the public piety of the people in the synagogue and temple, and meeting people in the everyday circumstances of their lives, in their homes, for teaching that looks like healing.

This feels like a serendipitously timely text, given that we’re about to begin a set of small group studies this coming week. You’ve read in your bulletins and you’ve heard during the announcements that beginning this Wednesday and Thursday, members of St. Luke’s and members of Luther Memorial (a sister site up in Lincoln Square) will be gathering together to read and discuss Brian McLaren’s new book, Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words. The Wednesday group, which is Co-Ed and at which there will be childcare, will meet here at St. Luke’s from 6:30pm – 8pm. The Thursday night group, which is for women and at which there will not be childcare, will be meeting in people’s homes from 6:30pm – 8pm.

As many of you who have participated in previous small groups here at St. Luke’s, and perhaps elsewhere, can attest – these gathering times are often filled with teaching that feels like healing. Sunday morning worship, the heartbeat of Christian community that gathers us in and breathes fresh life into us through Word and Meal before pumping us back out into circulation in the world, is only one – though the primary one – practice or habit of Christian discipleship. Gathering in each other’s homes for study, and shared meals, and prayer is another practice – and one that connects us with the experiences of the earliest Christians.

Listen again to what happens when Jesus enters the home of a disciple, in this case, Peter. When Jesus enters Peter’s home he discovers that someone in that house is ill. How often we hide our illnesses from the world, whether they be literal injuries or illnesses, or figurative ones. Our congested heads or our congested lives. Our broken bones or our broken relationships. Jesus enters the home and takes Simon’s mother-in-law by the hand, lifting her up from her sick bed.

What would it look like for Jesus to enter your home? If we take seriously what we declare to be true every time we baptize an infant or an adult, that in these waters we become a part of the body of Christ, then what would it look like for Jesus to enter your home? Might it look like one of the people here, in this room, this morning, knocking on your door and asking to come in?

What would it look like for Jesus to enter your home and take you by the hand? If we, seated here, are members of the body of Christ, might it look like one hand holding another, joined in prayer for the members of your household, of every household?

And, what might happen if the body of Christ were to enter your home and heal you? What would you do next? Would you stay in bed, happy for a few more hours of rest? Well, perhaps. I mean, just to catch up on lost sleep, and we could let that slide without making too much of it. But then what? What would you do if the burdens of your life were made lighter by the healing presence of the community of Christ in your home?

I’m not certain, but my hunch is that you would rise to your feet and put yourself in service of the many others in this church, and in our community, that are in need of healing. I am willing to venture that guess, because it’s what I’ve seen you do. I see you shouldering the heavy loads of insane work demands and painful ailments in your bodies, and still you show up to feed our hungry neighbors and make this place warm and inviting for the many who share our church home for their own ministries of healing and art.

There’s a strand of biblical criticism that chaffs at the story of Peter’s mother-in-law rising from her illness only to immediately begin serving Jesus and the disciples. In Mark’s gospel however, everything is happening immediately, as if to suggest to us that the world is being transformed before our very eyes. There is, what our seminarian Francisco has been saying to the small group he leads on Thursday nights, a “breathlessness” to the gospel of Mark – a sense that something amazing is happening, and that we are being drawn into it. When Peter’s mother-in-law rises from her illness, the Greek word describing her service to the disciples is diakonia, the same word from which we draw the title “deacon.” This woman, whom Jesus heals, is subtly named a deacon of the church.

I’ve seen that happen when members of St. Luke’s gather in the home as well. I recall that, about a year ago, some of the young women here at St. Luke’s were gathering in each other’s home to read Joan Didion’s memoir of the year of grief that followed the death of her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking. In the book, Didion remembers the many people who just showed up at her door with hot meals so that she wouldn’t have to worry about preparing meals as she wandered, lost in her grief. The women in the small group recalled the many times they’d seen their own mothers prepare a meal for someone in the church or in the neighborhood after a surgery, or a death in the family. And it dawned on them, that they too were now deacons of the church, people drawn from healing into service. They came to me and asked if they could please be made aware of people who might need or enjoy a home cooked meal. I know that some of you here have enjoyed the blessings of those meals.

This is what happens when Jesus enters our homes. We are healed and we are called into service. This is why we are working hard to create new and different opportunities in the coming weeks and months for you to gather in one another’s homes. It is a part of your Christian education and formation, to be sure, but it is more than that as well. Like Jesus, who teaches with authority even when we don’t know the content of his sermons, we are discovering that the learning that lasts is the learning that meets us in our homes; in the intimate places of our lives, the places where unclean powers need to be named and driven out; where sickness is keeping us from service.

Sisters and brothers, the house church is alive and well in our day and age. It is not an alternative to the synagogue or the sanctuary, it is an extension of this place… like the extension you add to the dinner table so that it can fit just a few more people around. The words on which we here feast, the meals which we here share, are too rich to be digested in just one day. Open your doors, open your hearts, open your lives to the body of Christ waiting to enter your home. Rise up and be healed.

In the name of Jesus. Amen.

I have climbed up into the pulpit this morning to preach on a topic that is near and dear to many of us, and that subject is toilet paper and the church. This is an indelicate conversation, so I will try and keep it light. You may find yourself inclined to giggle, or perhaps even laugh out loud. I encourage you to do so. It will most likely be a long time before I preach about toilets again, so you should try and make the most of it.

I was having coffee with Lynda Deacon yesterday, and I found myself holding forth with a rant that went something like this,

“I am so sick of hearing about toilet paper! I don’t ever need to hear another conversation about the state of our bathrooms. As long as I’ve been here, people have been complaining to me about the embarrassing state of our bathrooms. Lots of people use our bathrooms. Lots of homeless and hungry people use our bathrooms. People take baths in our sinks. People steal our toilet paper. What am I supposed to do about that? Honestly, if money is so tight that people are choosing between buying food and buying toilet paper, I hope they’re buying the food. I can’t get mad at someone for doing what they have to do to make sure they can clean up after themselves! What can I say? I am no toilet expert. The Bible doesn’t have lots of practical advice to offer about toilets, so your idea is as good as mine.”

If you’re not already aware, the subject of toilet paper and the church comes up a lot at St. Luke’s. So, let’s go over the logistics. St. Luke’s has four restrooms. The two largest and most public of our bathrooms are on the ground floor of the parish hall, at the bottom of the stairs. These bathrooms are gendered – the men’s room containing two standing urinals and two private toilet seats, the women’s room containing three private toilet seats. There are also two unisex, single-occupant bathrooms on the second floor of the parish hall – one just outside the church office, and the other just off the formal lounge and the yoga studio. None of our bathrooms can be accessed without negotiating at least one flight of stairs, and none of them are set up to accommodate people with mobility impairments of any kind. Just saying.

In the introduction to her 2008 New York Times bestseller, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters, author Rose George shares a story about bathrooms that can, perhaps, help us break the seal on this taboo topic. She writes,

I need the bathroom. I assume there is one, though I’m at a spartan restaurant in the Ivory Coast, in a small town filled with refugees from next-door Liberia, where water comes in buckets and you can buy towels secondhand. The waiter, a young Liberian man, only nods when I ask. He takes me off into the darkness to a one-room building, switches on the light, and leaves. There’s a white tiled floor, while tiled walls and that’s it. No toilet, no hole, no clue. I go outside to find him again and ask if he’s sent me to the right place. He smiles with sarcasm. Refugees don’t have much fun but he’s having some now. “Do it on the floor. What do you expect? This isn’t America!” I feel foolish. I say I’m happy to use the bushes, it’s not that I’m fussy. But he’s already gone, laughing into the darkness.

I need the bathroom. I leave the reading room of the British Library in central London and find a “ladies” a few yards away. If I prefer, there’s another one on the far side of the same floor, and more on the other five floors. By 6pm, after thousands of people have entered and exited the library and the toilets, the stalls are still clean. The doors still lock. There is warm water in the clean sinks. I do what I have to do, then flush the toilet and forget it, immediately, because I can, and because all my life I have done no differently.

This is why the Liberian waiter laughed at me. He thought that I thought a toilet was my right, when he knew it was a privilege.

I’m talking about toilets this morning, and I’m not talking about toilets this morning; and that, in fact, is how a lot of toilet talk is done. Talking about toilets is rarely ever just talking about toilets. It’s talk about sanitation, cleanliness, health, poverty, gender, class, sexuality and disease. Our taboos surrounding toilets often serve to keep us from talking about all sorts of taboo subjects, and asking questions like:

• Why do our downstairs bathrooms smell so bad? (Answer: because there are many people using our bathrooms throughout the week who have little or no access to showers, so they shower in our sinks and change clothes in our toilet stalls)
• Why do we wait to wait to use the bathrooms in our homes if we can’t use one of the upstairs bathrooms? (Answer: because none of us wants to be in a smelly, dirty bathroom if we have a choice)

Those are the easy questions. The tougher ones come next, questions like:

• Which of the following do our bathrooms more closely resemble: private, residential bathrooms or public transit rest stops – and what does that suggest?
• If St. Luke’s bathrooms are not for you, who are they for? What’s the first answer that comes to mind? Be honest.

Then, of course, there’s the final – perhaps the most obvious – question: why am I talking about this?

In the passage from Mark’s gospel we read this morning, Jesus has just come back from the wilderness, where he was tempted by Satan, and from the lakeshore, where he called his first disciples. Now he has arrived at the synagogue on the Sabbath where he teaches with authority. What he’s teaching we don’t know, we’re simply told that it’s markedly different from what the scribes have to say.

The scribes were interpreters of the law. They were the transmitters of tradition. They passed on what they had first received. For example, they knew how many days a woman should remove herself during the time of her period, or the proper sacrifice for someone to offer to be made clean after touching a dead body. They knew what was clean and what was unclean.

Or did they?

Mark tells us that “there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit.” Some translations render this an “evil” spirit. I don’t think we should get hung up on whether or not the spirit was “unclean” or “evil.” It’s probably more germane to notice that we think the two things are related. We imagine that unclean things, or people, are evil things, or people. This is why we don’t want to share too much with them. Like our bathrooms.

In his essay “Learning from the Loo,” American sociologist Harvey Molotch writes,

“Whatever the setting or scale of the problem, we have in the toilet an instrument and institution that both reflects how people and societies operate and also reinforces the existing pattern. Precisely because the toilet operates somewhat in hiding, those who plan, manage, and control its use often act on their own, without a public to which they most provide detailed and explicit accounts of what they are doing. The toilet thus operates irresponsibly. Compared to other artifacts, arrangements, and patterns of usage, it thus resists change – however unjust, damaging, or inefficient things may be.”

I have to admit, I’d never considered the prophetic edge of pee and poo and public loos, but there it is. “We have in the toilet an instrument and institution that both reflects how people and societies operate and also reinforces the existing pattern.”

To speak plainly, this means that the condition of our restrooms both means something and does something. What it means is related to difference and how we view it. The accommodations we expect for ourselves as opposed to the ones we make available to others. What it does is actually maintain and reinforce those differences. The person who uses our toilet because they don’t have access to any other one isn’t invited into a meditation on class, poverty and human dignity. They are experiencing classism, power and indignity. Whether or not we mean for that to happen is really beside the point.

What’s so clever and remarkable about Mark’s gospel is that it says that Jesus taught with authority, but it doesn’t tell you what he taught. That’s not what we expect. We expect that teaching is related to conveying information, mastering content. Instead, Jesus’ teaching unmasks a conflict between two spiritual forces in the world – the spirit that has possessed the man in the synagogue and the Holy Spirit present in Jesus. It is no match. What Jesus teaches, then and now, is that every barrier is broken down when exposed to the power of God’s love. I say love, because look how it happens. Jesus does not command the unclean person to be gone, he commands the unclean spirit. He restores the man to good health, to community. The label, whether it is “evil” or “dirty,” is, well, eliminated. Flushed away. All that remains is the person whom God loves.

In his letter to the Corinthians Paul writes, “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” Knowledge wants to know whose job it is to keep the dirty people from taking baths in our sink. Knowledge wants to know who’s going to make sure there’s toilet paper in the stalls. Knowledge wants to know why we’re still talking about our bathrooms. By contrast, love builds up. Love spends Saturday afternoons spray painting the stalls. Love replaces the cracked mirrors and the broken commodes. Love asks for the key to the closet and makes sure there’s a fresh roll of toilet paper for our guests on Tuesdays and Thursdays, on Saturdays and Sundays.

What distinguishes Jesus’ teaching from the scribes is that Jesus is teaching for transformation, not information. It’s not about having the answer, it’s about being the answer.

St. Luke’s, it’s true, there is something about our bathroom situation that stinks… but it’s not just the pink urinal pucks. It’s true that we have a waste removal problem, but what needs elimination is our attitudes, not the people who provoke us. Because, at the end of the day, no one’s poo smells good. Not yours. Not mine. Not our neighbors’. Not our guests’. We don’t accomplish anything by ranking our relative odor. We don’t prove anything by pointing fingers. What’s needed is not information, it’s transformation.

So, what’s next? I don’t know. We’ve got an annual meeting after church, at which you’re going to elect some new council members to provide vision and leadership for our congregation. I suspect they’re about as excited as I am to spend any more time talking about toilet paper. But mission and ministry, justice and hospitality, those are things I think we’re all aching to talk about, and more than talk about. That’s the work we’re called to be about doing, even if it starts with something as mundane as our bathrooms.

Can I get an amen. Please?

A couple weeks ago I mentioned the fact that I’ve worked in a variety of group homes and other residential settings for youth and adults with cognitive, emotional or developmental difficulties. Here’s a story from one of them, where I worked during my senior year at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. I love to tell this story. It’s one of my favorite parables of grace, so you may have heard it before.

During my last year of college I spent my Saturday mornings working at a group home for boys with emotional or behavioral concerns – kids who’d been removed from home and school because of violent or disruptive behavior. There were only about eight to ten kids in the house at a time, and two staff members charged with keeping order – making meals, planning outings, and creating opportunities for the boys to talk about their lives. In reality it often felt like refereeing a high-speed soccer match as the boys tumbled around the house fighting with each other and breaking anything that wasn’t nailed down to the floor.

The toughest kid in the house was also the youngest, a Native American boy named Kyle who’d grown up on a reservation in northern Minnesota and had seen his brother shot on the front lawn of their home. He was nine, but his anger at the world was so immediately palpable that all the boys made way for him when he entered the room. He was unpredictable and aggressive, and frankly he scared people.

I remember a morning that began like most others, but ended very differently.

Kyle started the day in a bad mood. He’d gotten a phone call from his family up north and he was upset. He didn’t know what to do with his feelings. He didn’t know how to talk about them, so he began picking fights with the other boys instead.

My co-worker and I were nervous for a couple of reasons. First, the other boys were having a pretty good morning and we were hoping to get everyone out of the house for an outing to the skating rink. That would keep everyone occupied and having fun, and would make our shift go faster. If Kyle started making trouble, the chain reaction of conflicts was sure to land everyone grounded in their rooms and kill any chance for an easy morning. Second, Kyle had a storm brewing behind his eyes, and we knew from experience that he could get so angry that the only way to keep him, and others around him, safe was to physically restrain him. Kyle was a biter and a scratcher, and restraining him was never easy. Understandably, we were nervous.

It didn’t take long for our anxieties to be realized. Kyle picked one fight after another with every boy in the house, and got everyone so upset that we had to send him to his room to keep the other boys from ganging up on him. Once in his room we hoped he would find the space he needed to calm down, but instead we heard the slow wreck of bookcases being pushed over and toys being smashed. Then, the sound of glass shattering as he threw a chair into the window. My co-worker stayed with the rest of the boys while I went to investigate.

Opening the door of the bedroom I saw Kyle sitting on the floor surrounded by shards of broken glass, catching his breath and looking for something else to break. He was the definition of a wild child, but beneath the anger I could see that there was also fear and confusion and heartbreak.

“Kyle, you’ve got to get control of yourself,” I said, “or you’ll get hurt.” He looked me straight in the eye, picked up a book from the pile he’d made and threw it at my head. “Kyle,” I said, “you can’t keep destroying the house and you can’t keep attacking everyone around you.” Of course, he saw right through me and we both realized that, in fact, he could keep destroying the house and attacking everyone around him. So I pulled out the final threat. “Kyle,” I said, “we can’t let you hurt yourself or anyone else. If you keep this up we’re going to have to restrain you.”

That was it, the threat he’d been waiting for. He picked up another book, a heavy one I seem to recall, and chucked it straight at me. He called my bluff. All my training told me that once you set a limit you have to be ready to enforce it if you want to maintain discipline and rebuild a sense of structure for the kids. He was so deliberate though. He’d worked the situation so methodically, escalating to the point where someone would have to step in and take control, and it occurred to me this may have been just what he wanted. Sensing a moment full of potential in front of me, I took a risk.

“Kyle,” I said, “I know you had a bad phone call with your family this morning, and that you’re really upset. I don’t want to restrain you if all you need is a hug. Think about it for a minute and let me know. If you just need a hug, all you have to do is ask.”

It was a long minute while Kyle thought it over. I sensed it could go either way as he fell silent, considering what I’d said. Then his answer came. “Really?” And I walked across broken glass and scattered toys and sat down next to him. He folded into my arms and started to cry.

Jesus approaches those who would be his disciples and says, “the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe the good news.” The apostle Paul writes, “the appointed time has grown short…for the present form of this world is passing away.” What both Jesus and Paul are telling us is that we live in a time when the good news of God is trying to break through the ordinary time of our lives, when opportunities for seeing the holy wrapped up in the ordinary, or the beloved wrapped up in the enemy, are right before our eyes.

Let’s stop here for just a minute and take this in. Today, this morning, right now, God has drawn near to us – to you – to call you away from your rage, or your fear, or your shame. Can you find that place in yourself? The place where you still feel small, still feel helpless or hopeless. Still feel alone. It may not be difficult for you to find. You may feel like that’s the place where you live, day in and day out. Or maybe you’ve locked those feelings up, hidden them away, and tried to forget they exist. The nagging worry that you have disappointed your parents, your children, your friends, your spouse. The grief of a love lost, or not yet found.

What happens when those feelings are left to fester? Pain can only be tolerated for so long before it transforms into some more tolerable sentiment. Maybe apathy. Maybe anger. Is that how we come to hold such bitter grudges towards the people we love and care for the most? Is it easier to hate, than to hold out hope that change may yet happen?

Jonah is sent to Ninevah, the home of his worst enemies, to announce their need for repentance. He expects nothing from them, worse than nothing, but miraculously they hear God’s call to repent and the entire nation, from the king to the common subject, turns from its violence and realigns itself with God’s work in the world.

Who have you given up on? Who have you written off? What would it take for you to shake off your discouragement, your disgust, and go after the very people you’ve come to regard as your enemies seeking not vengeance, but reconciliation?

Jesus calls to Peter and Andrew, James and John, and they drop everything to follow him. These ordinary people, living at the economic and social edge of Empire, treated their whole lives like “the help,” like cogs in the machine; when Jesus looks at these people and sees the whole of them, inside and out, they immediately leave the lives they’ve known behind and follow him.

Jesus sees you as well. Not just the “you” you present to the world, but the you that sits in the middle of the room surrounded by the broken pieces of your life. Jesus sees your jealousy. Jesus sees your anger. Jesus sees your shame. Jesus sees your guilt. Jesus sees all of you, and Jesus loves you completely. There is need to wait for the other shoe to drop. There is no point at which the whole truth comes out and God can no longer love you.

God sees you laboring down on the shore of your life, trying so hard to bring in a haul large enough to justify your place at the table. Rather than counting the fish in your net, or the good deeds in your day, or the dollars in your bank account, Jesus is calling you to leave the nets behind and follow him. The mess that you’re in, that we’re all in, isn’t one we can clean up by ourselves. We will need more than ourselves. We will need each other, everyone, all together. That is why Jesus calls us to go fishing for people instead.

The call to repentance is a calling from God to turn away from our sin. Modern ears, ears like ours, hate this word sin. We tend to immediately shut down, as memories or stereotypes of a religion of guilt and shame come to mind. That’s not the ancient understanding of sin though.

Throughout the long history of Christianity sin has been understood less as a list of things that should not be done, more as a condition of the soul. A reality of human life. Like a doctor diagnosing you with pneumonia, it’s not something you do – it’s something you have. Sin is the reality of brokenness, like the shards of glass from the window that littered the floor, or the heart of the little boy whose family was destroyed by violence, or the children who gather in schoolhouses filled with bullet casings after the bombing ends. Sin is the web of brokenness in which we live our lives.

“Follow me and I will make you fish for people,” Jesus says. Repentance, turning from sin, takes the form of discipleship where we are knit into a human net and cast out into the chaotic waters of life where people are hurting and drowning in their pain. “I will make you fish for people,” is God’s call on our lives to watch and to listen for those moments when hostility can be converted to hospitality. “Fishing for people” is not just a catch phrase for recruiting new members to the church, it is evangelism of a different order. Good news that looks like swords being beaten into plowshares. “Fishing for people” is another way to think about our relationship to the enemy, like Ninevah, which today lies across the river from Mosul, in Iraq. A way of relating to those who are not only different from us, but who we believe are irredeemably against us.

Jesus’ call to repentance is not a divine scolding, it is a divine invitation. It is an invitation to turn away from the web of brokenness and to be caught in the net of God’s loving embrace. God wants to catch us in our freefalling lives before we hit the ground, before we hurt ourselves or someone else yet again. God wants to restrain us with the freedom to be new people. God sees our suffering, our confrontational provocations of one another as individuals and clans and nations and wonders if, perhaps, we might be willing to trade fits of violence for evidence of love. Then God sends us out to be that evidence.

The invitation to Christian discipleship may be imagined as this: the assembly that gathers here each Sunday and joins hands as we pass peace, or joins hands as we bless one another for the week ahead, is the very tool that God has at God’s disposal as God sets out to heal the world with love.

We find ways to hold fast to each other so that the mesh of our interconnectedness will be strong enough to hold fast to the world as it gets caught in our nets. Hold tight to one another, sisters and brothers, and together we will fish for people.

Amen.

Here’s a rhetorical question, one to which I think I already know the answer. Have any of you ever felt embarrassed by the church, or like you had to apologize for being a Christian?

I have. Plenty of times, and with good cause. Christians have a long and ignoble history of messing up and causing harm, intentionally or not. Do anything for two thousand years with billions of people across the face of the planet, and you’ll inevitably end up with a library of books on all the ways you messed up.

What I find frustrating about the public failings of Christians isn’t that we have them, but that others outside the church act so surprised. When I find myself in one of those situations in which I’m feeling apologetic for being a Christian, it’s often in the company of someone who’s pointing out the hypocrisy of the church to me as if that’s news. “I just don’t see why,” they say, “anyone would want to be part of an organization that is so bold in pronouncing its judgments on other people, and so unwilling or unable to confess its own failures.”

Well, let me take care of that right now. It’s true. We Christians fail, quite a lot, to live up to our own standards. But that’s not something we’re shy about discussing. In fact, we include those stories right in our scriptures, as if to remind ourselves that any community called to proclaim God’s good news to the world must be prepared to fearlessly examine its own conduct.

This morning the scriptures give us two examples of people of faith speaking the truth in love, and then the story of Jesus inviting people to follow him, to come and see what God is doing in the world. I want to suggest that these stories, as odd and impolite as they may come across at first, model for us the kind of hospitality we are called to as Christians – a truth-telling and direct invitation to a different kind of life.

Our first story comes from the book of First Samuel, and begins innocuously enough. It’s the kind of story that works well in Sunday School. The boy Samuel was ministering in the temple under the leadership of the priest Eli when, one night, he heard a voice calling to him. “Samuel, Samuel,” the voice called, and the boy rose and went to his mentor’s side to see what was needed only to be told that he hadn’t been summoned. This happens three times before the older priest realizes that God is trying to speak to the boy. Eli tells Samuel to return to his bed, and if he hears the voice again to reply, “Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.”

That’s where the Sunday School version of this story ends: with a tidy moral about being attentive to the voice of God in your life, trying to get your attention. It’s only when you read on that you discover that the message God is trying to get out into the world is that Eli’s house isn’t in order. That his sons, who stand in line to take Eli’s job, have failed to keep faith with God and that God is going to remove the mantle of leadership from that household forever. That’s the message God gives to the boy Samuel to deliver to his master Eli.

Now the moral is considerably less tidy. Listening for the voice of God in your everyday life is no longer simply a path to spiritual self-help, but an opening up to be called into service in ways that may place you in conflict with the values of the world that surrounds you, perhaps even with the very people closest to you.

The second reading makes this point even clearer, as the apostle Paul writes to the community of followers he established in Corinth to admonish them for the bad habits sprouting up among them. In his previous visit to Corinth, Paul had presumably preached a gospel of liberation – that, in Christ, we are set free from the old divisions that separate and oppress us. What some of the people heard was that they were free to do whatever they wished, and that freedom was being expressed in ways that dishonored the image of God in them. In one case a member of the church was carrying on with his father’s wife, while others were not only employing the prostitutes of Corinth but justifying their actions with thin theological arguments that the world would soon end and that their bodies would be left behind as their souls were joined with God.

This is what Paul takes on in his letter. Despite what you may have heard, he’s not being prudish or sex-phobic in his response to the Corinthians. Actually, he’s being pretty body-positive. These church people’s involvement with the prostitutes came out of a belief that their bodies didn’t matter, that only their souls mattered to God. Paul confronts his friends and followers, reminding them that their bodies are made in the image and likeness of God. He pleads with them to show reverence to their bodies out of reverence for the one who made them.

So, we have a story about a student called by God to rebuke his teacher, and then a story about an apostle called by God to rebuke his students, and in both cases the scriptures give us stories about people within the community of faith speaking words of truth to those they love. These aren’t stories about Christians passing judgment on the world outside them. These are stories about the early church practicing the difficult work of becoming a place of genuine hospitality, where strangers learn to speak to one another like family, and where bodies and lives are respected as sites for holy encounters with God.

Hospitality, the way I usually use the word, is concerned with welcoming guests into my home and attending to their needs. Writer Henri Nouwen speaks of the movement from hostility to hospitality as one of the central tasks of the spiritual life, which is to say that it is one of the journeys each of us undertakes as a part of being human.

“Although many, we might even say most, strangers in this world become easily the victim of a fearful hostility, it is possible for men and women and obligatory for Christians to offer an open and hospitable space where strangers can cast off their strangeness and become our fellow human beings.[1]”

Nouwen defines hospitality as “the creation of a free space where the stranger can enter and become a friend instead of an enemy[2],” and calls this task obligatory for Christians. It is our job, our calling, to be about the work of creating a world in which our anxiety about the strangeness of the foreigner, the oddities of our neighbors, the quirks of our community, the idiosyncrasies of our selves can be seen and accepted and loved into the warmth of friendship. Where the distance between stranger and sibling can be crossed.

In times past we often thought of worship as being like the meal that strengthened us here to go “out there” to do our mission work – whether that mission work was raising a family, or teaching a class, or practicing law, or whatever vocation God has called us into in our everyday lives. Worship is for “us,” mission is for “them.” But by now many are suspicious of “us and them” language. We see too much of ourselves in each other to think the dividing lines can be drawn all that easily. We know as well that we are hungry for God’s mission. We are in need of community, of education and formation, of healing and reconciliation. We need some of that mission for ourselves!

Do you remember how you came to end up in the pew? Some of you have been coming to St. Luke’s your whole lives. Some of you have worshipped with other congregations in different cities, or different denominations. Some of you only recently found yourself walking through the doors of a church building, perhaps not even sure why you got out of bed so early on a Sunday morning, but knowing that there was a space in your life, a curiosity, perhaps a hunger or a pain. A hope that there might be something here to address you in all your human complexity.

Philip and Nathaniel were like that. Jesus found Philip and called him into community. Philip immediately found Nathaniel and said to him, “we have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote,” or “we found what we have been looking for. We have been met by the one who can see us and address us as we are.” This is underscored when Nathaniel asks Jesus how he knows him. Jesus responds, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” A simple response that still persuades Nathaniel that when Jesus sees you, you are known inside and out, because he responds by declaring Jesus the Son of God and King of Israel.

I think we long to be seen that clearly. I think the inherent loneliness of life is one of the main reasons many of us find ourselves here on Sunday mornings. Not that our lives are tragic, but they are difficult and lonely. We can be newly married and still feel terribly lonely and unknown. We can be surrounded by children and grandchildren, acquaintances and co-workers, and still feel totally invisible and anonymous. Day in and day out we are trained to answer the question, “how are you” with the answer “I’m good, thanks.” We are told to smile when we are not happy.

Worship can be like that too, but it shouldn’t. The pattern of our worship is in its very structure designed to slow us down and give us the breathing room to become real.

• Every week, we gather, we confess our pains and failings, we remember the promises of our baptism – our claim on an identity large enough to make us all family to one another,
• We listen – to words from scripture, to prayers lifted up on our behalf, and hopefully to each other. When we can, we brave the sound of our own voices lifting up the cares and concerns of our own lives. We make ourselves vulnerable to each other by telling the truth about ourselves, and in our vulnerability we make it possible for others, perhaps newcomers, to trust that here there is also room for them to be real, to be messy and complicated and in need.
• We share a meal, the way families do. We come to the meal together, and we say all are welcome. We make sure there’s enough for everybody as a reminder of the way it’s supposed to be every time we sit down to eat.
• Then we are sent – not simply sent “out there” carried by the strength of this worship to carry out good works, but actually also to share an invitation with others that there is a good work being done here. The good deed being done is God’s: God is making families, God is shaping and forming us, God is healing us. That is happening right here, and we are sent out in peace to “share the good news.”

How does this really happen? It’s a fair question. How does this ancient ritual, this holy liturgy, these words and songs and standing and sitting and kneeling and call and response – how – how does it accomplish all of this?

It is Nathaniel’s question, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?” A place I’ve never heard of, an inconsequential place, hardly worth mentioning? Can the divinity of God be wrapped up in a human life? Can an assembly of people really claim to be the body of Christ, a sign of God’s powerful presence in the world right now? Can anything powerful come out of something as weak as a weekly ritual of words and wine and water?

Meditations upon those questions fill book upon book, many of them assigned to me in seminary and now sitting on the bookshelf in my office – but none of them are as good as the transformation that takes place over time as we gather here, as we make ourselves vulnerable to each other, as we come to care for one another in our joys and in our griefs, as we teach each other’s children and form each other’s faith, as we heal and forgive and are reconciled to each other.

Perhaps it is best for you to simply come and see.

Amen.

[1] Nouwen, Henri. 1975. Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. p.65. New York:Image.

[2] Ibid, p.71.

I’d like you to try something out with me this morning, a guided visualization.

If you will, close your eyes and clear your head.

Imagine only darkness, inky blackness to every margin of your mind.

As you usher any remaining thoughts from your consciousness, pay attention to the sound of your breathing. Don’t try and change it, just notice it. Now, as you take your next breath, imagine the air filling every corner of your body, slipping behind your ribs and under your belly and enlarging even your fingers and toes.

Take another deep breath, and as you release it, imagine that the wind rushing from your body is shaping the darkness in your mind’s eye. That the black ink has begun to ripple, like waves pushed toward the shore on a windy day.

Play with that for a moment, your breath moving over the darkness in your mind, and the ripples it’s making. How deep is the pool of darkness? Is it a puddle? Is it a lake, or an ocean? Is it a galaxy? How choppy are the waves? Do the deeps of your interior resist the disruption of your breath, or are the black waters inside you choppy like a storm at sea?

Keep breathing. Keep your eyes closed, but now I want you to notice that somewhere, maybe high above your waters, maybe far out on the horizon, or perhaps illuminated from below, there is light.

Slowly, open your eyes, but hold on to that image of the vast waters within you. As you take in the familiar sights of the sanctuary, don’t lose track of the memory of the ocean inside.

You know, don’t you, that you are made up mostly of water. I’ve heard that, as infants, we’re made up of 75 – 80% water, and that the percentage decreases as we age. Parts of our body are waterier than other. Our brains are 85% water. Our bones are more like 10 – 15% water.

As a college student I worked in a series of group homes, some for kids in state custody, other for adults with persistent mental illness. Despite their differences, one thing they held in common was a superstition that on nights when the moon was full, the residents would be just a little bit wilder. I remember a co-worker trying to convince me this was because, just like the moon’s gravitational force pulls waves from the ocean, it also exerted some tidal force over the waters in our body, making us a little crazy.

The moon has been waxing gibbous for days now, on its way to a full moon tomorrow night. How are your waters this morning? Have they been roiling about inside you? Are they crashing against your heart?

The scriptures this morning are overflowing with water. The waters of creation from Genesis. The voice of God thundering over the waters in the psalm. The baptisms of the Ephesians by water into the name of Jesus. Then, Jesus himself entering into the waters of the Jordan followed by the epiphany that this one is the Beloved of God.

Truth is, we hear these scriptures fairly frequently in worship. It was just weeks ago that we read the story of John the Baptist crying out in the wilderness as we waited for the coming of God in Christ during the season of Advent. Here we are again, back in that story, but this time on the other side of Christmas, the festival of the incarnation.

How does this story change, when read on the other side of Christmas?

One thing that happens for me after Christmas is that the balance of my attention begins to shift away from hopeful expectation to present incarnation. I find myself waiting less and seeking more. Seeking signs that God has become fully immersed in my experience, in the experience of the world.

The world’s waters are certainly stormy these days, as they always are somewhere. There is the almost literal example this past week of the high seas adventure in the Gulf of Oman wherein a boat load of Iranian hostages who’d been taken hostage by Somali pirates were rescued by American Navy sailors. Then in metaphoric waters not too far away, there is a new storm brewing in the Persian Gulf, as the United States attempts to broker a peaceful resolution to tensions between Israel and Iran over Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Even as we finally pull out of Afghanistan, and the president has voiced support for a greatly reduced military program, the threat of a new war in the Middle East looms.

Those far away waters seem so much larger than the bodies of water within us, but our personal storms are no less devastating. We have endured the loss of loved ones. We fear the loss of loved ones. We are looking for work. We are fighting for our marriages. We are afraid for our children. We are praying that the new life surrounded by the waters in our wombs will be borne safely into this world.

Every conceivable body of water you can imagine is stirred up right now, and it is on these stormy shores that Jesus arrives this morning to be baptized. As we stand back along the banks with the others who left the safety of the city behind to come hear what John the Baptist was preaching, the epiphany is that the waters into which Jesus is baptized are our own!

Imagine that. Really, go on. If it will help, close your eyes again and find the pool that fills your heart, the one that threatens to break the levees of your life. Now listen, now see – the God that was present at creation, whose breath moved over the waters, has come down to your shore. That God, the one wrapped up in the flesh of Jesus is immersed today in you. God, whose voice thunders over the waters; Jesus, whose voice stilled the seas; the Holy Spirit, whose breath brought order out of chaos – the entirety of God is being baptized in you. You are the river into which God desires to dive.

Once Jesus came up for air, a voice from heaven spoke, saying “you are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” But, consider this, that one – God’s pleasure, God’s beloved – that one was sent to you. How deeply God must love you. Like waters overflowing the banks of a river, God’s love has arrived, washing over you.

Amen.

Welcome 2012, and a happy New Year to you all!

It’s the morning after last night, and a month-long season of eating and celebrating that stretched from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Eve, so I suspect some of you are, like me, feeling the need to make some New Year’s resolutions. I’m always impressed by the scope and variety of resolutions people make: commitments to learn a new language, to travel to someplace new, to write a novel. My resolutions are always so much more mundane and predictable: to get to bed on time, to eat right, to hit the gym more often. And, as often as not, my resolutions run out of steam weeks before they are renewed for Lent. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

Resolutions are hard to keep, but perhaps even more difficult is holding on to the value each resolution is meant to fulfill. We don’t resolve to make more time for reading, or to be home from work in time for dinner, because books shouldn’t be dusty or because tables shouldn’t be empty. We commit to these things because we value our minds, we cherish our families, and we want to nurture both of them. This distinction, between the keeping of resolutions and the fulfillment of the values they represent is very present in the scriptures for this morning, as we read of Mary and Joseph’s journey to Jerusalem for Jesus’ presentation and Mary’s purification.

Remembering back to Christmas Eve, we recall that Mary and Joseph have already taken one trip, required of them by law, for the census called by Caesar Augustus. Now, eight days after his birth, Mary and Joseph are keeping another law, this one a religious law, traveling to the Temple in Jerusalem.

The action moves quickly at this point in the story, so let’s slow it down just enough to understand the significance of what we’re being told. The first verse of the gospel reading tells us, “when the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord.” What Luke is remembering here is actually two separate rituals: the purification is actually for Mary, the presentation is for Jesus.

According to Levitical law, after the birth of a male child a mother was ceremonially unclean for seven days, and on the eighth day she would begin purification rituals that would last for thirty-three days. If the child was female, the period was twice as long. As a woman, Mary was only allowed into the Temple as far as the women’s court.

Two verses later we read that the holy family “offered a sacrifice according to what is stated in the law of the Lord, ‘a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons.’” Again, Jesus’ family is keeping the law, which actually required an offering for the mother’s purification (not the child’s birth) of a lamb, unless the family could not afford a lamb, in which case two turtledoves or pigeons would suffice. Luke is reminding the readers that Jesus, God’s own Beloved and the world’s Messiah, was born among the poor. His family, though not respected by worldly standards, still respected the observance of the law, the keeping of religious resolutions.

What happens next however falls outside the boundaries of ritual or expectation. First, the Holy Spirit brings a man named Simeon to the holy family, where he takes Jesus into his arms and pronounces a blessing that foreshadows all that this child will be, “a light for revelation to the Gentiles and glory for [God’s] people Israel.”

What should have happened, what was expected, was that Mary and Joseph would offer the poor person’s sacrifice to begin Mary’s purification, and then a priest of the Temple would have supplied a blessing for the infant Jesus. What actually took place was quite different. In the temple, a place only Jews could enter; to a family whose poor gift evidently didn’t rise to the level of the priests’ attention; a man filled with the Holy Spirit and not a priest offers a blessing that names this child as the hope of both Jews and Gentiles, both insiders and outsiders.

Simeon says, “this child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed.” This is a classic bit of foreshadowing as well. As at his birth, all of the events surrounding the infant Jesus point to the radical upending of power and privilege he will usher into the world. Yet, the point the scriptures are trying to make this morning, is that this blessing, this promise, this foretaste of the story yet to come, is all made possible through devout observance of the law on the part of Mary and Joseph, and by extension, Jesus.

Consider again those resolutions you’ve made, or you are making, for the coming year. The purpose of resolving to read the paper each morning isn’t to ensure the Chicago Tribune or the New York Times stays solvent. The purpose of committing to yoga twice a week isn’t to keep your favorite yogi employed. The purpose of these commitments, these resolutions, these private laws, is to provide you with the habits, the disciplines, the patterns of being that are necessary in order for you to be transformed. That is what you’re after, a transformed life.

That is what God is after too: a transformed life, a transformed people, and a transformed world. I think too often I assume, and perhaps you do as well, that transformation comes by letting go of everything that is keeping us down or holding us back. Certainly, transformation requires us to be prepared to die to what is old so that something new can be born in us. The stories scripture tells us this morning remind us of another truth though, and that is that ritual and habit and discipline and practice are also the context in which transformation occurs.

Had Mary and Joseph not observed the ritual laws of purification and presentation, they would not have been present to receive Simeon and Anna’s blessings. They would not have heard these powerful, prophetic, life-changing pronouncements. Had they been of the “spiritual, but not religious” scho0l of thought, they would have stayed home in Nazareth on that eighth day and missed out on the transformative encounter with an unexpected stranger with a word from the Lord.

You know I’m not one to pine for the good old days, so mark your calendars as I offer this next thought, but I do miss the day when rites and rituals were given more respect in our culture. These days it seems that people are quick to dismiss all ritual as empty, meaningless and unproductive. To me, this is somewhat like dismissing sit ups because you tried one once and it didn’t make your tummy any flatter.

Rituals, whether enacted at the gym, around the dining room table, or here in the sanctuary, don’t show their power in a single occurrence. They work over time, creating the conditions for all kinds of transformations. Bodies are strengthened. Families are bonded. Lives are given meaning. This process is slow, like the seasons following one after another. Each day of winter can seem eternally long, and then it is spring. Or, as Isaiah puts it, “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.”

Keeping the law is the context in which fulfillment of the law can take place, like keeping our resolutions is the context in which personal transformation can take place, or keeping our word is the context in which relationships can become transformative and fulfilling. What’s important isn’t our laws, or our resolutions, or our word. What is important is our transformation, which is another way of understanding the fulfillment of the law.

Finally, and this is so important, our track record in the area of fulfilling the law is about as solid as my track record with New Year’s resolutions. This is biblical, and it goes back to the beginning. In our very creation stories we tell a tale of the first two people, and how they couldn’t follow the laws concerned which food to eat and to avoid. Even as they come to know their nakedness however, God clothes them with leaves and provides a new way forward.

Isaiah hints at this aspect of God’s nature, that our shame and our failure is always being covered by God’s grace, when he writes to a people who have known exile, “I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my whole being shall exult in my God; for [God] has clothed me with the garments of salvation, [God] 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.”

The gospel reading for this morning ends with this post-script, “when they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him.” As we each return to our homes this New Year’s Day, let our keeping of the law open up a space in our hearts, in our minds, in our lives for God to once again surprise us with the unexpected joy of the new life being born again in us and in the world.

Here’s to New Year’s resolutions – God grant us the grace to keep making them, as we thank God for the grace that follows when we cannot.

Happy New Year, and Amen.

Good morning! I am so glad to be here, in worship, with each of you this morning – which is not so unusual a thing, given that it is Sunday morning and this is what we normally do on Sunday mornings… gather for worship. And, of course, it’s not a normal Sunday morning. Many of our friends are away this morning, traveling to be with their families on this holiday, and many of our friends were here last night with extended family, and lots of children, to celebrate the nativity of our Lord with songs and stories and lots and lots of candles.

But this morning is different. The extended families have gone back to their own homes (or are sleeping in), and here we are. I wasn’t meaning to be cheeky when I selected as our gathering hymn, O Come, All Ye Faithful, but it’s kind of appropriate, isn’t it? Here you have come, ye faithful, this Christmas morning.

Christmas morning always has a different feel to it than Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve is all about the stories. The story of Mary and Joseph giving birth to the infant Jesus in the back of the barn. The story of the angels appearing to the shepherds to announce the birth of a new kind of king, a messiah, the delivery of a deliverer. Then there were the other stories. I preached the story of Christmas Eve traditions in my household growing up, and there were other traditions happening right before our eyes. Grandchildren making the annual pilgrimage to church with grandparents.

Christmas morning we don’t really tell stories though. The feeling is different. Like those ancient parents, maybe we’re too tired from a long night and days of travel. We long for a different kind of rest this morning. So, instead, scripture gives us poetry in the form of John’s gospel. What else can we call it? It clearly isn’t a first-person account of the origins of being, this hymn, this statement of faith that “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh and lived among us…full of grace and truth.” It’s true, but it’s not history. It’s poetry. Mysterious words inviting us into the mystery of how God lives and moves and has God’s being with and among us.

“The Word became flesh and lived among us…” That’s an image to play with, words wrapped in flesh. Such a Christmas image, fit for a day full of gifts wrapped in paper and bows. The infant of Bethlehem is God, and is wrapped up in you. You are I are like the temporary papers that shroud the gift God has placed inside us all. And on this day, and on every day, we tear into one another – patiently, gently… energetically, passionately… enviously, fearfully… looking for the evidence of love that already lives inside us all.

Poetry. Playful serious words, inviting us to ponder again what it means that all the power and might of God can be contained in an infant. What kind of God were you hoping for this Christmas? One that would step powerfully into your life and right all the wrongs of the past year? One that would shield you from all future harms? Sorry. Like so many of God’s children, you may be disappointed to find that the gift under the tree isn’t what you asked for, but instead, what you needed. Something fragile, ephemeral, a Word wrapped up in flesh. Spoken and then gone, though always there, since the very beginning.

One of the joys of poetry is that it’s not science. You can’t nail it down. It is evocative. A particular poem may pull something very different out of me than it does out of you. It is relational. It does its work in the gap between the experience of the author and that of the reader. It asks you to search the treasures of your own experience to understand the message of the writer’s.

You see that dynamic at play in our hymn of the day, “Twas in the Moon of Wintertime. Written by the French Jesuit missionary to the indigenous people of Canada, Jean de Brébeuf, this carol takes the Word and wraps it up in the flesh of those people. So swaddling clothes become rabbit skins, shepherds become hunters, and the three kings become chiefs bearing gifts of animal pelts to shelter the baby from the cold. A sort of story poem playing with the familiar and the unfamiliar, as if to remind us that what it means for the Word to take on flesh and dwell among us is that God learns the idioms of our life and tells the old story in a new way, through us.

What will it mean for you that God is born again this day? How do you understand that the new life in the manger is a fragile thing, something that needs caring for every bit as much as you do? How will you carry the gift wrapped up in your flesh, and how will you unwrap it for the world to see?

Like a poem, the mystery of Christmas takes on meaning in the space between the story of then and the life of now. So, in the spirit of John, who used a poem about light and life and words to traverse the distance between himself and those who would follow, I want to offer you one more poem this morning – this time from the Irish poet John O’Donohue, from his collection, To Bless the Space Between Us. In his poem, “As a Child Enters the World” he writes,

As I enter my new family / may they be delighted / At how their kindness / Comes into blossom.

Unknown to me and them, / May I be exactly the one / To restore in their forlorn places / New vitality and promise.

May the hearts of others / Hear again the music / In the lost echoes / Of their neglected wonder.

If my destiny is sheltered, / May the grace of this privilege / Reach and bless the other infants / Who are destined for torn places.

If my destiny is bleak, / May I find in myself / A secret stillness / And tranquility / Beneath the turmoil.

May my eyes never lose sight / Of why I have come here, / That I never be claimed / By the falsity of fear / Or eat the bread of bitterness.

In everything I do, think / Feel, and say, / May I allow the light / Of the world I am leaving / To shine through and carry me home.

May the light present since the dawn of time, out of which you were born and that even now lies wrapped up beneath your skin, shine through you this day and carry you home.

Merry Christmas, and Amen.

Welcome friends to this Christmas Eve, a night filled with traditions at the end of a season steeped in traditions. Black Fridays have been survived. Cookies have been baked. Trees have been trimmed. Presents have been bought. Office parties have been endured. Carols have been sung. Families have gathered or disbanded, or both, and now we are here. It is no wonder that, when Charles Dickens told stories about this night, the ghosts of Christmases past, present and future all made appearances – because this night has that quality of being almost timeless. Children experience it almost entirely in the moment, while the rest of us seem able to simultaneously exist in this moment and in the memory of each Christmas that has already passed.

When I was a boy, Christmas Eve was the longest night. Our church had four services that night so my father, a church musician, left the house early and only came home for a quick dinner after the first service was done. While he was away, Mom would be in the kitchen preparing dinner for Dad and any guests we’d invited over that year. I was only marginally helpful, mostly there to keep company. As she worked, Iowa Public Radio would be on in the background so that we could listen to the annual broadcast of A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College in Cambridge.

Listening to the BBC broadcast is like a cross between being in Cambridge yourself and watching golf on television. You can hear the congregation milling about in the minutes before the worship service begins, then a commentator whispers in hushed tones – as though his dubbed over voice might actually interrupt the ceremony – to tell the story of the lessons and carols.

King’s College has been presenting the festival of lessons and carols for almost a century, since 1918, and has been broadcasting it by radio since 1928. American public radio stations started carrying the program in the late ‘70s, right around the time my family moved to Iowa when I was in the second grade.

Standing in the kitchen, rolling up her almond crescent rolls and preparing the annual ham and broccoli soup, my mom listened to the lessons and carols, inviting us both to imagine what it would be like to be there.

“Now everyone is taking their seats,” the radio commentator would say and Mom would already be one step ahead of him. “The choir boys are in place now,” she’d reply, “and they’re waiting to see who will get the opening solo.”

This was one of those Christmas traditions that captivated me. I actually don’t know if this is true, or if it’s some apocryphal tale, but I have a vivid memory of Mom telling me that each year the boys in the choir would audition to be the opening soloist for “Once in Royal David’s City.” The choirmaster would select two boys as finalists, both prepared to sing this famous solo, being broadcast around the globe as it has for almost a century. Then, on the night of the service, as worship began, the choirmaster would raise his baton and point to one of the boys, and in the next breath that boy would sing to the world.

Like I said, I don’t know if that’s really how it happened, or happens today. But that’s what my mother told me, or at least how I remember it.

As a young singer, my active imagination transported me via the crisp vowels of the radio host to Cambridge itself, and I imagined what it would be like to be standing there in my white choir robes, waiting for the night to begin, wondering if I would be picked to sing.

The choir boys of King’s College seem like a perfect parable of Christmas to me. Like them, we have been practicing and preparing for Christmas for weeks now, for months and for years. Inside the church, our preparations have been wrapped up in the season of Advent, with its annual remembrance of John the Baptist and Mary, mother of God. These last four weeks have been all about waiting, preparing, hoping.

Outside the church, our lives have been filled with waiting, preparing and hoping as well. Not just for Christmas, but for the kind of life we suspect Christmas is supposed to represent. Family and friends. Reunions with those from whom we’ve been separated. Reconciliation with those from whom we’ve been estranged. Peace between enemies. A new beginning. These are the things for which we are waiting, preparing, hoping – and this is why a holiday that can seem so purely joyful to the youngest of children becomes complicated as we grow older. We have lived through cycles of life in which the reunions have been missed, the reconciliation has been botched, the peace has been broken, the new beginning has finished before it really ever even began. We wonder what power on earth or heaven could possibly live up to all our hoping.

Then there is this other way that the boy choir at King’s College seems like a parable for the Christmas season, and it’s in the choirmaster’s act of picking a boy to sing. Luke’s gospel begins with some serious name dropping. Jesus was born during the reign of the Emperor Augustus, while Quirinius was governor of Syria. So far this story sounds kind of boring and predictable. Power born into and among power. Then the scene shifts. Jesus’ family comes from Nazareth to Bethlehem, two nowhere towns on the edge of nowhere. He’s born in a barn. His crib is a feed trough. The first witnesses to his birth are rural animal keepers. Given two choices, the rich and powerful or the poor and overlooked, God picks the poor and overlooked.

Of the angels’ appearance to the shepherds in Bethlehem, Luke writes, “the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified.” That makes sense to me. God’s glory would seem fitting in a palace occupied by the emperor, or the court of the governor of Syria. But in a field, among the sheep, behind a barn?

As a boy, I always assumed that the choirmaster picked the best singer to sing “Once in Royal David’s City,” and that the other kid was the back-up, the understudy. In all reality, that’s probably the case. But the real story of Christmas is that God does pick the back-ups, the understudies, the struggling, the poor and the overlooked. God chooses ordinary people like you and me.

All of our waiting and preparing and hoping has been for a God who picks us! This is the good news of great joy, precisely because it is for all people! And it is a challenging truth. Perhaps we were hoping God would pick the other guy, that God would pick the emperor, or the governor, or your boss, or your parents, or anyone else but you to be born in, to change the world through. Instead, here’s what has everyone singing tonight: God has picked you! You are the one the angels are singing to out in the field, and you are the one God has chosen to sing the new song, the one about families made up of friends, about reunions and reconciliations, about peace now, for everyone, forever.

This Christmas Eve, filled with old traditions and hopeful expectations, the thing that is new is you. Tonight, and tomorrow, and for every day to come, God is being born again in you. The murmur of the crowd has finally died down on this silent, holy night and the choirmaster has raised the baton. Who will be picked? Whose voice will carry the news forth that once again in David’s royal city God has come to dwell with us?

It is you. God has picked you.

Amen.