healing service | Michael Valliant

Love God, Love Your Neighbor

Background: Last week I preached at Christ Church Easton’s weekly Wednesday healing service and led our Zoom Prayer service and Gospel discussion. The lectionary Gospel was Mark 12:28-34, where a scribe asks Jesus, “What is the first (greatest) commandment?” This is the text of the homily and what we used to get us discussing the reading on Zoom.

“Love God, Love Your Neighbor”

What is the first/greatest/most important commandment?

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

How many people have heard this answer from Jesus? It’s one of his teachings we’ve become pretty familiar with, I think.

I’m curious, if you’d never heard Jesus say this and someone put a list of the commandments in front of you, which one would you think is the most important commandment?

Jesus always seems to understand what is behind the questions that people ask. To use a saying that goes around, the scribes, Pharisees, and Sadducees are all playing checkers while Jesus is playing chess. And I’ve always laughed at the line Mark gives us at the end of this reading, “After that no one dared to ask him any question.”

I’m serious when I say that I thank Jesus for this teaching every day. In part, because I hate having to memorize long lists, particularly of rules to follow. Two is a good number for me to remember.

The reason there are only two is because Jesus has taken it down to the very essence of all the laws. And he’s done it with one action verb: LOVE.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.”

If we were to paint a picture with words, what would it look like in our world and in our lives if we loved God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength? Can you give me any examples that pop into your minds?

Part of it for me is that we would love what God loves. Have you had the experience of loving someone so much that their love of something becomes your love of it too? When there is something that your loved one gets so charged and excited about that you then come to love it as well?

What if we allowed ourselves to love God so much that what God loved, we loved as well, feeling the joy that God gets out of something.

How about Creation. The universe, the world—Creation of which we are a part. In the creation story in Genesis, God looks around at the end of each day and says, it’s good. And as he is finished, he looks at mankind and says, you are in charge. Take care of it.

If there is anything we have royally screwed up in modern times, it’s caring for Creation. But darned if we aren’t willing to ruin the world for lower gas prices, a better economy, and convenience for ourselves.

I can remember reading Dr. Seuss’s book, “The Lorax” to my girls when they were little and thinking that we should be reading this book to grown-ups every day in regular conversation. That and Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree.”

Under Michael Curry as our Presiding Bishop (whose nine year term ended on October 31), the Episcopal Church prioritized a few core initiatives to focus on along with its program ministries. What it picked as the key things we need to focus on as a church to further the work of Jesus are: evangelism, racial reconciliation, and Creation Care.

This is the charge for Creation Care:

“In Jesus, God so loved the whole world. We follow Jesus, so we love the world God loves. Concerned for the global climate emergency, drawing on diverse approaches for our diverse contexts, we commit to form and restore loving, liberating, life-giving relationships with all of Creation.

“The Episcopal Church’s Covenant for the Care of Creation is a commitment to practice loving formation, liberating advocacy and life-giving conservation as individuals, congregations, ministries and dioceses.”

“We follow Jesus, so we love the world God loves.” That’s it in a nutshell. We’ve got our work cut out for us. To form and restore, loving, liberating, life-giving relationships with all of Creation. I can’t think of anything more important than that when it comes to living out what it looks like to love God with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength.

Don’t forget, Jesus gave us a second commandment—whether we want to call it number two, or 1-A, because it is absolutely connected to the first. How about loving our neighbors as ourselves? What does it look like if we take this commandment seriously?

One of the things you are taught not to do when preaching is not to use a different Gospel, say Luke, to make or prove a point when talking about Mark’s Gospel. So let me tell you a parable:

A man was going down to Oxford and fell into the hands of robbers, who stripped him, beat him, and took off, leaving him half-dead. Now, it happened a priest was going down Oxford Road, and when he saw the man beaten and in the ditch, he crossed over and passed by him on the other side. Likewise a deacon came to the place, saw him, and passed by on the other side. But a pagan biker while traveling down Oxford Road saw him and was moved with compassion. She went to him and bandaged his wounds and spared no expense of her own money. Then she put him in her sidecar, took him to an inn, and gave the innkeeper money and said take care of him, and if it costs more than this, I’ll pay you when I come back.

Which one of theses three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?

If you’ve ever heard a different version of that story, the Samaritan, or pagan biker, is the one least likely in the minds of those hearing the story, to stop and offer help.

And yet, we can all agree that the biker is the one who treated the wounded man as her neighbor.

If we take a point from the story, it might be that everyone is our neighbor, when it comes to caring and being cared for. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor, what race, how they vote, who they love, how they dress: we are all created in the image of God and we are all neighbors to each other, and if we are to take the commandments by their name, we are commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves. In the same way we look after our own self-interests, we are charged to look out of our neighbors’ care and well-being.

Our Mark reading today begins with a scribe asking Jesus a question. This wasn’t a scribe who was trying to trick Jesus, as we’ve seen in some other cases. This was a scribe who saw people arguing and heard Jesus answer questions so well, that he put the question to him: which of the commandments is the most important?

And hearing the answer Jesus gave, the scribe thinks about it and says, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’ —this is much more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”

What an amazing answer. Not nice job, or ‘atta boy’, or even ‘your faith has made you well.’ You are not far from the kingdom of God.

We’ve heard this throughout Mark’s Gospel, and we can agree that the kingdom of God is what we are all aiming for—that’s the end result we want.

The scribe, in taking Jesus’s words to heart, letting them sink in, letting them work on him, has moved close to the kingdom of God.

If we are to take Jesus as his word, wouldn’t the same thing be true for us? If knowing and fully understanding that loving God and loving our neighbor are the most important commandments God has given us, and that Jesus has summarized and made easier for us to remember; that if we have this understanding, then the only thing standing between us and the kingdom of God is actually putting it into practice, actually living it out in our daily lives—that fully realized and lived, LOVE of God and loving our neighbor is what brings us to the kingdom of God…

If that’s the case, and Jesus says it is, shouldn’t we spend a bit more of our time, effort, and resources trying to do so?

At this point in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus has already entered into Jerusalem. He’s already cleansed the Temple. He’s about to get arrested and be put to death. He’s put his life on the line for us. What are we willing to do for him?

‘Hear, O Believers: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Amen.

Feast of St. James

Background: Wednesday, October 23 was the Feast of St. James of Jerusalem, the brother of Jesus. Christ Church Easton‘s weekly Wednesday healing service fell on the feast day, so we used the lectionary readings and I gave a homily on St. James to observe the feast day. Following is the text of the homily.

James, the Brother of Jesus: Get in the Game

We run into a number of Johns and James’s in the New Testament, so it’s helpful to differentiate who is who. Today is the Feast of St. James of Jerusalem. This is not James the Apostle, one of the 12, brother of John, and one of Jesus’s closest friends in the Gospels. This is James, the brother of Jesus, who we learn about primarily in the Book of Acts and in Paul’s letters, though this James is mentioned in the Gospels, as we see in the Matthew reading from this morning.

And this James, the brother of Jesus, is thought to be the author of the letter of James that we find in the epistles, which we’ll talk about a bit today and you would do well to read and spend time with.

Now, the first thing that jumps into my mind when thinking about James is to feel sorry for him. Of all the lines of work he could go into, to go into ministry as the younger brother of the Messiah, who performed miracles, healed the sick, drew huge crowds when he taught and preached, and oh by the way was also resurrected from the dead and ascended into heaven… James was clearly signing on for a supporting role—he wasn’t going to be the main character. He might have considered agriculture, becoming a soldier, tent-maker, or sticking with carpentry like his father.

But that also gives us a feeling for James’s sense of mission, seeing what his brother did, who Jesus became, and knowing how critical it was to continue the work that Jesus began, we can see the selflessness that James had.

Some of the background I am about to relate comes from the website, “The Bible Project,” which if you are not familiar with, is a wonderful resource, with short video summaries of all the books of the Old and New Testaments and many of the themes that run throughout Scripture.

Poster of the Letter of James from The Bible Project.

In the Book of Acts, we see that Peter moved on from Jerusalem to go start new churches in other areas. It is then that Jesus’s brother James rose to prominence as a leader in the mother church in Jerusalem, which was mostly messianic or Christian Jews. Some of the new churches and followers of Jesus being started were made up of Gentiles.

The church in Jerusalem was the first Christian community and James was the leader of the community for about 20 years; a pillar of the church and a peacemaker until he was murdered.

The letter that James wrote is a summary of his wisdom sayings. It is not about so much about theology and the philosophical underpinnings, he seems content to leave that to Jesus, James is concerned about what now and what next: how do we live our lives?

Some key influences we find when reading the letter include: Jesus’s life and teachings, particularly the Sermon on the Mount, and the Book of Proverbs, especially the poems in chapters 1-9. James grew up with Jesus and with Proverbs and his language sounds like each of them.

James wants their community to become truly wise by living according to Jesus’s summary of the law: Love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

James is urging his readers and listeners to live complete or whole lives, fully integrated where your actions are always consistent with the values and beliefs you have received from Jesus.

“Works” is a big concept for James—who says we become a new humanity when we don’t just listen to God’s Word, but we also DO WHAT IT SAYS. That may seem like a no-brainer, but 2,000-plus years later, I would say the world probably has a lot more professing and confessing Christians than Christians who live out their faith by doing good works.

James calls us to:

Speak with love
Serve the poor
Be wholly devoted to God

The guys at The Bible Project calls James’s letter: “A beautifully crafted punch in the gut for those who want to follow Jesus.” We’ll see why in short order.

As with the Sermon on the Mount and Proverbs, James has a talent for zingers, one-liners that really stick with you.

Let me throw a few of them at you:

“Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.”

“Be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”

“Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.”

“Humble yourselves before God and he will exalt you.”

And here is a big one, which James may be most known for:

“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works… Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”

James brings this to a point by saying, if a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet does nothing to supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?

He goes on to say it even more pointedly: “Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it commits sin.”

Can we send James to DC?

We might rather have Jesus’s parables back. Then we don’t feel so called out and we can claim that we are confused and we don’t really know what to do. This James is tough.

This morning let’s ask an easy question then. Is James correct: is faith, without works, dead?

There are folks over the course of church history who haven’t loved James, among the most notable, Martin Luther, for whom the concept of works confuses what justification by faith is all about—faith is what gets us there, not works.

I will forever quote Nicky Gumbel, former vicar of Holy Trinity Brompton in London and pioneer of The Alpha Course, because he put it as succinctly as I have heard:

“We are not saved BY doing good works. We are saved IN ORDER TO do good works.”

If our faith is important to us, if our salvation is important to us, shouldn’t our lives show it? We shouldn’t have to get our membership card out of our wallets to show someone we are Christians. Our lives should proclaim it in some meaningful way.

For me, James is the pragmatist that many of us need. There are plenty of people who find Scripture confusing, too much reading, just tell me what I need to do. You want to live life the way Jesus modeled and told us to do likewise? Read James, he has you covered.

It’s worth pointing out that James was murdered, he became a martyr for the faith, not long after his letter was written. As he wrote, he lived. Creating stability, giving the new church, the first church community a foundation and leadership for 20 years at a time when your faith could mean your death, that’s an incredible legacy.

James doesn’t want armchair Christians. We don’t get to sit in the comfort of our living rooms, profess our beliefs, and complain at the TV about the decisions the coaches (bishops, priests, etc.) are making and how the players (active Christians) keep messing up.

We’ve got to get in the game.

There is a contemporary Christian song by the Newsboys called “We Believe” that Fr. Patrick has our contemporary band at the Saturday service playing and singing the chorus from to give us a kind of creed to hang our hats on. It’s very much like the Nicene Creed in what it professes. There is a line that stands out to me in the song:

“So, let our faith be more than anthems
Greater than the songs we sing.”

Let our faith be more than the songs we sing. Let our faith be more than the prayers we pray. Let our faith be more than the worship services we attend. Let us live out our faith in and with our lives, integrated, whole, and devoted to God.

Let us remember and celebrate the life and example of James, the brother of Jesus.

Luke’s Witness

Background: October 18 is set aside on the lectionary calendar as the Feast of St. Luke, the Evangelist. At Christ Church Easton‘s weekly Wednesday Healing Service, I gave an appreciation homily for Luke. This is the text of the homily.

Luke’s Witness

Matthew’s Gospel begins with “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah…”

Mark gives us, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”

John goes deep: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Brace yourselves. In each case, we’re diving right in.

Here is how Luke starts his Gospel:

“Since many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word, I, too, decided, as one having a grasp of everything from the start, to write a well-ordered account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may have a firm grasp of the words in which you have been instructed.”

The author of Luke is also credited with being the author of the Book of Acts, which begins: “In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus did and taught from the beginning until the day he was taken up to heaven.”

The name Theophilus can be translated to mean, lover of God, friend of God, or loved by God. “God lover” may be a more fun way to say it, and our sister-in-Christ, Rev. Barbara Coleman used to like to call all her church friends “Theophilus.” “How’s it going, Theophilus?”

As an aside, if you ever find yourself wondering who was the most prolific New Testament writer… you might jump to John, hey he wrote the Gospel and possibly the letters, so probably him, right? Wait, we have all those letters, the epistles, attributed to Paul, it’s gotta be Paul. Good guess. If you take Luke as the author of both the gospel and Acts, he’s got more words and pages than anyone else in the New Testament. The scales tilt to Luke.

Luke is our only transparent Gospel writer: he’s intentional, he tells us what he’s trying to do. Lots of folks have tried to put this story together. I think I have a good grasp on these things, so I want to give you a well-ordered account so that you can understand what happened here. Not that there is anything wrong with the others, but check this out…

What do we get from Luke’s witness? What’s different from the other Gospels?

15th century depiction of St. Luke, the Evangelist

It’s Luke who gives us Mary’s perspective, her encounter with the angel and news of her pregnancy, along with Elizabeth and the cousin connection to John the Baptist.

It’s Luke who gives us the shepherds coming to see Jesus at his birth and thereby Linus’s speech from “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”

It’s Luke who gives us the only glimpse of Jesus’s childhood with the 12-year-old Jesus in the Temple

Whereas Matthew gives us Jesus’s family tree back to Abraham, Luke goes all the way back to Adam (interestingly, the family trees don’t perfectly match, but that’s another story).

It’s Luke that gives us the parables of the Good Samaritan, the neighbor asking for bread for an unexpected visitor, Lazarus and the rich man, and the prodigal son. They aren’t in the other Gospels.

And the Resurrection story of Jesus and the men on the Road to Emmaus is a story only in Luke.

In Luke we see the elevation of women in ministries, a huge push on lifting up the poor and on social justice. When Jesus gives us his Beatitudes, he is not giving the Sermon on the Mount that we see in Matthew, he comes down to a level place to talk with people.

In talking about how Luke put together his Gospel, Franciscan author Richard Rohr says:

“Luke is creating his gospel using Scripture and tradition, and he’s doing it within a believing community. In putting together his gospel, he’s not only drawing on past Scriptures, such as the Hebrew Bible and Mark’s Gospel, but he’s also weaving in contemporary spirituality, knowledge of the theological schools of Judaism, experience of the times, insights of the believing community (the living body of Christ), and putting it all together.”

Luke looked around, talked to everyone he could, incorporated his own perspective and knowledge, and synthesized this kind of composite account that gives us a deeper understanding of who Jesus was than if Luke had just figured the other accounts were enough.

And there is nothing else in the New Testament like Acts, the days of the early church—Peter finally putting it altogether and becoming “the Rock” of the movement that Jesus predicted he would be; the opening of the ranks to include Gentiles; earthquakes and road trips and shipwrecks, and the conversion of Saul the persecutor of Jesus followers to Paul, the Apostle.

In about a month and a half, when the new church year begins with Advent, we’ll be in a Luke lectionary year, and we’ll see more closely what Luke’s witness is.

Here is a question I have for you. We can see what Luke felt it was important to include in the Gospel that no one else had. We can see what questions Luke asked and wanted answers for. Now take out your reporter’s notebook and pen or pencil: if you were to write your own account of the Gospel, what are the things that aren’t there, the questions that aren’t answered in the other accounts, that you would ask and want to find answers to? What details or eyewitness accounts would you put in your Gospel account?

I want to bring us back to today’s Gospel reading. Luke shows Jesus coming to Nazareth, going to the synagogue, taking and reading the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Jesus reads:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And with everyone staring at him, Jesus then says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Jesus just read his mission statement: bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Luke’s witness to who Jesus is and what his messiahship looks like is Scripture-based, radical, relevant, and social justice-minded.

Talking about Luke’s witness, preacher and author Frederick Buechner says:

“To put it in a nutshell, by playing all these things up Luke shows he was a man who believed that you shouldn’t let the fact that a person is jailbait keep you from treating that person like a human being, and that if you pray hard enough, there’s no telling what may happen, and that if you think you’ve got heaven made but don’t let it worry you that there are children across the tracks who are half starving to death, then you’re kidding yourself.”

The people in Nazareth who heard Jesus read the scroll and go on to call them out got angry, drove Jesus out of town, and up to the top of a hill hoping to throw him off of it.

How do we react to the Jesus Luke shows us?

Let’s shoot for the disciples on the road to Emmaus, for whom Jesus blessed and broke bread and gave it to them, “Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him… and they said to each other, ‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’” And they go to Jerusalem and tell everyone, “The Lord has risen indeed.”

Saying Yes and What Happens Next

Background: August 15 is the Feast of St. Mary the Virgin on the lectionary calendar. The Gospel reading used for the liturgy is Luke 1:46-55, a song Mary sings while pregnant, now referred to as The Magnificat. The following is the text of a homily I gave at the Christ Church Easton weekly healing service, where we used the St. Mary readings.

“Saying Yes and What Happens Next”

Mary said yes. She said yes to God. Today’s reading gives us Mary’s song of joy in what is happening with her; but the “yes” happened first. If we stick to Luke’s Gospel, the angel Gabriel comes to Mary and says, “Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you. Do not be afraid, you have found favor with God.”

Gabriel explains what will happen, that she will bear a son and who he will be and what he will do and mean for the world. When she has questions, he explains that “the Holy Spirit will come upon her and the power of the Most High will overshadow her; therefore the child will be born holy; he will be called Son of God.”

Mary’s response was, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

As far as we know, that is the last conversation Gabriel and Mary had. All it took was Mary’s consent. She said yes, when God called on her.

Mary goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who was barren, and became miraculously pregnant with John the Baptist. The two women come together and are overjoyed and anxious and excited, the baby in Elizabeth’s womb leaps at the presence of the pregnant Mary.

Caught up in this excitement, Mary gives us today’s reading, which we call, “The Magnificat,” which is used in Catholic, Lutheran, and Anglican/Episcopal Vespers (evening) services and sung or prayed as a canticle.

Mary’s song echoes older songs, including the Song or Prayer of Hannah, in 1 Samuel 2:1-10, which Hannah—who couldn’t conceive and prayed to God and who then had a son Samuel—sang to rejoice.

So this is the kind of joyous song someone is filled with when an incredible, overwhelming, and unexpected thing happens.

It’s the saying yes to God’s call, big or small, that opens us up to being filled with the Holy Spirit. And what that looks like can be big or small as well—it could look or feel like laughter, tears, joy; it can come over us as we do something we love or we feel called to do, it can feel like affirmation, it can feel like connection, it can feel like closeness—it’s a feeling inside us that comes from outside us, or that stirs something up in us that we didn’t know was there.

But here’s the thing: they are moments. They are gifts, but they don’t necessarily last. Here was this moment shared by Mary and Elizabeth, but it isn’t the moment or the Magnificat that we remember Mary for.

We remember her because she said yes to God. She said, “let it be with me according to your word.”

And what did saying yes then entail?

Mary then had to lean into Joseph’s understanding and compassion and bear an unexpected pregnancy in a culture that stoned women for what it seemed she had done.

Image: Giotto, The Arena Chapel Frescoes: *The Boy Jesus in the Temple (1305-1306).*

We learn later in Luke the story of Jesus going missing from Mary and Joseph and their having to return over days to come back and find their 12-year-old son teaching in the Temple. Imagine that prayer to God—”Hi, God, it’s me, Mary. I kind of lost your son…”

We’ve heard and recently talked about the story where Mary and Jesus’s later siblings come looking for him when they fear he has lost it, or gone too far, and he says, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers and sisters?”

And Mary lives to see Jesus crucified in front of her.

These are bullet points, not going into any kind of detail. But pointing out that Mary’s life got more difficult, more confusing, and more heartbreaking after she said yes to God. We see similar storylines with John the Baptist, the Twelve disciples, and the apostle Paul.

We rightly celebrate and revere St. Mary the Virgin, not because she was unattainable and so far beyond human, but because she was human, scared, unsure at times, and she said yes and stepped up anyway, not even knowing what the cost might be.

Mary’s willingness might help us look at our own lives and see and seize opportunities to say yes, when we are called.

Debie Thomas, in her book “Into the Mess & Other Jesus stories” frames it like this:

“At its heart, Mary’s story is about what happens when a human being encounters the divine and decides of her own volition to lean into that encounter…

“In pondering Mary’s yes, we are invited to consider what our own might look like. What can we anticipate if we give our consent to God. What will happen within and around us if we agree to bear God into the world? Who will we become, and who will God become, in the long aftermath of our consent?”

A question I have for us this morning, can you think of an example, it could be from your life, or a friend or family member’s, or it can be an example that you have read about or know about that inspires you in some way, of a person who has said yes when called upon, and what that looked like?

I want to put it out there that if Mary’s life had been cushy or easy and she rode around in chariots and was carried everywhere she went, we wouldn’t think of her as a saint.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops says that “saints are persons in heaven (officially canonized or not), who lived heroically virtuous lives, offered their life for others, or were martyred for the faith, and who are worthy of imitation.”

That sounds like a tall order. None of us might aspire to be a saint—just living a good and commendable life seems like a plenty high bar to shoot for. But we are all called to be saints. When Paul used the word saints in his letters and when the earliest church talked about saints, it meant everyone, the whole body of the church, the Body of Christ.

If you look at the ending of the Apostle’s Creed, we say:

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
    the holy catholic Church,
    the communion of saints,
    the forgiveness of sins
    the resurrection of the body,
    and the life everlasting. Amen.

The Communion of Saints is all the faithful followers of Christ, living, dead, past, present, and future.

Rev. Katie Shockley, a Methodist minister, frames it like this:

“When we gather in worship, we praise God with believers we cannot see. When we celebrate Holy Communion, we feast with past, present and future disciples of Christ. We experience the communion of saints, the community of believers –– living and dead. This faith community stretches beyond space and time. We commune with Christians around the world, believers who came before us, and believers who will come after us. We believe that the church is the communion of saints, and as a believer, you belong to the communion of saints.”

We are bound together, lifted and carried by grace, with those who have come before us and those who will come after us. And we look to someone like Mary for inspiration, to remind us that we too can say yes, in our own ways, in our own lives.

When Mary said yes, I don’t think her thought process made her say, “hey, if I agree, maybe people will remember me as a saint someday!” Based on how Luke frames it, it was more along the lines of: God is asking for my help: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

And she was willing to bear whatever came with that saying yes, though she knew not what that was.

Here is Debie Thomas one more time:

“The particularities of our own stories might differ from Mary’s but the weight and cost of ‘bearing’ remain the same—and so does the grace. When we consent to the unbearable, we learn a new kind of hope. A hope set free from expectation and frenzy. A resurrected hope that doesn’t need or want easy answers. A hope that accepts the grayness of things and leaves room for mystery.”

We don’t know what saying yes might mean. We don’t know exactly what comes next when we open and offer ourselves up. But we know that it brings us closer to God; we know that it allows us to be a part of God’s plans for the world; and we know that in God’s love for us, He invites us into richer, fuller lives, being a part of the Communion of Saints, and His holy mystery.

We can look to Mary as an example and for inspiration.

Prepare the Way

Every Wednesday at Christ Church Easton, there is a small healing service. On December 6, using the lectionary readings for the second Sunday of Advent (Mark 1:1-8) I gave this homily, combining the Gospel reading and some of Kate Bowler’s Advent daily devotional we are using this season.

“Prepare the Way”

Does anyone know what the last book in the Old Testament is? Malachi. And does anyone know what thoughts or prophesy Malachi closes out his book with?

“See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me…“

“Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes… so that he can change the hearts of the parents to their children and children to their parents so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.”

With no Gospels yet written, Mark picks up the final promise of the Old Testament and its being fulfilled in this new good news he is sharing.

What else does Mark do for us as he starts his account? He kicks it off:

“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the son of God.”

Where do we famously hear, “the beginning” in the Bible? At the beginning: Genesis, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth.”

So in his opening lines, Mark connects us to the beginning of Scripture and echoes and continues the most recent thread of Scripture they had.

In doing this, he introduces us to John the Baptist.

In his book, “Mark: The Gospel of Passion,” Michael Card writes:

“When we meet him in Mark, John is standing in the Jordan with his camel-hair coat, preaching repentance. Repentance—it is the only way the people would be prepared to meet the one who was coming to forgive their sins. That is how John ‘prepares the way’ for Jesus.”

“John is all that is old and everything that is new. He stands with one foot in the Old Testament and the other firmly planted in the New. It is impossible to overstate his significance.”

In every Gospel account, Jesus’s ministry begins with and carries on from John the Baptist’s ministry (sometimes in talking New Testament it’s helpful to differentiate John the Baptist from John the apostle/Gospel writer). Mark, the shortest of the Gospels, known for giving us, the readers everything we need and not one thing we don’t, doesn’t even give us a birth narrative—that wasn’t important—Mark starts with John the Baptist.

John became hugely popular; he had a huge following and his own disciples. Mark tells us, “People from the whole Judean countryside and all the people from Jerusalem were going out to him and were baptized by him.”

That would be enough to blow your ego up, make you feel important. And yet, listen to John in just these few short verses:

“The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

The humility of John the Baptist. He is not “The Way” (which is what they would call the early followers of Jesus)—John has come to prepare the way. He understands his job and his purpose, and he doesn’t try to hog the spotlight or make it all about him. He might dress funny and eat strange foods, but John is humble. And John is making a clear, straight path to Jesus. He is preparing the way.

Our first Advent reading, from this past Sunday, is where Jesus told his disciples, and us, to “keep awake.” Anticipation. Our second Advent reading, and the focus is preparation.

Maybe we can understand John’s role in preparing the people for Jesus. But what does it look like for us to prepare as we begin our walk through the season of Advent?

Throughout this month, I am going to be bouncing off, writing about, and connecting us to Kate Bowler’s daily devotional, “Bless the Advent We Actually Have.”

In these first four days of the season, Bowler has reminded us to see:

Hope As Protest – in world where we expect things to go wrong, hope in God, hope in Christ is a protest against the ways of the world (as opposed to the ways of God)
God Is With Us – on the great days and the impossible days, God is with us, that’s why Jesus is called “Emmanuel” and a big part of why he becomes incarnate, to assure us we aren’t alone
Teach Us to Pray – prayer as preparation.

This hit me. Bowler says:

“When we cry out to God just as Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane—“God take this cup from me”—our voice joins the chorus of the fellowship of the afflicted… I take comfort in knowing I don’t cry out alone. And my cries don’t fall on unlistening ears. So if today is not your day of wholeness or hope… let’s look around at others and see where God is working in their lives. Maybe see where we can make their loads a little lighter. Together may we become people who look for signs of hope and act in hope while we wait.”

One of the points of Bowler’s devotional is that even as we wait in hope, we have difficult days. And even on those days, when we are low, there is still hope. If we can’t find anything in our lives at a particular moment, we can remember that we are connected to others who are going through things, including Jesus, and when we look around, maybe we can ease our burdens together.

Compressed Hope – is her theme for today (December 6). Can we find those moments, those stories, those friendships, that connect us to hope? What are the ways we can package this expansive hope in God into something we can carry with us in our daily lives?

When I think about John the Baptist, he had seen no huge change in the world when he started his ministry. Israel was enslaved to Rome, the state of the world was bleak, and he trusted God, trusted Jesus who was to come, and powerfully proclaimed the need for people to repent. We know things did not turn out great for John in any worldly sense. But he was a man on a mission, and he was full of hope.

As Bowler was going through cancer treatment, she came to this reminder:

“How easy it is to forget. Forget there is someone turning on and off the stars. Forget that the sun rises and sets without us having to remind it to. Forget there is someone who makes each snowflake unique… These tiny miracles can be reminders that God holds the world together, not us.

Hope is found in knowing that even though it feels like the world is coming undone in my time and maybe in my life situation, the truth is that the sun keeps shining every day and the stars will still shine at night. The whole world shines hope upon us every day.”

God is bigger than we are. The universe is bigger than we are. God takes care of the biggest parts of our world, like the sun rising and setting, the planets in their orbits, and we are a part of that ride. But as small as we might be in the big picture, he has a part for us. Like he did for John, God has a role for us to play, preparing the way, preparing our lives, for something bigger to follow.

This Advent, as we are intentional in our waiting, in our hopefulness, in our preparation, we know that God’s love in the form of the incarnation and coming of Jesus, is what’s coming, is who is coming. And that’s worth the wait. Let’s do our part to prepare the way and prepare our hearts and lives.

Amen.