3 Magi, 2 Kings, 1 Star

By Lyndon Marcotte, Sermons Online

Epiphany A, B, C
Matthew 2:1-12

My earliest memories of the nativity were life size plastic characters with light bulbs inside that stood in a gigantic wooden manger that my grandfather built and put out in the front yard every Christmas. I remember the wise men most because they were the tallest figures in the scene and taller than me. The funny thing is that in reality the wise men were not in the manger scene at all. They came later. How much later is up for speculation. Most scholars believe it could have been as much as two years later before they arrived in search of the newborn king, although we celebrate Epiphany as the 12^th day of Christmas when the Magi are believed to have appeared.

Our Christmas traditions are really a mix of different cultural traditions that have been borrowed and adapted many times over many years. It’s funny how just this last year a couple new holiday movies have changed my kids’ ideas about some things about Christmas, including how many reindeer there really are and that Santa Claus has jet engines on his sleigh.

We know that Jesus wasn’t really born on December 25^th.  It’s a day that’s been set aside to commemorate his birth. It was actually a compromise by the church in the middle ages. After fighting the pagan customs and holiday observances to no avail, the church decided if you can’t beat em, join em. So they chose to observe the birth of Jesus during the same time as the pagan festivals. If you can’t stop them, maybe they can tone them down a little and redirect their revelry to more wholesome causes. The irony is that for all the fuss about keeping Christ in Christmas it really should be about putting Christ in Christmas.

You see living the Christian life isn’t about maintaining this pristine, pure doctrine and way of life, letting nothing common or ordinary ever defile it. It’s about taking all of life, as messy and ugly as it may be at times, and infusing it with the presence of Christ.

Last week we discovered how shepherds were among the most unlikely and untrustworthy people to be trusted as messengers in days when Jesus was born. These Magi from the east are no more religious or saintly than they were.

Despite the Christmas carols that we sing, Magi weren’t really kings at all. The only kings in this story are Herod, king of the Jews, and Christ the King. Magi were not necessarily wise either. It’s a really polite and civil description that comes from the time of King James and the translation of the Bible that he commissioned. In fact the Magi were actually astrologers. No, not astronomers like scientists that we think of today. They were astrologers, fortune tellers. Not unlike those who write horoscopes today and tell you all about what your sign is and what that means. Magi observed the stars and used them as a guide for signs.

One particular night however when they were studying the heavens as they did on every other night, they noticed an unusual star that appeared in the sky and shone brighter than all the other stars. It was so sudden and different that they were certain that it meant something very significant. They believed that a great King had been born, and they left home and livelihood to go west in search of him.

When they came to Jerusalem, the capital of this foreign land, looking for the king, they were sent to King Herod, a jealous, power hungry, paranoid ruler of a subjugated people. This was actually a province of Rome and under Roman rule, but in order to keep the peace and prevent a revolt the Romans used local rulers to keep a resemblance of local government and authority to keep the peace, as long as the taxes were paid on schedule. He is a tyrant who lords over those he rules rather than serving them. He is not a ruler who “shepherds” God’s people.

By contrast, the infant king Jesus is helpless and vulnerable, a ruler whose power is hidden in humility. The wise men in Matthew 2 are the chief priests and the scribes who function as Herod’s key advisors. Learned in the scriptures, they possess academic knowledge that both Herod and the magi lack. But what good does it do them? It does not lead them to their Messiah but causes them to become involved in a plot to kill him.

The magi are examples for who follow Christ today. They are depicted as persons who:

• who do as they are instructed,
• who seek no honor for themselves, and
• who gladly humble themselves, kneeling even before a woman and a child.

Clearly, they fit the image of servants better than that of kings.

The gifts they gave are symbolic of who this baby would become:

• Gold for a King to reign over His Father’s kingdom
• Frankincense for a Priest to teach a higher law & intercede with God for us
• Myrrh for a Savior who would die for the sins of mankind

We must welcome this Christ-child into our lives as our King, our Intercessor, and our Savior.

The church’s observance of epiphany should not be a triumphal occasion for those who have seen the light to celebrate their privileged status over others. The lessons of epiphany encourage humble admission that God’s glory is often manifested where we least expect it.

When Bad Things Happen to Good People

By Lyndon Marcotte, Contemplative Corner

Proper 12A/ Ordinary 17A
Romans 8:26-39

It’s amazing to me that despite all of our education, technology, and knowledge of scripture so many people, including Christians, still believe that bad things are supposed to happen to bad people and good things are supposed to happen to good people. So whenever something bad happens in our lives, we immediately assume that we’ve done something to deserve it, and when something tragic happens to the innocent, it throws not only our lives but our faith into a tailspin.

It’s not a question of if bad things will happen but rather when bad things will happen. In Matt.5:45 Jesus said, “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” None of us are immune from difficulties or hard times. However, you can greatly increase your chances of having hardship if you choose to do evil instead of good. If you want to get mixed up with the wrong crowd, break the law, or hurt other people you will greatly increase the likelihood that your life will be full of misery, but that’s not what keeps us up at night. We don’t worry when troublemakers fall on hard times. We assume they brought it on themselves and maybe even deserve it, but when bad things happen to good people, especially ourselves, we have a crisis of faith.

Job dared to protest and take his case straight to the top. He said that this wasn’t right. It’s not how this is supposed to be, and he demanded answers, but he didn’t get an easy answer to the cause of suffering. Instead God answered Job’s questioning with questions of His own. In the end of the book of Job suffering is a deep, unfathomable mystery, and it is a part of life. Part of what makes us human is the ability to face suffering and overcome it.

So when you come to these verses in Romans, Paul is specifically addressing Christians who are suffering for their faith in Christ, but if you are looking for an answer to why we suffer, you won’t find it. You also won’t find a “how to” manual to end your suffering. These verses don’t teach us what we must do to end our suffering. Instead we find what God says He will do when we are suffering.

Three Promises to Cling to in Difficult Times:

1. The Holy Spirit helps us when we cannot help ourselves.

It is a lie that “God helps those who help themselves.” The Gospel is that God helps those who cannot help themselves. Jesus passionately took up the cause of the helpless and the marginalized… the least, the lost, and the lonely.

There are times when we feel so utterly helpless we don’t know what to do or even how to pray in those situations. We know that God is always present and always with us, but it is at those times when we are most alone and most helpless we are most aware of our need of God and His presence and His love expressed through others around us is often the only thing that sustains us.

This is a promise that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us and prays for us when we cannot pray for ourselves. There are times when words fail us and there are no words adequate to convey the depth of our pain or feelings.

Once Mother Theresa was asked what she said when she prayed. She answered that she didn’t say anything, she listened. When asked what God said to her, she said that God didn’t say anything; He listened back.

God listens to us. He hears us. He knows what we’re going through. Even though we may not see it in the moment, He upholds us and sustains us through the darkest hours. We are never truly alone, especially in our suffering

2. God can use any circumstance for our good and for His glory.

Romans 8:28 is really one of those “life preserver” verses in the Bible. It’s one of those promises you cling to when it seems like you’ve got nothing left. “in all things God works for the good of those who love Him.”

There have been occasions when my faith has failed and withered up to nothing, yet a promise like this becomes a stubborn refusal to accept the mess we’re in as the way things are. It was that kind of gut level faith that drove Job to persist through his suffering and refuse to accept it. This may be a defining moment in our life, but it will not define us. We are more than our pain, more than our suffering. In times like these we draw upon a strength not of ourselves to get through them.

John Maxwell talks about Failing Forward in his book of the same name. It’s all about learning from our mistakes and failures. He says when you’ve fallen on your face flat on the floor, while you’re down there pick something up so it won’t be a wasted trip. The idea is to learn from the experience and use it to make you better. I think the same should be said of our suffering.

Suffering should never be a wasted experience in our lives. It may not be pleasant and something we never wish to experience again, but at the very least use that pain and experience to propel us forward. When we look back on our lives, it is the hard times that really shape and make us into who we are. We all carry wounds and scars, so did Jesus. That’s what makes us human and being willing to show those to others makes us truly Christian.

The idea of being predestined here is not about some being “in” and others being “out” – too many theologians have spent far too much time on this idea, coming up with convoluted explanations of things like “double predestination,” where those who are doomed to Hell go there no matter what, and the Elect are chosen whether they like it or not. – John Harrison

Our “destiny”, i.e. God’s plan for our lives, is that we would know Him, that we would love Him and love others as He has loved us. In that sense we are all “predestined,” specifically God wants us to take on the likeness of His Son whom Paul called the first among many more to come. That is to say, God wants us to be like Jesus. He will use every circumstance in our life, whether good or bad, to shape us, to build us up, to encourage us, and to make us more and more into the image of Jesus.

3. Nothing and no one will ever separate us from the love of God.

God’s answer to our suffering is most clearly seen in the cross of Jesus Christ. God answered our suffering in the death of Jesus, “I will suffer with you.” Jesus did not come into the world to end all suffering and death in this life. He came into the world to suffer with us and for us. He came to redeem even our suffering, so that we do not suffer alone and never again suffer without hope.

So many people imagine that God is sitting on the edge of His seat waiting to strike us with lightning bolts every time we mess up. Ezekiel 18:23 says that God doesn’t take pleasure in the death of even the wicked. Surely, he doesn’t take pleasure in our failures or our suffering either. The Gospel says that God is sitting on the edge of His seat waiting to forgive us, to heal us, to restore us, to love us… not to harm us, not to punish us.

Even when Jesus was on His way to Jerusalem to facing death He said of those who would soon kill Him, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings,” Luke 13:34.

God is stubborn and relentless in His love for us. The Bible is clear that He is on our side, on all of our sides. He is cheering for each us to be who He knows we can be. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will ever separate us from His love for us:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

There is no sin that can stop God from loving you. No failure, no mistake so large that God will give up on you. There is no disease that can make you unlovely to Him. No distance you can run that His love will not find you. There is no pain so great that could numb His love from touching you. Lastly, there is no death that will ever separate us from Him.

These are the promises we cling to. This is the God who loves us, who suffers with us and for us, who upholds us when we cannot stand alone. May we rest in Him.

Simple Church: The Bride of Christ

By Lyndon Marcotte, Contemplative Corner

Matthew 28:16-20

We’ve been talking throughout the month about what it means to be the Church. At its most basic level, what does it mean to be the Church? It’s easy to be caught up in trends and cultural definitions of what the Church is, but what does the Bible say?

We’ve identified dynamics that are characteristic of a Simple Church: Upward, Inward, Outward, and Forward. The images and names used in the New Testament give us insights into how these four dynamics work in the Church:

We grow Upward, as a House of Prayer. We grow Inward, as the Family of God. We grow Outward, as the Body of Christ. We go Forward, as the Bride of Christ.

The first three must be present in order for the church to go forward into growth and maturity. We’re not talking about just growing in numbers. Any organization can do that, but we grow in spiritual maturity together as a Church when we grow Upward in our relationship to God, when we grow Inward in our relationship to one another, and when we grow Outward in our relationship to our community. When we do all three, we experience spiritual maturity that enables us to go Forward to be a Church that God uses for His glory to make an impact on the lives of others.

The term the Bride of Christ isn’t used directly in the New Testament to describe the Church, but it is implied in several texts: “Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready,” Rev.19:7. The Gospels also refer to Jesus as the Bridge groom, implying he has a bride, and in Ephesians Paul compares the union of husband and wife to Christ and the Church.

I think the Bride of Christ is the image that is most personal and most descriptive of the Church fulfilling the potential of the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. All the preparations have been made, everything is in place to go forward into a deeper walk with Christ and experience the fullness of that relationship in the world.

I personally think that some weddings go overboard with pomp and circumstance, but you need a certain measure of decorum to signify what the importance of the occasion. I mean, if the bride showed up late for the wedding and came dragging down the aisle in sweatpants & a t-shirt like she just rolled out of bed, then got to the altar and said, “can we hurry up? I’m hungry and the game’s about to come on,” I think most grooms would be right to assume, “you know, I’m not sure, but I don’t think she’s really serious about this.”

Jesus told Peter, “if you love me, feed My sheep.” If you really love me, love My people. John tells us in 1 John, if you really love God, then love one another. We know from the New Testament that we can’t be selective in who we love and how much we love them. If we are serious about God and being followers of Christ, this is what it looks like.

Over the years, I’ve heard people make critical comments about churches and preachers, “All he ever preaches about is love, love, love… love God, love everybody. Let’s all just love…” as though that were a bad thing, as if there were any other message. If we could just get that one, we wouldn’t need any others. That’s exactly what Jesus said when they asked him, “What’s the most important commandment?” He said all the law and the prophets hang on these two: Love God, Love one another. That’s it. There is no other message.

It’s easy to look down your nose at someone else and judge them. It’s easy to talk about sin and end times, and make ourselves look better than all those ignorant sinners out there. It’s quite another thing to look in the mirror and see ourselves as we are and to see one another as we are, warts and all, and choose to love each other anyway. Jesus didn’t live and die on the cross, so we could tell everyone how horrible they are and how God wants to roast them in hell forever, unless they believe like us, dress like us, act like us, worship like us… We’re NOT the insiders who have the inside track on eternal salvation. On our best day, we are beggars telling other beggars where we found bread. Jesus died to show us this is what love looks like. This is the message. That you don’t fight ignorance with arguments. You don’t overcome violence with violence. You don’t fix loneliness and heartache with orthodoxy. Love doesn’t come with limits. If it has limits, it’s not really love. This is what love looks like… “Greater love has no man than this, that you lay down your life for another.”

The goal for a New Testament Church isn’t to be big and have lots of people, lots of money, and lots of activity. That’s not what it’s about. The goal, the purpose of the Church, is to love God, love one another, love your community, and grow in grace with God and one another. When your heart is in the right place and your priorities are lined up with God’s plan, as found in scripture, spiritual growth and maturity are sure to follow.

The hard lesson that I had to learn over the years in the church is that a lot of people in the church aren’t really interested in spiritual maturity. They just like to see most of the pews and offering plates filled.

A lot of people aren’t really interested in reaching their community. They’re just interested in having a good reputation in the community.

A lot of people aren’t interested in loving one another and being church to one another. They just want people to think good things about them and stay out of their business.

A lot of people aren’t really interested in knowing God and growing closer to Him. They just want to be entertained and have some measure of peace that they’ll go to some celestial palace when they die.

I’m not being mean. I’m being honest, and not only have I met those kinds of people in the church, from time to time, I’ve been those kinds of people. My heart hasn’t always been in the right place, all the time. Believe it or not, from time to time, I’ve liked to think that it was all about me. There have been times when I wasn’t all that concerned with spiritual maturity, and growing closer to God and others. It’s not that we have ill intentions. Most of the time we’re just busy or distracted with bills, jobs, family, health, etc. that we lose our focus and take our eyes off the prize. For some of us those moments may last a few hours, a few days, a few months, or longer, but we need to be reminded. We need to re-commit to the purpose and plan that God has for us and for His church.

This is a picture of the potential that we have in Christ. It’s a picture of who Jesus knew the Church could be. It’s up to us to decide if we’ll live up to that potential. Are we going to be the person, the people, and the Church that honors God, loves one another, and loves the community and the world that God placed us in? Are we just going to make this all about us? We need to make that choice today… and tomorrow… and the next day…

We’ll Work Till Jesus Comes

By Lyndon Marcotte, Contemplative Corner

Proper 28A/Ordinary 33A/Pentecost +22
Matthew 25:14-30

The Bible has been misused and taken out of context for a very long time. Jesus Himself often had to correct misunderstandings about Old Testament scriptures. Hopefully, it has been misused mostly out of ignorance and not from ill-intention. I certainly have made mistakes over the years in how I looked a particular passage and now view some things differently than I did when I first started preaching. However, some people intentionally and maliciously twist scripture to fit their own agendas.

This particular passage is one of the more commonly abused passages in the Gospels. It has become quite popular with preachers of the “prosperity Gospel.” You know, the tv preachers who say God wants all Christians to be millionaires, to inherent their “divine destiny,” “name-it-and-claim-it,” etc. Of course the path to achieving that success begins with a donation to their tv ministry and signing up for their audio message of the month club.

They like to use a text like this to prove that God wants us to be wealthy. The implication is that if you’re not, something is wrong with your faith. They want you to read this passage literally and take away from it that God wants us all to do well with our 401k’s and stock options. If that were the case, we don’t need pastors. We need financial planners and hedge fund managers. We don’t need sermons. We need seminars on how to manage your money.

Too many people see God as a divine slot machine. “If I put X in, pull the religious lever correctly, I will get Y out.”  Many people see Christianity as one big transaction. “If I’m a good person, God will love me and take me to heaven when I die.”

Whenever Moses went up the mountain and stayed gone too long, the people took to their own devices and made it up as they went along. After Jesus ascended and left the Church behind, some people decided to follow the Israelites example. While we may not be worshipping golden calves these days, we have taken to worshipping personalities, power, and money, even in the church, especially in the church.

This is another parable in a series of those that Jesus told that talks about the kingdom of heaven. “The kingdom of heaven is like…” Jesus is trying to prepare the Church for his physical absence from them. The Gospels were written decades after Jesus left by a faith community that had begun to question whether would Jesus return, when He would return, and how. Most of them were written even after A.D. 70 when the temple in Jerusalem had been destroyed. These were bleak times for this community, and they turned to the words of Jesus for comfort and hope.

When they heard the parable again after Jesus had left, they heard it differently. “Like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his property to them… After a long time the master of those servants returned…” They knew who the Master was when they heard this parable retold in Jesus’ absence.

In the parable of the 10 virgins waiting for the bridegroom, we were told to be vigilant in watching and waiting for His return, even though He tarry. Keep on watching, keep on waiting.  Be on watch for the kingdom to appear in every moment.  In this parable we are told what we are to be about while we are waiting, what kind of business we should be engaged in. We are not to dig a hole and hide our treasure. We are not to find a safe little place to hide, hold hands, and sing kum-ba-ya till Jesus comes. We are supposed to be about our Father’s business, just like Jesus.

The real currency of life is not money. The real currency of our lives is time. We must be careful how we spend it. We must wisely spend our lives in our Father’s business, even though Christ tarry in His coming. We should not become lazy. We should not be fearful. We should live to please ourselves, but we should love God and love one another. Use everything we have: our time, our bodies, the strength of our hands, the skill of our minds… use them all for God’s glory.

Annie Dillard said, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our life.” It’s what we do in the little insignificant moments that matters, not just on those really big important moments where everyone is watching. What are you doing with the life God gave you? Are you just going to wring your hands in despair? Are you going to spend it on your own pleasures, going from one to another trying to find happiness? Are you going to use your life to glorify the God who gave it to you and to love the people God has placed in your life? That’s the real question.

Jesus is coming. Jesus is always coming and is always here. He comes to us each and everyday in big and small ways. Jesus comes in our acts of kindness and words of love. As we spend our lives on behalf of others, Christ comes to us and to those we love in those moments, and we get a glimpse of the kingdom of heaven.

What Goes Up

By Lyndon Marcotte, Contemplative Corner

Transfiguration Sunday, Year B
Mark 9:2-9

This is known as Transfiguration Sunday in the life of the Church. It’s a day when we reflect on this unique moment in the life of Christ, and it’s implications for us. This is an unusual story in the Gospels that sticks out from all others. Trans-figuration literally means “change,” “figure or form.” Jesus’ appearance changed miraculously. This carpenter’s son, this man from Galilee, this teacher, this Rabbi became something else. All through the Gospels you begin with an introduction of who Jesus is and little by little, piece by piece, parable by parable, miracle by miracle, you get a more complete picture of who He is. There are hints being dropped along the way about who He is and what He is here to do. Some people catch on quicker than others, but eventually we all see the full picture of Jesus on the cross and leaving an empty tomb. This day on this mountaintop God pulls back the curtain of our understanding for a moment and lets theses few disciples get a picture of just who Jesus is.

Moses represents the Law, and Elijah the prophets. This mountaintop meeting is full of theological significance, depicting Christ as the fulfillment of them both. Moses and Elijah also had their mountaintop moments, if you remember. Moses went up the mountain to meet with God where he was hid in the cleft of the rock as the glory of God passed by. Elijah went up on the mountain hoping to have that same kind of experience that Moses had, but he discovered that God was in the sound of gentle silence. Now Jesus too is having his mountaintop moment with God where the glory of God is being revealed in Him and to His disciples.

Peter said it was good for them to here and have this experience. It was so good that he didn’t want anyone to leave. He offered to build three shelters for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah so they could stay there on that mountaintop and enjoy this moment for as long as possible, but we can’t make moments last forever. You can’t freeze time and just avoid the rest of your life. You can’t live on the mountaintop. You’ll starve and freeze to death. You have to come down eventually. Everything comes down eventually, but you can come down different than the way you went up.

On Transfiguration Sunday, the last Sunday before Lent begins, we are given a glimpse of the big picture. You see, in Mark’s Gospel there are three major confessions of the Christ’s identity: the first at his baptism, when the heavenly voice declares, “You are my Son, the Beloved.” It’s a scene of glory. The last is on the cross, when after Jesus’ death, a Roman soldier confesses, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” It’s a scene of suffering. In between these two is this one, a confession that combines his glory and his suffering. Peter wants to build some monuments on the mountain. The only monument will become a cross on a hillside.

But none of us really want to go through Lent to get to Easter. Can’t we just skip the ashes and sackcloth? Can’t we just have spring now? Can’t we just sing Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” and be done with all of the suffering? The disciples felt the same way. Can’t we just overthrow the Romans and be done with it all?

You probably are aware that in the Gospels the disciples don’t always come off looking so good. That’s especially true with Mark’s Gospel. In this account of the life of Jesus, the disciples are repeatedly portrayed as thick, blind. In fact, in this section of Mark, it’s a blind man who proclaims the true identity of Jesus, while his closest followers stumble around in the dark. As a former colleague of mine once noted, in Mark’s Gospel anytime the disciples are afraid, you could just as easily translate it as confused. In other words, the Greek word for “terrified” is “duh.” Peter didn’t know what to say, writes Mark, “for they were terrified.” Same thing in this case.

We’d rather take the shortcut to Easter, but we can’t. In his book Peculiar Speech, Will Willimon says, “When you join the Rotary they give you a handshake and a lapel pin. When you join the church we throw you in water and half drown you.” The Lenten journey ahead of us begins with ashes and leads toward a cross. That’s the truth.

But it’s not the whole truth. You see, if scholars are right, that the transfiguration is a glimpse of things to come, then it is worth noting that Jesus’ words of explanation end in resurrection. He comes down from the mountain and warns them not to say anything about what happened until he is raised from the dead. If the beginning of Lent is ashes, its end is resurrection.

Before you undertake any great journey you plan ahead and make provisions for the trip: how much money you’ll need, how much gas, food, where will you stay, what the itinerary will be, which route you will take, etc. You want to make sure that you have everything you need or access to what you need along the way. If you don’t, you won’t make it to your destination. We need to take a spiritual inventory of our lives from time to time, especially as we go through difficulties and hardships in the valleys.

Richard Rohr says, “Your image of God creates you.” Whatever image you hold of God in your mind and heart, creates it. It’s formative. It shapes who you are, what you believe, what you think, how you react, where you will go, what you will do, how you feel. It sustains you when all other lights have gone out. The reason we most often fall in the dark moments of our lives is because we do not have a proper image of God fixed within us.

A couple years ago I was going into a nursing home in south Louisiana, and an old man was sitting outside on the bench. As I walked across the parking lot, I could see he was holding something to his nose. As I got closer I could see that it was an old photograph, dog-eared and worn. He didn’t just glance at that picture for a second. He looked long, hard, and lovingly into it. As I passed him by he slowly slipped that picture back into his front shirt pocket and gazed out in the distance. It was a picture of his wife, who no doubt had gone on before him. That picture of her sustained him. It accompanied the image of her that he held in his mind and heart.

We need a proper image of God fixed within us. Often, we have an idea of God fashioned in our own image. A God on call for emergencies, a good book we can rub between our hands for good luck, an image of God that looks like us, believes like us, and most importantly agrees with us. Richard Rohr says that prayer is not making our wish list known to God so that we can get what we want. Prayer is about completely emptying us of ourselves before God, so that He can fill us with Himself. Only when that transfiguration has occurred within us will we have the strength and sustenance to go through the storms and valleys with faith and courage.

Water, Wind, & Fire

By Lyndon Marcotte, Contemplative Corner

Pentecost A
John 7:37-39, Acts 2:1-21

In the text we read that Jesus promised the Spirit would come after Him. The outpouring of the Spirit happened on what is known as the Day of Pentecost, some 50 days after the resurrection, which we observe this Sunday. Sadly, this day often goes unnoticed in many churches. To be sure there is plenty of bad theology out there regarding the Holy Spirit and the whole subject can be confusing, but the knee jerk reaction not to talk about it is just as bad if not worse. We need to understand what the Bible actually says about it. As simply as I can put it, the Spirit is the living Christ at work in our lives. There are three symbols of the Spirit in these texts that reveal the work of the living Christ in us.

First we read that the Spirit is like water.

We should not overlook that Jesus stood up and said these words on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles. Given the terrible drought that we are experiencing across the South, we might consider holding a Feast of Tabernacles ourselves.

You see, it was tradition during this feast that they would put up booths or tents as a reminder of their journey through the wilderness during the exodus and how God was faithful to deliver them from Egypt. As part of that observance they would gather palm branches and make a leaf canopy over the altar. Every day of the feast the priest would gather water from the pool of Siloam and carry it to the altar in procession with trumpets blowing then pour the water in a bowl next to the altar and pour wine in an another bowl on the other side. Thanksgiving prayers were offered for the water God gave Moses when he struck the rock and for the rain that has sustained them since. They also prayed for rain for the next year and a fruitful harvest. This was the biggest feast of the Jewish year and this was the culmination of that feast on the last day when people are praying for rain that Jesus stands up and says, “If anyone is thirsty let him come to me and drink, whoever believes in Me.”

In dry desert communities water is life. Likewise, the Spirit gives life and sustains us through the desert places in our lives. For those worshippers at the feast they knew all too well the struggles of survival, finding water, drawing it several times a day to keep your family and livestock alive, like the Samaritan woman at the well. They reacted much like she did at first when she He heard the offer of this “living water.” A lot of Christians think grace must be too good to be true, because they keep trying to do something to earn God’s love and forgiveness. It seems like the cross just wasn’t enough. They need to feel as though they’ve earned it. Jesus is offering living water to quench our spiritual thrists, yet so many feel compelled to attach strings to this offer that Jesus never did.

Specifically, it is “living water” that gives life. There are places like the ocean or the Dead Sea that cannot sustain us because they are full of “dead water.” Meaning, fresh water flows into them, but it does not flow out.

“Dead water” is synonymous with “dead churches” and “dead Christians.” That sounds like an oxymoron, an impossibility. How can churches and Christians be dead? They are dead because they do not have the living water of the Spirit flowing in and out of their lives. We cannot soak up the grace of God continually and not share it with others. At the wedding at Cana and on the hillside feeding the multitudes the wine, the bread, and the fish did not run out as long as it was being given away. Jesus said that “streams of living water flow from within Him.” It is an inexhaustible supply of grace. If we want to experience the life-giving Spirit of the Christ, we have to give our lives away to the thirsty among us, sharing God’s love and grace with others. If we don’t, our well will run dry, our waters will stagnate, and we will wither.

In Acts 2 we find that the Spirit is like wind.

When the day had come for the promise of the Spirit to be realized, the disciples and other followers of Jesus were in Jerusalem gathered together in one place when, “Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting,” Acts 2:2.

It’s really hard to try to explain the Holy Spirit to someone. How does all this work? What does it mean? Those can be hard questions to answer sometime, but the Spirit is like the wind. We don’t see the wind, but we see what the wind blows. We can tell where it’s coming from and feel where it’s going. When Jesus was trying to explain spiritual things to Nicodemus, a highly educated man, He said, “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit,” John 3:8.

Still, you have to wonder why it’s not easier at times. There are times when you just wish God would write on the wall what you should do, because you just don’t know anymore. David Lose wrote:

The Holy Spirit does not come to solve our problems but to create them. Think about it: absent the coming of the Holy Spirit, the disciples could go back to their previous careers as fishermen. I can almost hearing James and John explaining, “Sure, it was a wild and crazy three-year-ride, and that Jesus sure was a heck of a guy, but maybe we needed to get that out of our system before we could settle down and take on Dad’s business.” Once the Spirit comes, however, that return to normalcy is no longer an option.

The Spirit is also the rushing wind that comes into our lives and shakes them up, moves us out of our comfort zones, and calls us to the great adventure of walking by faith and not by sight. It’s worth noting that the wind “filled the whole house.” That means that there is no place where it is not. That’s exactly like God. God isn’t impossible to find. God is impossible to avoid. God is everywhere. There is no place that God is not. So no matter wherever we are, God is with us. There is no place or no situation we may find ourselves in where God is not with us and able to see us through it.

Lastly, the Spirit is like fire.

Just like God provided a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night to guide the Israelites out of Egypt and through the wilderness, the Spirit is the fire that lights our way.

It can be hard to understand what God is doing in our lives a lot of times, even on the good days. I’ve often told people that the hardest choices we have to make in life are not the choices between good and bad. Those are easy. We may not always want to do the right thing, but if we know this is good and the other is bad, we know what we should do even if we don’t want to do it. The really hard choices in life are between good and better. Those are the choices we have to pray hard about. We ask God to show us what He wants for our lives, because often we don’t know which way is best. In those moments we “lean not on our own understanding.” We trust God, seek His direction. What we are doing is asking for the Spirit to show us what to do, to help us find peace in the middle of a difficult time in our lives.

The Spirit is also like the “consuming fire” that burned on the mountain with Moses. It consumes everything in us that pollutes our character and dilutes our message. It convicts us, grips our hearts and turns them to God and to the least, the lost, and the lonely among us. Were it not for the conviction of the Spirit we might withdraw into ourselves and spend our lives only on our pleasures, but the Spirit of God compels us, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” It moves us out of selfishness and into selflessness. On the Day of Pentecost the tongues of fire consumed the pride and prejudice that threatened the first church and brought unity and peace between everyone gathered there.

Lastly, just as a fire burned over the tabernacle in the wilderness to remind the Israelites of God’s presence with them, the Spirit burns within us assuring us that God is with us. Church membership is no guarantee of a person’s character. There are just as many rascals inside the church as there are outside it. The one and only evidence that someone is following the living Christ is the Spirit that shines through their life.

The greatest evidence of the arrival of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost was unity among all the different Christians that were gathered there. When we are all following the Spirit, seeking God’s will and our neighbor’s interests above our own, there will be peace and unity in the fellowship. That’s the Church the world needs to see. One that is alive, healthy, and full of grace.

May the Spirit of the living Christ fill us with living water overflowing with His grace. May the Spirit of the resurrected Christ blow a fresh wind into our lives wakening us to His call. May the Spirit of the coming Christ light a fire within our hearts that may burn brightly with His love. Amen.

 

Last Requests

By Lyndon Marcotte, Contemplative Corner

Easter 7A, June 5, 2011
John 17:1-11

This is a prayer of last requests. While not a death bed prayer, it might as well be. Jesus is praying in the Garden of Gethsemane knowing that He will soon be arrested and be put be death.

“He’s in the middle of an eleventh hour crash course on “everything you need to know before everything goes berserk between Good Friday and Easter.” It’s crunch time, and in this moment Jesus offers up a prayer for his followers, mindful of what they will have to endure (and with an eye toward all of us who will come long after them).” Danielle Shroyer

It’s a very hard text to dissect into pieces and force into a sermon. We should hear it and feel the heart of the one who prayed these words. It’s deeply personal. You can hear the anguish in the prayer of Jesus knowing everything that awaits Him. You can hear of His deep love for His Father, for His disciples, and for those who were yet to come to know Him.

Last words carry a special weight to them that lingers in the air when we hear them. This prayer reveals the heart of Jesus and the burdens that weighed on Him most in His final hours. There are three themes that run all the way through the prayer that we must pay attention to. May we listen carefully for God’s good word to us.

God May Be Glorified

First and foremost, Jesus prays that God will be glorified in His life and through what will soon took place. Even as He prays for God to glorify Him, He asks only so that He may in turn glorify His Father. God the Father and God the Son are mirror reflections of each other.

Specifically, Jesus prays that God may glorify Him the way He was before the world began. As much as He is divine, Jesus is every bit human. This was going to be almost too much to bear. Because of His love for His Father and His love for us He endured the cross that He would have to bear. He prayed that God would be glorified even in His death.

Jesus’ signs and miracles reveal God’s glory by displaying divine power, the crucifixion reveals God’s glory by conveying divine love. The crucifixion completes Jesus’ work of glorifying God on earth, for by laying down his life he gives himself so completely that the world may know of Jesus’ love for God and God’s love for the world.

Everything that God gives to us, our talents, our time, and our treasures should be used to bring glory to God. Even Jesus looked at His power, His time on Earth, and His disciples as gifts from God, (vs.6-10). He was faithful with all that God had given Him up until the end. He prays for all of us that we may also be faithful and that God would protect us (vs.11,15) so that others would come to know Christ through our message (vs.20).

Jesus glorified God on earth by finishing the work God gave him to do (v.4) and by revealing God’s power. We can glorify God by finishing the work He has given us to do, to use our lives as instruments of His grace, to share His love with others. As we love others the way Christ loved us, we make the invisible God visible in the flesh through our lives.

We May Have Eternal Life

“Christ does not pray that they might be rich and great in the world, but that they might be kept from sin, strengthened for their duty, and brought safe to heaven.” Matthew Henry

It’s interesting to realize all the things that Jesus didn’t pray for in this moment. No, He didn’t pray for us to all be rich, powerful, and have everything we want, but He did pray for us to have the one thing we needed above all else… He prayed that we would know God, specifically to know God the way He knows God.

Jesus prayed that we may have eternal life, (v.3). He prayed that God would bring us to be with Him where He is going, (v.24). He wanted us to have that assurance of reunion with God and His Son, but He also said something else about what eternal life really is, (v.3).

He said that eternal life is “knowing you, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent,” (vs.3). “According to John’s gospel, eternal life comes from a relationship with the eternal God,” Craig Koester. Eternal life is now. This is part of eternity right now. The kind of life that God wants for us doesn’t start when we die. It begins now as we follow Christ and come to know the eternal God. Jesus didn’t pray for God to take us out of this world but that He would protect us and use us for His glory in this world, (v.15).

We can experience the full measure of God’s love and His grace here and now in this life. We don’t wait till we die to know God.

We May Be One

The blessing Jesus prays for is: That we may be one as Jesus and God are one. That’s a very important distinction in the kind of unity that Jesus wants for us. He doesn’t just want us to get along and not kill each other. He actually wants us to love one another selflessly the way He loves His Father and the Father loves Him.

We don’t have to get to Martin Luther, or even to the East/West schism of 1054, to know that Christian unity hasn’t lived up to Jesus’ prayer for us. Peter bailed on Jesus and his friends just a chapter later. Paul and Barnabas parted ways halfway through the Book of Acts. And us? If you checked the blogosphere right now, you’d find thousands of examples of Christians arguing over the fine print of our faith. We aren’t one as Jesus and the Father are one. We spend most of our time competing with one another, finding scapegoat enemies on whom to blame the world’s problems, and yelling.  We’re running a repetitive grinder of anxiety in our collective stomachs.

If Jesus is praying on our behalf for us to attain a higher, more lofty sense of togetherness, we sure haven’t listened. So what does that say about us?

What does that say about Jesus’ prayer? For all those who were taught that their heartfelt prayers would be heard and answered, it is quite problematic to see the Son of God’s unanswered prayer staring us in the face.  What does it mean when even Jesus’ prayer isn’t answered?

– Danielle Shroyer

We believe that there is nothing that God cannot do, but why hasn’t Jesus’ prayer been answered? We know that God doesn’t force us to do anything. He leads us, prompts us, convicts us, challenges us, but if we don’t listen, if we don’t follow Him, a part of God’s good plan for us remains unfulfilled. I believe that “God gets what God wants.” He will accomplish His purposes, but the frightening thing is that we may miss out on what He is doing. We may miss the blessing that could have been ours when we fight and argue rather than love and serve. Worse yet than missing out is that we may be a stumbling block for others. Rather than being a conduit for God’s love to be shown to a hurting world, we may actually drive people away from God and His Son by the way we claim to represent Him.

Jesus isn’t just asking God for something. He’s asking us for something. He’s praying to us, pleading with us also… “be one with each other, as We are one.” Unity and love in the body of Christ is far more important than being right. It seems for the last century the major thrust of Christendom is about who’s right and has the answers. We’ve lost something when we fail to love one another and love others who may be difficult to love. Can we really call ourselves Christians just because we believe certain things and go to special places, if we don’t truly love people. As the old hymn reminds us, “They will know we are Christians by our love.”

I read somewhere that “people may not always remember what you say, but they will always remember how it made them feel.” I pray that we make people feel loved, wanted, believed in, and hoped for. May we bring out the best in one another rather than the worst in each other.

As we come to the close of Jesus’ prayer, we must turn our focus to our own prayers. How shall we pray? “What if we spent less time praying about being right and more time praying about being one?” Danielle Shroyer. What if we spent more time praying for the grace to love those who may be difficult to love? What if we spent more time praying for opportunities to show God’s love to others, whether or not we have the chance to explain it.

May God be glorified in us. May we experience life eternal and the love of an eternal God. May we be one as the Father and the Son are one. May Christ’s prayer be answered in our own. Amen.

Touching Jesus

By Lyndon Marcotte, Contemplative Corner

Proper 8B/Ordinary 13B/Pentecost 5
Mark 5:21-43

So if you’d like to think that Jesus was just a prophet, a revolutionary figure, a reformer, or even a charlatan, here comes these passages that declare without pretense that he was more than what you take him for. We can debate whether these things happened literally or were the embellishments of people writing to make a theological statement, but we would miss the point of what these passages are supposed to teach us about who Jesus was and who we are.

There are plenty of people making money selling the latest greatest whatever in religion. Miracle handkerchiefs, annointed oil, holy water, seeds of faith, multi-millon dollar sanctuaries, fantastic programs, mega-star personalities, and on and on. In this passage both Jairus and the woman believed that touching Jesus was enough to heal. Touch is a powerful human experience in and of itself without any special magic.

In college I learned what to do and what not to do when it comes to caring for the ill and dying. In what was supposed to be a practical how-to of pastoral care, the only thing I remember from that class was the professor said when making pastoral visits to the sick 1) never sit on the bed, 2) read a scripture, 3) have prayer, and 4) never stay more than a few minutes. Seriously. While I was job shadowing a hospice chaplain the next semester, I learned that he broke every rule. He told me how important it was to touch people, especially the dying. So many terminally ill and shut ins, go days and weeks without anyone touching them in a meaningful and compassionate way. I watched him sit on the bedside and hold hands, rub shoulders, kiss foreheads, even cry and pray with people, and we almost always stayed until the time was right to leave.

There was nothing magical, super spiritual, or clinically effective about what he did, but it made such a difference in those lives. I never saw one of them jump out of bed miraculously healed either. They all died. Everyone of them, but I like to think their spirits were healed, which was so much more effective than a ceremonial pastoral blessing.

Before we write sermons and build churches around the “touch of Jesus,” he said in the passage that it wasn’t touching him that made them whole. Lots of people were touching him and pushing him around, but none of them were miraculously healed. He told the woman who touched him that it was her faith that made her whole. When Jairus found out his daughter had died, Jesus told him, “Don’t be afraid; only believe.”

I don’t know how to adequately describe faith. It’s not about “believing” the right things. It’s about hope and trust in what can be. I readily admit that there are people in my life who have much more faith than I do. I’m a skeptic by default. I reason everything out and try to figure things out for myself, but there are people I know who just hope against hope for no other reason than it’s all they have. I need people like that around me, because all too often we encounter situations and crises that are beyond our ability to cope with or fix. We have to make a choice. Either we resign ourselves to be victims of circumstance, lie down, and take it, or we declare with every ounce of our being that we refuse to accept reality as it’s presented to us. We hold onto faith.

The law of odds says that more times than not miracles are rare. If they happened routinely, they wouldn’t be considered miraculous. It’s the exception for a devestating illness to suddenly disappear… for young girls on death’s door to get up and walk. Even for those who experience miraculous turns of fate, they too eventually died. All of them. It doesn’t mean that they didn’t have faith.

I’ve never been so angry as to visit terminally ill people who were visited by a faith healer or a preacher selling indulgences. It makes my blood boil to think of the people who’ve been told, “if you only had faith, God would heal you.” I’ve buried plenty of men and women of great faith. Life happens and so does death. No snake oil salesmen can change that.

I take away from these encounters with Jesus that there is something in us that we have the abilitiy to tap into that allows us to transcend our circumstances. There is divinity in us. It’s in our cosmic DNA. There are traces of timelessness in us that defies death, disease, and adversity. I do believe that people can discover faith that enables them to tap into the incredible potential of our bodies to heal themselves, but more importantly they can realize that they are more than flesh and blood and bones. They are spirit, and death and disease can never kill them.

50.

People who look
for the secret of long life
wind up dead.

Their bodies are the focus of their lives
and the source of their death,
because they think a healthy body
is all there is to life.

Lao Tzu used to say
a man who truly understood life
could walk through the jungle
without fear
or across a battlefield
without armor, totally unarmed.
Wild animals and weapons couldn’t kill him.

I know, I know:
what the hell does that mean?
“Well, he couldn’t be killed,”
Lao Tzu said,
“because his body
wasn’t where he kept his death.”

~ Tao Te Ching, adapted by Ron Hogan