Water Rights

Water Rights

© 2008 Robert J. Elder
Mountain View Presbyterian Church, Las Vegas, Nevada
John 4:5-42
February 24, 2008

Saint Augustine once wrote, “Hope has two beautiful daughters: anger at the way things are, and courage to see to it that they do not remain that way.” Our passage for today is one that is filled with hope and marked by both of hope’s daughters.

Here we have a wonderful story that provides the exception to the usual rule which declares that all the gospel stories are about Jesus, not about the characters he bumps into. This is the longest recorded conversation that Jesus had with anyone in scripture. It has the wonderful ironies and multiple meanings characteristic of John’s gospel. If not the whole point, at least one large and unmistakable point of this story is the Samaritan woman herself, all the things about her, who she is, what she was, what she becomes, and, of course, who Jesus is in relation to her. She is both of hope’s beautiful daughters rolled into one.

Often we jump to too many disparaging conclusions about her, based on our own perversities and prejudices. As Winston Churchill once said, “A lie goes halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on.” We may take on a Jerry Springer Show mentality, thinking of her as one of those talk show guest targets, for whom Jerry has the surprise of all five husbands waiting in the wings to come out and confront her. She realized that Jesus knew everything she had ever done. But we don’t.

“To be sure, Jesus knows she has been married five times and now ‘has’ a man who is not her husband, but what are the particulars? Deaths? Divorces? Legal tangles? Or is it promiscuity? We do not know... Jesus does not urge the woman to repent or change her behavior.”1

So maybe it would be good to set all snickering, behind-the-hand remarks about her aside and consider two critical, and often overlooked elements of the story:

[1] Jesus found himself in what was, for all practical purposes, enemy territory. And while he was there, he ran into someone who shared his monotheistic faith, though the Samaritan woman’s faith had reached lots of particular conclusions differing from classic Jewish faith. It is in some ways like the way our monotheistic faith in Jesus has some similarities to, but is very different from, contemporary Muslim monotheism which celebrates but does not worship Jesus. It is while he was in this hostile territory that he identified himself as the awaited Messiah, the gift of God who can give living water to those outside the fold of Judaism.

[2] The story then provides a grounds for resolution of an age-old animosity between peoples, when many Samaritans believed in Jesus “because of this woman’s testimony.”

This story provided the early church with important guidance regarding the new healing and hope in Jesus available to all whose wounds and divisions are long-standing. It can serve us in that way as well. It is no accident that this meeting took place at Jacob’s well (a place that can still be seen today) a spot where two widely diverging traditions had a common beginning place, connected with Jacob, a common ancestor.

Jacob’s well was the place for the entirely unlikely meeting between Jesus and the despised woman of the hated Samaritans. The Samaritan people were considered a sort of half-breed of near-Jews by the people of Jerusalem and the officials of the sanctioned Temple religion of Judea.

By the time of Jesus, the rupture between Samaritans and Jews had had a long, long history over almost a thousand years. It began after the time of King Solomon, when the ten northern tribes of Israel broke away from the southern tribes of Judah with their capital in Jerusalem. The northern kingdom in Samaria was eventually defeated in battle over 700 years before the time of Jesus, and most of the leaders and well-to-do folks were carried away into exile, never to return. Those who remained in Samaria were poor, largely ignorant, powerless people. They intermarried with other peoples around them. Yet they retained the first five books of our Old Testament as their scripture, having this in common with the Jews to the south of them. The two peoples remained bitterly divided over political and theological differences. There is still a very tiny Samaritan community in Israel today, mostly in the city of Nablus.

Just 200 years before the time of Jesus, the Samaritans had built a shrine to God on Mount Gerazim, claiming that this shrine, not the Temple in Jerusalem, was the proper place for worship by the people of Abraham who had received the laws of Moses. Jews destroyed the Samaritan shrine a hundred years before Jesus, and the bitter hatred between them only grew worse.

So when Jesus met the unnamed woman of Samaria at the well, both of them carried a lot more than a water bucket to the meeting.

A friend of mine2 wrote,

“I’ve begun to think of this text as a way to explore the phenomena of the walking wounded. Old wounds can be emotionally crippling, social mores can be functionally crippling, and animosities between peoples and groups can be spiritually wounding. To the extent that healing takes place in this incredible conversation, it seems to take place on all those levels. Theologically, Jesus as ‘the gift of God,’ is the source of this healing, the woman becomes the instrument of this peace. We probably can’t honor her enough for what she can mean to our churches... in her own way she re-forms the church. Now they have a polygamous Samaritan woman on their hands with quite a following at Sychar. Imagine that!”

What will the Spirit think of next? If this woman comes to know and share the love of God through Jesus, who could resist it?

Frederick Buechner’s lovely little book, Telling Secrets, includes the story of his daughter’s struggle with anorexia as well as his own struggle with his desire to ensure her recovery from the disease, to make her better through the sheer force of his own will and control. In the process, he discovered his life-long desire to control all outcomes, really. In a search for his own healing and help, he sought out a group for adult children of alcoholics, people who come from families that have experienced problems with alcohol even though they themselves do not. He wrote,

“They have slogans, which you can either dismiss as hopelessly simplistic or cling on to like driftwood in a stormy sea. One of them is ‘Let go and let God’ — which is so easy to say and for people like me so far from easy to follow. Let go of the dark, which you wrap yourself in like a straight jacket, and let in the light. Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you — your children’s lives, the lives of your husband, your wife, your friends — because this is just what you are powerless to do. Remember that the lives of other people are not your business. They are God’s business because they all have God whether they use the word God or not. Even your own life is not your business. It is also God’s business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become a life-transforming thought.”3

It is life-transforming only when we believe our lives are God’s business, as well as our own, that God takes an active interest in our lives and is not only actively interested but takes an active role in them. If we can recognize this one thing, passivity is thrown out the window and we are empowered to take up our lives again in a whole new way. God’s constant activity in our lives is what we look for at every turn in the road, and often when it is expected the least. It is so difficult to seek that when we are busy managing other people’s lives. It is even more difficult when we believe our lives are only our business. In the Psalms God says, “From your mother’s womb I have known you.”4 What a total transformation it is to seek to know ourselves as God knows us.

The woman who met Jesus at the well that day became the missionary of good news to her own people. It is odd that the first missionary was a non-Jew, and the church began to burst the bounds of culture and social norms almost before it got started, here near the very beginning of John’s gospel. And all because a woman realized her life was an open book to the One who knew God better than anyone ever had. She let go and let God.

“At the conclusion of the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman, most readers would have expected the hero to ride off on a white horse in view of a few baffled Samaritans ... instead, the One from Above chooses to submit to the way of the cross. With near unbearable irony, the Keeper of Living Waters will, on Good Friday, say to Roman and Jewish spectators, ‘I thirst.’ But once he is dead and pierced, out will flow blood — and water.”5

This beautiful daughter of hope came to know the truth of Jeremiah’s words6 when he said “I know the plans I have made for you, says the Lord, they are plans for your welfare and not for your harm, to give you a future with hope.”6 That kind of God met the woman at the well that day. That same God awaits us, prays we will open ourselves to him. Answer God’s prayer today.

© Copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder All Rights Reserved

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1 Fred Craddock, “The Witness at the Well,” Christian Century, March 7, 1990. p. 243.
2 George Chorba, unpublished paper delivered at the Homiletical Feast meeting in Tampa, Florida, January, 2002.
3 Telling Secrets, by Frederick Buechner, Harper Collins, 1991, p. 92 ff.
4 Psalm 139.
5 Richard Lischer, “Strangers in the Night,” Christian Century, February 24, 1999.
6 Jeremiah 29:11.

Take It From the Top

Take It From the Top

© 2008 Robert J. Elder, Interim Pastor
Mountain View Presbyterian Church, Las Vegas, Nevada
Second Sunday in Lent: February 17, 2008
Genesis 12:1-4a, John 3:1-7

Have you ever sat before a TV set with a remote control in your hand switching from channel to channel, pausing only briefly to see what is on? There is a descriptive term for this behavior of course: “channel surfing.” Someone once told me that men and women are different in the way we surf channels or surf the Internet, declaring that women are interested in seeing what’s on, while men are interested in seeing what else is on. However that may be, one of the things that sometimes happens especially when we are “channel surfing” is that unrelated remarks made in programs or commercials occasionally coincide in funny combinations. We might call this “commercial roulette,” and if someone were sitting in an adjoining room, only hearing the audio coming over the TV as we switched it, it might sound to them like this: “

...So, next time you have excess stomach acid, remember (click)...
...tonight’s late movie, featuring (click)...
...bad breath. It will make you say (click)...
...I love what you do for me!”

What makes this humorous is that the conversational fragments have so little to do with each other, yet they appear to go together. They only accidentally make sense.

Once a national gathering of religious scholars was held in a conference center hotel. The wall behind the platform in the conference hall did not go up to the ceiling, and just behind it was a bank of pay telephones. Several times during the conference the participants could hear people on the other side of the wall talking on the phones, but at one meeting it happened when the convener had asked the group to bow in prayer. As he intoned the opening phrase, “Oh God,” a fragment of conversation drifted over the wall, “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for some time!” Unfazed, the praying went on with several petitions, “O Lord, we ask...” concerning the health of various members, crisis situations around the world, and so forth. Again, the voice on the other side of the wall responded, “Yes, well I’ll see to that as soon as I can.”

Reading over this conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, I am reminded of just such dialogues in which one participant doesn’t seem to be entirely aware of the presence, much less the meaning behind the words, of the other.

Nicodemus came to Jesus by night, and though I’m sure his intentions were good, we can infer from that note about the time of day the very thing we are likely to believe about people who go about their business under the cover of darkness. As it turns out, Nicodemus was in the dark in more ways than one. When he came to Jesus, he offered a very respectful greeting: “Rabbi, you are a teacher who has come from God, because no one can do the things you have been doing apart from the presence of God!” I have done a lot of teaching in my life, and if someone were to say that to me, I would be flattered and perhaps even a little uneasy. Such an affirmation is a lot to live up to. So, I would have expected Jesus to have blushed and responded, “Well thank you, how kind you are!”

Instead, Jesus responded with, “No one can see the kingdom without being born from above.” One of the things we miss by reading this story in English is the fact that the very same Greek word used here can mean either from above, or again. Those two concepts don’t have a lot in common, but that is what the one word can mean, much like our English word “tear” which can mean either moistened eyes or a rending of fabric or paper. So, like the person channel surfing through commercials, when Jesus says, “No one can see the kingdom without being born from above,” Nicodemus hears, “No one can see the kingdom without being born again.”

It’s almost a prescription for misunderstanding, and it only seems to get worse the more Nicodemus tries to understand it. “You mean,” he asks Jesus, “I have to crawl back into my mother’s womb before I can see the kingdom? Ridiculous! Not only am I 5'10" and 150 pounds, but I’m 75 years old, and my mother passed away nine years ago!”

Nicodemus awaits an explanation. Looking over his shoulder at Jesus, so do we. We’d like to know how to see the kingdom too, but we’re not sure we’ve figured it out from what Jesus has said so far. Nicodemus thinks in terms of human, material origins — what Jesus calls flesh — while Jesus has in mind another sort of origin, one that occurs in the realm of the Spirit. So Jesus goes on, “I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit.”

See? No? Well, don’t feel lonesome, neither did Nicodemus! Jesus continues speaking at another level of meaning from the one Nicodemus is hearing, continues with another single word that in the original language has two meanings. The Greek word for “Spirit” is pneuma, and that is also the word for “wind.” So now we hear that the flesh is flesh but the wind is the wind...or should that be, the spirit is the spirit, or the wind is the spirit or the spirit is the wind? I almost lose track where we are!

Finally, Nicodemus, by this time as baffled as we are, exclaims, “How can these things be?” He speaks for us all, in a way, and in doing so gives Jesus the opportunity to speak of the reality of the world of the spirit and the world of material existence. And what is the essence of these two worlds? What is God’s plan for both material and spiritual reality?

It is summed up in probably the most famous verse of all scripture, the one we often see flashed between the goalposts during televised football games, the one that many of us committed to memory at an early age: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Look at those two verbs that describe this central action of God: God loved, and God gave. Anyone who knows anything about the one knows that it inevitably leads to the other. Love without a desire to give of oneself is an empty love. And giving without love is never much more than a grim response to some feeling of obligation.

It seems to me that all this conversation about the material and spiritual nature of the kingdom results in this declaration about Jesus. God loved the world so much — this material world, terra firma, along with all the creatures on it — God loves this world we know and in which we live out our days. That’s quite a declaration in itself. There are plenty of religious perspectives which declare otherwise, which say that this world either is not real, or that it is a thing to be escaped or avoided. Plenty of people find no reason whatsoever to believe that the gods have any desire to have anything to do with this world. Not so this God who sends Jesus. He loves the world, loves it, lock stock and barrel, warts and all; loved it right into existence. God loves the world enough to want to redeem it. It turns out this passage isn’t about Nicodemus at all, but it certainly is about the sort of God we worship. This is a God of love, not as an abstraction, but as a verb: “God loved the world so much...”

And the way that love has been demonstrated, dear Nicodemus, was in giving: giving an only Son. Remember this Nicodemus, like so many of us, was caught up in a worldview which all but declared that the way to access the grace of God was through obedience and good works. The idea of God’s love as a gift didn’t enter into his thinking very much more than it does into ours during our average day. The very idea that this son who was given is a gift turns the entire merit system upside down, and that’s a lot to turn!

Do any of you watch Jeopardy? You know the key to understanding the game. Alex Trebeque reads the answer and you have to figure out the question. What if John 3:16 is the answer? Lots of people think it’s a pretty good answer, some have called it the “gospel in miniature.” So if this verse is the answer, what is the question?

Here are just a few of the questions this verse might answer:

• Answer: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...”
Question: My parents used to abuse me, what is God going to do about it?

• Answer: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...”
Question: What can be done about the inhumanity of suicide bombers who set off explosives or crash airplanes into skyscrapers, or who shoot unarmed people trying to retrieve relief parcels?

• Answer: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son...”
Question: What hope is there for my life if I have tried to get myself back on my feet time after time, and each time I have failed?

It seems to me that at least one of the only answers that make any sense at all to any of our deepest human questions is filled with loving and giving. Not so much our loving and giving, but God’s. God’s giving of himself in Christ is what makes our pale attempts at loving and giving possible. God has given himself to us, unreservedly. Surely there is someone here today who has begun to feel the need to give himself or herself to God in return. Do it today. Do it with me as we pray.

Oh Lord, even as you gave yourself to us in Jesus Christ, we offer ourselves to you. Take us and make of us what you will, for your sake. In Christ’s name. Amen.

© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder, All Rights Reserved

A Fear of Falling

A Fear of Falling

© 2008 Robert J. Elder, Interim Pastor
Mountain View Presbyterian Church, Las Vegas, Nevada
Genesis 2:4b-9, 15-17, 25-3:1-7
1st Sunday in Lent, February 10, 2008

The forty days of Lent started on Ash Wednesday this past week, as most of us are probably aware. Three observations:

[1] I remember a time, several years ago, when Donald Trump was much in the news because of difficulties in his personal life. If newspaper accounts at the time were accurate, one of the reasons Donald Trump began having second thoughts about his relationships — and the meaning of his life in general — could be traced to the accidental deaths of two of his close associates. The most profound way he could find to describe his reaction to their loss sounded typically Trumpian. He said that he could not understand the meaning behind the loss of two people “of such quality.”

[2] A heroic account of the work of a Protestant pastor — who conspired to hide and transport Jews in German-occupied France during World War II — opens with the story of the death of his mother.1 When he was a boy, his family was in an automobile accident in which his mother was killed. That proved to be a turning point in his life. The contemplation of his mother’s lifeless body there on the road and his father’s reckless driving that had killed her, led him to affirm that human life is infinitely precious, whether it was the life of the Jews who were fleeing the Nazis, or the lives of the Nazis themselves.

[3] One bright morning along between the ages of thirty-five to fifty, many people look themselves in the mirror and are struck by the dawning realization that we are no longer what our society calls “young people.” We begin to discover that the models on TV, the actors that get the best roles, and the folks who pose with products in magazines are increasingly selected from people younger than ourselves. Professional football, baseball, and basketball players our own age are relegated now to the sidelines or described as “aging veterans.” Sure, there are likely to be comments from folks in their seventies and eighties about how they would love to be forty again, but the widespread use of the phrase, mid-life crisis, suggests that there is a special developmental task for those in the mid-life period of life which must be accomplished if we are ever to reach a well-adjusted viewpoint at sixty, seventy, or eighty. At age forty people have reached a time in which the end is in sight, when — statistically speaking — there is more time spent than remaining, and that the time which remains will include the subtle and not-so-subtle deterioration of physical abilities, accompanied by the increasing awareness of aches, pains, and assorted medical problems that now won’t just go away.

What do these three random observations have in common? Just this: the awareness — unique among all animals to the human animal — that we are mortal. Like the other animals, our bodies are not designed to last forever. Unlike other animals, we know in advance that this is so. Just because this has always been so does not make each generation’s accommodation to it any easier. Why is this pertinent to us on a Sunday morning? Because this is precisely what our readings from Genesis can help us to understand.

In his best selling book, When Bad Things Happen To Good People (Schocken Books, 1989), Rabbi Harold Kushner correctly observed that people do not fear death itself as much as we fear what death might mean. Does the fact that I will die one day mean that my life has been meaningless? Does it mean that all the good things of life — the love we have experienced, the care that we have shared with others, the accomplishments we have managed to leave behind — are erased by our parting? Will my death be a time in which I am abandoned by those who once loved me, and all my life’s work will be seen as futile?

Our story in Genesis declared that God took dust from the earth, blew into it the mysterious and still little-understood breath of life, and God’s relationship with humanity was underway. Later, after the disobedience in the garden (where God’s warning turned out not to be that they would die if they ate the forbidden fruit so much as that they would know they would die), the nineteenth verse of the third chapter says that from that point on, people would have to toil their existence out of the very dust to which they would ultimately return. Our own toil in the earth would serve as a daily reminder of our mortality. Humanity not only has to live with the fact that death ends our lives, but we have to live with the knowledge of that fact as well.

I have had the blessing over the years of the companionship of three different beautiful Golden Retrievers in my home. The dog in our home these days is named Maxwell, a beautiful three year-old Golden. Though he is only three, I know that one day he will die and I will weep. But he doesn’t know that, and is not confronted with daily reminders of his impending mortality. He eats, sleeps, and launches himself into gravity-defying leaps when he thinks he is going to have a ride in the car or a walk on the leash. His life is generally serene. His death is no source of anxiety for him today.

Not so with us. The story in Genesis proclaims that our daily toil itself, just the work of living, reminds us that we will die, in echoes that are as unavoidable for billionaire entrepreneurs and French pastors as for anyone who finds themselves occasionally mourning for their vanished youth. There shall be no exception to this rule. Its reminders will shadow us until the shadow one day claims us. That is the curse laid upon Adam and Eve in eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and whether we believe this is a good explanation of its origin or not, it is a fact of our lives to this very minute, as up-to-date as the morning newspaper. Death always makes the news. It always has. It always will.

Where does that leave us? The apostle Paul believed death was the result of sin, so that universal human mortality was the proof of our universal sin.2 The number one sin throughout the Bible is the sin of idolatry, generally setting ourselves up as little gods in the rightful place of our Creator God. When the serpent promised that they would become like God, he didn’t mention that it meant knowing something it would have been better to have let God keep to himself. Adam and Eve stand for all of disobedient humanity, but Paul suggested a new era has begun, that in view of the resurrection of Jesus, there is a new possibility open to humanity in addition to the necessity of sin and death: it is grace and life.

Clearly, this passage from Genesis shows that the biblical idea of sin goes well beyond a concern with little transgressions we may have committed on this or that occasion. The more fundamental problem for humanity, which the story of Adam and Eve shows to be a problem originating deep in the mists of human prehistory, is a rebellion against God. Further, it is a rebellion which — despite our best efforts — we are powerless to overcome. Try as we might, we make ourselves the measure of this world and the good God who created it, rather than letting our God be the measure of us, his creatures. We appear “incurably prone to the idolatry of regarding ourselves rather than God as the final hope of our redemption.”3

If Jesus had not shared this curse of death with us, then he could not have been truly human. If he had not contemplated with dread the prospect of his own death, he would have been only a pretender to community with us. But the entirety of his life and ministry makes clear the fact that he placed his whole trust and confidence in his heavenly Father. Paul declared that because of that unique sinless quality, Jesus has become the new Adam, creating the possibility for life where before there was only the possibility for death. Jesus has led us from the gates outside the Garden of Eden through the Garden of Gethsemane, to the gates of heaven. God raised Jesus from the dead, and his example of a new humanity makes possible an altogether new contemplation of the finality of our existence. Lives void of any other meaning may now be filled with the meaning that Jesus’ life gives us.

We have entered the season of Lent this week, but it is important that as we begin this time, we not lose sight of Easter and the hope of eternity which Easter provides. Our dread of death is taken up in God’s ringing affirmation of life in Christ. Praise be to God whose victory is ours in Jesus Christ!

© copyright 2008 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, Harper & Row, 1979, p. 53.
2 Romans 5:12-19.
3 Paul Achtemeier, Romans, Interpretation Commentary Series, John Knox Press, 1985, p. 101.

We Saw What We Saw

We Saw What We Saw

© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder, Pastor

Mountain View Presbyterian Church, Las Vegas, Nevada
Transfiguration Sunday, February 3, 2008
II Peter 1:16-21
Matthew 17:1-5

We had been eyewitnesses of his majesty...
... We ourselves heard.

By late in the first century of our era — that is, just about 1900 years ago — the original apostles of Jesus had all passed away. The churches they had founded had to find ways to carry the message about Christ into the future without the first-person oral testimony of those who knew him in his earthly life. The collected New Testament, as we know it, did not yet exist. There were new circumstances in the world and the stress of conflicting teaching and world events was confusing the people in the church. As situations around him threatened the life of the church that the apostle had founded, an unnamed church leader committed to writing a call to the church to remember the faith that was taught to them by Peter and other apostles. He wrote this letter in Peter’s name to tell them things that Peter had declared orally to the church. This was a well-accepted, respectable way to keep a sainted person’s words alive in a changing, preliterate, forgetful world. The passage we have before us today comes from that time. And it is good to hear it together, because in its original time, it was read to assemblies of people like this, not in the privacy of a library or home, but in gatherings for worship.

We Saw

We had been eyewitnesses to his majesty.

Probably most of us have seen the paintings we refer to as icons in Orthodox churches, like the Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox churches. They are paintings of Mary and the child Jesus or the saints, and considered so precious in those churches that when the Russian Orthodox church in Sitka, Alaska caught fire and burned to the ground back in the 1970s, the people of the church raced in to rescue the icons, disregarding almost everything else in the building. Icons are paintings that are often adorned with precious metal and jewels, and they are generally of a nonrepresentational style, that is, they are not like the religious paintings of the renaissance period in Italy, with perspective and focus on the human qualities of the figures. In comparison, iconic paintings can seem rather flat, almost lifeless. Lifeless, that is, except for one aspect of them that captivates the observer. I once learned that those who paint traditional icons spend about 90% of their time working on the eyes. When you see one of these paintings, it is important to notice whose eyes in the painting are fixed on you, following you around the room. Often, when entering a darkened Orthodox church from the bright light, one of the first things we will see is the sets of the eyes in the icons that are looking at us. Icons are, in this way, windows to the soul. They are not paintings meant for a person to look at or admire, they look at us, and through us, and penetrate into our souls.

What does Peter mean when he says “We had been eyewitnesses of his majesty”? He is talking about this memory from Jesus’ ministry, which we can find in Matthew’s gospel:

Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white ... suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” (Matthew 17:1-5)

Peter knew what he had seen, but probably more important than that, he knew that they had been seen. God had them in view, God, through the eyes of Christ, saw, and heard and taught and traveled with them. Peter knew this, he would never forget it, it was sealed in his memory as one of his life’s transforming moments.

But he is talking about more than a memory. He is also reminding us that as witnesses — those who have seen — we are also those who have been seen. “We saw ... we heard” he said. And once we have seen and heard that Christ is in the world, we then have the eyes of eternity upon us as we carry the message about Christ forward.

The Morning Star

The morning star makes three appearances in the New Testament, the other two are in Revelation. The last star to appear in the heavens before the arrival of the dawn is what the Bible calls the morning star, which we know today is the planet Venus. It came to be associated with the return of Christ, the last heavenly body to appear before the full arrival of the new day, and the time of waiting until his return was compared with the long night which must pass before morning comes, announced by the morning star.

Now by the time II Peter was written, it was clear that the apostles’ expectation of Jesus’ physical return was going to be delayed by at least one generation. Today we know it has been delayed by many more than that. So this line is one of those early realizations that the coming of Christ is not necessarily a physical reappearance on the stage of history, but rather that the coming of Christ occurs in the hearts of those who love him and follow him. Every faithful act, every gesture of kindness, every decision to forego self-interest in favor of helping others is a fresh arrival of the morning star, the new day heralded by Christ’s presence in the world.

It is as if God said to those believers 1900 years ago, and now to us, “I am going to place you in a culture in which the primary task is to acquire goods and enjoy yourself as much as possible, but I don’t want you to do that, I want you to bear a cross. I want you to wait for a bus even when it doesn’t come.” And finally someone worries that maybe it isn’t coming at all, but here Peter breaks into the conversation and says, wait, I know the driver, he is coming.”

And then they remember the words spoken by Jesus, “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” We aren’t sitting here today awaiting the return of Jesus so much as we are today celebrating his promise to be present among us. What a different quality human love takes on when “the morning star rises in our hearts.”

This is a nice alternative to the Valentine’s day heart which so many of us will send around to family and friends. It is not the heart that matters as much as the content of the heart. When we meet people in whose heart the morning star of Christ is rising, we know them and we know the gift they are to the world.

Men and women spoke from God

Since the time when II Peter was written, men and women have come to know the arrival of Christ, the morning star, in many ways. One published prayer I appreciate refers to this in a way we can all understand and relate to, saying “It beckons me, Lord, from the tawdriness of my everyday concerns — from a cluttered desk, a messy laundry room, unpaid bills, a car in need of repair. Thank you for hallowing such moments, and for sending a light in my darkness.”1

This passage reminds me of an old Peanuts cartoon. You may remember it, it was a famous one : Lucy has her sign up offering psychiatric help for 5¢. Charlie Brown sits in front of her. The good “doctor” tells him, “Life is like a deck chair, Charlie Brown. On the great cruise ship of life, some people place their deck chair at the rear of the ship to see where they’ve been. Others are at the front so they can see where they are going. Which way is your deck chair facing?”

It’s a good question. In many ways, our entire lives are spent in between times, reviewing and reliving our past, or anticipating and planning for our future. But Charlie Brown stays insistently in the present: Without hesitation Charlie Brown replies, glumly, “I can’t even get my deck chair unfolded.”

The morning star of Christ beckons us away from our lives cluttered with anchors from the past and anxieties about the future to focus on the presence of Christ among us now. “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”2

Copyright © 2008 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 John Killinger, A Sense of His Presence, Doubleday, 1977, p. 70.
2 Matthew 28:20.

Go Fish

Go Fish

Robert J. Elder, Interim Pastor
Mountain View Presbyterian Church, Las Vegas, Nevada
Third Sunday of Ordinary Time: January 27, 2008
Isaiah 9:1-4
Matthew 4:12-23

We have from the hand of Matthew two separate scenes from the early ministry of Jesus. They are separate, yet there is something that binds them together.

• The first scene recalls a disaster that had swallowed up the Jewish people by the time Matthew wrote his gospel.

• The second scene seems to shift us abruptly to the call to discipleship of the fishermen, Peter and Andrew and James and John.

First of all, consider the disaster of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. When Matthew wrote his gospel, probably after the year 70 A.D., the Romans had recently run rough shod over Herod’s magnificent Temple in Jerusalem. No legions of angels had interceded on behalf of God’s chosen people. Nothing miraculous had happened. The Romans had done their worst and nothing had been forthcoming from the throne of God. It must have been an awful time. According to the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, the fighting within the walls in Jerusalem and the Temple among the Jews themselves nearly was worse than the devastation that the Romans wrought from outside.

The rebellion had happened almost by accident. The final Roman procurator of Jerusalem had goaded the people, torturing and killing them, deaf to the cries of the moderate Jewish leaders. Various radical groups began to react in a blind rage, and when the rebels began to occupy strategic points in the city, the moderates -- who could see that the end of the battle would mean the destruction of all -- were murdered by their own countrymen.

And so the city fell into the hands of warring parties of revolutionaries who were at least as busy killing each other as they were fending off the Romans, willfully blind to the fact that even a united defense must eventually have failed. Like Ethiopian spears against Italian tanks in World War II, there was no winning against the superior power of Rome. The final walls were breached, and the city was laid waste from one end to the other.

Some in the tiny Christian community of Jerusalem managed to escape before the destruction. Most of these considered themselves Jews as well as Christians. They must have shared the numb feeling that all Jews felt upon learning that the fortifications of Jerusalem, crowned by the Temple, were no more. What could be left of faith in a God who could have abandoned his people so completely?

It is a question that for us, hundreds of years later, has perhaps some mild academic interest. Of course we know that the worship of God is not centered in any Temple made by human hands. But then it was a novel thought, an idea that was disturbing and threatening in its raw newness. Could there be life after Jerusalem was destroyed? Could there be faith?

Matthew recalled for his troubled congregation another time when the people of God must have asked the same question. He reminded them of the prophecy of Isaiah (9:1-4):

The Land of Zeb´ulun and the Land of Naph´tali,
Toward the sea, across the Jordan,
Galilee of the Gentiles
The people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death
Light has dawned.

Probably few of Matthew’s people knew precisely where Zeb´ulun and Naph´tali had been. They had been tribes of Jews that had disappeared 700 years before, during another time of foreign invasion and devastation. But the mention of their names would have called forth a feeling of distress, the same feeling they were experiencing over the fall of Jerusalem in their own time. Similar to what we might feel in hearing the word “Alamo” or that native Americans might feel in hearing “Trail of Tears.” It is a wounded, humiliated, powerless feeling, even for those who are separated from tragic events by many years.

It seemed that Matthew wanted to tie together the raw wound of the fresh experience of disaster that his people knew with a former time of disaster, as if to say that even in the face of unspeakable dishonor and sorrow, God’s hope can spring forth again. In the midst of faithless horror, faith can be born.

When no faith is found among the competing factions of Jerusalem, when one person kills another in the name of God, then God may well abandon us to our own horrors, but that doesn’t mean God has given up on humanity. It means that we must look for the work of God in a new, most likely unexpected place. In this case, Matthew talked about going fishing. He asked his people to look to the place where Jesus had begun his ministry. Not in the streets of Jerusalem or among the Temple officials there. He had begun his ministry in Capernaum, among the very people who had moved into the area vacated by the Hebrew tribes of Zeb´ulun and Naph´tali when they were carted off into exile 700 years before. He began his ministry among the mixed races of Gentiles and Jews in Galilee, among gentle, simple fisherfolk.

The end of the first scene in this little passage from Matthew gives us the opening words of Jesus’ preaching: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”

Then, having reminded his listeners of the pitiable devastation that is possible for even the things we cherish most, such as the Temple, Matthew shifts abruptly to the second scene: by the shores of the lake, he speaks to men who are about their fishing business, a model for emerging faith.

The call of Peter and Andrew and James and John shows at the very beginning what it must have meant for a person of Jewish background to come into the church. It did not involve a simple decision to change from this church to that, one religious outlook for another, choosing to be a Methodist instead of a Presbyterian. It meant the dropping of everything familiar to take up a whole new way of life. We are reminded that there is much to be given up if there is much to be gained. All four of the disciples dropped not only their nets, but their means of livelihood. For James and John, responding to Jesus’ call meant leaving their father Zebedee. Means of livelihood, even family, not to mention loyalty to the Temple, much may have to be left behind by those who choose to follow the carpenter’s son from Nazareth. There are wonderful words about this in a hymn in the Presbyterian hymnal but not in ours. It is rarely sung even in our churches that use the denominational hymnal because many people don’t know the tune. But I think the words are appropriate to our scripture readings today:

They cast their nets in Galilee
Just off the hills of brown;
Such happy, simple fisherfolk,
Before the Lord came down.
Contented, peaceful fishermen,
Before they ever knew
The peace of God that filled their hearts
Brimful, and broke them too.

Young John who trimmed the flapping sail,
Homeless in Patmos died.
Peter, who hauled the teeming net,
Head down was crucified.
The peace of God, it is no peace,
But strife closed in the sod.
Yet, brothers, pray for but one thing --
The marvelous peace of God.1

What had been cherished had to be set aside. When God’s spirit works, it often must work in spite of human reluctance, indifference, even opposition. Squeeze a balloon in one place and the air will fill into another spot. For a Jew to accept the fact that God could be working among the Gentiles was as difficult as the decisions of the first four disciples to abandon their way of life to go fishing for another sort of catch.

Isaiah spoke about those dwelling in a land of deep darkness, and I suppose we don’t have to be Hebrews in exile to know what deep darkness is all about. Those who have dwelt in a land of deep darkness know who they are when the Prince of Darkness taps them on the shoulder. We know who we are and we shudder because the land of deep darkness is the kingdom of annihilation and obliteration. It is the land where creation is reversed, and things that used to make sense begin to dissolve back into their original chaos, the place where the loving hand of God on nature is not necessarily replaced by an evil hand so much as by no hand at all: no guidance, no love, no order, no creation, just deep darkness and chaos.

Anyone who has walked into a room once occupied by a loved one who is now gone, seeing the half-read book on the night table, the pajamas hung in the bathroom, the eyeglasses on the dresser, the medicines in the cabinet, the clothing in the closet, anyone who has had to pick up their life with that kind of emptiness cutting a big hole in the middle of it, knows where the land of deep darkness is. The one who has experienced the falling-apart marriage, the still-born child, the approach of retirement when there seems to be so much more to do, these know where the land of deep darkness is.

To all of us who have visited the kingdom of darkness and dread a return trip, Jesus extends an invitation to go fish. While it may seem like an option, the call to discipleship is not some choice we make among other alternatives, but turns out to be the only alternative to the land of deep darkness, for no other loyalty springs forth from the kingdom of heaven. Jesus called those four fishermen to a new kind of fishing, and in the process of responding they discovered that all other loyalties are temporary, none endures, not family, not Temple, not career, not nation, not even life itself. No, an invitation from Jesus to go fish is an invitation to follow the only one who leads forth from the land of deep darkness toward the great light.

Albert Schweitzer once wrote,

He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lakeside, He came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me.” And sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.2

God give us the courage to rise and follow as Christ calls our names by the lakeside.

© copyright 2008 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 William Alexander Percy, Copyright 1924, LeRoy P. Percy.
2 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, p. 403.

Fulfilling All Righteousness

Fulfilling All Righteousness

Acts 10:34-43
Matthew 3:13-17
© copyright 2008 Robert J. Elder
January 13, 2008

The righteousness of God. It’s a topic that just sounds as if it belongs in church, doesn’t it? And maybe in a church with members who are a little more fiercely opinionated than your average Presbyterian. As students, most preachers were admonished to make up titles for sermons that would cause a passerby to pause, and perhaps be made curious enough to come inside to see what the sermon would say. In New York City, the standard was that preachers should create titles compelling enough to cause someone on a midtown bus to disembark and enter the church out of curiosity.

Sounds great, but it can be quite a burden when you have to come up with 40 or 50 of these titles a year, every year, for a bunch of years. I’m wondering if today’s sermon title would compel many to enter an unfamiliar sanctuary on a Sunday morning; it might even scare some away. Speaking of years, over 20 years ago I stepped into the pulpit of a church I served for the first time as their pastor. My sermon title on that day was almost as exciting as today’s, it was called “The Plain Truth.” I suppose some who were there might possibly remember every golden word, though I can’t remember a single phrase myself. Figuring maybe 40 or so sermons a year, that makes 600 titles, give or take. And there had been 13 years in the ministry for me before that, 7 as a preaching pastor, for an additional 280 sermons. I am exhausted just thinking about it. I can only imagine how it makes a congregation feel, just thinking about having to swallow 880 sermons, give or take. Some of us have sat still for many more than that.

Still, the sermon title today concerns righteousness and refers to the very first words that Jesus uttered in the gospel. Though the word righteousness may not be much in our modern vocabulary, it was a word on Jesus’ lips at the very beginning of his public ministry, and so it merits our attention whether it would grab passersby or not. We are almost at the end of three chapters of Matthew’s gospel before we hear Jesus’ voice, and when we do, it is in answer to John’s objection about baptizing this one who is so clearly his spiritual superior. Jesus responded to John’s protest, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”

His words highlight two or three things, then. They are about what is proper, they are about fulfillment, and they are about righteousness.

Propriety

“It is proper for us in this way,” Jesus said, “to fulfill all righteousness.”

Several years ago a film was released entitled, “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” loosely — very loosely — based on Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey. The film was set during the Great Depression in the deep South, as three inmates escape from a chain gang. They are a clueless trio, but manage to bungle their way to freedom. On their journey they come across a gathering of folks by a riverbank who are lining up to be baptized. Two of the three scramble down to the water, and the first one baptized, the one played to perfection by Tim Blake Nelson, exclaims as he returns to his skeptical friend on the bank that the pastor told him all his sins have been washed away, even the theft of a pig for which he’d been convicted and sent to prison. His friend reminds him sarcastically that he had maintained all along that he was innocent. He responds, “I lied...and that’s been washed away too!”

The church has always maintained that Jesus was sinless, the one human being ever on the face of the earth who did not sin. John the Baptist came to the Jordan proclaiming a baptism of repentance for sin. Why would Jesus, sinless as he was, desire such a baptism? How is it that it could be proper? We can all understand the motivation behind the pig-stealing convert’s baptism, he needed to be freed from his burden of guilt as we all do, but why Jesus? Why baptism to erase the sin of one who knew no sin?

This was among the first challenges leveled by non-believers at the church’s proclamation about Jesus. How could it be that baptism for repentance was a proper thing when Jesus had nothing in his spirit in need of cleansing? The word translated as proper is sometimes also rendered “fitting.” Matthew uses it only two times, and both times the word is on the lips of Jesus. Luke uses it once, in a story about faithful servants that also appears in Matthew’s gospel. It doesn’t appear at all in Mark or John, and only four additional times in the rest of the New Testament.

What does it mean to do something in a proper way? The plainest meaning I can identify suggests that a proper way of doing something is the right way, the appropriate way, the orderly way. Bent over my study desk as a youngster, with my head cradled on my elbow, looking sideways and nearly cross-eyed across my homework page, my father was as likely as not to pass by my room and call out to me, “Alright son, you won’t get much done sitting that way, now sit up properly.” Now we may argue with folks who suggest this or that method for doing things as the proper way, but I think that when Jesus mentions the word proper in regard to his own baptism, he means that it is the right way to go about doing things, that it has an appropriateness. However much this may have confounded John and contradicted his image of the mighty coming Messiah, Jesus described his submission as proper. Jesus was obedient to God, properly so, a model for us all.

Fulfillment

“It is proper for us in this way,” Jesus said, “to fulfill all righteousness.”

Here is something I had missed in all the times I have read over this passage. “It is proper for us in this way,” Jesus said, “to fulfill all righteousness.” For us...meaning, this was something which involved both Jesus and John in fulfilling the heart’s desire of God: The sinless one and one who, like the rest of us, was a sinful person. Baptism requires one who receives it, and one who administers it. And clearly, in this model, the one who administers it is not in any way superior to the one receiving it, any more than the priest who baptized Mother Theresa would have been considered superior to her. It was a fulfilling action on both parts, John and Jesus. Jesus, God’s word made flesh, could never be truly human unless in his life he submitted to the fullness of human experience in partnership with other, fallible human beings. Every person knows what it mean to ask and receive forgiveness. Jesus, though sinless, nevertheless needed to know the experience of the forgiving and cleansing love of God. He needed to submit to the baptism of John.

Matthew is big on fulfillment. He uses forms of this word fifteen times in his gospel. The typical formula is, “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet...”

It is as though, while the world awaited the arrival of Jesus, there was a big gap, a large something missing. There had been expectation, Lord knows, plenty of expectation and hope and even wishful thinking. But not so much fulfillment. For the fulfillment of God’s promise to save his people, there had still been some waiting to be done. And then came Jesus, down to the riverside, and from there the gospel takes off with reports of this and that fulfilling what Isaiah or Jeremiah or Zechariah or the Psalmist or Hosea said in their prophecies in the Old Testament.

Righteousness

“It is proper for us in this way,” Jesus said, “to fulfill all righteousness.”

And so at last to righteousness. “It is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” The word righteousness in the Bible doesn’t necessarily mean what we might think. It means to be in an appropriate, proper relationship with God. “Paul wrote that none of us is righteous,1 not saying that none of us has ever done anything right, but rather saying that our life with God and with God’s children is out of kilter, needs to be set right. Jesus has become our righteousness, says Paul. Jesus has done for us that which we cannot do for ourselves, namely, put things right between us and God. Righteousness means to live life in congruence with the demands of a just God, to see our lives, not as our own, to use as we please, but rather as God's gifts, to be used as God pleases.”2

Theologian Joseph Sittler often shared a story of a mechanical breakdown he once experienced in Jerusalem. He took his car to a mechanic. When the mechanic had finished his work on the car, he started it up, and as it hummed along perfectly, he said, “Zadik.” Zadik is the Hebrew word for righteousness. In the garage, it meant simply “It’s working,” or “It’s working again the way it is supposed to work.”

Righteousness means doing the revealed will of God. It means our relationship with God is returned to the working order which God intended. God has provided people with ample instruction on doing his will. To seek righteousness means to set about doing God’s revealed will, to aim at making things work again the way they are supposed to. Living justly with kindness and mercy, that sort of thing.

For whatever reason he knew it, Jesus knew that to pursue righteousness meant receiving the baptism of John. It meant an obedience to God signified in partnership with faltering and failing humanity so that God could turn us toward the relationship he has always had in mind for us. In this, Jesus is, as the author of the letter to the Hebrews said, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

How do we move from our repentance-needy lives to the place where repentance is made possible, where the cleansing of the waters of baptism can touch us and transform us? I invite you to pass by the baptismal font on your way out of the sanctuary this morning. Touch the waters, remember the one who has cleansed us, remember you are baptized, just like Jesus before you, and be glad.

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1 Romans 3:10; Psalm 143:2.
2 “No Problem,” by William Willimon, preached at the Chapel at Duke University, January 10, 1999.

© copyright 2008 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

The Gathering

The Gathering
A Communion Meditation

Robert J. Elder, Interim Pastor
Mountain View Presbyterian Church, Las Vegas, Nevada
Matthew 2:1-12
Ephesians 1:1-12
Epiphany Day, January 6, 2008

The Sunday or two after Christmas day every year are hard Sundays for modern preachers and their congregations. Having thrown ourselves into planning and celebrating in the days leading up to Christmas, the Sundays after inevitably strike us as a bit of a letdown.

What are we doing here? The baby’s been born, Christmas is over, it’s not nearly time for Easter. And why are we singing these suddenly tired-sounding Christmas songs? I noticed that the first of the annual advice for ways to unload the now unwelcome Christmas tree appeared in newspapers on Christmas day this year! Has no one at a newspaper office or radio station ever sung “The Twelve Days of Christmas?” The twelfth day was yesterday. What do they think it is about, a special leap year with twelve December the 25ths?

Probably many – even most – of us have already pulled the decorations off the tree and set it out on the road, boxed up the other decorations around the house except for the one you won’t find until you move the sofa to clean under it in May, ceased turning on the outdoor display, and have considered Christmas only in the past tense for several days now. More’s the pity. For centuries, the church has called Christmas a season, not a single day. It runs from December 25th to Epiphany, which is today, January 6th. We gather today, then, on a special day called “Epiphany,” more familiar to Orthodox Christians, the day of the light – from the Greek word “phanos,” the word for light. Orthodox Christians wait until January 6th to celebrate the arrival of the Christ child, because that is the traditional day to recall the arrival in Bethlehem of the magi from foreign lands – people foreign to Israel and her God as we would be without that child.

So we are gathered here in our now treeless and poinsettia-free sanctuary. What brings us here today? For some of us, it is a late coming to Christmas, but as with the magi, what matters is that we come, late or not. This gathering in this room takes place every Sunday, and we are all late by the measure of the shepherds and angels of the birthday, but on time by the measure of magi who came seeking the light.

Did you hear what Matthew reported about the arrival of the visitors from the East? Are you sure? Often these familiar stories are almost too familiar, and we fail to see anything other than what we have always seen in them. We could check Mark, Luke and John for second or third opinions, but we will find nothing about magi there. Matthew is the only one of the four gospels to report these foreign visitors, so if we want to know the details, we will have to look here.

And did you notice what wasn’t said about them in the gospel lesson? For starters, they are not referred to as kings – as in the famous Christmas carol – but as magi. The word Matthew uses – “magi” – the beginning of our word for “magic” – literally means, astrologers, or star-gazers, people who sought to know about current and future events from the alignments of the stars in the sky. These were people who were considered wise in some eastern gentile cultures in New Testament times, though today their successors are relegated to a marginal existence in the Life section of the newspaper with the daily horoscope. I think it is instructive that though we may not lend too much credence to astrology today, in that season even the stars pointed to the one for whom all creation waited, whether those waiting were wise or not.

Many of the manger scenes which adorn our homes and hearths at Christmastime include a variety of barnyard animals along with the holy family, shepherds whom Luke said came to see the infant Jesus, and these magi whom we find in Matthew. But Matthew doesn’t have anything to say about a manger or an innkeeper. The wise men inquired of Herod of the one “who has been born,” and Matthew says, “On entering the house, they saw the child...” On entering the house, not the barn or stable of Luke’s Christmas story, they saw, not the infant (brephos) of Luke’s Christmas day account, but the child (paidiou), which was the word Luke used when speaking of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple with the elders. “Child” refers to a youngster well past the newborn stage. No wonder the church actually reserves the commemoration of the visit of the magi for January 6th, after the 12 days of the Christmas celebration which only began on December 25th. Their visit came much later than the shepherds’.

Matthew also did not say how many magi there were. Our Christmas traditions have assumed there were three, because that is the number of gifts laid before the child, but Matthew never numbered them. Tradition has even given them names which we do not find in scripture: Caspar — the friendly magi who brought gold, Melchior who brought the fragrant frankincense, and Alberto Salazar...no, that’s Balthazzar, who brought bitter myrrh, best known in the first century for its usefulness in embalming.

So, we have done all we can to help get the wise men there on time, but try as we might, we have to realize they were late, too late for the first birthday. They were not called by the obstetrician anyway, but by the light, the special star. We also have to realize that we have arrived late, too. None of us was there on that first day of Jesus’ life. Yet something calls us here today. I wonder what it is. I wonder if we are not more like the wise men than the shepherds, called simply because something tells us there is light here in this gathering of people who claim the name of Christ.

Though these gentiles did not have the benefit of the scriptures of Israel, we find the startling news in Matthew’s gospel that they have made their way to the infant savior by the light they did have, the light of the star in the East. All of creation, apparently, is in cahoots with the God who has plans to seek out even star-struck foreigners and bring them home to Jesus.

I once had an opportunity to hear a pastor speak about the magi, thinking of those folks who go through life rejecting the church even though they do not know it well, because they do not want to look like hypocrites who go to church without fully believing what the church says. I notice that the magi made no further appearances in Matthew’s gospel or anywhere else for that matter. Who knows if they became believers. Perhaps they were hypocrites! But I don’t think so.

I prefer to think of any of us who come looking for light as seekers, for that is what we are in these days after Christmas, you and I. There must be more to this story than the account of a birth of a child, and though we may not know what more there is, much less whether we can trust it, we come seeking, searching for a place that understands our preoccupations with material things like the gold of Caspar, our need for the things of the spirit, like the fragrant offering of Melchior, and our hope that someone can make sense of the death we must all come to know, symbolized in the embalming gift of Balthazzar.

Whether we think of it in just these words or not, we all desire someone or some cause worthy of the offering of our material lives; some commitment which will nourish our flagging spirits, someone worthy of our reverence and worship; and someone who brings good news to a bad news world.

The magi were the first of the non-Jewish world to recognize that Jesus would be a king like no other king. They came to worship him, and that gathering for worship continues to this very day right here in this place.

Paul wrote about gathering and its meaning for believers. As he began his letter to the Ephesians he said, With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.

Gathering up all things? All of them? Jesus will gather up even strangely bedecked astrologers from foreign places? Even things of earth as well as things of heaven, such as gold, incense, embalming material? Even you and me as we sit here this day, not too sure about the one who calls us together here, but sure of our need for some calling at least? Even if you only know enough of Christ to recognize in him some light, come to this gathering with other seekers again. Come and see and worship and find whether or not this will be the one who will one day give you and me the very Word of life. The story we track from this day throughout the rest of the year is nothing less than that story of Jesus, and how he came and what he did, and how he lives on through this gathering of his people.

Come to the gathering, Sunday after Sunday, and like the magi, bring your best to this table of our Lord, so that what we offer may in some way respond to the glory which God has offered us in Jesus Christ.

© copyright 2008, Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved