Preaching Helps: First Sunday of Advent-Transfiguration of Our Lord, series B.

Kindness, Heroes, and Good Sermons

Bob Kerrey, former senator from the state of Nebraska now serving as President of New School University in New York City, has written a memoir called When I Was a Young Man (New York: Harcourt, 2002). In this artless narrative Kerrey traces his life from early memories of childhood and youth and climaxes his story by speaking bluntly of his experiences in Vietnam. His brief tour in Vietnam ended with the shattering of his right leg and the shattering of his innocence.

He tells of his time as a child at Bethany Christian Church in Lincoln, Nebraska. His church was an awesome place. Long after he ceased believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, he still believed that the enormous wood cross above the baptismal font was the cross actually used to crucify Christ.

Around the age of 7 or 8, he writes, he first began to listen intently and with some measure of understanding to the pastor's sermons. It was the custom at his church, as at so many to this day, to articulate the heart of the sermon in a single short sentence and to post that sentence on the sign in front of the church.

He offers these four sentences on what he regarded as a "good sermon." "Good sermons had quotations from books we all knew we should have read but hadn't. Good sermons had solid beginnings and perhaps funny stories. Good sermons told about poor souls who learned biblical lessons the hard way. Good sermons made sense and stayed with me all week" (p. 45).

His "heroes" came from the Bible in those days. He heard stirring stories of "fathers who had spared their children and about men who shared their wealth with strangers. I learned about men and women who had prayed, listened, waited, and then did what God told them to do."

At the very same time, he was learning other heroic stories every Saturday morning at the Stuart Theater downtown. "The shows we hungered for were never-ending serials about Tarzan or Zorro or some obscure cowboy character."

To Kerrey the stories he heard in church on Sunday and those he saw portrayed on the silver screen each Saturday were "parallel dramas." Stories can be vivid and memorable and therefore powerful in shaping our view of ourselves and of our place in the world. Kerrey does not ponder any contradictions or tensions between the lives of the biblical heroes and the heroes of Hollywood.

But late in his book Kerrey speaks of the shock administered to his being by his experiences in Vietnam. "I had suffered physical and spiritual loss. ... I had spent my life preparing for easy decisions and when the difficult one came I wasn't ready. Physical stamina and intellectual strength were not enough."

What is "enough"? Here Kerrey's words remind me of the "it is enough" of Article VII of the Augsburg Confession. What really constitutes the church, the people of God? What makes them? What calls them into being? What sustains them in their faith and union with God? The answer is simple. Or is it? Article VII speaks of the gospel and the sacraments, those vehicles of God's grace. God's healing touch, God's life-giving and liberating mercy. And it deliberately rejects any other "traditions or rites and ceremonies invented by human beings, however old, however interesting, or even however helpful they may sometimes be.

Kerrey was haunted by nightmare memories of a raid he led in Vietnam resulting in the killing of women and children. His minister told him he could be forgiven if only he asked God, whose capacity to forgive is absolute. He asked, hoping he could recover his childhood innocence, but it did not come.

Nevertheless, forgiveness did gradually come to him "in small doses and at unexpected moments." He felt renewed when people extended kindness to him during his long recovery from his wounds. Step by step he learned that "kindness--unselfish and unafraid--could lift [his] spirit most of all." He came to regard kindness as a bedrock reality, one to believe in and build on. And he came to believe that "giving kindness was more liberating than receiving it" (pp. 249-50).

It surely seems that "kindness" should be at the heart of our churchly storytelling. As a child, Kerrey says, he admired the way "Mary and Joseph had risked ridicule and estrangement from their family and friends to be the mother and father of Christ" (p. 45). Apparently he was told the biblical story in such a way that the Sunday story was simply indistinguishable from the heroic tales of Saturday.

Or is it that we cannot possibly know the depths of the biblical story while we still live in the time that William Blake called "Innocence"? When we have come to the time of "Experience," then our eyes are opened to hard truths about ourselves and our world. And then the power of the biblical story may begin to address us.

What a strange and powerful story it is we have to share in these days of Advent and Christmas and Epiphany. What comes? What is born? What is shiningly revealed? Isn't it the astonishing kindness that God has for us in spite of everything?

The October issue of Currents always carries the longest section of Preaching Helps, since we want to treat all the Sundays and preaching occasions of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany in this one issue. Our habit has been to dole out the task of writing these materials to two people. This year it happens that the two are brothers: John and Richard Rollefson.

John Rollefson has been pastor at Lord of Light Lutheran Church (the Lutheran Campus Ministry) at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor for a dozen years now, following a decade at Our Savior's in Milwaukee and five years at St. Francis in San Francisco.

Richard Rollefson is pastor at The Village (Juneau Village) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He previously served Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church in Berkeley, California.

Both John and Richard have always worked very intentionally at connecting the kindness of God and the human situation, and they both find that books and films and dramas are a significant help in making the connection and articulating the depth of the biblical message. The three of us sat and talked over coffee about the preaching task at Brewed Awakenings in Berkeley in January of this year. John and Richard were in town attending lectures and workshops on theology and preaching. I suggested that they team up to write the studies and reflections for this issue, and I am grateful to them that they accepted that invitation.

And I am grateful for all good preaching and all good preachers who know that a "good sermon" is one that features not the heroics that we as an American nation love so much, but one that not merely articulates but even mediates the very kindness of God.

Wishing you good sermonizing!

Robert H. Smith, Editor of Preaching Helps

Professor of New Testament

Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary

2770 Marin Avenue, Berkeley CA 94708

[e-mail]

First Sunday in Advent December 1, 2002

Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19

Isaiah 64:1-9

1 Corinthians 1:3-9

Mark 13:24-37

Stir up your might
and come to save us! (Ps 80:2b)

First Reading

Today's readings continue the strong end-time message of the final three Sundays of Year A (Matthew 25, the Ten Bridesmaids, the Talents, and the Final Judgment). Eschatology moves into a sharply apocalyptic mood as we enter the season of Advent. Using the language of cataclysm, Isaiah pleads for God to "tear open the heavens and come down." Then he offers images of a tortured nature: quaking mountains, brush fires, boiling water, and fierce wind. (See Donald B. Gowan, Eschatology in the Old Testament [Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1987], Pp. 97ff., on the "eschatological transformation of nature.")

Our Gospel text, an excerpt from St. Mark's "little apocalypse, "opens with Jesus himself indulging in apocalyptic reverie while "sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple" (13:3). Jesus, like Isaiah before him, foresees a time of natural cataclysm when "the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken" (vv. 24-25). These signs will precede the coming of the Son-of-Man, Jesus' favorite way of referencing himself in Mark, "with great power and glory" accompanied by clouds and angels. Yet, immediately Jesus turns to a gentler, softer, more everyday image from nature to make his point: "From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near" (v. 28). "So," Jesus says, "when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates." Then follows Jesus' promise that has bedeviled the church at least since Paul 's day in seeming so at odds with the so-called "delay of the parousia:" "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place." (See Ben Witherington's Jesus, Paul and the End of the World [Chicago: InterVarsity Press, 1992), pp. 20ff., for a reassessment of Albert Schweitzer's conclusions regarding Jesus as apocalyptic prophet.)

Pastoral Reflections

Jesus himself is the best interpreter of his own apocalyptic mood, disavowing all subsequent adventisms that would wrongheadedly delight in setting dates for his return. He could not be clearer as he goes on to warn, "But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (v. 32). Instead of speculating, Jesus makes explicit the implication of the imminence of the end time in a series of redundant imperatives: "Beware," "Keep alert," and then, twice, "Keep awake." To clinch his point, Jesus sketches in briefest outline a parable of how someone going on a journey will command the doorkeeper to be "on the watch" so that when the master returns "in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn"--"whenever," as we say--the doorkeeper will be at the ready. And so, Jesus concludes, "what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake." This is Jesus' clear mandate regarding the imminence of the end time, and the season of Advent consequently becomes the time for th e church to be reminded of its need to stay awake and to ponder the ethical implications of living in a constant state of readiness "as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ," as Paul puts it in our second reading.

Dear to traditional Lutheran ears attuned to Adventide is the so-called king of chorales, written and composed by Philipp Nicolai a couple of generations after Luther's death, "Wachet Auf," or, in English, "Wake, Awake, for Night Is Flying" (LBW #31). Singing this old Lutheran warhorse (whose text references the eschatological parable of the ten maidens in Matthew 25, read in church just three weeks earlier) is the wake-up call that Advent has arrived. J. S. Bach's magnificent setting, with its gorgeous counterpoint, can be played as an organ solo, or organ and violin duet, or as a choral offering with organ in its cantata version. For less formal liturgies consider using, as I have, a recording of the Jacques Loussier Trio's jazz versions of "Wake, Awake" for a prelude and postlude.

Some years ago a fellow pastor somewhere proposed in print that the church finally accede to the culture that has been rushing toward Christmas since Halloween and recognize that the weeks leading up to the Nativity of our Lord are de facto the Christmas Season. Her proposal, as I remember it, was that we move Advent back to November, retaining many of those end-time texts we hear anyway, and let that be our annual season of contemplating things eschatological with All Saints Day as its kickoff. There is something eminently reasonable about such a proposal, especially for us in campus ministry whose flocks have already dispersed by Christmas and reassemble only after Epiphany. But the bifocal character of Advent--anticipating both the first coming of Jesus "at Christmastide in Bethlehem" and his second coming at the end of time--is a liturgical and pastoral challenge I'm not quite ready to give up. At least not yet!

John Rollefson

Second Sunday in Advent December 8, 2002

Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13

Isaiah 40: 1-11

2 Peter 3:8-15a

Mark 1:1-8

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
(Ps 85:10)

First Reading

Our reading from 2 Peter is only one of two readings appointed in our Revised Common Lectionary from this late, scarcely known part of the New Testament canon. It's become one of my favorite eschatological preaching texts as it combines allusions to several strains of end-time traditions. It begins with a musing reminiscent of the Hebrew Wisdom tradition (cf. Ps 90:4): "Do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day" (v. 8). The purpose for this philosophical observation, it soon becomes clear, is pastoral: "The Lord is not slow concerning the promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish but all to come to repentance" (v. 9). Evidently, as already in mid-century Thessalonica in Paul's day, so also in the community of saints to which 2 Peter was written perhaps a half-century or more later, the seeming slowness of God's promise keeping was a matter of faith that needed pastoral care.

Following a reference common in eschatological literature, "But the day of the Lord will come like a thief," come allusions to natural signs of the end, "and then the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with fire, and the earth and everything that is done on it will be disclosed" (v. 10). But it is in verse 11 that we encounter the question that lies simmering at the heart of all the language about watching and waiting and keeping awake and being prepared that we heard last week and in our end-time texts: "what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God (vv. 11b-12a)? What sort of persons are we Advent people to be?

We are to be people of the promise, is 2 Peter's answer, persons who trust and await the fulfillment of the promises of God: "But in accordance with God's promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home" (v. 13). I love that phrase, "where righteousness is at home" (katoikei in Greek). This "homely" image of Christ's coming at the end as a time, a place, a reality where God's righteousness will be "at home," where God's justice is no longer alien but can kick off its shoes and put up its feet, helps give ethical content to our anticipation and waiting. As our text concludes: "Therefore, beloved, while you are waiting for these things strive to be found by God at peace, without spot or blemish; and regard the patience of our Lord as salvation" (vv. 14-15). What we Christians may be tempted to think of as God's slowness, the church's chronic and impatient lament at the delay of the parousia, is here transfigured into "the patience [literally, in Greek, 'the longsuffering'] of ou r Lord," which the church is urged to "regard ... as salvation."

Pastoral Reflections

Many who hear today's first reading from Isaiah 40 can't help but do so to the strains of the opening tenor recitative, aria, and chorus from Handel's Messiah sounding in their mind's ear. (See Roger Bullard's Messiah: The Gospel According to Handel's Oratorio [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993] as well as the excellent adult study resource by Carol Bechtel Reynolds, Hallelujah: The Bible and Handel's Messiah (Pittsburgh: The Kerygma Program, 1995.) But late Baroque is not Advent's only musical idiom. The fusion of text and melody, of music's ability to sing the gospel in the language of the heart, is particularly evident in the rich variety of Advent hymnody available to the church in our day. Ours, like a growing number of congregations, annually hosts an Advent Service of Lessons and Carols that intersperses a number of Hebrew Scripture and New Testament Advent texts with Advent hymns and choral arrangements from a wide array of ethnic backgrounds and musical styles. None has been sung with greater vigor in recent years than Andrae Crouch's composed spiritual "Soon and Very Soon" (With One Voice #744). Isaiah's paean of return here sings of the earlier apocalyptic cataclysms of nature transfigured into a vision of the wilderness tamed, of valleys lifted up and mountains and hills made low, as a "highway for our God" transforms the desert into the way home.

The Gospel text from the opening verses of St. Mark connect this prophecy with "the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God" (v. 1) inaugurated with John the Baptizer's appearance in the wilderness, "proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" (v. 4). Yet John, whose exotic garb and diet easily identify him with the widespread expectation of the prophet Elijah's return as a sign of the end time, is intent on underlining his own status as precursor rather than main event: "After me one who is more powerful than I is coming, the thong of whose sandals Jam not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water; but the one who is coming will baptize you with the Holy Spirit" (vv. 7-8).

A recent publishing phenomenon has been the popularity of the series of books on the rapture by conservative evangelical Tim LaHaye. While a recent film based on this fictionalized theology was not well received, the film Rapture of several years ago told a chilling story of emotionally needy people caught up in dangerous forms of adventism. (For an amusing story-sermon on this theme, see my Ann Arbor neighbor Michael Lindvall's "Rapture" in The Good News From North Haven [New York: Pocket Books, 1991].)

John Rollefson

Third Sunday in Advent December 15, 2002

Psalm 126 or Luke 1:47-55

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11

1 Thessalonians 5:16-24

John 1:6-8, 19-28

The Lord has done great things for us,
and we rejoiced. (Ps 126:3)

... the Mighty One has done great things for
me, and holy is his name. (Lk 1:49)

First Reading

The prophet Isaiah's swords, whose resonances are heard in Mary's song, begin with the text that is familiar from Jesus' reading of it during his visit to his hometown synagogue in Nazareth at the outset of his ministry as narrated in the fourth chapter of Luke's Gospel: "The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me ... to bring good news ... to bind up ... to proclaim liberty ... and release ... to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor ... to comfort all who mourn ... (vv. 1-2)

Here the prophet of Israel's return from exile sings a full-throated ode to joy: "I will greatly rejoice in the Lord, my whole being shall exult in my God" (v. 10a). Apocalyptic gloom and doom and cataclysms of nature give way first to wedding imagery and then to a picture of Edenic life in a garden (remembering last week's reading from 2 Peter, "where righteousness is at home"): "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" (v. 11). The old and much-loved Swedish Advent hymn, "Rejoice, Rejoice, Believers" (LBW #25) weds text to music to create an unusually upbeat hymn of praise appropriate to today's texts. Unusually upbeat for traditional Lutherans, at any rate!

Pastoral Reflections

"Gaudete," the Latin imperative for "rejoice," this Third Sunday in Advent used to be called, supposedly because the Introit for the day began with a word of encouragement to joy breaking into the theretofore penitential spirit for which Advent used to be known. Hence the lone pink candle that has hung on in some Advent wreaths. (I've always been suspicious that the change from purple to blue as Advent's color and the retention of one pink candle had more to do with church publishing house marketing than liturgical scholarship, but who's to judge?) Anyway, both first and second readings do give strong encouragement to make this a day of rejoicing, and the readings generally represent a turn from the apocalyptic mood of the late November and early Advent readings to a more positive and confident attitude toward what Paul in 1 Thessalonians calls "the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ" (v. 23b). (For a provocative essay that argues for a "relaxed" Christian ethical attitude toward end-time matters because of the biblical basis for what Scripture calls "hope," see Hans Weder's "Hope and Creation," in The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology, ed. John Polking-horne and Michael Welker [Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 2000], 184-202. On joy see also in the same volume Patrick Miller's "Judgment and Joy" and Miroslav Volf' s "Enter into Joy!")

The Gospel reading begins with a snippet from the Prologue of John's Gospel referring to John the Baptizer as "a man sent from God" who came "as a witness [Greek, 'martyr'] to the light" with the clear negation, also found in last week's Gospel reading from Mark 1, that "he himself was not the light." Then, jumping ten verses, we are given the Baptizer's own "testimony" that he is "neither the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the prophet," but, invoking last week's text from Isaiah 40, "I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, 'Make straight the way of the Lord"' (v. 23). This matter of what scholars call the "intertextuality of Scripture," both the explicit citation and implicit resonances, echoes, and allusions of the older testament, are especially evident throughout our Advent texts and, as with the various Gospel passion accounts, are notably reliant on the Book of Isaiah. Advent would be an appropriate time to begin an in-depth adult Bible study of this most influential and many-layered writing that could carry through at least the season of Lent. (Brevard Childs' recent commentary on Isaiah, with his sensitivity to Isaiah's relationship to the whole canon of Scripture, would be an excellent resource--Isaiah: The Old Testament Library [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001]. For another perspective, see Walter Brueggemann's two-volume Westminster Bible Companion commentary [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998].)

John Rollefson

Fourth Sunday in Advent December 22, 2002

Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26 or Luke 1:47-55

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16

Romans 16:25-27

Luke 1:26-38

I will sing of your steadfast love, O Lord,
forever; with my mouth I will proclaim your
faithfulness to all generations. (Ps 89:1)

My soul magnifies the Lord,
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior...
(Lk 1:47)

First Reading

Poised on the brink of Christmas, Advent finally relinquishes its bifocal perspective on both the first and second comings of Christ and turns full-face to consider the Davidic covenant's fulfillment in the angel's perplexing announcement to Mary. Mary's trusting response to the angel's annunciation became for Martin Luther the paradigmatic expression of faith: "Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word" (v. 38). And Mary's song, the Magnificat, sung in response to her visit with her relative Elizabeth (which is the alternative psalmody for today), becomes the archetypal psalm of faith. It echoes not only today's Psalm 89 but also Hannah's song (1 Sam 2:1-10) and Miriam's/Moses' song (Exod 15: 1-21).

Luther's commentary on the Magnificat, written along with several of his other most famous works in 1521, merits a close reading. Not only does it provide insight into Luther's exegetical acumen, it affords homiletical and pastoral insights easily accessible to an adult study group. Here are a number of memorable nuggets: "this sacred hymn of the most blessed mother of God" (p. 298); "God is the kind of Lord who does nothing but exalt those of low degree and put down the mighty from their thrones, in short, break what is whole and make whole what is broken" (p.299); "[Mary] sang it not for herself alone but for us all, to sing after her" (p. 306); "being herself [Mary] no more than a cheerful guest chamber and willing hostess to so great a Guest" (p. 308); "it is no less a miracle that she refrained from pride and arrogance. ... She finds herself the Mother of God, exalted above all mortals, and still remains so simple and so calm that she does not think of any poor serving maid as beneath her" (p. 308).

And still more: "They delighted in their salvation much more than in their Savior, in the gift more than in the Giver, in the creature rather than in the Creator" (p. 309). "True humility ... never knows that it is humble ... for if it knew this, it would turn proud from contemplation of so fine a virtue" (p. 315). "... there is today in the churches a great ringing of bells, blowing of trumpets, singing, shouting, and intoning, yet I fear precious little worship of God, who wants to be worshiped in spirit and truth, as he says in John 4:24" (p. 325). "Mother of God. No one can say anything greater of her or to her, though he had as many tongues as there are leaves on the trees, or grass in the fields, or stars in the sky, or sand by the sea. It needs to be pondered in the heart what it means to be the Mother of God" (p.326). "We pray God to give us a right understanding of this Magnificat, an understanding that consists not merely in brilliant words but in glowing life in body and soul. May Christ grant us t his through the intercession and for the sake of His dear Mother Mary! Amen" (p. 355). (Luther's Works 21 [St. Louis: Concordia, 1956]: 295-358.)

Pastoral Reflections

Singing Mary's song after her is a good Lutheran way of describing the church's everyday calling, but especially on this Sunday before Christmas. Numerous settings of the Magnificat are available in the classical and contemporary repertoire, both solos and choral pieces, but the congregation should have an opportunity to join their voices in echoing Mary's words as well.

Examples of accessible congregational settings are "My Soul Now Magnifies the Lord" (LB W#180), "My Soul Proclaims Your Greatness" (WOV#730), "Canticle of the Turning" (Rory Cooney, 1990 GIA), chants such as numbers 24 and 45 in Songs and Prayers from Taize (1991 GIA), and Marty Haugen's popular version which follows a sung version of the annunciation in his Holden Evening Prayer (GIA, 1990). In addition, WOV includes a singable annunciation hymn, "The Angel Gabriel from Heaven Came" (#632) and an appropriate Advent hymn for this day, "Sing of Mary, Pure and Lowly" (#634).

There is sufficient residual anti-Catholicism in many of us Lutherans that attention to Mary's role in the Incarnation can be thought reason for suspicion. As a young pastor, I remember being sternly advised by a retired clergyperson that the Advent meditation on Mary's Magnificat that I'd just presented to my fellow clergy was dangerously unevangelical, however much I quoted Luther on the matter. And indeed, much Mariology can border on mariolotry. (See publications of the U.S. Lutheran-Roman Catholic Dialog, Mary in the New Testament [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978] and The One Mediator, The Saints, and Mary [Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992] as well as Jaroslav Pelikan, et al., Mary [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986].)

Still, Mary as supreme exemplar of faith is a thoroughly evangelical idea, and as Luther himself said, "The Virgin birth is a mere trifle for God; that God should become man is a greater miracle; but most amazing of all is it that this maiden should credit the announcement that she, rather than some other virgin, had been chosen to be the mother of God" (from Roland Bainton, The Martin Luther Christmas Book [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1948], 23).

Mary's trust in the angel's word was only possible by the gift of God's grace which enabled her to become theotokos, "god-bearer" or "Mother of God," Luther's, along with the church "fathers,"' favorite epithet for Mary. We could do worse than "ponder" this, as Luther said, and in our worship this day magnify our God who alone could accomplish such a miracle!

John Rollefson

The Nativity of Our Lord Christmas Eve December 24, 2002

Psalm 96

Isaiah 9:2-7

Titus 2:11-14

Luke 2:1-14 [15-20]

O sing to the Lord a new song;
sing to the Lord, all the earth....
Let the heavens be glad,
and let the earth rejoice;...
Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy
before the Lord; for he is coming.
(Ps 96:1, 11a, 12b-13a)

First Reading

Tonight is the night to follow the psalmist's encomium to let our rejoicing swell the chorus of nature's own unrestrained joy at the long-promised and long-awaited Advent of our God. Perhaps the legendary story and carol of the "friendly beasts" surrounding Jesus' manger birthplace bursting into praise on this magical night is the place to begin our contemplation of the wondrous thing God has accomplished "for us and for our salvation" on this night of all nights. We advocates of a cross theology are rightly suspicious of all theologies of glory. (See Gerhard Forde's On Being A Theologian of the Cross [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997] and Douglas John Hall's Lighten Our Darkness: Toward an Indigenous Theology of the Cross [Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977].)

Yet the message of this night is the prophet's great good news: "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness--on them light has shined" (Isa 9:2).

Hall quotes Kierkegaard's journal: "Unto you is born this day a Saviour--and yet it was night when he was born. That is an eternal illustration: it must be night--and becomes day in the middle of the night when the Saviour is born" (p. 129).

Glory bursting into the darkness, the angel chorus singing for an audience of lowly shepherds "living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night," a royal birth of a scion of David "wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger," of all places, is the contrast of brightness amid the gloomy dark, glory set against the coarsest and humblest of settings, that Scripture prompts our mind's eye to imagine and our hearts, like Mary, to treasure and ponder.

Pastoral Reflections

Next to Good Friday, when crowd control in our churches is much less of a problem, Christmas Eve is the day in the church year that has invited the greatest possible diversity of liturgical (and nonliturgical!) expression on the part of the worshiping community. Standard these days are a variety of children and family services that seek to be accessible to meaningful celebration of Jesus' birth (like the old-fashioned bathrobed Sunday School pageants of my own childhood) held at times carefully chosen not to conflict with family gatherings. While many of us pastors grimace at the sheer sentimentality and kitsch of such popular services, we need to take care not to underestimate the opportunity they can provide for communicating the story of Jesus' birth to new generations and modeling what the church's celebrating of the good news of this light for our particular darkness might look like in our contemporary world so enamored of treating worship as mere entertainment. Focusing on encouraging the congregation's participation (like the friendly beasts) in the angels' and shepherds' glorification and adoration of "this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us" is key to the "success" of good informal liturgies appropriate for this night.

Various kinds of Lessons-and-Carols services have also become popular for Christmas Eve. I find these a highly appropriate form of worship for this night with their recital of salvation history, including the reading of many texts from Hebrew Scripture culminating in the narratives of Jesus' birth interspersed with the choral and congregational singing of a wide variety of hymnody that has arisen from these texts. Sometimes we've taken special care to include in our repertoire of music carols representative of particular ethnicities found in our congregation and in the larger community utilizing the original languages if a soloist or small group can be found to lead the singing. Again, involving the congregation in the act of "praising God and saying, 'Glory to God in the highest heaven"' is the end to be sought.

Midnight masses and other celebrations of the Eucharist are, of course, also widespread, but I prefer to defer such services to Christmas Day, the official feast-day. See the following section for my rationale for this preference, but it has long struck me that both the demographics of Christmas Eve worship and the character of the texts themselves invite singing rather than preaching as the most fitting response. It is certainly not that the Word should be absent from Christmas Eve worship. But the mystery of the nativity of the Word become flesh is so awesome a reality that sheer joy and immediate glorification (not gratification!) need to find the fullest possible expression as the proclamation most appropriate to the occasion. The treasuring and pondering of the implications of this "good news of great joy for all the people" surely must also follow as we return to the or do of our regular Word and Sacrament liturgies tomorrow.

John Rollefson

The Nativity of Our Lord

Christmas Day

December 25, 2002

Psalm 98

Isaiah 52:7-10

Hebrews 1:1-4 [5-12]

John 1:1-14

O sing to the Lord a new song,
for he [God] has done marvelous things.
(Ps 98:1)

First Reading

"Before the Marvel of This Night" is a beautiful contemporary hymn (WOV #636) that sings in perfect pitch with the cosmic marvel that this day celebrates of what Incarnation betokens, "Immanuel," God with us in the flesh! As stanza 2 of the hymn counsels, so the church's worship this day should strive to

Awake the sleeping world with song,
This is the day the Lord has made.
Assemble here, celestial throng,
In royal splendor come arrayed.
Give earth a glimpse of heav'nly bliss,
A teasing taste of what they miss:
Sing bliss, sing bliss, sing endless bliss,
Sing bliss, sing endless bliss!

Reinhold Niebuhr long ago gave voice to the dis-ease that many of us preachers feel regarding preaching on high church festivals. "Only poets can do justice to the Christmas and Easter stories," and, he laments, "there are not many poets in the pulpit." It is better, he suggests, "to be satisfied with the symbolic presentation of the poetry in hymn, anthem, and liturgy." Yet, thoroughgoing Protestant that Niebuhr was and disappointing as he found most Christmas sermons to be (especially the one he reviews of the thankfully nameless bishop that prompted his reflection), he nonetheless insists: "Of course there must be a sermon. Religious emotion must be made relevant and applicable to the problems of everyday life. The church has a teaching function. Let it inspire religious emotion, but the religious emotion must be channeled into all of the thirsty areas of life" ("A Christmas Service in Retrospect," in Essays in Applied Theology [New York: Meridian, 1959], 29).

Today, we preachers wear self-consciously the mantle of the prophet as we assume the privilege and duty of "the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, 'Your God reigns"' (Isa 52:7). But our vocation to be good news-bearing sentinels of the reign of God also makes us songleaders and ministers of eucharist (thanksgiving) as we heed our calling to "break forth together into singing" over the "ruins of Jerusalem," which I take to be Niebuhr's "thirsty areas of life." As the Letter to the Hebrews puts it, the message of this day is that while "Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets,...in these last days God has spoken to us by a Son, whom God appointed heir of all things, through whom God also created the worlds," the One who is "the reflection of God's glory," "the exact imprint of God's very being," and the sustainer of "all things by his powerful word" (1:l-3a).

The Prologue to St. John's Gospel, appointed for Christmas Day, offers the preacher and the people both poetic and philosophical substance to reflect upon, abstract-sounding as it may be in comparison with the seemingly more accessible Lucan and Matthean birth narratives. John's "And the Word became flesh and lived among us...full of grace and truth" is the Christmas gospel in highly concentrated form. And his "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it" is our invitation to point to and reflect upon those "thirsty areas of life" or the world's "darkness" into which we are called to reflect the gospel's "light."

Pastoral Reflections

It is regrettable that so many congregations have abandoned Christmas Day services. In our university city none of our ELCA congregations gathers for worship on this most special day (mine is on Christmas break!), while Christmas Eve services have proliferated. (Hint: There's a "market" out there somewhere!) I have found Christmas Day to be a wonderful time to gather, after all the hoopla of the night before, for a joyful but more subdued celebration of the Incarnation of our Lord with both sermon and Eucharist, sometimes using a chorale setting that utilizes many Christmas carols as parts of the liturgy. It has always been a considerably smaller gathering than any on Christmas Eve. Traditional hymns such as "Of the Father's Love Begotten" (LBW #42) with its simple plainsong melody and "Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence" (LBW #198) as well as "Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful" (LBW #45) are all favorites for this day paired with our text from John's Prologue.

Annie Dillard's short, short story entitled "God in the Doorway" (in Teaching a Stone to Talk [New York: Harper and Row, 1982]) is a favorite resource for Christmas Day preaching. In that story the author elaborates on a childhood memory in which fear of Santa Claus and fear of God get muddled. Dillard's conclusion is a nice distillation of the Christmas message and the trouble we fearful but thirsty ones have in receiving it (see John 1:10-11): "I am still running, running from that knowledge, that eye, that love from which there is no refuge. for you [God] meant only love, and love, and I felt only fear, and pain. So once in Israel love came to us incarnate, stood in the doorway between two worlds, and we were all afraid."

"A teasing taste of what they miss" indeed!

John Rollefson

First Sunday after Christmas December 29, 2002

Psalm 148

Isaiah 61:10-62:3

Galatians 4:4-7

Luke 2:22-40

Praise the Lord from the earth...
fire and hail, snow and frost,
stormy wind fulfilling his [God's] command!
(Ps 148:7a, 8)

First Reading

Sheer praise is the name of the game this Sunday so far as both our appointed psalmody and first reading from Third Isaiah are concerned. For those of us living in northern climes it's good to be reminded that hail, snow, frost, and stormy wind are not just grin'n' bear it realities of our harsh winters. They can be imagined from the perspective of faith to be participants in creation's symphony of joy in praise of the Creator God. It's a stretch, let me tell you, but even the Catalonian carol "Cold December Flies Away" (LBW #53)--how cold can it get in Catalonia, anyway?--encourages us to link today's warm basking in the afterglow of Christmas to the climatic and natural wonders about us. Isaiah's reference to Zion's vindication shining out "like the dawn and its salvation like a burning torch" remind us to expand our carol repertoire beyond our hymn books to include the likes of "Bring a Torch, Jeanette Isabella" and the Galician carol "Torches, Torches, Run with Torches" (The Oxford Book of Carols [London: Oxford, 1964], 176).

If we're fastidious about delaying the singing of Christmas carols until Christmas has arrived, now is the time to bring them all out in this all-too-brief season of rejoicing.

Pastoral Reflections

Luke 2 points the way for our rejoicing in preserving for the church both the poignant story and precious song contained in these few verses that flesh out what St. Paul referred to in the closest thing to a Christmas narrative he ever wrote: "When the fullness of time had come, God sent the Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children" (Gal 4:4-5). Fidelity to what it meant to "be born under the law" is what led Mary and Joseph to bring their infant son Jesus up to the temple in Jerusalem "to present him to the Lord" according to the "law," a reference Luke considers sufficiently important to mention five times.

The Song of Simeon (Nunc Dimittis) is the third of the poetic songs or canticles that Luke has included in the first two chapters of his Gospel. Each has found a home in the various liturgies of the church. This one is included in Compline (Prayer at the Close of the Day) and in the order for the Burial of the Dead. It is also given as an optional post-communion canticle in the order for Holy Communion. I remember years ago a friend receiving a Christmas card from the noted church historian and biographer of Luther, Roland Bainton, who was also known as an inveterate caricaturist (I have a couple he once did of me that are far from flattering!). Bainton had sketched a drawing of Simeon holding the baby Jesus in his arms, and then wrote: "Simeon, the aged, held the baby Jesus, one would assume, for less than a quarter of an hour. Yet he could say that he had seen a light for revelation." Bainton went on: "Life is so full of brief encounters. Some of you, my friends, once close, I have not seen for all of sixty years. But the impact is not to be measured in length of days. Cherished memories and annual greetings are an inalienable blessing."

How much poorer the church would be if St. Luke had not included this little lyrically recounted tale of Joseph's and Mary's intentions to do "everything required by the law of the Lord" (v. 39a) and of the role of the faithful attendance on their actions by two ancient yet contemporary prophets of their faith, Simeon and Anna. Find a way--there are so many congregational and choral settings available-- to join in singing Simeon's Song on this day and throughout the church year. Tillis Butler's and James Harris's "Now, Lord, You Let Your Servant Go in Peace" from the Detroit Folk Mass, now available at WOV#624, is a beautifully bluesy setting easily sung by all.

John Rollefson

The Holy Innocents, Martyrs

December 28, 2002

Psalm 124

Jeremiah 31:15-17

1 Peter 4:12-19

Matthew 2:13-18

Simeon's prophetic warning to Mary about Jesus' destiny and his puzzling but ominous words that "a sword will pierce your own soul too" are reminders that even in this season of celebration, presentiments of a theology of the cross are present. The story of the Bethlehem infant and toddler boys slain by Herod's soldiers and the attendant texts appointed for this annual commemoration presents an opportunity to reflect on the "menacing of Christmas" that continues in our and every culture. The slaughter and abuse of the young has continued from Herod's day to our own. It's a time to "get real" about Christmas and, amid our rejoicing, set aside our sentimentalizing of Jesus' birth in favor of taking up our calling to join the angels' song of "peace, good will" amid a world that can be expected to wreak violence in the wake of such a challenge to the status quo.

John Rollefson

Second Sunday after Christmas

January 5, 2003

Psalm 147:12-20

Jeremiah 31:7-14

Ephesians 1:3-14

John 1:[1-9] 10-18

Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem!
Praise your God, O Zion!
For he [God] strengthens the bars of your
gates; ... blesses your children within you;
... grants peace within your borders;
...fills you with the finest wheat.
(Ps 147:12-14)

First Reading

One needs think only of contemporary Jerusalem to sigh in response to our psalmody, "Oh, were it only so!" Yet it is no novel experience for God's people to hear these words of promise as encouragement to praise God even and especially in the midst of insecurity, poverty, and violence done to children. Jeremiah in his day was surrounded by utter destruction. God's word of unrelenting judgment was a fire in his bones consuming him. And yet even he, the prophet of doom and destruction par excellence, sings of the One who "has redeemed Jacob's people from hands too strong for them" and of the promised time when "their life shall become like a watered garden" where "they shall never languish again" (Jer 31:11b, 12b). Sing today the tuneful setting of Jeremiah's words found as Canticle 14 in LBW, "Listen! You Nations."

The reading from Ephesians contains the same language we encountered last week in Paul's letter to the Galatians when we heard "that we might receive adoption as children" with the resulting "So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God" (Gal 4:5b, 7). The writer of Ephesians puts the same thought this way: "God destined us for adoption as children through Jesus Christ" (1:5a), "In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance" (v. 1la), and "this is the pledge of our inheritance" (v. 14a). David Bartlett in his recent Beecher Lectures at Yale suggested that, despite our legitimate focus on Paul's use of justification language and his legal metaphors to describe God's redemptive purpose, we would benefit by paying more attention to Pauline use of adoption language and its cognates of being made God's children and thus heirs. Bartlett illustrated the user-friendly nature of the image of adoption as metaphor for redemption by retelling a story told him by a friend. The f riend had taken great care to explain to his adopted child how special he was to his parents and how he, in contrast to his unadopted younger brother, born to his biological parents, had been specifically singled out, chosen, waited for, and welcomed by his parents into their family. The adopted son chewed this news over, looked deep in thought for a moment, and with a smile spreading across his face enthused: "Well, can't we adopt him too?" ("What's Good about This Good News," audio tape, 1 October 2001.)

Being brought into the family of God as adopted children, being specially chosen siblings of our older sisters and brothers, the Jews, and being fellow heirs with Jesus the Jew, communicates the good news of our redemption in language and images accessible to people of our day.

Pastoral Reflections

It may at first seem daunting to contemplate preaching yet another sermon in less than two weeks on the pithy prologue to John's Gospel. You have my permission, on this Eve of the Epiphany (if there is such a thing liturgically speaking) to use the rich Epiphany texts which include St. Matthew's visit of the Magi. But if you so choose, then you must use Philipp Nicolai's other great seasonal hymn "O Morning Star, How Fair and Bright" (LBW #76). This hymn is the queen of chorales, consort to the king ("Wake, Awake"), of Advent. The sixth and final verse simply explodes with joy:

Oh, let the harps break forth in sound!
Our joy be all with music crowned,
Our voices gaily blending!
For Christ goes with us all the way--
Today, tomorrow, ev'ry day!
His love is never ending!
Sing out! Ring out!
Jubilation! Exaltation! Tell the story!
Great is he, the King of glory!

Have you ever seen a Lutheran hymn with so many exclamation marks?

But should you feel the need to celebrate Christmas 2 and take up again the Prologue, my advice would be to focus on the closing words of the Gospel reading: "No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father's heart, who has made God known" (v. 18).

Recently in our "What's A Lutheran Anyway?" Inquiry and New Member Class a participant who came to us from a Jehovah's Witness background stunned us into silence with the question, "Well, who is God, anyway?" John 1:18 did not but should have come to mind as an answer as I finally stuttered, "Jesus--well Jesus is God for us." Jesus is God in human form made available for us as the one "who has made God known" and continues to make God known by the power of the Spirit. From the perspective of Christian faith we do not need to speculate about God "out there," some First Cause in a philosophical or scientific or comparative religion sense. As Christians we are interested in dialogue with philosophers and scientists and adherents of other faiths, to be sure. And we have much to learn from such engagement. But what we Christians bring to the table is Jesus, the God incarnate found lying in a Bethlehem manger and stretched out in agonizing death on a Golgotha cross, Jesus who is "God the only Son, who is close to t he Father's heart, who has made God known" (v. 18). This is the reality of which the season of Christmas sings and in whose afterglow the Sundays following the Epiphany bask: the Word made flesh--the elusive God incarnate. (See Samuel Terrien's masterful The Elusive Presence: The Heart of Biblical Theology [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978].)

As the old Appalachian carol sings, bad grammar and all:

I wonder as I wander, out under the sky
How Jesus the Savior did come for to die
For poor ord'nary people like you and like I.
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.
(WOV #642)

John Rollefson

First Sunday after the Epiphany

The Baptism of Our Lord

January 12, 2003

Genesis 1:1-5

Psalm 29

Acts 19:1-7

Mark 1:4-11

First Reading

"In the beginning..." (Gen 1:1) is a good place to start the new year. With the Epiphany season we enter into what is sometimes called ordinary time. After the busyness of Christmas festivities, we may be ready for some ordinary time. But ordinary time is also the time we know best: it's the everyday, commonplace, vernacular world we live in.

As the Gospel texts of the past weeks of Christmas have already made clear, the meaning of the Incarnation is the presence of God in the real, ordinary world in which we live. The Creator has entered into the creation, the extraordinary is revealed in and through the ordinary. "Immanuel" means precisely that God is with us in the here and now of ordinary time. The ordinary, the everyday, is now the locus of God's saving activity.

One of Martin Luther's great achievements was his translation of the Bible into vernacular German. The gospel message was once again rendered in the language of the people. I've only recently become familiar with Eugene Peterson's contemporary biblical translation, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language (Colorado Springs: Navpress, 1995), but it seems an appropriate text for our readings in this "vernacular" season. As he observes in his introduction, "In order to understand the Message right, the language must be right--not a refined language that appeals to our aspirations after the best but a rough and earthly language that reveals God's presence and action where we least expect it, catching us when we are up to our elbows in the soiled ordinariness of our lives and God is the furthest thing from our minds" (p. 10).

Beyond retelling the historical narrative, the significance of the baptism of Jesus for our listeners comes by connecting it with their own experience, with their own baptisms. This is an especially appropriate time to begin worship with a remembrance of baptism and a sprinkling rite. A number of sprinkling-rite hymns are available in the Roman Catholic hymnal, Gather Comprehensive (Chicago: GIA Publications, 1994), which connect baptism with images from the natural world. In Ray McKeever's "God Give Us Life" service of Holy Communion in With All Your Heart (Lima, Ohio: Fairway Press, 1984) the call to worship correlates the congregational chant "Come into us, Holy Spirit" with the Genesis 1 creation story. Perhaps the Sundays from the Baptism of our Lord through the Transfiguration can be linked by using a particular liturgy like Marty Haugen's Mass of Creation or David Haas's Mass of Light, both available through GIA. These liturgical reinforcements help us to embody in our worship the truth that, even in t his ordinary Epiphany season, no time is really ordinary anymore, for all of creation has been made sacred by the advent of the Creator.

Pastoral Reflections

Today we truly begin the new year of readings from Mark's Gospel. Over the preceding Sundays of Advent and Christmas, with Matthew' sand Luke's birth narratives and the powerful poetry of John's "In the beginning was the Word," we have already heard the beginning of the story. But according to Mark the good news really starts with John the Baptizer and his message of repentance: "John the Baptizer appeared in the wild, preaching a baptism of life-change that leads to forgiveness of sins." (v. 4, The Message)

"Life-change"--Eugene Peterson's rendering of "repentance"--is a simple yet powerful way of expressing the essence of John's message. Peterson's translation also helps to underscore the dramatic character of Mark's presentation with its fast-paced action and out-of-breath segues, "suddenly," "immediately," and "all at once." The drama of the story is spelled out by the Baptist himself: "The real action comes next: the star in this drama, to whom I'm a mere stagehand, will change your life. I'm baptizing you here in the river turning your old life in for a kingdom life. His baptism--a holy baptism by the Holy Spirit--will change you from the inside out" (vv. 7-8).

For the people to whom we tell the story, the important thing is to connect Jesus' extraordinary baptism in the river Jordan with the usually more ordinary character of their own. Given the tradition of infant baptism the event may not even be a part of one's memory. And even if it is, the notion of repentance and life-change may often seem more abstract than real.

And yet, this very contrast may provide an opportunity for reflecting on the paradoxical character of baptism as death and renewal, destruction and creation. In his poem The Slip, Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry tells the story of the flooding of an acre of farm land which is both a devastating destruction and a creative cleansing: "The river takes the land, and leaves nothing/And yet this nothing is the seed of all--the clear eye/of Heaven where all the worlds appear/Though death is in the healing, it will heal."

In the Coen brothers' film, O Brother Where Art Thou, three escaped convicts stumble upon a mass baptism/revival at a river. Just as the most worldly and cynical of the three ridicules the event, the most gullible of them plunges into the river and pushes his way to the front of the line to be baptized. "Delmar's been saved!" says the third as he watches his friend emerge from beneath the surface of the water. When the newly baptized convict returns he announces: "All my sins have been forgiven, even that Piggly Wiggly I robbed." The skeptic responds, "I thought you said you didn't do that one." "Well," Delmar stammers, "I did; and the preacher says that one's been washed away too." It's probably a scam, of course; there's no real indication of repentance or life-change. Then again, it's also a parable of pure grace.

The film ends with an even more powerful depiction of baptism, echoing both Genesis and Berry's The Slip. Just as the three convicts are about to be hanged for their crimes, they are miraculously saved by the flooding of the valley. Again it is baptism as both destruction and salvation, devastation and redemption. It is baptism as the life-changing grace of God.

Richard Rollefson

Second Sunday after the Epiphany

January 19, 2003

1 Samuel 3:1-10

Psalm 139

1 Corinthians 6:12-20

John 1:43-51

First Reading

"Here I am" (1 Sam 3:4) and "Come and see" (John 1:39) sound like a game of hide and seek. Sometimes that seems to describe our experience of God. The tragic events of September 11, 2001, led many people to ask, "Where is God?" In Telling the Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairytale (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), Frederick Buechner writes, "The world hides God from us, or we hide ourselves from God, or for reasons of his own God hides himself from us, but however you account for it, [God] is more conspicuous by his absence than his presence" (p. 43).

But the psalmist reminds us that God knows us and seeks us out: "Lord, you have examined me and known me.... You discern my thoughts from afar.... You have traced my journey and are familiar with all my paths" (vv. 2-3). C. S. Lewis is said to have suggested, "Man's search for God is like the mouse's search for the cat." Even before we seek God, God has been seeking us; even the ability to say "Here I am" is the gift of God.

In his All I Realty Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986), Robert Fulghum tells the story of watching some children play hide and seek. One child, who has hidden so well that he can't be found, prompts Fulghum to shout out, "Get found, kid!" He notes that the same may be said for many adults who, one way or another, are in hiding and sorely in need of being found.

Fulghum says he prefers the game Sardines, where the person who's It goes and hides and everyone else seeks him. When one of the seekers finds the hiding place, he or she climbs in with the hider and they hide together; and so it goes until everyone is all bunched in together like sardines and somebody giggles and everybody gets found. According to Fulghum, it's a good image for what God is up to: "Medieval theologians even described God in hide and seek terms, calling him Deus Absconditus. But me, I think old God is a Sardine player. And will be found the same way everybody gets found in Sardines--by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end" (p. 56).

Pastoral Reflections

Today's Gospel presents the calling of the first disciples as told by John. After the poetic grandeur of "In the beginning was the Word," the Word made flesh is traipsing around the backwater towns of the Sea of Galilee. Compared to the cosmic profundity of John's Prologue, it all seems pretty commonplace and ordinary.

Still, some amazing things are in the works for some of the ordinary people of the region. Two disciples of the Baptist overhear him talking about Jesus and so run after him. When Jesus asks them what they're after, they respond, "Where are you staying?" Maybe they were a bit tongue-tied, or maybe they thought that by seeing Jesus in his everyday setting they would get a handle on him. In any event, according to John, Jesus says, "Come and see," and they end up staying with him all day. There is no record of the conversation, but it must have been good.

Later, after Jesus runs into Philip and tells him to follow, Philip in turn goes to tell Nathanael: "'We've found the one Moses wrote of in the Law, the One preached by the prophets. It's Jesus, Joseph's son, the one from Nazareth." In the parlance of Peterson's biblical paraphrase, Nathanael responds: "Nazareth? You've got to be kidding" (Mark 1:46, The Message)

"You've got to be kidding." It's not the most auspicious beginning for a life of discipleship, but things work out when Nate finally meets Jesus. There's a similar you've got-to-be-kidding quality to the story of San Francisco Bay area writer Anne Lamott' s conversion in her wonderfully funny and profoundly honest Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (New York: Anchor Books, 2000). After what she describes as a life of "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll," Lamott is depressed, alcoholic, and pregnant. She has an abortion and then spends the next week drinking. On the seventh night while trying to sleep she has a religious vision: "After a while, as I lay there, I became aware of someone with me, hunkered down in the corner... I knew beyond any doubt that it was Jesus... And I was appalled. I thought about my life and my brilliant and hilarious progressive friends, I thought about what everyone would think of me if I became a Christian, and it seemed an utterly impossible thing that could not be allowed to happ en. I turned to the wall and said out loud, 'I would rather die'" (p. 49).

Later, feeling pursued by something she dare not let in, Lamott resists until, hung-over and tired, she attends a local church: "I stayed for the sermon, which I just thought was so ridiculous, like someone trying to prove the existence of extraterrestrials, but the last song was so deep and raw and pure that I could not escape. It was as if the people were singing in between the notes, weeping and joyful at the same time, and I felt like their voices or something was rocking me in its bosom, holding me like a scared kid, and I opened up to that feeling and it washed over me. I began to cry and left before the benediction" (p. 50).

When she gets home, she finally gives in: "I opened the door to my houseboat, and I stood there a minute... I took a long deep breath and said out loud, 'All right. You can come in.' So this was my beautiful conversion" (p. 50).

I suppose you could say that Andrew, Peter, Philip, and Nathanael all "got converted" that day they ran into Jesus. Another way to say it is that they "got found." The same for Samuel with the voice and Anne with her vision late at night. In each case it happens a little bit differently, but whether it's "here I am," or "come and see," or "you can come in," when the extraordinary happens--when God happens--a person's ordinary life is forever changed.

Richard Rollefson

Third Sunday after the Epiphany January 26, 2003

Jonah 3:1-5; 10

Psalm 62:6-14

1 Corinthians 7:29-31

Mark 1:14-20

First Reading

In contrast to last week's Old Testament reading, in which Samuel immediately responds to God's call in the night with "Here I am," Jonah is a reluctant prophet. While we have only a brief passage from the book of Jonah, this might be a good occasion for telling the whole story (including the reason God had to use that big fish).

The story of Jonah poses a number of interesting questions, especially for preachers: What if the people you have gotten used to lambasting for their sinfulness actually repent? What if your enemy changes his ways? What if someone you hate gets saved? And especially troubling for preachers of the gospel, What if God's idea of who should receive mercy is a lot bigger than yours? If the "what ifs" turn out to be true, then what are you supposed to do? (This is where you need to remember the part about Jonah and his boat ride).

According to Paul in his advice to the young church in Corinth, time is of the essence, and there's none to waste. And given his abbreviated story of the calling of the first disciples (at least compared to John's version last week), Mark apparently thinks the same thing. The moral seems to be that sharing the good news of God's love for all people--whether we like them or not--is the most important thing in the whole world. And there's no time to waste.

The brevity and simplicity of Mark's account of the calling of the first disciples also suggests that what matters is simply that they are called and that they follow. Jesus speaks to them in images from their ordinary lives in the real world, and he doesn't waste any time getting the message across. Maybe there's a lesson here for preachers--the one my parishioners have repeatedly tried to teach me: Keep it real, and keep it short.

Pastoral Reflections

In today's Gospel Mark tells his version of the calling of the first disciples. Walking by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus doesn't waste any time when he sees the fishermen Simon and Andrew. All he says is, "Come with me. I'll make a new kind of fisherman out of you. I'll show you how to catch men and women instead of perch and bass" (Mark 1:17, The Message).

No questions asked, they just drop their nets and follow. It's as though whatever they have to do has to be done right now with no delays. In the case of catching men and women, apparently, like regular fishing, you've got to fish while the fishing's good. Who knows, maybe God was trying to make the same point when he turned things around and used a fish to get Jonah going in the right direction. In light of the new thing God is doing, there's no time to waste, no time to keep old grudges or hatreds, no time to decide who's in and who's Out.

Both of these are stories of calling, of vocation. In his Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (San Francisco, Jossey-Bass Books, 2000), Parker Palmer reflects on the concept of vocation: "Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about--quite apart from what I would like it to be about--or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions. That insight is hidden in the word vocation itself, which is rooted in the Latin for 'voice.' Vocation does not mean a goal I pursue. It means a calling that I hear" (p. 4).

Palmer argues that the usual understanding of vocation puts far too much emphasis on "shoulds" and "oughts," based on a deep distrust of the self understood as sin-ridden and selfish unless corrected by external forces of virtue. In its place, Palmer says: "Today I understand vocation quite differently-not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received.... Vocation does not come from a voice "cut there" calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice "in here" calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given to me at birth by God" (p. 10).

Mark doesn't spend any time probing the psyches of the prospective disciples: Jesus calls, they follow. But we probably do need to engage the complexities of our listeners' lives in the real world by reflecting on the relation between personal identity and authentic vocation. With all the different voices clamoring for our attention, which one will we listen to? How do we discern which voice to follow?

In one sense, I suppose you could say that Jesus' call to the disciples comes from "out there," and yet it is a calling to become the persons God created them to be. They are fishermen, and they are called to be fishermen; it's just that now they will be catching people instead of perch. Maybe it's the same for those whom Jesus calls today. True vocation comes more as gift than goal and is grounded in gratitude, not guilt. Vocation means listening to the voice of God, but the call of God, coming as it does from the One who made us and knows us best, also speaks from within. And, it always calls us to be who we were created to be.

Richard Rollefson

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany February 2, 2003

Deuteronomy 18:15-20

Psalm 111

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

Mark 1:21-28

First Reading

Wisdom, knowledge, and authority are words that stand Out in our readings today. "Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," says the psalmist (v. 10). According to Paul, "knowledge puffs up, but love builds up." And in Mark, Jesus is perceived as one who teaches "with authority," one whose teaching "does what it says" (1:27, The Message)

A common definition of wisdom is knowledge plus experience. Wisdom is something more than information acquired from a book; it is only gained over time because it includes experience in the real world. Wisdom is knowledge where "the rubber meets the road," where what we know is tested through action and refined by practice.

But from the biblical perspective, wisdom is something still more: it is life grounded in honoring the authority of the Creator. Wisdom is not only lived knowledge, it is knowledge of that by which we live. Recognizing our dependence upon the grace of God is the starting place for authentic wisdom; it is the foundation of a life where what we say and what we do come together to form a whole.

In philosophical discussion, the concept of "praxis" is used to suggest the integration of theory and practice where the commonplace division between words and actions is mediated and overcome. Praxis is theory in action and action subjected to reflection.

In the realm of theology, however, the disjunction between faith and practice that parallels the theory/practice bifurcation seems to continue unabated as "faith versus works." Our Lutheran tradition is probably most responsible for perpetuating this disjunction. While Luther was clearly right to make a theological distinction between justification and sanctification, to reject the notion that justification is dependent upon good works, and to distinguish between faith and love, the subtleties of his argument seem to get lost. What we end up with is a notion of faith divorced from practice. But faith, as Luther understood it, is not simply intellectual assent; instead, it is trust in God lived out in daily life. Ordinary life is where faith is tested and refined, even as faith redescribes the ordinary world as the locus of God's saving grace. For this reason faith is probably better understood as "faithfulness," the praxis of trust in God, where belief and behavior come together to form a whole--and a whole p erson.

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and they who live by it grow in understanding." According to Psalm 111, wisdom begins with respect for God. For Paul, knowledge needs always to be connected to love. Wisdom--the knowledge that matters--is knowledge plus love. Yet, for Paul, it is not simply our intent to be loving but rather the experience of God's love that grounds our love of neighbor. As we have been loved by God, so we are empowered to love. So it is that Luther spoke of the life of faithfulness as "faith active in love."

What is the teaching that we can live by, the wisdom that gives life, the authority that grounds truth? As Luther understood, it is the gospel, God's love revealed in Christ.

Pastoral Reflections

"A new teaching that does what he says" (Mark 1:27, The Message) is how the congregation responds to the experience of hearing Jesus teach and then seeing him heal a demon-possessed man. A colloquial, vernacular way of putting it might be to say, "he practices what he preaches." The connection between words and actions--doing what we say--is central to the question of the nature of wisdom, authentic knowledge, and authority. You might say that seeing a necessary connection between our words and actions is the beginning of wisdom and that demonstrating the connection between the two in daily life is the source of authentic authority.

J. L. Austin, a practitioner of the Anglo-American philosophical perspective some-times known as ordinary-language philosophy, coined the term "performative utterance" to describe those uses of language where the common distinction between words and actions is bridged, where to say something is to do something. One example of such a speech-act is a minister pronouncing a couple husband and wife at a marriage ceremony. In such a case the speaking of the pronouncement is the action. Truth is, the more Austin thought about the whole matter, the more it seemed to him that all speaking is, or is intended to be, the performing of an action, and then we're right back to saying that there is a necessary connection between words and actions. What we say and what we do are always supposed to correspond to one another, or something important is Out of place.

Those of us called to proclaim the gospel are supposed to practice what we preach. Sometimes that may seem like a problem, but when it is, it's usually because we are preaching something like advice or personal opinions instead of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Besides officiating at weddings, ministers get to do some other paradigmatic "performative utterances" that, like Jesus' teaching, do what they say. In these cases, however, it isn't because of the consistency of our words and actions or our own authority, but God's. It happens when, following the confession of sins, in God's name, we pronounce the forgiveness of sins; it happens when, by Christ's authority, we are privileged to proclaim, "This is the body of Christ, broken for you, the blood of Christ shed for you."

Richard Rollefson

Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany February 9, 2003

Isaiah 40:21-31

Psalm 147

1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Mark 1:29-39

First Reading

This week and next our texts convey the theme of the power of God's healing. Isaiah 40 speaks of God giving strength to the weary and promises that those who wait for the Lord "shall mount up with wings like eagles." Psalm 147 sings of the God who "heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds" (v. 3). And Mark tells the story of Jesus healing Peter's mother-in-law.

This week and next might be an occasion within this season of ordinary time to use a Service of Healing in your congregation. The Occasional Services book includes a "Service of the Word for Healing" and "Laying on of Hands and Anointing the Sick," and many other resources are available. Following the Hymn of the Day, in conjunction with the prayers, worshipers may be invited to come forward for individual prayers of healing for themselves or loved ones. Or you might consider an additional station at the time of communion for such prayers and the laying on of hands. Whether a full service of healing or an addition to the prayers or communion distribution, such liturgical actions can help to embody the extraordinary love of God in our ordinary lives.

Pastoral Reflections

Mark's account of the healing of Simon Peter's mother-in-law might seem either humorous or poignant, depending on your point of view. As is often the case in our ordinary lives, it is probably both at the same time.

As Mark tells it, after returning from the meeting place where Jesus taught, Jesus and some of the disciples return to Simon's house, where they find his mother-in-law sick in bed. They tell Jesus, and he goes to her, takes her hand and helps her up. "No sooner had the fever left her than she was up fixing dinner for them" (v. 31, The Message).

Now you might think that in the crowd of men we are told are present--Simon, Andrew, James, John, and Jesus--one might have been able to rustle up something to eat. Who knows, maybe they could even have seen that Peter's mother-in-law got some food into herself, what with her fever and all. Instead, as soon as she's feeling good enough to get out of bed, she's the one waiting on the men. Looks like traditional cultural roles are more resistant to miraculous healing than disease.

On the other hand, most of us are fortunate to have known women like Peter's mother-in-law, who, when they are ill, bemoan not their own suffering but their inability to take care of others. Such extraordinary women embody hospitality in such a way that nothing pleases them more than to feed a hungry crew, even when they show up at a bad time. If we weren't blinded by its ordinariness, the fact that most of us have experienced such healing hospitality in everyday life would lead us to recognize it--and the people who provide it-- for the miracles they are.

Richard Rollefson

Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

February 16, 2003

2 Kings 5:1-14

Psalm 30

1 Corinthians 9:24-27

Mark 1:40-45

First Reading

2 Kings 5 tells the story of the healing of the foreigner Naaman by the prophet Elisha. In his letter to the church at Corinth, Paul uses the image of being an athlete who pushes on toward the prize as a metaphor for the Christian life. And Mark continues his narrative of Jesus' ministry with an implied question for Jesus posed by a leper: "If you want to, you can cleanse me." Jesus' response, "I want to," is a statement in brief of his ministry of compassion to all in need of healing.

Today's psalm contains the compelling lines, "Weeping may linger in the night, but joy comes in the morning." On a recent trip to a favorite summer vacation area, my wife and I pulled into the parking lot of a diner we had frequented in the past. But as we drove in, we noticed that all that stood before us were the charred remains of the building. On a small handwritten sign in one of the windows were the words, "There may be tears at night, but joy comes in the morning." We were saddened by the thought of the loss sustained by the hospitable cafe owners, but that little sign was a powerful witness to their continuing hope.

If you did not do a service of healing or a rite of individual prayers and the laying on of hands within your worship last week, you may want to do so this week. Marty Haugen's "Healer of our Every Ill" is an especially appropriate hymn (available in the Hymnal Supplement: 1991 from GIA publications). The refrain also echoes Psalm 130:

Healer of our every ill,
light of each tomorrow,
give us peace beyond our fear
and hope beyond our sorrow.

Pastoral Reflections

Sometimes the power of faith in God is revealed in ways that we are prone to overlook and even resist. Our Hebrew Testament reading tells the story of Naaman, a high-ranking military officer in the army of the Aram who also happens to be a leper. The Jewish slave girl who waits on his wife tells her that there is a prophet back in her homeland who can cure her husband. With letters of introduction from the king, a bunch of nice robes, and a stack of gold, Naaman heads off to find this prophet. When he arrives at the prophet's house, Naaman is insulted that Elisha does not emerge and greet him but instead sends out a messenger who tells the visiting dignitary to go wash in the Jordan seven times. Naaman is miffed: "Here I was thinking he would be sure to come out to me, and stand there, and call on the name of Yahweh his God, and wave his hands over the spot and cure the leprous part" (v. 11).

Maybe Naaman already had some experience with holy-man types and figured he knew how they were supposed to operate, or maybe he just was used to getting a big response when he showed up in his chariot. The prescription Elisha writes apparently sounds a bit too ordinary, and as rivers go, the Jordan isn't particularly impressive. "At least he could wave his hands around some," Naaman grumbles about the lack of hocus-pocus as he turns to leave. Luckily, his servants intervene with the sound advice that just because it isn't fancy or complicated doesn't mean it might not work, and so Naaman does what Elisha prescribed.

Our lectionary reading doesn't include the part that follows. After Elisha refuses payment from Naaman, his servant Gehazi, showing some initiative, decides to cash in on the action himself. When Elisha finds out, Gehazi ends up with Naaman's leprosy. So we have more than one lesson here: (1) Even if they tell you to do something that sounds way too ordinary, it doesn't mean that God can't do something extraordinary with it; and (2) Never cross a prophet.

In the healing story that Mark tells, things are even more ordinary: a simple question, a brief response, no hocus-pocus. Like Elisha, Jesus isn't looking for anything in return either, and after he has cured the man he commands him not to tell anyone what's happened. But as you might imagine, the newly healed man can't keep his mouth shut. In this case, however, disobeying a prophet doesn't result in any dire consequences.

Mark tells us that "Jesus was deeply moved" as he reached out to touch with hands of healing. Compassion, being deeply moved, reaching out to those considered unclean and unworthy, is an everyday event in Jesus' ministry and the essence of his gospel. Maybe that's what makes him more than just a prophet.

Richard Rollefson

The Transfiguration of Our Lord February 23, 2003

2 Kings 2:1-12

Psalm 50

2 Corinthians 4:3-6

Mark 9:2-9

First Reading

Both the departure of Elijah in a fiery chariot and the transfiguring of Jesus on a mountaintop ablaze with light bring an extraordinary conclusion to this Epiphany season of ordinary time. This Sunday serves as a transition to the Lenten season that lies ahead: just as the vision on the mountaintop was given to sustain the disciples as Jesus turns toward Jerusalem and all that will follow, so we are given a vision of Jesus as the Christ of God to sustain us on our own Lenten journeys.

In a passage from earlier in his counsel to the Corinthians, Paul speaks of our own transfigurations, where "our lives gradually become brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him" (1 Cor 4:18, The Message). But Paul is confident that the light of the gospel message will overcome our darkness, for it is the self-revelation of the One who first spoke creation into being: "It started when God said, 'Light up the darkness!' and our lives filled up with light as we saw and understood God in the face of Christ, all bright and beautiful" (v. 6, The Message).

Pastoral Reflections

Under the entry "Mysticism" in his Wishful Thinking (SanFrancisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1973), Frederick Buechner contends, "Mysticism is where religions start.... Religion as ethics, institution, dogma, ritual, Scripture, social action, all of this comes later, and in the long run probably counts for less. Religions start, as Frost said poems do, with a lump in the throat--to put it mildly--or with a bush going up in flames, a rain of flowers, a dove coming out of the sky" (p. 65).

I suppose it could be argued that the scene that Mark describes--Jesus shining with light on a mountaintop--would qualify as such a religion-starting mystical experience. Peter, James, and John are along, and besides the light and Jesus' shimmering robes they see him conversing with Moses and Elijah. Jesus is revealed as part of a long tradition of holy prophets just as God's voice proclaims him something more: "This is my Son, marked by my love. Listen to him."

Peter wants to preserve the moment, and so, without much thinking to slow him down, he comes up with the idea that they should build three memorials to commemorate the event. Now Jesus did nickname Peter "Rock," but sometimes you get the feeling maybe something was lost in the translation and in more colloquial terms it should've been translated not as Rock but something more like "blockhead." No one even bothers to acknowledge Rocky's suggestion. Still, even if Peter's proposal is preposterous, it's an understandable feeling, wanting to hold on to something so extraordinary. He and the other disciples had been slogging along with Jesus for some time now. They had seen some amazing things along the way, no doubt about it, but they'd been through some hard times, too, and had seen Jesus just as weary and worn out as the rest of them. And now, instead of the excitement of the early days, there was a growing sense of dread as Jesus kept making veiled predictions that "the Son of Man must suffer and die."

After the light fades and the voice stops, Mark tells us, "They see nothing but Jesus, only Jesus" (v. 8). From the heights of the extraordinary and awe-inspiring they return to the ordinary. They see "only Jesus" both in the sense that he is now alone and in the sense that it's "only Jesus," just the regular old Jesus-- the person that they have come to know personally and intimately--who is now returned to them. They will push on to Jerusalem with the Jesus they know, but now with a heightened sense of his holy calling.

The term "transfiguration" is defined as "a change of form or appearance," and apparently it's something that can happen to anything or anyone. According to Paul, most of us live most of the time with a kind of veil over things. Maybe it's inevitable given the way the world is and the way we are that we are blind to what he calls "the dayspring brightness of the Message that shines with Christ, who gives us the best picture of God we'll ever see" (2 Cor 4:5, The Message). But sometimes, if we pay attention, and sometimes even though we don't, the veil is lifted, and we see past the surface to the depth of things. If only for a moment, there is that change of form or appearance that gives us a glimpse of the truth.

The meaning of the transfiguration is not that we need to have mystic visions but that we begin to see with religious vision, begin to see God everywhere in everyday, ordinary life, in laughter and tears, in celebration and mourning; see God in all those places where we are granted a vision of the truth beneath the surface of things.

What took place on the mountain was that the disciples caught a glimpse of the deeper truth of Jesus as the Christ, God's own chosen child. What they saw was what Buechner describes as "holiness shining through humanness." It's one way of describing Jesus' transfiguration, but it's also a way of characterizing the whole of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the revelation of God in the ordinary human face of Christ. And as we prepare to journey with Jesus to a place called Golgotha we can be reminded that it was there--a garbage dump with Jesus on a cross strung up between two common thieves--that the final and fullest transfiguration took place. It was in this most unlikely and ordinary of places where holiness shining through humanness is revealed as divine compassion for all the world.

"Holy" means something that is set apart for God's special purpose. It is in and through the story of Jesus that we learn its fullest expression. But the promise of what the disciples saw on the mountain, the promise of those smaller transfigurations that come to us as gifts in everyday life, the promise of the gospel, is that we will be transfigured by God into .the likeness of Christ; that, as ordinary and everyday as we may be, we too can become the places where holiness shines through humanness.

Richard Rollefson