The Word dwells among us in all our beginnings, middles, and ends: new year's eve year b

The first reading is Genesis 1:1-5, 14-18.
The second reading is Micah 5:2-5a.

A reading from Revelation (21:1-6a).

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth;

     for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away,

          and the sea was no more.

²And I saw the holy city,

     the new Jerusalem,

          coming down out of heaven from God,

               prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

³And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

     “See, the home of God is among mortals.

          God will dwell with them as their God;

               they will be God’s peoples,

               and God’s own self will be with them;

          ⁴God will wipe every tear from their eyes.

               Death will be no more;

               mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

                    for the first things have passed away.”

⁵And the one who was seated on the throne said,

     “See, I am making all things new.”

Also that one said,

     “Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

⁶Then the one said to me,

     “It is done!

          I am the Alpha and the Omega,

               the beginning and the end.”

The holy gospel according to John (1:1-14).

In the beginning was the Word,

     and the Word was with God,

     and the Word was God.

          ²The Word was in the beginning with God.

               ³All things came into being through the Word,

                    without whom not one thing came into being.

                    What has come into being ⁴in the Word was life,

                         and the life was the light of all people.

⁵The light shines in the darkness,

     and the darkness did not overcome it.

⁶There was a man sent from God,

     whose name was John.

          ⁷He came as a witness to testify to the light,

               so that all might believe through him.

               ⁸John himself was not the light,

                    but he came to testify to the light.

⁹The true light,

     which enlightens everyone,

          was coming into the world.

     ¹⁰The light was in the world,

     and the world came into being through the light;

          yet the world did not know the light.

     ¹¹The light came to what was their own,

          and their own people did not accept them.

               ¹²But to all who received the light,

                    who believed in the name,

                         the light gave power to become children of God,

                              ¹³who were born,

                                   not of blood

                                   or of the will of the flesh

                                   or of the will of a human,

                                        but of God.

¹⁴And the Word became flesh and lived among us,

     and we have seen the glory of the Word,

          the glory as of a father’s only child,

              full of grace and truth.

The gospel of the Lord.

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Today is a day of endings and beginnings.  As we end our calendar year, not only do we prepare to begin a new one, but we are already right in the middle of Christmas and the birth of God with us.  Add into that Advent being the beginning of our new church year, and we have a whole mess of beginnings and middles, even at this ending.

Our readings for today reflect this as well.  A story of beginning creation in Genesis, new hope for a Messiah to come in Micah, a hymn of beginning creation and the Word made flesh in John, and newness in Revelation.  The poetry of these readings pulls us into the mystery that comes with beginning and ending.

The vision laid out in Revelation feels magical, even, with the new heaven and new earth.  For me, especially having grown up in the mountains of Colorado, it’s like the day after a snowfall—this morning, for example.  Everything feels new and bright as the sunlight twinkles like glitter off the new flakes of snow blanketing everything.  It’s not a complete restart, but it feels new enough to be one.

Maybe that’s the real truth of all of these readings—that beginnings and endings are never only one or the other, but instead encompass so much more.  While we frequently think about the world in binaries—beginning and end, dark and light, dog and cat—that has not always been the worldview. 

My favorite Hebrew poetry technique, called a merism, actually shows up all over the place in our readings, especially the reading from Revelation.  A merism names two things typically understood as being at opposite ends of a spectrum or idea, like heaven and earth or male and female, dark and light, as a kind of shorthand to include everything in between.

So when we hear or read about God creating the heavens and the earth, we can think about the creation of the whole cosmos.  And when the One on the throne in Revelation says, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end,” we know it means not only the alpha and the omega, but also the beta, gamma, delta, epsilon—the beginning, middle, end, and every new beginning.

The God who comes to us as the Word made flesh isn’t just with us at the beginnings of birth and baptism and the endings of funerals, but instead the Word made flesh is with us in every moment of our fleshy lives.

The incarnation, which we celebrate particularly at Christmas, is God choosing humanity with so much enthusiasm that God takes it all on—the joy and the sorrow.  God takes on our graduations, new jobs, relationships, sobriety and recovery, as well as the layoffs, failed tests, broken relationships, and royal mess-ups. 

God is with us in all of that and each week as we celebrate communion, we receive a tangible reminder of that love and grace that chooses to be with us for it all.  In the bread and wine, which are the body and blood of Christ, Jesus, the Word made flesh, joins in our flesh and journeys with us throughout the week—at every Table, bedside, and bus stop.  

Jesus sticks with us no matter what, so that at the end of all things, we are not surprised to find God with us for what may not be an ending, but just the middle or even another beginning.

Thanks be to God.

God loves our whole, embodied selves

I also reference Revelation 21:1-6 and John 13:31-35.

 

A reading from Acts 11:1-18

Now the apostles and the believers who were in Judea heard

       that the Gentiles had also accepted the word of God.

²So when Peter went up to Jerusalem,

       the circumcised believers criticized him, ³saying,

              “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?”

⁴Then Peter began to explain it to them,

       step by step, saying,

              ⁵“I was in the city of Joppa praying,

                     and in a trance I saw a vision.

                     There was something like a large sheet coming down from heaven,

                            being lowered by its four corners;

                            and it came close to me.

                                   ⁶As I looked at it closely I saw four-footed animals,

                                          beasts of prey,

                                          reptiles,

                                          and birds of the air.

                     ⁷I also heard a voice saying to me,

                            ‘Get up, Peter;

                                   kill and eat.’

                     ⁸But I replied,

                            ‘By no means, Lord;

                                   for nothing profane or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’

                     ⁹But a second time the voice answered from heaven,

                            ‘What God has made clean,

                                   you must not call profane.’

                     ¹⁰This happened three times;

                            then everything was pulled up again to heaven.

              ¹¹At that very moment three men,

                     sent to me from Caesarea,

                            arrived at the house where we were.

                     ¹²The Spirit told me to go with them

                     and not to make a distinction between them and us.

              These six brothers also accompanied me,

                     and we entered the man’s house.

                     ¹³He told us how he had seen the angel

                            standing in his house and saying,

                                   ‘Send to Joppa and bring Simon,

                                          who is called Peter;

                                          ¹⁴he will give you a message

                                                 by which you 

                                                        and your entire household 

                                                               will be saved.’

                     ¹⁵And as I began to speak,

                            the Holy Spirit fell upon them

                                   just as it had upon us at the beginning.

                                   ¹⁶And I remembered the word of the Lord,

                                   how Jesus had said,

                                          ‘John baptized with water,

                                                 but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’

              ¹⁷If then God gave them the same gift

                     that God gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ,                                                                 who was I that I could hinder God?”

¹⁸When the apostles and believers heard this,

       they were silenced.

              And they praised God, saying,

                     “Then God has given even to the Gentiles

                            the repentance that leads to life.”

Word of God, word of life.

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It is good to be back with you all.  The last two weeks of vacation and continuing education were good and yet it is good to be back here.  As my continuing ed while I was gone, I attended the yearly Proclaim Gathering.  Proclaim is a professional community that I am a part of for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer Lutheran leaders in the church. 

This community not only proclaims the gospel to me, but also embodies the gospel with me.  As part of our opening Eucharist this year, we took our calling as members of Christ’s body to heart.  We read through the names of those gathered and as each person’s name was called, that person would stand or raise their hand and call out, “this is my body,” echoing Jesus’ words at the Last Supper. 

As people were named into the space, we tossed or passed balls of red yarn—I like to think of it as our Holy Spirit yarn—to each other, making a messy, interwoven mass of red as we sat together.  As LGBTQ people of faith, we claimed the very bodied space—our embodied place—in the body of Christ, a space that has, in recent history, been denied to us.

While there are many ways that we all embody our faith, physically living into and living out our member-ship in the body of Christ, for me as a queer pastor, Proclaim brings my whole self into ministry and faith.  I don’t need to parse out which parts of me belong—to church, to home, to friends.  My whole being belongs and is celebrated as part of the body of Christ.

In today’s reading from Acts, Peter and the apostles and believers in Judea are confronted with a challenge, a new embodiment of their community of faith.  Up until that point, Gentiles—those who were Greek and didn’t identify as Jewish—had to be circumcised and convert to Judaism before they were considered members of the community of faith.  Their own culture and their unique differences didn’t fit within the community’s understanding of themselves and so they were forced to assimilate, to adapt to the dominant culture of the group, leaving part of who they were at the door.

But that is not God’s will for any of us.  Just as it was for the Gentiles in Acts, our own Presbyterian-ness, our Lutheran-ness, our Christian-ness, is not rooted in our cultural heritages, in how much lefse we eat or when bagpipes are present, how we make tamales, organize our congregation, or even how many pies we bake.  What unites us, the thing that roots our faith, is God, made known through Jesus Christ.   And it is God who loves our whole beings, our whole selves, even when we struggle.

As with the early church in Acts, it takes time to figure out as a community what it means for different groups or types of people to truly be a part of us.  We have to wrestle with how our culture and our identities impact the group.  Does the language we speak force others to leave a part of who they are at the door?  Is our grief or loneliness, still present after so many years, out of place here?

We each have unique gifts, identities, and perspectives, some of which clearly fit, no questions asked, in this part of the body of Christ.  And I imagine many of us have passions or interests or parts of our identity that we haven’t shared with others.  We’re unsure if they make us unfit or too different for the community of faith.   

Maybe we keep things on the surface during fellowship so we don’t have to risk the pain and hurt of opening up and being vulnerable only to have our community abandon or denounce us.  Maybe we just ask and share about the weather and the busy-ness of life instead of asking and sharing what we’re most passionate about.  Maybe we’re afraid of the vulnerability in naming our continuing grief over a loved one’s death, or loneliness without them here.

The community of believers in Judea start out unsure of these uncircumcised believers that Peter baptized—unsure if they really belong, since they are so different.  Even Peter was unsure at the beginning!  He thought he knew the rules.  He thought he knew which food and which people were in and which were out—until God came and shook things up.

Peter says, “the Holy Spirit fell upon them just as it had upon us at the beginning.” And as the Holy Spirit fell, it turned Peter’s understanding upside down.  His faith remained.  He still trusted in the loving God made known to him in Jesus, but now his understanding of God’s expansive, radical love had to change, because “If then God gave [the Gentiles] the same gift that God gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?”

Ultimately Peter realized that he couldn’t hinder God, but he could embrace God’s expansive love, and share his experience of transformation with others.

When we come together to worship or serve or learn, we too get to ask “who am I that I could hinder God?”  and we are given the opportunity to embrace God’s expansive love, beginning even with ourselves.  Being with other LGBTQ Lutheran church leaders helps me live into God’s expansive love.  And being able to share stories from that time with you all also helps me live into it.

What helps you embrace God’s expansive love for you? and for others? and for all of creation?  What do you risk in bringing your whole self into this part of the body of Christ?  Do you know—do you trust—God’s expansive, radical love for you?  Do you know that the Holy Spirit falls upon you just as it did upon Peter and the other apostles at the beginning?  I do.  I know it because I see it in each of you.

God is always coming to us in love for our whole flawed and perfectly loved selves. 

Our whole bodies and our whole lived experiences are the body of Christ, together with the great cloud of witnesses, spanning all of time and space.  The things that make us different and the things that can make us question whether we or another person can really bring our whole selves into the body of Christ                        are also the things that make us more truly the body of Christ together.  Our grief and our loneliness, our differences, are all signs of God’s love for us and God’s love at work through us.

God’s home is among mortals.  Jesus declares, “This is my body.”  God comes to you just as you are.  And just as you are, you are a part of the body of Christ.   

Because love wins.   

Because grace triumphs.   

Because Christ is risen!   

Christ is risen, indeed!  Alleluia!

God is faithful until death and gives the crown of life.

We're going off the lectionary for the rest of the summer and I'm preaching on people's favorite bible passages.  This week's favorite bible passage was from Revelation 2, specifically verse 10b: "Be faithful until death and I will give you the crown of life."

The first reading was Job 19:1-12.

The gospel was Luke 12:22-31. 

A reading from Revelation (2:8-11).

God says,

⁸“And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write:

       These are the words of the first and the last,

              who was dead and came to life:

                     ⁹“I know your affliction and your poverty,

                            even though you are rich.

                     I know the slander on the part of those

                            who say that they are Jews and are not,

                                   but are a synagogue of Satan.

                     ¹⁰Do not fear what you are about to suffer.

                            Beware, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison

                                   so that you may be tested,

                                   and for ten days you will have affliction.

                     Be faithful until death,

                            and I will give you the crown of life.

                     ¹¹Let anyone who has an ear listen

                            to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

                                   Whoever conquers will not be harmed by the second death.

The word of the Lord.

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Today’s readings are a bit of a mixed bag.  Job complains about the treatment and poor advice of his friends toward his trials and tribulations while in Revelation we hear God’s words to the church in Smyrna, a community of faith that is afflicted even in its affluence, facing persecution.  And into the midst of that fear God speaks words of encouragement. “Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.”

God is saying, “No matter what may come, I am with you.  I have chosen you as my own.”  God does not promise an easy life.  God does not even promise survival.  These words are spoken into the midst of suffering and persecution.  I wonder how those who gathered for Bible Study at Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston would hear these words.  "Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life."  Or those whose church buildings have been set ablaze.  What would they hear in these assurances from God? 

But God is the only one who can speak encouragement into persecution and into suffering because God is speaking as one who suffered the deepest depths of torture and death on the cross.  God knows the pain and the sorrow of each community and still speaks words of promise and assurance.

God knows Job’s complaints as he confronts his friends and laments that “God breaks me down on every side, and I am gone, God has uprooted my hope like a tree.”  Job is in the full throes of his despair and yet God knows them and knows it is not the full story.

The ravens have food enough, the lilies are clothed in splendor and Jesus declares, “Of how much more value are you than the birds!”  Job’s worth and yours is so immense that it is immeasurable to God.

Claimed in the waters of baptism, God put our sinful selves to death with Christ, bringing us to new life in the crucified and risen one, giving us “the crown of life.”  We have been put to death and yet are alive, poor even in richness.

As Lutherans especially, we live into the paradox of things that appear to be opposites—dead yet alive, sinner and saint, living into God’s reign on earth, even as it has yet to be fully realized.  Even our language about God is paradoxical!  Jesus is both fully human and fully divine.  God is the alpha and the omega, or as in Revelation, “the first and the last, who was dead and came to life.”  God is a paradox, a mysterious mix of unknown and knowable.

Right now we have many people trying to win the crown to rule our country.  Ok, it might not be an actual crown, but sometimes it seems like that with all the pageantry and pontificating.

Political campaigns are the perfect place to examine human hypocrisy, human paradox.  Each campaign works overtime to root out opponents’ hypocrisies—flip flop positions, suspect donors, and actions that don’t match up with stated values.

Lesson learned:            everyone is a hypocrite:                        you, me, every one of the many candidates for president on all sides;            we’re all hypocrites.  In theological language we could say that “we have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” (Romans 3:23) 

The hypocrisy is not that we fall short, but that we pretend we do not.  We put on a face of perfection, we do our best to appear to all the world as beings without fault, totally put together, without sin, without any complicity in injustice, completely unbroken and unwavering in our faith.

But we proclaim Christ crucified.  The cross, an instrument of political torture used to keep Jesus in his place, has become the symbol of life.  It is our theology based precisely on this cross            that compels us to name reality as it is.   

We mess up.  We are complicit in injustice.  We do not do everything we can to stop the killing of children of God of African descent, we shy away from tough conversations even as we know their importance.  We harm ourselves and we harm others.  We doubt and we worry.  We are slowly being put to death by the subtle ways our culture undermines all of our humanity.

But lest you preemptively despair, joining Job in his lament that “God has stripped my glory from me, and taken the crown from my head,” remember God’s words in Revelation, “Be faithful until death, and I will give you the crown of life.”

God comes in to save us.  Putting us to death with Christ in our baptism, making us “faithful until death” in order to “give [us] the crown of life.”  God makes us alive again with Christ.

God gives the crown of life to the whole body of Christ, not just you or me or Christ the King or even the whole ELCA, but the whole body of Christ, the whole church.  The crown of life empowers us to live into our new identities as saints in Christ and empowers us to name the ways we are still sinners, the ways we don’t measure up, because no one ever does.  No one can measure up.  And no one has to. 

God doesn’t ask us to be perfect.  God doesn’t ask us to do better than everyone else.  God’s hope is that we will be ourselves, that we will live into our identities as beloved children of God.  God bestows love and blessing on us.  “Be faithful until death,” death at the hands of a racist man with a gun in bible study or at the end of a long life, and even death in the waters of baptism, whether those waters poured over you last year or decades ago.  God’s faithfulness in death brings us to the death of Christ in the waters of baptism so that God may “give [us] the crown of life.”

In our baptism we are crowned with the crown of life, that whatever may come, whatever our mess ups and triumphs may be, our God who loves us is the God of new life.  The God of hope.  The God of our future, with us now and always.

Thanks be to God.