Hope Community Presbyterian Church

Isaiah 61:1-6a

Luke 4:14-21

Luke tells us that as Jesus stood up to read in the synagogue, everyone’s attention was rapt on him. Jesus had become a well-known preacher before he came back to Nazareth, and his home-town crowd wanted to know what he would say. This was a defining moment in the early part of his ministry, Jesus’ chance to set a tone for the future and tell what he’s all about. I sometimes have similar moments when people ask me about our congregation: “what kind of church are you?” In reality, they usually ask one of two questions: “Where is your church (by which they mean this building)?” Or “how big is it?” Sometimes they’ll ask something about our worship style. They’re asking what they think is important, trying to fit our church into the community or their mental landscape.

There’s usually something unspoken wrapped into this question. People who ask about the church are not fitting a new idea into their landscape, because churches already have a place in people’s minds. Some people are more straightforward about the unspoken issue. They might ask if I “preach the Bible,” by which they mean to ask if my theology matches theirs. Or they might turn up the volume on their God-language in order to prove that they’re as Christian as they think I’ll demand of them. Others avoid their own religious or political ideas because of what they assume I’ll think. One pastor in the state of Virginia, when he has to admit that he’s a pastor, hears the questioner making silent comparisons to Pat Robertson. That’s the same Pat Robertson who blamed the Haiti earthquake on a mythical pact with devil, which is something I’ll just come out and name as a stupid idea. So this pastor wrote an op-ed column for his local paper, describing what kind of Christian he wants to be linked to. He talked, for instance, about the people who were already in Haiti before the earthquake trying to lift that country out of its poverty. (more…)

1 Corinthians 12:12-14, 25-27

I remember back to my first year in college, at a liberal arts school. My roommate made some crazy connection between two classes, something like taking an idea from Calculus into English, and he read differently into a book because he had some other thought in mind. We called it a “liberal arts moment,” and that made some sense of this program of studying bits of many different subjects. That program left us very well qualified for not very much, but we pride ourselves on being very fast learners because we can see connections with what already knew. The basic idea is that the different things we study are all one set of knowledge, so English and Math are the same basic kind of thought.

I still think that. I think my background in religious studies and your background in psychology, English, math, mechanics, or music are all one knowledge, just in different forms. Your brain studies the structure of a building, the flow of power, the flicker of pain in a face, just as mine sees Hebrew, Greek, and committees. We think in different ways – we analyze, do math, or imagine – but there’s something deeply connected about our thought. That’s why I minister better when I learn about your lives and interests, because the truth of your life connects to mine. (more…)

Jeremiah 1:4-10

1 Corinthians 13:1-13

I remember sitting in worship and hearing this Jeremiah passage as if God spoke it directly to me: “I knew you before formed you in the womb. I appointed you before you were born to be a prophet.” Inside or between those words, I heard a call to ordained ministry. That was a transformative thing to hear. It transformed my past (as I tried to find myself in it), so my hurts and disappointments were no longer just that. Now my past became parts of others’ pain and experience that I could understand. My life changed from being a journey alone to a journey with God. I saw that God was there in my struggles. God’s love surrounded me then, and it flowed out of me now. In a way, my life fell into place. I saw that everything I’d experienced had taught me how to love (because the best way to get someone to love is to love them first).

I interpreted what I heard as a call to ministry (which was a good thing). Maybe I made the connection because ministry is so analogous to Jeremiah’s call. But the more I reflect, the more sure I am that I was wrong. I wasn’t wrong about my call to be a pastor, because that’s been reaffirmed several times. However, I think I was wrong to connect it with this text. I heard something that led me to ordained ministry, but that’s not what I heard. “Ordained ministry” has a lot to do with particular gifts and skills, the details of what God has called forth in my life. Those particular experiences matter – God formed me for this – but what I really heard ran deeper than that. (more…)

Isaiah 43:1-7

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Three years in Jesus’ future, when it became clear that the path of faithfulness was going to lead through an agonizing death, when the Roman soldiers laughed and spat at him for being the wrong kind of king, I can imagine that he might have struggled to hold onto this scene when the heavens opened and the Spirit came down in the body of a dove. We can assume that he did never lose his sense of himself as a beloved child of God, because we say that he was without sin – and sin is what we call the violation of our identity as God’s beloved children. But we also know, from Luke’s gospel, that Jesus spent the night before his blasphemy of a trial praying so hard he cried blood. We know that as Luke tells the story, Jesus was desperate for a reminder of who he was and who God had put him in flesh to be. Was he closing his eyes and hoping that the image of that dove was still burned on the back of his eyelids somehow? (more…)

Matthew 2:1-12

Ephesians 3:1-12

Matthew tells a marvelous story about the fulfillment of messianic hopes laid out in the Old Testament (whether the authors knew they hoped for “Christ” or not). Today, he draws on the ideas from Psalm 72 and Isaiah 60 that “the Lord will arise” and foreigners will bring tribute to Israel’s God. We can see, of course, how this connects with the Magi’s response when Jesus was born. Matthew cares about the fulfillment of prophecy because he’s writing a deeply Jewish Gospel. In Jewish thought at Matthew’s time, the fulfillment of prophecy was the best indicator of God’s faithfulness. Yes, Matthew meant for foreigners to see God’s glory in the heavens, but it’s “his” religion’s glory that was predicted.

In that case, Matthew was probably surprised by the twist in his story even as he wrote it: these foreigners see a glory that “our people” don’t see. The king of Judea and his religious scholars miss it, and the pagans get the scoop. It’s as if something about this story was beyond the religious thinkers. Something was. The secret of Christ’s coming was hidden from those who were not truly open to it, those people with power to consolidate. If we read on in Matthew’s story, we find that those with power end up using their knowledge to kill infants, so they can hold onto their power. The Magi, by contrast, were open to new knowledge. Something in the stars led them to learn something new, to ask questions, to follow a hunch across the desert all the way to Bethlehem. Their openness leads them to yet another new take on this story. God’s truth grew that day. (more…)

Happy New Year!

Ten years ago today, the world did not end. It should have, according to the catastrophic worries about “the Y2K problem” where computers would fail to record the correct date as they rolled over from ‘99 to ‘00. In a New York Times op-ed piece today, philosophy professor Denis Dutton reminds us of the hysteria leading up to that great calendar change. Aside from a few dates that registered as “Jan. 01, 101,” I don’t recall any great cataclysm.

In addition to the computers, Dutton recalls the heightened anticipation among many Christians that if Jesus were coming back, he would likely choose a round-numbered date like 2000 for the event. (The same frenzy developed around the turn of the previous millennium.) I already knew by that time that Jesus’ 2000th birthday had probably come in 1996, and I was fairly sure that his return meant something non-literal about the life of the church. All the same, I must admit to having been a little nervous that the apocalypse would catch me unprepared, and I was a little relieved when the sky didn’t open up as the clock struck midnight.

Dutton suggests that our end-times predictions are ways of distracting ourselves from the real social and technical work that would make our world a better place today. More than that, I think this tendency reflects our ambivalence about God’s future. In the big picture, of course, the fulfillment of Christ’s presence would represent a wonderful new beginning, a world of justice and peace for all. At the same time, new beginnings call for a transition away from the way things have been, which is always unsettling. Most of us earnestly hope for progress toward a more blessed world, but the changes required by that progress make us understandably uncomfortable.

Today hasn’t been a particularly apocalyptic New Year, but the turning of the calendar often inspires us to examine the year gone by and make resolutions for the coming future. The tensions expressed in prophecies about the end of time also manifest themselves in the way we think about exercising more, pursuing a new role at work, or reevaluating a program at church. Our excitement for the new beginning runs in parallel with a sense of the impending end of what came before. When the future comes near us, we’re simultaneously fascinated, hopeful, and scared.

This normal human reaction reminds me of the way that young children react when my dog is out for a walk. Duncan loves children, and they love him. Typically, the kids notice him from about a block away, and they’re very excited to see the cute, friendly puppy. Then, as he gets closer, they notice that he’s getting bigger too. Before long, he’s a 70-pound dog who can look them directly in the face with all four feet on the ground. As he gets closer, the initial feelings of joy and excitement mix with surprise and often a little worry. This friend still wags his tail and loves to have his ears scritched, but he’s more of an adventure than he seemed at first.

That’s the dilemma behind our fear and fascination about the future. What’s coming next looks so interesting, yet it looms over us in sometimes scary ways. During the next 12 months, many things will change. Children will join our families, loved ones will die, relationships will begin or end. Jobs will be created, lost, or reinvented. The church will make decisions about activities, facilities, and budgets in light of the gifts and needs our congregation carries into the next stage of its mission. If we take the long view, we often know what kinds of blessings may be in store, but as the necessary changes draw closer, they look ever more challenging.

Later this month, we will mark the new year with our annual congregational meeting. The written reports of our various boards and committees will look back at the past year and suggest directions for the future. As you read the reports, let these new directions play in your imagination. Feel for which of them might grab your soul’s energy. Think about what it might take to make a vision into reality. Pray with the rest of the church that the Spirit that gave us life would continue to direct us into a future that will be even more blessed than our past. Happy new beginnings!

In Christ’s peace,

Nathan