Are We Answering to the Wrong Name?

Our Lectionary Readings this week are Isaiah 49:1-7, 1 Corinthians 1:1-9, and John 1:29-42. You can read this week's passages here.

I'm starting to wonder if we've gotten it all wrong. I mean...has anyone noticed that this will be the fourth Sunday out of our past seven that we've had to deal with John the Baptist? He keeps showing up, as one commentator put it, "like the cat who refused to take the hint when I've thrown him off my lap for the twentieth time."

We've gotten a lot of different pictures of John over the past few weeks: one preaching in the wilderness of the one who is to come; one who wonders if it is legit for him to baptize Jesus when Jesus is so much greater than him; but perhaps it is this week's picture of John that brings all the pictures together. If you were to Google pictures of John the Baptist, in almost every picture he is pointing away from himself, towards something else: whether it's a photograph reenactment, a Sunday School picture, or an icon of John, his index finger, nine times out of ten, is pointed away from himself. One person suggested that if John had a Facebook page, his Profile Picture would be a long finger, pointing away from himself, and every response to a Wall Post from his friends would be something like, "Go on over to the Lamb's page." This is because if John was certain of anything, it was his place: "I am not the One," John kept saying. "Don't look at me; look at him." Or, as he will say elsewhere in John's gospel, "He must increase, as I decrease." This, perhaps, is why this is pretty much the last time we'll meet John in our lectionary year after his prominence at the beginning.

John knew his place: He was not Jesus. He was a messenger, a witness, one sent to testify that others may see and follow Jesus. In this way...I wonder if John is a better model for our calling than Jesus is? After all, what John does is what we are to do: use our lives to point towards Christ, being willing to give up our own prominence that Jesus' true place may be honored, doing the work of baptism not for our own sakes or glory but as a way to testify about this One who baptizes with the Spirit? Maybe we've taken the wrong model for our life of faith...maybe, instead of calling ourselves Christians, we should call ourselves Baptists.

Oh, wait. We already do that. Johnians? Well, you get my point, hopefully: John models for us what following Jesus should look like in terms of how it shapes our lives.

Except for one thing: one really, really, really major detail. John, as best as we can tell, never follows Jesus...not physically, at least. He doesn't follow Jesus out of the desert and into the cities like his disciples do; he is not found with him on the Mount for the Sermon, he is not sent out with the 72 into all the towns to share the good news, he is not around to receive Jesus' post-resurrection commission nor the Pentecostal gift of the Spirit. As best as we can tell, John never actually follows the pointing of his own finger: he sees who Jesus is and declares this, but never changes the pattern and path of his life to actually follow him.

So I take it back. I have nothing but respect for John's witness in the desert; but why did he never take his witness beyond this? Why did he not lay down his title and follow Jesus, too? Why was he never transformed from John the Baptist into John the Christian?

All of this, I think, can raise questions for our discipleship. How are our fingers pointing to Jesus? This is a part of John's witness that we want to imitate--we want to invite people to behold Jesus. But we want to follow the wisdom of John's disciples, too...being aware enough to go where that finger points, to go on the hard journey of following Jesus out of the wilderness and into the world, even when we do not know where Jesus is leading. How can the movement of our lives point to Jesus as well, making us truly Christians as we walk in his dusty footsteps?

What's In a Voice?

Our readings for this week are Isaiah 42:1-9, Acts 10:34-43, and Matthew 3:13-17. You can read them here.

What's in a voice? I found an amazing answer to that question this week as I perused my favorite news source, ESPN.com. There, amidst stories about the NFL playoffs and Baseball Hall of Fame elections, was the story of one of the countless homeless men who roams the streets of Columbus, Ohio. This man, however, had something that set him apart: before falling into addiction, Ted Williams had been a radio announcer, and he still possessed a silky deep voice that literally had the power to stop traffic as he stood beside the road asking for help. As he demonstrated his voice off of an interstate exit ramp, a local news videographer stopped and shot some footage of Williams that took the internet by storm, much as the voice of Susan Boyle did when she unexpectedly blew away the panel of "Britain's Got Talent" with sounds that seemed to belong more to an angel than a plain middle aged woman. Williams' voice appears to be landing him a second chance: the Cleveland Cavaliers, upon seeing the video and hearing his amazing golden tone, have offered him a job in announcing work with their NBA team--a job that could very well help him get off the streets and turn his life around. (You can read the whole article here).

This story resonated with me this week in particular because of the powerful ways voice is at the center of our lectionary readings. Isaiah speaks of a servant whose voice stands in contrast to so many of the ostentatious voices of his world: this voice will not break the wounded, but will bring about justice. God's voice is heard in this passage as well: it is calling God's people in righteousness and declaring God's good intention to do a new thing, to turn things around.

Voices take center stage in the Matthew reading as well: the voice of John the Baptist no longer confidently crying out in the wilderness, but confusedly wondering why Jesus is coming to him to be baptized. In response, we hear Jesus' voice for the first time in the New Testament, a voice of absolute trust and obedience even in this act that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense: "let it be so," Jesus says. A voice that rips open the sky confirms that Jesus has done the right thing in acquiescing to God's strange leadings: God's voice affirming Jesus as God's Son and the one with whom God is well pleased likely became a memory that sustained Jesus during some of the darkest times of his ministry, and that gave him an impetus for the difficult actions that lay before him.

Acts brings us the voice of Peter, seeking to interpret for his audience all of the unusual things that God was bringing to pass around them. Speaking with bold confidence, Peter tells them the great story of what was begun when Jesus came out of Galilee to be baptized: a ministry of healing and help that ended in death, but was made whole in resurrection--a ministry that now belongs also to those who enter the baptismal waters after Christ.

As we move further into this new year and consider the meaning of Jesus' baptism this week and of our own call to baptism as well, it seems like a good time to pay attention to voices--to the voice of God and its call in our life; to the voices God has given us and the ways we are called to exercise those voices in this world; to the voices of those around us questioning and crying out for mercy. That God spoke at Jesus' baptism is a detail all of the Gospels agree upon...what is God speaking over us as we begin this new year as disciples, and what is God calling us to use the gift of our voices to do?

Past Present Future

This First Sunday in the New Year is also the Second Sunday of Christmastide (i.e. the 12 Days of Christmas!) and the Sunday that can be celebrated as Epiphany, the day of the Wise Men's visit to Jesus and the revelation of Jesus not just to the Jews but to the Gentiles (traditionally observed on January 6, which this year falls on a Thursday). The readings for this day remain fairly consistent every year: Isaiah 60:1-6, Ephesians 3:1-12, Matthew 2:1-12...stories of light, mystery, and strange visitors from far away. You can read them here.

So as we finish up our Advent/Christmas Series on time, perhaps no passage in its very word choice asks the question of "What Time Is It?" more than the appointed Old Testament reading for Epiphany from Isaiah 60. Now, I confess that I do not know a lot of Hebrew; but one of my regular sermon preparation practices is to read each passage in several different translations. All it took was reading this passage in a couple of different English translations to raise questions for me about time. This passage would have gotten slaughtered by any of my English teachers in high school because the writer could not seem to pick a consistent verb tense...is Isaiah speaking of something present, or past, or future? The passage seems to switch randomly between times, often not being clear enough on verb tense for translators to agree on whether the prophet was referencing something that had already happened, is presently happening, or will happen at some time in the future.

Check out this parallel with translations in the NRSV and the NIV: I highlighted what appear to be future verbs in purple (though these appear to just be kind of boldfaced here, I guess), and present verbs in orange. You can see that this is a bit of a mess:

As we enter this day of closing out the Christmas season and moving into the Epiphany season of celebrating the revelation of God in Christ, this conjunction of times and tenses brings up a series of interesting questions for people of faith, questions that can help shape our seeking and living in a new year. What has already happened in Christ, and what are we still waiting for? What has God already done, and what do we need to implore and watch for God yet to do? This passage from the Old Testament was at least partially fulfilled through Christ, yet anyone who observes our world knows that all nations of the earth are not yet praising in one accord the Lord. So how do we live in this strange meantime, caught somewhere between fullfillment and really full full-fillment? Are we to live waiting on things that are yet to come, or in light of what God has already shown? Can we live both ways? How do we live in the now while also living towards the not-yet? These are questions we need to visit again and again...because they go to the heart of the great tension of living in the upside-down kingdom of God that has already come among us in Christ, but that is seeking now to break in once again.

It Makes Me Wonder...

This week we get two sets of lectionary texts: one for Christmas Eve, and one for the First Sunday in Christmastide. Our readings for Friday night are Isaiah 9:2-7, Titus 2:11-14, and Luke 2:1-20 and can be found here. Our readings for Sunday are Isaiah 63:7-9, Hebrews 2:10-18, and Matthew 2:13-23 and can be found here.

Our Gospel readings for Christmas Eve and the first Sunday in Christmas (that's right--Christmas is more than a day, it's a whole season! Ever heard of the 12 days of Christmas? December 25 to January 6=Christmastide...this celebration is by no means over) show us two very different sides of Jesus' birth: the way it is announced, and the way it is responded to and received. Both of these sides are peculiar...the only ones who get Jesus' birth announcement are some shepherds in a field and a few scholars who happened to be paying attention to the night sky. The only ones who recognize what is going on enough to respond are those shepherds and magi, as well as chronically insecure King Herod--and they react in vastly different ways.

A great observation was made in the title song to the musical "Jesus Christ, Superstar": If you'd come today you would have reached a whole nation, Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication. Maybe this is a silly thing to consider when reading a story as significant as the Christmas story, but it makes me wonder...

If Jesus were born today, in this age of mass communication even beyond what "Jesus Christ, Superstar" could have imagined, how would God have shared the good news? Would God have sent out one of the nice photo birth announcements like the one at right to everyone God knew...meaning, I guess, to everyone? Would God have posted pictures on Facebook, or notified all God's followers on Twitter using 140 characters or less? With new technologies available, would God have changed the way God announced this birth so that more people could find out quickly?

Part of me hopes not. Because, though it seems incredibly inefficient, part of what I love about the announcement of Jesus' birth is how intimate it is...how personal...how God is giving this gift to the whole world, but it is being unwrapped (or seen wrapped in its swaddling clothes, more accurately) by just a few witnesses whose testimony will become part of how God shares the good news of love and grace. After all, God could have unleashed those angels on all of Bethelehem...all of Israel, for that matter...but for some reason, God didn't: God chose a quiet way, a particular way, and God chose to involve other humans in the announcement. I think there must be something to that...enough to ponder for many future Christmases.

Then, I look at the contrasting reactions to the birth of the Christchild. On one hand we have the shepherds--the lowliest of society--trying to outrace each other to see who can get to the baby first. On the other hand we have a king--the most powerful of society--terrified by this new bundle of alleged joy, a bundle he fears could grow up to threaten his security and power. This baby is such a threat that Herod kills who knows how many innocents just to protect himself. I wonder how we would respond if we got news that this promised king was born among us this day...would we trip over each other trying to get to him with haste...or scurry to insulate ourselves from anything that might uproot our worlds...or, worse yet, would we fail to respond at all?

The questions of the first Christmas remain potent more than 2000 years later: the technologies have changed, but our God hasn't...and nor, it certainly seen, has human nature. Jesus comes again among us...silently...without much flash or dazzle...often unrecognized. Will we respond with joy or with fear? And will we be aware enough to respond at all?

Lost in Translation (or, perhaps, Found)

Our Lectionary Texts for this final Sunday of Advent are Isaiah 7:10-16, Matthew 1:18-25, and Romans 1:1-7. Read them here as we prepare for our final days of preparation.

Here's the dilemma of this week's readings: I hate it when people take scripture out of context and try to bend it to whatever point they're trying to make. It's one of my pastoral pet peeves...always pay attention to the context, people. Though they have rich applications for life today and can still be faithful guides, these texts were originally written for specific communities in specific times, and we have to approach them always with this in mind.

So what do we do, then, when one biblical writer seems to misquote and take out of context another biblical writer? It makes me squirm a little...but that seems to be what Matthew is doing in quoting the now-famous and much-debated prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 within the narrative of his gospel.

Isaiah had a very specific context in mind when he offered this sign to Ahaz more than 700 years before the birth of Christ. The original Hebrew of this passage reads something like this: "Here, the young woman is pregnant, and is giving birth to a son. She will call his name Emmanuel, meaning 'God with us.' And before this child is three or four, these two kings you presently live in fear of will have been dethroned." Matthew, apparently drawing upon the Greek version of this passage which uses a word that could be translated "virgin" as well as "young woman," takes the liberty (prompted again by the Greek) of projecting this passage out of the present tense into the future, saying this virgin (now understood as Mary) "will give birth," and claims this son, too, will be called "Emmanuel"--even though the angel, clearly, had just told Joseph to name him not Emmanuel, but Jesus, or "God saves."

So what gives? Is Matthew being a bad interpreter of scripture? If so, Lord help us all.

But I don't think he is. Perhaps what Matthew is doing is reinterpreting Isaiah in light of God's new action...no one expected any further fulfillment to Isaiah's prophecy, you see. That Emmanuel had been born, the years had passed, and the kings had gone down just like Isaiah said they would. The prophecy was over. But here we see God doing something unexpected...that prophecy had been fulfilled, but perhaps it has not yet been full-filled, if you get what I mean. That child was named "God with us"; but here is a child who actually is "God with us." Now it's not just a young woman, but a virgin--the prophecy is taken a step further. And now it's not just two kings who will be deposed, but all the kingdoms of the world will be superceded by this baby who is himself a king, one introducing a new sort of kingdom that will have no end.

Perhaps what Matthew is doing here is not interpretive unfaithfulness; perhaps he is doing the most faithful thing an interpreter can do with a text: seeing the God who is lurking behind it and animating it, and imagining how God might, again and again, do a new thing that no one expects. It's having the imagination to dream of new ways that God's promises might be even fuller in the future than they were in the past. I really like how commentator Fred Gaiser described such imaginative dream work:

"It takes a daring reinterpretation to make this one work. The word of God is not a simple prediction that will "come true" in a latter day or an equation to be solved to get one final answer-it is a living word that kills and makes alive in every generation, always needing to be proclaimed anew, always carrying both continuity and surprise: continuity in God's steadfast love and mercy, which never change; surprise in God's enduring penchant to do a new thing (Isaiah 43:19), which always stirs things up. And now, says Matthew, Jesus is that unexpected new thing: Jesus is Immanuel, God with us, even if they didn't get his name right. The details are not the point; the promise is."

Are we free to dream about the story of God in this way? Or does Matthew need to go back to school and take another class on proper biblical interpretation?

Thoughts on this one welcomed...

Apparently, Spring is Coming

Our Lectionary texts for this Third Week of Advent are Isaiah 35:1-10, Luke 1:46-55 (we get this second gospel text in place of a Psalm, because Mary's song reads very much like one!), and Matthew 11:2-11. Read them here, along with a reading from James that, though fabulous, won't be among our readings this week.

When February rolls around, some people look towards the infamous groundhog to find out if winter is finally over. For me, as a child February's progression meant that, every time I walked out the back door of my family's home, I would peer into the mulchy bed to the right of the steps, straining to see the first glimmer of purple. Usually, right around my birthday at the beginning of March, it would suddenly appear: sometimes poking up through snow, sometimes responding to a burst of warm air, a single crocus--the first visible sign that, apparently, spring was coming...and coming soon.


Isaiah tells us that the crocus' time has come: this crocus strains not through mulch or through ice but through the harsh wilderness landscape of the desert--a rocky land where nothing blooms. Yet here we find not just a single crocus, but crocus(crocuses? croci? Not sure on the plural...) that "blossom abundantly," signaling the unlikely dawn of a new season. It's a day when everything from the physical environment to the human heart will be miraculously transformed, where it's impossible to get lost even if you left your GPS at home--and all because God is here, a God who has been as absent to the people during exile as water is to the desert.

Mary sings of the crocus, too--of another glimpse of what it looks like to be able to say with confidence, "Here is your God." Mary sings of a social order transformed, of oppressed people put on an even playing field, of economic justice, of promises fulfilled--all because of this unexpected baby beginning to kick in her womb, the first signs of a new season in her life and the life of her people.


In prison, however, it's hard to see a crocus--or anything--growing outside of the dark concrete walls. In his cell, John is filled not with song but with one piercing question, the question of one who thought they'd seen spring beginning to dawn but who now can't see a sign of any blessed thing breaking through the ground: "Are you the one who is to come, or should we be expecting someone else?" It is the question of one who has seen his shadow and scurried back into his hole, this life of being a prophet far more difficult than he'd imagined and whose dream Messiah has turned out to be a little slower than his heart had hoped. Nothing was turning out like John had imagined...so would the crocus ever bloom? Would spring ever come?


It's cold as all get out in Annapolis this week...the time for crocuses to bloom could not feel farther away. But hang in there, friends. If we believe these promises of God...then apparently, spring is coming. And as we ask our heartbreaking questions of that promising God, we might begin to see glimpses of budding miracles of truth: the blind can see, the lame can dance, and the most helpless among us learn God is on their side.

A Parting Poem to reflect on:

"Waiting for It," by R.S. Thomas

Now
in the small hours
of belief the one eloquence
to master is that
of the bowed head, the bent
knee, waiting, as at the end
of a hard winter
for one flower to open
on the mind’s tree of thorns.

John the Baptist's Time in the Spotlight

Our scripture texts for this Second Sunday of Advent are a motley crew of beauty and bizareness: Isaiah 11:1-10, Romans 15:4-13, and Matthew 3:1-12. Click here to give them a read.

The picture at right is too good not to use, and I figured I probably could not get away with using it as the bulletin cover this week, SO...meet Lego John the Baptist. As I was searching for a picture of John the Baptist to use on our blog this week this was not the picture I was expecting to come across...but then again, when is John the Baptist ever what we expect? He shows up at the beginning of all four gospels, preparing the way for Jesus...and he shows up in the lectionary for the Second Sunday of Advent every single year...he is Advent's prophet. Yet he always catches me a little off guard and makes me wonder, what is it with this guy? What makes him so significant that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all give him serious face time...that Luke gives us as many details about his conception and birth as he does about Jesus'? What makes this season of Advent a particularly poignant opportunity to pay attention to such an odd character? Why is he the right prophet for this season of preparation? What makes this the right time, to continue our theme, for John to show up and disrupt our lives with his cry of, "Repent, for the kingdom of God is near"?

Beyond this plethora of questions about John the Baptist, the other question I had rolling around in my head as I read our texts for this week had to do with all the tree imagery found in these passages. In this season where we put up trees in our homes as a means of preparation, these passages speak of a shoot coming out of a stump, of a root rising to rule over all people...such images of growth and new life are rich in Isaiah and Romans. In Matthew, however, we hear of an axe prepared to chop trees down at their roots, leaving those that don't bear fruit as decimated stump. We hear of cut-down castoffs added as fuel to the fire by a sort of Lumberjack Lord. How do these seemingly contrasting images, powerful in their rich detail, hold together? When we put them side by side, what kind of forest can we make out from these trees?

Good questions for us to ponder as we head into this Sunday...