The Manger on Main Street

A few weeks ago I was driving down Main Street in our little town of Chelsea, rumbling along through the cold black night, the tires on the pickup truck crunching through the snow, headed toward home at the end of a long and tough week, when I spotted a powerfully improbable vision on the side of the road. It was the sort of thing that makes you close your eyes and shake your head and then goes away. So I did. But it didn't.

My eyes freshly focused, I realized that I had seen precisely what I thought I had seen. There, on the west side of Main Street, at the end of a row of shiny new frost-covered Fords, stood a manger. And there, inside the manger, shifting restlessly to stay warm, circled a collection of wise men, shepherds, and all the other usual players of the nativity. The only figure I didn't remember from my family creche set was that of a frigid soul who stood in front of the manger holding a llama on a rope. It was a nice touch.

In the midst of puzzling over this I suddenly remembered that I had heard something about our town featuring a "living nativity scene" as part of its "hometown holiday" celebration. I breathed a sigh of relief, but then tightened with a twinge of disappointment. After all, a nativity scene seemed a little out of place at the end of a new car lot. A nativity scene seemed like the sort of thing we should find amidst the trees in our city park, or on the land of one of the nearby historic farms, or next to a stable just outside of town. But a few yards away from a sign about advantageous financing? It felt a little odd.

And this sense of strangeness was helped by the grim symbolism that new car lots have come to express in the past few months. For most of my life, rows of new cars have held an irresistible appeal. I know, of course, that cars are just material things and that in the end they stop running and start rusting and we can't take them with us. But I grew up in Michigan, where the car--and particularly the new car--conveyed messages of freedom and self-determination and excitement. Some kids grow up wanting to be astronauts or surgeons or President of the United States. I grew up wanting to drive a Mustang.

These days, however, rows of new cars remind us of other things. They remind us of deeply troubled financial and credit markets, of survival struggles within an industry, of pleas for government help, of layoffs and buyouts and ripple effects, and of dreams gone dark. So this set me to wondering: of all the places on earth, why would you put a nativity scene there?

Well, they say there are no stupid questions, but I immediately realized that I'd just asked myself one. Why would you put a manger scene there? You would so so because that is exactly where it belongs. And it belongs there more this year than in any year in the past.

After all, the message of the manger is not that hope lives somewhere else, in some sparkling and lovely place we haven't seen yet. It is that hope lives right here, right now, right next to some of the things we find most unsettling and difficult to understand. The message of the manger is not that we have to find peaceful places to find peace itself. It is that peace can come to us anywhere, at any time, under any circumstances. And the message of the manger is not that everything has to be alright for us to experience true, exuberant, over-the-top out-of-control joy. It is that such joy can come into our hearts even in the bleak midwinters of life, even with the cold wind swirling around us, even on the west side of Main Street at the end of a car lot.

As I drove past the manger, I watched the families walk hand-in-hand toward the freezing figures who greeted them. I saw the children run up gleefully to admire the rickety structure and to pet the llama. And I understood why the manger belongs on Main Street.

I cannot imagine it anywhere else.

A Christmas Prayer

Lord of love
In this season of memory, help us to remember all those for whom this is a dark and burdened time:
the poor, for whom this is a season of want;
the unemployed, for whom this is a season of disappointment;
the homeless, for whom this is a season of cold;
the sick, for whom this is a season of suffering;
the lonely, for whom this is a season of despair;
the imprisoned, for whom this is a season of isolation;
the survivors of lost loved ones, for whom this is a season of sorrow;
and the men and women serving our country abroad, for whom this is a season of separation from family and friends.
Gracious God,
we remember them because we know that you remember them,
that in your kingdom no one is forgotten,
no one is abandoned,
no one is finally alone.
And it is in that spirit that we also remember
that this is a season of hope and grace and light,
that this is a time when we mark history's witness
to the greatest act of love the world has ever known.
For this is the season when we rememer the transformative power
of a child,
come into the world to change the world,
come into our lives to change our lives,
come into our hearts to change our hearts.
Oh, may it be so.
Amen.

What Now?

I have an image and a question.

Here is the image: You live in the Galilean region of Judea during the rule of Pontius Pilate. You have heard that a man named John is preaching to people on the banks of the Jordan. Curious, you travel to the river to hear what he has to say. When you arrive, you stop at the top of a hill and watch.

This man looks wild. He wears clothes made of camel’s hair. People say he eats locusts and wild honey. His words are filled with bitter judgment.

Down beside the river, he leads a strange ritual. People wander into the water; John places his hands on them; they immerse themselves and then they emerge, disheveled and sodden, but also looking as if somehow, in some way, something important has changed.

That is the image. Now, here is the question: Would you walk down the hill to meet this man?

We all understand the signal importance of John the Baptist. Jesus described him as a “burning and shining lamp.” He appears in all four gospels. He is associated with the “voice … crying in the wilderness” and “prepar[ing] a way for the Lord” that was foretold by Isaiah. The opportunity to stand in the presence of John seems like it would be an incredible experience.

But John is more than a little intimidating. He challenges us. His words have a stark and relentless quality to them. He demands that we change course right here, right now. He talks about axes and threshing forks and unquenchable fires.

At one point or another, we have all probably played the game where we identify historical figures we wish we could invite to dinner. I doubt that many of us have ever proposed John the Baptist as our first choice. And that is not because of his unique dietary restrictions.

No, John puts us off. And his almost inhuman purity makes it even harder to have warm and fuzzy feelings toward him. We love many of the figures we encounter in the gospels because in them we see our own foibles and failings: many of us can be hot-headed or hypocritical like Peter or skeptical like Thomas. We can sympathize with the rich young man who wants to be good but also wants to stay rich. We know people who, like Mary Magdalene, came into the light from very, very dark places. Maybe we are that person.

This is why Luke’s distinctive portrayal of John the Baptist is so important. Luke provides us with additional details that show us John’s humanity, demonstrate John’s compassion, and help connect the words we hear now from John with the words we will hear later from Jesus.

One particular detail, which appears only in the gospel of Luke, seems to me especially important. In this passage, John calls for those who have gathered to repent in order to prepare for the one who is coming--that much appears in all the gospels. But Luke goes on to tell us that the crowd wanted more information. The crowd wanted a better understanding of what John meant by his command that they must “bear fruits worthy of repentance.”

So they asked a logical question: “What then should we do?”

John tells them to prepare for the coming of the Lord.

So they ask the next logical question: How should we do it?

And here’s where things get really interesting and where the brilliance of Luke’s gospel shines through.

John does not answer their question by describing articles of faith or doctrine. He does not answer by citing scripture. He does not answer by setting rules for membership in an exclusive organization. He does not answer by prescribing religious rituals.

Rather, he answers by saying this: “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” That, John says, is what the people must do to turn their lives around. That is what they must do to prepare. That is what they must do to get ready to stand in the presence of the living God. They must give to those who have less.

And when the tax collectors and the soldiers press for still greater clarity, Luke offers them a similarly simple directive. He tells them not to use their authority to oppress others but, instead, to treat them as they would be treated.

The timing of John's message is also interesting. When John said these things, Jesus had not begun his ministry as an adult. People therefore might have had faith in the abstract proposition that a savior was coming. But they would not yet have had a reason to believe that the savior had already arrived, particularly in the person of Jesus. That is, of course, precisely why the people asked John if he was the one for whom they had been hoping and praying.
Still, John does not tell them to wait around until Jesus arrives; he does not tell them to put their faith in idle until the time comes to put it in gear; he does not send them off to contemplate or meditate or procrastinate. He tells them to get to work, to give to those who have less, and to treat others as they would be treated.

In his book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis confronts the difficulty of fulfilling the command that we must love those we don’t even like. He says “The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”

John’s answers to the questions asked of him reflect the same fundamental psychological truth. In essence, John told his audience not to waste time wringing their hands over whether they were ready, but to go ahead be ready by behaving as if they were people of God. 

Later, Jesus will give us these same messages.

He will tell us to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, give shelter to strangers, visit the sick and imprisoned, and care for the needy.

He will tell us to treat others as we would be treated.

He will tell us to show mercy and forgiveness and grace and love--and to do so in ways that radically transcend our normal, comfortable sense of what it means to care for other people.

And he will give us the greatest lesson imaginable by doing the most loving act imaginable: he will die for us.

“What then should we do?” the baptized asked.

The answer now is the same as it was thousands of years ago.

Come down off of the hill.

Throw yourself into the water.

Live as if you were a child of God, charged to care for the children of God.

Because you are. And you are.

Amen.

The Greater Miracle

Scripture: Mark 6:1-6

A number of years ago, a prominent theologian from the United States traveled to Central America to meet a renowned bishop whose work he had long admired. When his plane landed at the airport, the theologian found a driver waiting to transport him to the church. During the long ride, the theologian stared out the window at the scenery, chatted informally with the driver, and meditated about the issues he wanted to discuss with the bishop during the brief time they would have together. When he finally arrived, the theologian leapt from the car and rushed toward the two smiling, bright-faced men who greeted him. One of the men took his hand and said “Welcome. I am the bishop’s assistant. And this,” he continued respectfully, turning toward the other man, “is the bishop’s secretary.” Then he gestured toward the driver and said, “Of course, you’ve already met the bishop himself.”

The first half-dozen chapters of the book of Mark include numerous instances in which people do not—or, perhaps, will not—recognize Jesus for who and what he is. In Chapter 3, members of his local community claim he has “lost his mind.” Mark 3:21. The Scribes accuse him of being in league with the devil. Mark 3:22. Even his own family appears to harbor doubts: they hear the mutterings of others and try to “restrain him” from continuing his work. Mark 3.21. In Chapter 4, his disciples cry out in despair over their imminent drowning because they fail to recognize him as one who has the power to calm the storm. Mark 4:38-41.

Even those who witness his miraculous works fail to see Jesus for who and what he is. Indeed, some of those individuals observe a miracle, acknowledge the wonder of it, and then try to distance themselves from Jesus—as far as possible. Consider, for example, the story in the fifth chapter of Mark about the man possessed by demons, “legions” of demons, as it were. Jesus sends the unclean spirits into a herd of swine, liberates the man from his curse, and restores his physical and mental health. Have you ever noticed what happens next? Mark says this: “Those who had seen what had happened to the demoniac and to the swine reported it. Then they began to beg Jesus to leave their neighborhood.” Mark 5:16-17.

That brings us to the familiar passage in the sixth chapter of Mark, where Jesus carries his ministry home to the people who knew him best—and yet apparently didn’t know him at all. In his hometown, Jesus finds ridicule and mockery the likes of which he will not know again until the Cross. The people—his people—take “offense” at his preaching. Mark 6:3. They express astonishment at his presumptuousness. Mark 6:2. They dismiss him as a local tradesman and homeboy: “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” Mark 6:3. All this prompts Jesus to declare that “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house.” Mark 6:4.

Then the gospel tells us something remarkable—something so remarkable that I want to spend my time here trying to figure out what it can possibly mean. At this point, Mark declares that Jesus—“amazed at their unbelief”—“could do no deed of power there.” Mark 6:5-6. Now, this statement has to grab our attention. After all, we find many instances in the gospels where Jesus would not do something—for example, throw himself off the pinnacle of the Temple at the devil’s invitation. But we find very few instances in the gospels where Jesus could not do something. Indeed, in some ways the notion seems fundamentally inconsistent with our understanding of Jesus as one having authority—the sort of full authority that can calm the storms of life, literally, and that can finally overcome even death itself.

So, what are we to make of this passage? What is the gospel saying here? Well, I want to suggest that this passage conveys two messages, two very important messages. Indeed, I want to suggest that the two messages embedded in this passage do nothing less than tell us how we should live and why we should live that way.

The first of these messages is plain enough: our faith matters. It matters a great deal. Our faith plays an active role in the realization of God’s will on earth. Our faith brings something critical to the equation. Standing around without faith waiting for a miracle is like standing around in your basement waiting for a suntan. If faith is not present, then some things simply will not happen—“amazed at their unbelief, he could do no deed of power there.”

This holds true in an abstract and theological sense. But, perhaps more importantly, it also holds true in a concrete and practical sense. After all, faith inspires hope, and hope inspires commitment to action, and when faithful people start moving they unleash a formidable force. In this way, our faith helps all of us become agents of God, agents of goodness, agents of grace.

One evening a few months ago my wife Lisa looked up from a book she was reading and said: “Hey, listen to this.” I'll confess that I always experience a certain amount of unease at these invitations because, well, our taste in recreational reading runs in very different directions. Lisa likes novels with lots of compassion and contemplation and conversation. I like chronicles of military history with lots of action and adventure and ammunition. But we understand each other’s idiosyncrasies in this regard and so are selective in what we share. This time, as usual, Lisa had a gem.

She read me a quotation from a book called Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. In the book, the protagonist describes the contrasting ways in which she and her sister experience faith. Gilbert says this:

"Here’s another example of the difference in our worldviews. A family in my sister’s neighborhood was recently stricken with a double tragedy, when both the young mother and her three-year-old son were diagnosed with cancer. When Catherine told me about this, I could only say, shocked, 'Dear God, that family needs grace.' She replied firmly, 'That family needs casseroles,' and then proceeded to organize the entire neighborhood into bringing that family dinner, in shifts, every single night, for an entire year. I do not know if my sister fully recognizes that this is grace."

Of course, that is precisely why John Wesley urged us to do all the good we can, by all the means we can, in all the ways we can, in all the places we can, at all the times we can, to all the people we can, for as long as ever we can.

So the first message of this passage is that our faith matters. But, as I say, there is a second message here as well. For if you read this passage carefully, you’ll notice that the scripture says “And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.” I think this statement drips with poignant irony: Jesus couldn’t do anything powerful—just heal the sick by touching them. Now, the last time I checked, healing by the laying on of hands qualified as pretty powerful stuff. But the scripture plainly suggests that there were greater events, greater deeds, greater miracles—that were just waiting to happen if only the people had believed.

This passage therefore does not just implore us to have faith; it tells us that if we have faith even greater things may happen than we could dare to imagine. It must be so. After all, we can’t know the mind of God. We can’t look over God’s shoulder and study the blueprints. We can’t even sneak a peek at God’s homework. So we can’t know the amazing places our faith will take us; we just have to believe, and act on our belief, and watch. Indeed, that is the very essence of faith.

I have some personal experience with this phenomenon of not being able to imagine what God has in store for you. A number of years ago I felt a strong, I would even say irresistible, call to preach some sermons. I came up with a plan: I would go back to school, to seminary, and prepare myself. I researched the issue and asked around and discovered that I could pursue part-time seminary work in Detroit, at a school named Ecumenical Theological Seminary, and in Chicago, at a school named Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. I signed up, I got started, I took some classes, and I said: “Thank you God, now I know what I’m supposed to do.”

Well, as we know, God always answers us—though not always right away—so a little time passed before I heard back. And, when God responded, what I heard was this: “Well, Len, you almost got it right. You are supposed to preach. And you are supposed to study theology to help you do so. But you’ll be studying at seminaries named Evan and Jordan. These are good boys who deserve a good home and I need you and Lisa to adopt them. And if you want to learn more about patience and innocence, truth and forgiveness, sacrifice and joy, strength and grace, responsibility and empathy, laughter and love, then that is where you need to study. If you want to know how weak you really are, and how much you really need God's presence in your life, then that is the school of choice. The curriculum will challenge you. And there are pop quizzes daily. But I’ll be there to help tutor you along the way.”

Oh, what an education it has already been; oh, the things I’ve already learned; oh, the theological class work that makes up our everyday life. One lesson I picked up in the last couple months relates directly to the subject I’ve been discussing and so I’ll mention it now. For present purposes, I’ll call it “the discipleship of flag football.”

Now, for those of you who don’t know, flag football is a non-tackle variation on the sport. I didn’t know much about it myself until Jordan (J.J. to his friends and family) took it up last month. It works like this: Kids wear belts with colorful flags hanging from them; the offense tries to advance the ball; the defense tries to pull the flag of the running back or receiver; general lunacy and havoc prevail. It’s enough to make you think that when God brought order out of chaos he missed a corner somewhere.

In a common local version of flag football each team must have eight players on the field at all times. So if only seven kids materialize on any given evening the coach has a problem. The coach needs that eighth kid. The coach needs that kid whether he or she is large or small, fast or slow. The coach needs that kid even if he or she can’t throw, catch or run. The coach needs that kid even if he or she couldn’t find something worth pulling in a flag factory. The coach needs that kid even if all he or she can do is stand on the field and get in the way of the other team—because, in flag football, that’s often what passes for defensive strategy. A flag football coach wants and needs many things. But, first and foremost, he wants and needs his kids to show up—each and every one of them.

God want us to show up, too. God wants us to show up even if we’re not the best or the brightest or the slickest or the strongest. God wants us to show up even in our weakness and imperfection and uncertainty. God wants us to show up even if we’re still trying to figure out which position we play—or, for that matter, which direction we need to move the ball. God wants us to show up with whatever we can muster so we can be put to work—with our compassion, our courage, and our casseroles. God wants us to show up because God has a use for us, all of us, every one of us. God wants us to show up so we can help God make that greater miracle happen.

A few months after Lisa read me the passage from Eat, Pray, Love I shared with her something from the book I was reading at the time. It’s called Chosen Soldier and it was written by a former Navy SEAL named Dick Couch. At one level, Chosen Solider is a book about how the Army selects, trains, and physically and mentally prepares Green Berets for the daunting work ahead of them. But, at another level, it is a book about sacrifice, about putting oneself on the line, and about showing up—big time. At one point midway through the book, an instructor tells his trainees what he calls the “four L’s” of showing up: don’t be late; don’t be light; don’t be lost; and don’t be last. Unfortunately, that’s how many of us show up for God when we finally get around to it. But, in an act of amazing grace, God takes us anyway. Just as the father took in the prodigal son—a young man who was about as late, light, lost, and last as you can get.

What really struck me about Chosen Soldier, though, is how it begins. That’s the part that made me turn to Lisa and say “Hey, listen to this.” The book begins by quoting the inscription on a dog tag that rested on the homeward-bound casket of an American special operations soldier killed in Afghanistan in July of 2005. The inscription perfectly describes the process of hearing the call, recognizing the voice, and answering without delay. The inscription perfectly describes the essence of faith and commitment and showing up. The inscription perfectly describes how many, perhaps most, of the greater miracles in life happen.

You may know the inscription. It comes from the sixth chapter of Isaiah. And it reads:

“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then I said, here I am. Send me.”

Amen.

The Prayer He Taught Us

Scripture: Matthew 6:5-15 (The Lord's Prayer)

This past week, our nation marked the seventh anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001. If you attend church regularly and pray occasionally then, by my estimation, it is likely that in the course of the seven-year period since that day you have recited the Lord’s Prayer approximately four-hundred times.

I use the word “recite” advisedly but deliberately. After all, anything we do with such frequency can become tired, rehearsed, and mechanical. A fresh look at these words may help us rediscover their incredible poetry and power. And a close reading of them may help us understand why these words have a place at the center of our worship, and should have a place at the center of our lives.

One striking aspect of our experience of the Lord’s Prayer is that we almost always read, hear, and say it out of context. We treat the prayer as if it stood in splendid isolation from everything that comes before and after it. As a result, we miss some important messages that the gospel seeks to convey. Those messages become clearer if we return the prayer to its context within the Gospel of Matthew.

Biblical scholars have observed that the Lord’s Prayer comes at the precise structural center of the Sermon on the Mount. They point out that the Sermon is divided into three parts: a series of pronouncements, a series of instructions, and a series of warnings. The Lord’s Prayer appears in the second of these parts—that is, right in the middle.

Furthermore, this second part is itself divided into three sections addressing three acts of righteousness: giving to charity, prayer, and fasting. Again, the Lord’s Prayer appears right in the middle.

The Lord’s Prayer is therefore at the center of the center of the Sermon. This structure unmistakably emphasizes the centrality of prayer, and particularly of the Lord’s Prayer, in the most expansive single collection of teachings that Jesus offers us.

This placement of the Lord’s Prayer conveys a more important, if also subtler, point as well. For the Lord’s Prayer is not just surrounded by other messages; it is surrounded by other messages that may seem to us qualitatively different from his message about prayer.

After all, the Sermon on the Mount is a theological exposition: it describes the fulfillment of prophecy; it calls us to a life that transcends even the expectations of the Ten Commandments; it declares the primacy of love in our relationship with God; it uses abstract language, paradox, and metaphor. Sitting in the middle of all this theological grandeur is a very specific instruction about how to pray.

The passage may therefore strike us as a digression, a minor detour that Jesus takes in the course of making larger points. In short, the Lord’s Prayer may seem to us out of place because we usually think of theology as one thing and of prayer as something else. The centrality of the Lord’s Prayer, however, invites us to think differently.

One New Testament scholar puts it this way: “Prayer is theology; theology is prayer. Prayer is a theological act, the fundamental theological act. What one prays for simultaneously shapes and expresses one’s theology. Matthew’s decision to place the Lord’s Prayer at the center of the instruction of the Sermon on the Mount dissolves the line between worship and theology.” (M. Eugene Boring, The New Interpreter’s Bible (1995), p. 206).

The great theologian Karl Barth was not known as a man of few words. But with respect to this issue he succinctly declared: “The first and basic act of theological work is prayer.” (Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology (1963), p. 160)

Matthew invites us to put prayer at the center of our worship, the center of our faith, the center of our being.

There is another striking aspect of our experience of the Lord’s Prayer: we have become very comfortable with a text that includes some very uncomfortable passages. The prayer calls upon us to wish for the fulfillment of God’s kingdom and God’s will right here and right now—a prospect some of us might wish to postpone until we’ve made a little more spiritual progress. The prayer requires us to focus on our simple needs for today rather than our eager ambitions for tomorrow. The prayer demands that we confront our unforgiving natures.

And then there’s that last, extremely troublesome passage: “And lead us not into temptation.” We say this over and over again but rarely pause to ask whether this corresponds to our understanding of who God is and what God does. Do we really believe in a God who would try to tempt us? Does God lead us into temptation? Isn't that someone else's job description?

The meaning of this phrase has been hotly debated, but only for about two thousand years. As one scholar notes, “From the earliest times the church has been bothered by the apparent threat that God could lead Jesus’ disciples into temptation, and had to be supplicated not to do so.” (Boring, p. 205)

Indeed, this part of the Lord’s Prayer worried some translators so much that they simply re-wrote it. Thus, one early Latin text conveniently re-phrased the prayer to read “ne patiaris nos induce in temptationem,” which means “do not permit us to be lead into temptation.” This certainly sounds better. The only problem is that Jesus didn’t say it.

In my view, the most persuasive interpretation of what Jesus did say goes something like this: “God calls us to follow. But, when we follow God, we may end up in some trying and difficult places, places that will test us and tempt us. We pray that, wherever God leads us, God will also give us the strength to resist the temptations we find there.” This is, of course, only one interpretation and you may read the text differently. For present purposes, though, the point is not what you think about it; the point is simply that you think about it.

Of course, there are reasons we don’t spend much time thinking about the Lord’s Prayer—I’ve already mentioned the familiarity of the text and our frequent repetition of it. There is an additional reason as well. In this passage, Jesus tells us precisely what to say. We dutifully memorize the words—these are, after all, the praying instructions of the Son of God, so we can hardly be blamed for wanting to learn them. But, paradoxically, that memorization leads to a kind of forgetfulness. We remember the words. But we forget the point. We say it. But we forget to pray it.

Now, Jesus knew a great deal about ritual. He didn’t think much of it—of doing religion by rote. Indeed, throughout the gospels he argues with the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the leaders of the Temple precisely because they elevate ritual over things that matter more—things like compassion, forgiveness, humility, and love. It therefore seems remarkable that Jesus would offer us something as easily memorized, as specifically expressed, and as essentially ritualistic as the Lord’s Prayer.

It is so unlike Jesus. Throughout the gospels, he speaks to us in parables and paradoxes. His language is rich with similes and stories and scriptural allusions. And yet, here, he offers very specific and explicit instructions—perhaps the most specific and explicit instructions Jesus gives us about how to do anything. Indeed, maybe you have occasionally wished for this sort of clarity on a few other issues as well. I know I have.

How can we explain this? Why did Jesus do it?

On its face, the text suggests that Jesus did this in order to move his followers away from the practice of engaging in elaborate, self-aggrandizing, public prayers that glorified the speaker rather than God. Providing a brief and specific prayer like this would certainly help accomplish that goal. But I don’t think that entirely explains what’s going on here. After all, in this part of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus also calls his followers away from demonstrative public alms-giving and fasting—but he doesn’t provide this sort of specific instruction about how to do those things.

So I invite you to consider an additional possibility. Jesus provided this sort of specific instruction because he understood what we do when we truly, deeply, sincerely pray. Jesus understood that real prayer is a mysterious process that transcends words, and for which words are not really even necessary. That is why Jesus prefaces his prayer by reminding us that God “knows what [we] need before [we] even ask.”

Jesus understood that real prayer is not about our words; it is about our heart; and it is about opening our heart to God. Jesus understood that real prayer is not about what we say; it is about our faith; and it is about how we put that faith into action. In this passage Jesus tells us how to pray, specifically. But, throughout the Gospels, Jesus tells us how to pray, generally. He invites us to make our lives into a prayer. In a sense, that is the prayer Jesus taught us.

But Jesus also understood human nature. He understood that we have times of sorrow and sadness, worry and weakness, anguish and anxiety. He understood that in the course of our lives we all spend some sleepless hours in the dark nights of the soul. He understood the importance of having somewhere to go when we feel lost—somewhere familiar; somewhere centering; somewhere that brings us back to what is essential; somewhere that brings us back to God; somewhere that brings us back home.

And that is the genius of the Lord’s Prayer. It distils our faith into a few easily memorized verses. As a result, on many occasions—no doubt, too many occasions—we will recite it absently, flatly, dispassionately. But on other occasions—often the most important occasions of our lives and of our faith—we will pray it eagerly, fervently, intensely. We will leave our wanderings. We will go home.

There is something that I cannot know, but that I can nevertheless say with confidence. I can say with confidence that on September 11 and in the days that followed many, many people went home to the Lord’s Prayer. I can say with confidence that this weekend—as terrible storms have borne down on the Gulf coast—many, many people have gone home to the Lord’s Prayer again. I can say with confidence that every minute of every day someone, someone who has nowhere else to go, goes home to prayer that Jesus taught us.

Today, and tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after that, we will go out into the world called to the great adventure of living a life of faith. In our wanderings, we will meet triumph and disaster, happiness and grief, joy and despair; we will meet the unanticipated and the unimaginable; we will meet the magnificent and the mundane; we will meet our dear friend life and that old villain death.

Sometimes, in those wanderings, we will get lost.

But we can always return to the prayer that Jesus taught us.

We can always, always go home again.

Amen.

Christmas Without Ornaments: A Summer Christmas Sermon

Scripture: Matthew Chapter 2

A couple of weeks ago, our family went for our annual vacation in the Adirondack Mountains. On our drive there we passed by a little town called North Pole, New York. North Pole is one of those novelty villages that dot the American landscape, and it will not surprise you to learn that its central feature is a sprawling tourist attraction called “Santa’s Workshop.”

We could not tell whether Santa’s Workshop was accepting visitors—the parking lot harbored a lone station wagon—but it didn’t matter. It was a warm July day, the mountains beckoned, and we were more enthused about encountering a brook trout or a blueberry patch than an elf or a reindeer. So we slowed down slightly but didn’t stop.

Occasionally, Christmas comes to us this way. We turn a corner and find ourselves hard upon it, unprepared, our head in other places. We do what we must to survive the holiday without alienating any family or losing any friends. We get the last scrawny tree on the lot. We try to get to church and honor a tradition or two. And then we move on. We slow down slightly but we don’t stop.

These days, though, it often seems as if we spend the entire final quarter of the year preparing for Christmas. It has become a cliché to remark on the fact that popular culture has commercialized the holiday, and I don't intend to re-tread that well-worn path. But I do think it worth noting that the same economic forces that drive the commercialization of Christmas also push the season of its celebration earlier and earlier.

The assault begins months ahead of time, not in the “bleak midwinter” but while we’re still raking up leaves. We are inundated with preseason sales of decorations, advertisements for gifts, piles of junk mail and catalogs urging us to get our shopping done before the rush, magazine articles giving us a head start so we can finally achieve the perfect Norman Rockwell holiday we’ve always dreamed of and stop sending relatives home hungry and angry, and so on and so on.

At some point in the fall of last year I discovered that a radio channel I periodically visited had converted to a program made up entirely of Christmas music, twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. Now, I like Christmas music as much as the next guy. But that’s an awful lot of snowmen, sleigh bells, and singing chipmunks.

Of course, the church does what it can to compensate for this onslaught and to keep us focused on the religious significance of the holiday. Still, this too involves a great deal of preparing for Christmas. We decorate the church. We have children’s pageants and hold special concerts. We organize efforts to buy Christmas gifts for those less fortunate than we are. We even make a ritual of our preparations through the celebration of Advent.

All this secular and sacred preparing means that we no longer celebrate Christmas. We marinate in it. We sit in a simmering pot of Christmas cheer for months and months. And, as a result, by time the holiday arrives we are thoroughly saturated with messages of sweetness and cuteness, little drummer boys and silent nights, joy to the world and sleeping in heavenly peace. It is in this state of mind that we typically hear the story of the nativity.

That is one of the advantages of honoring Christmas in the summer. It allows us to turn to that story unprepared. It gives us a chance to encounter that event—that world changing event—on its own terms, without distractions, without packaging, without promotion. It compels us to celebrate Christmas without ornaments.

And what a story it is. It is set in Judea, which we might think of as occupied territory under Roman control. In 40 B.C., the Roman Senate appointed Herod the Great as King of Judea. The Senate chose Herod because of his demonstrated ability in military and political confrontations.

Indeed, a remarkable fact tells us a great deal about Herod and about Rome’s confidence in him: at the time of his appointment, the throne of Judea was occupied by one Antigonus II, installed there by the Parthians, an Iranian people who had successfully stopped Roman expansion in the past. Thus, in order to accept his assignment, Herod had to march on Jerusalem, defeat the Parthian forces, and unseat and execute Antigonus. So, he did. And then he went on to prove himself as ruthless in guarding the throne as he had been in acquiring it.

We therefore have to wince when we read these words: “In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star at its rising, and have come to pay him homage.’” In fact, these words should make us wince three times. It is the wrong question—a question threatening the existing order—delivered to the wrong man—a paranoid king with the power of the Roman Empire behind him—by the wrong men—magi who came from the East, perhaps even from the Parthian Empire. Matthew tells us that this encounter frightened Herod, and he adds that it frightened “all Jerusalem with him.” We can understand why: a terrified despot is a terrifying prospect.

No stranger to war, Herod knew precisely how to begin—by gathering information about the enemy. So he called together “all the chief priests and scribes of the people” and demanded to know where the child would be born. He summoned the wise men and asked “the exact time when the star had appeared.” Then he tried to make the magi into his unwitting accomplices in murder: “[W]hen you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.” This is how Herod the Great prepared for Christmas.

Think of it. The most powerful military and political force on the planet was mobilized to find and kill an obscure Jewish infant. Herod would stop at nothing to accomplish his mission—even if it meant treating countless other children as collateral damage. And, tragically, it did.

So when Herod discovered that the wise men had betrayed him “he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under.” Imagine the shock, the anguish, the inconsolable despair wrought by this slaughter; imagine a land littered with the corpses of infants and toddlers; imagine the horror of it all—if you can bring yourself to do so. It is a gruesome vision perpetrated by the worst impulses of humankind and unadulterated evil: greed, wrath, hatred, the lust for power, the willingness to sacrifice the innocent.

Well, if hell mobilized, then so did heaven. A dream prevented the magi from returning to Herod and disclosing the whereabouts of the child. And an angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and told him to take his family and to run for their lives.

At Christmastime we often read this angel’s words with a tone reminiscent of a warm and fuzzy suggestion from a concerned uncle. I even remember a film version of the nativity where the angel delivers these lines like a friendly ghost in no particular hurry: "Jooooo-seph. Awaaake. Taaake the chiiiiild. Gooo to Eeeeegypt." Sorry, but I don't think so.

Lovely, gentle renditions like this miss the unmistakable urgency of the message. That urgency is harder to overlook if we remember what Herod was doing and if we remember that Joseph was sound asleep when these words descended upon him: “GET UP! Take the child and his mother and FLEE to Egypt! STAY THERE! STAY THERE UNTIL I TELL YOU! Herod is looking for the child in order to KILL HIM!” I almost imagine the angel with hands on hips, hollering like a divine drill sergeant.

Actually, the scripture tells us that these words came to Joseph not as reassuring guidance but as a startling revelation. It does so indirectly. It does so by beginning the next verse with this pointed observation: “Joseph got up!”

Those mobilized angels came to Joseph again. They guided him back to Israel. They ushered him into Nazareth. A prophecy was fulfilled. A savior was saved.

The story of how this happened is hard and frightening. It is not comfortable bedtime reading. Good things happen to bad people: Herod gains a throne and holds it until his death. Bad things happen to good people: innocent children are murdered; families are devastated; and one very special family is hounded from one desperate place to another. This Christmas—the Christmas without ornaments—is not for the faint of heart.

By time my mother reached her eighties she had endured more than her share of suffering. One day, to brighten her spirits, she went to a hair salon at a fancy department store as a minor indulgence. As she left the salon, feeling very stylish, a young woman behind the cosmetics counter called out to her “Well, don’t you look cute!”

My mother stopped in her tracks, turned, and marched over. “Young lady,” she responded. “I am more than eighty years old. I have lived through three wars, one of which killed my first husband. I have buried three men who I loved. I have survived financial ruin, a heart condition, skin cancer, breast cancer, the loss of a kidney, and blindness in one eye. I am many things. But I am not cute.”

Christmas is many things. But it is not cute. Celebrating it during the summer may help us remember what Christmas isn’t, and what it is.

It is the time when we remember the coming of Jesus Christ into our world—our world. Not a world filled with sweetness and light and talking snowmen and red-nosed reindeer, but the real world. A world filled with pain and suffering, greed and indifference, hatred and prejudice, war and violence, despair and death, horror and terror; a world that needs saving; a world that can be saved—through the grace and power of Love Itself. That is, indeed, the only thing that has any chance of saving it at all.

That is what Christmas is. It is Good News, the Ultimate Good News, the Best News Ever. It is, as the angel says to the shepherds, “good news of great joy.” It is sacred and saving news brought to a sad and sinking world. It is irresistible light, even in the presence of overwhelming darkness.

Have we ever needed it more?

Amen.

Of Grace and Patriotism

For most American, patriotism comes cheap.

This occurred to me recently while reading the work of the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoffer – a Lutheran pastor who had time and occasion to think deeply while detained in the Nazi prison where he died.

In a book called The Cost of Discipleship Bonhoffer criticized what he called “cheap grace.”

Through grace, Bonhoffer wrote, God grants forgiveness. We cannot hope to earn it. It comes to us free.

But this carries with the risk that we will receive the gift without behaving like truly grateful people, that we will receive forgiveness without offering back our repentance, that in the process of being forgiven we will forgive ourselves of any obligation to live differently.

In Bonhoffer’s words, “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow upon ourselves.”

Perhaps the same holds true with patriotism.

We accept our country’s bounty and opportunities – in Robert Frost’s memorable phrase, we take “the gift outright.” We say the proper things, we honor the symbols of our country’s ideals, and we embrace the attendant rituals. We do this every Fourth of July, and this one will surely be no different, particularly with our country at war.

But we can be a superficial and ungrateful lot. Do we take time on holidays like the Fourth of July to think about the priceless nature of this country’s freedoms and the rights we enjoy? Do we pause between the picnics and the softball games to ask ourselves whether our declared patriotism – our purported love of country – really costs us anything?

In 1783, George Washington found himself with a mutiny on his hands. Congress had never come up with a plan for paying the revolutionary soldiers the wages they had earned, and the troops had run out of patience. In an effort to calm them, Washington agreed to speak with their officer corps.

Washington could give powerful and inspiring speeches, but on this occasion his speaking ability did not count for much. The officers gave him a very chilly reception. In the tension of the moment, Washington stumbled over his text, paused, and famously said: “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” History tells us that Washington’s officers began to weep out of respect for his sacrifice.

Of course, we don’t have to think back two centuries to find examples of costly patriotism. In wartime we count those costs dearly and daily. We count those costs in lost limbs, lost lives, lost fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters. Whatever our other political differences, surely we can agree that those who have made such sacrifices for love of country have earned the name of “patriot.”

I love my country, even with all of its shortcomings. I respect and honor the Constitution, even with all of its imperfections and ambiguities. But I also recognize that my patriotism has come cheaply, while others have earned it by paying the greatest cost imaginable.

Costly grace, Bonhoffer tells us, “is the treasure hidden in the field; for the sake of it, a person will go and sell all they have.” A person who would do honor to grace must be willing to give their life to it, and for it. Perhaps the same holds true for those who would do honor to their country.

This Fourth of July signals an occasion for celebration.

Perhaps it also signals an occasion for reflection, and an opportunity for each of us to ask whether we have given back enough to a country that has given us so much.

At the Loom

Scripture: Genesis 1:1-5

Saturday was project day at our house on the lake. My father wanted to make sure I knew certain basic things—how to swing a hammer, how to make a straight cut with a handsaw, how to countersink a wood screw—and I wanted to learn them badly. In retrospect, badly is precisely how I did learn some of them. But the intentions were good, and so after a big breakfast of bacon and eggs he would lead me into the dark garage to pick out the tools and materials we needed for our various tasks.

As we walked into the garage, my father—who never tired of making the identical wisecrack over and over again—always started the same way: he’d flip the switch and in a deep sonorous voice declare “Let there be light.” Much later in life I would recognize that this was just one of the ways in which God made my father in His image. For, as the opening lines of Genesis tell us, God too turned on the light so He could get to work.

It is impossible to overstate the power of this idea. Think of it. Profound darkness—“darkness visible,” to use John Milton’s memorable phrase—covers everything. And then this vast and impenetrable blackness dissolves—or, maybe more accurately, blows apart—as a result of a single radical exercise of divine will. God creates light and, in the same gesture, creates language, the Word, the ineffable spoken Truth that God brings light to life so that God might bring light into life.

These are the first words God speaks to us: “Let there be light.” And I note in passing that if you wanted to adopt a creed to live by you could do a great deal worse than these four words. In the dark recesses of the world, let there be light. In the dark corners of our souls, let there be light. We might say such a blessing over a newborn: everywhere you go, in everything you do, let there be light.

We hear echoes of this imagery in the opening chapter of the Gospel of John. “In the beginning,” John tells us, “was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Indeed, Jesus tells us to let our own light shine before others so they might see our good works and glorify the Lord.

The idea of “sudden light,” which we encounter in both the Old and New Testaments, shapes our thinking in two distinct ways. It describes an external reality—a sudden and defining instant when “the light comes on” and darkness no longer prevails around us. And it describes an internal reality—a state of mind and spirit where light fills our souls and darkness no longer prevails within us.

Eastern philosophy describes this internal reality with the appropriately luminescent word “enlightenment.” In the stories of these traditions, enlightenment typically comes suddenly, sometimes humorously. One of my favorites comes from a Zen tale. In the story, a Zen master commands his pupil to meditate in order to gain enlightenment. The student labors at this with no success, repeatedly returning to the master to complain about his lack of progress. Finally, the master gives him this ultimatum: “Meditate for three days longer, then if you fail to attain enlightenment, you had better kill yourself.” “On the second day,” the story concludes, “the pupil was enlightened.”

Of course, our own Christian tradition recognizes the phenomenon of sudden enlightenment as well. Indeed, one of the leaders of our faith was abruptly enlightened both figuratively and literally. “Now, as [Saul] was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. And he fell to the ground. And he heard a voice.”

As I say, this idea of “sudden light” shapes our understanding of fundamental external and internal realities. But this carries with it a risk. For it may lure us into thinking of God’s creative activity as primary rather than continuous. And it may seduce us into viewing our commitment to God as an instantaneous change rather than as an organic process of growth.

In recent years, many people have focused on God’s initial creative activity. So we’ve heard a great deal of talk about “intelligent design” and “creationism,” much of which has labored in one way or another to discredit the Darwinian theories of evolution and natural selection. I respect the passion and zeal of those who worry after this issue. I confess, though, that I’ve always been a little puzzled by the amount of attention the issue has received.

It has always seemed to me that the Bible and biology set out to address different sorts of questions. It is therefore unsurprising they would offer different sorts of answers. If my question is “How am I to live? What should I do with my life? How can my life have meaning?” then science may suggest some partial responses, but it cannot offer anything like a comprehensive answer.

I do not turn to science for such answers, even though I am a devoted disciple of the utility of science, anymore than I turn to my car owner’s manual for such answers, even though it's pretty useful, too. I do not turn to Isaac Newton and to the Isaac of the Bible for understanding of the same sorts of things. You've probably heard the story of the scientists who struggle to the top of the mountain of truth, only to discover the theologians there waiting for them.

I invite you to think about it this way. Let’s assume for purposes of discussion that evolution is an established scientific fact—I recognize that opponents resist this idea, but let’s assume it to be the case. Now, what follows from that assumption? Well, I can tell you what doesn’t follow. What doesn’t follow is that evolution therefore offers a comprehensive explanation of reality—external or internal. Indeed, quite plainly it does not. Neither, for that matter, does gravity—something we all accept as a scientific fact even though it conflicts with numerous biblical texts.

Those who have tried to make evolution into a comprehensive explanation of reality have been pretty convincingly rebutted. In his wonderful book Being Good, the Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn offers several arguments against those who have attempted to convert evolution into what he calls a “Grand Unifying Skepticism.” Along the way, Blackburn points out that evolution actually fails to explain many things, including such questions as why we are fond of the songs of birds, or why we like the taste of cinnamon, or why we have ticklish feet.

I respect the fact that people of good will can and do disagree about conflicts between faith and science. And I do not know where you stand on these matters. But I personally do not find my faith in God threatened by a theory of human development and behavior that cannot even explain why I like mustard and relish on my cheeseburgers. Partial explanations are just that: partial.

More importantly, though, all this focus on God’s initial acts of creation can distract us from God’s ongoing acts of creation. It shifts our attention toward God as a “prime mover,” to use Aristotle’s image, and away from God as a continuing creative force in the world and in our lives.

Denise Levertov beautifully and brilliantly captures this contrast in her poem The Task. She begins the poem by entertaining the image of God as an old man sitting upstairs snoring—and she rejects it. She describes God as being in “the wilderness next door … busy at the loom.” God is hard at work, she writes, indeed “absorbed in work, and hears the spacious hum of bees, not the din, and hears far off our screams … And hurries on with the weaving.”

God is at the loom, in the woods right next to us, listening to us. God is at the loom, laboring to transform our beseeching cries into music. God is at the loom, the light on, working busily, weaving a “complex creation” that is, as Archbishop Rowan Williams puts it, “coherent and fragile.”

I don’t pretend to know much about how to live. But I think that, when we get life right, we are at the loom as well, working beside God, with God, for God.

For most of us, perhaps all of us, enlightenment comes not at a point in time but through a process over time. We see this even in the dramatic conversion of Saul. A sudden flash of light knocks him to the ground and a divine voice interrogates him. And yet, years later, the same man—called Paul, now, to mark his defining change—must nevertheless ask himself why he does over and over again the things he most wants not to do.

Our struggles at the loom, like Paul’s, prove a source of frustration, confusion, and disappointment. Those struggles keep us humble as our light brightens and fades. At least that’s how it works for me. And that explains why, someday, I’m going to print up a bumper sticker that reads: “Unfortunately, my enlightenment seems to work on a dimmer switch.”

The stories from Eastern traditions I described earlier tend to have a common theme. The student seeks enlightenment but cannot find it. The master gives the student a koan—a sort of puzzle or riddle, like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”—that forces the student into deep contemplation. Ultimately, however, the student discovers that enlightenment does not reside in complex theories or abstract intellectual concepts but rather in simple, basic, truths.

We might think of the opening verses of Genesis as a divine koan given to us by the true and final Master. After all, it has preoccupied an immense amount of intellectual energy over the years. And it is rich in puzzles: Where did God come from? Did time and space exist before God? If so, how did time and space come into being? If not, where did God exist and how could God engage in a creative process—which seems to presume the existence of time? How long were the days God created? Can we reconcile the creation story in Genesis with our current scientific understanding?

These questions are fun to debate and interesting to consider. But, as with all good koans, perhaps the point of the story is to learn to put aside the complexities and see the simple, basic truths the story conveys. We might summarize them in these three straightforward instructions, which may just be the secret to living faithfully and well:

Turn on the light.

Go to the loom.

Make something beautiful.

This Way Up

About ten years ago I started climbing mountains. Not serious, scary, life-threatening mountains like Everest or Kilimanjaro, but smaller mountains in the Eastern and Pacific Northwestern regions of this continent.

I have occasionally toyed with the idea of doing more ambitious climbing, but three obstacles always come to mind: (1) a set of lungs weakened by childhood asthma; (2) a compromised inner ear that results in periodic bouts of vertigo; and (3) a wife who would respond to such an idea by handcuffing me to the water heater. Still, I have no complaints because I have found more than enough challenge in the little hills I have tackled.

I started climbing because there is a strong and longstanding association between the tops of mountains and spiritual revelation. Abraham offered to sacrifice Isaac on top of a mountain. That’s where God appeared to Moses in the flame of a burning bush, sealed the covenant with Israel, and spoke the Ten Commandments. Jesus gave us the centerpiece of his teachings, including the Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer, on top of a mountain.

A quick review of a concordance shows about five-hundred references to mountains in the Bible. In a typical Bible, that averages about one reference every two pages. And the symbolism of high peaks figures prominently in other faiths, including the Buddhist and Native American religions.

So I went to the mountains in search of enlightenment. I think I got some. And I’m willing to share it and save you some scraped shins, blistered hands, and sore knees.

One of my moments of enlightenment came a few years ago when I hiked up a mountain in the Northeast. I prepared carefully. I joined the Appalachian Mountain Club and purchased several of their excellent guidebooks.

I bought a fancy new backpack, high-tech hiking clothing, and indestructible boots suitable for strolling on the moon. These days all this stuff comes in colors normally reserved for comic books, so I looked sort of like a plastic middle-aged action figure, Captain America on ibuprofen.

I drove to the park and stopped at the check-in booth. A young man in a ranger uniform looked through the car window at all my equipment, smiled admiringly, took my money, and waved me on.

I leaned out the window and told him I had never climbed this mountain before and asked if he had any recommendations. He thought for a moment and then said, “Yeah, you’ll want to follow the ‘red dot’ trail.” I thanked him, pulled into the parking lot, found the trailhead, and began to climb.

The “red dot trail” did not seem like anything I had read about in any of the books. As far I could tell it went straight up the mountain. I spent a lot of time on all fours, crawling over boulders, pulling myself up to get footholds, and walking at angles so severe they made my calves ache. Finally, after hours of very hard climbing, I neared the summit.

The last hundred feet or so seemed impossibly steep, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally lifted myself up over the topmost ledge. And there, there before me, there at the apex of the mountain, there at the limit of my endurance … was the moon-shaped face of a six-year-old child.

The boy was on his knees, looking over the edge of the mountain to see the source of the racket coming up the side. He made a gleeful noise, jumped to his feet, and then scooted off to rejoin his little brother and sister, who were also running around the top of the mountain, laughing and playing, as their mother and father watched a few feet away.

It didn’t take me long to figure out what had happened. The nice young ranger, seeing my expensive equipment and assuming a corresponding level of expertise, thought I would get the greatest pleasure from the toughest trail. So he dutifully sent me up the “red dot trail,” which I later learned to be the hardest route by far. In contrast, he pointed the family with little children to the “red triangle trail,” a nice, gradual, lazy series of switchbacks that meandered effortlessly to the summit.

Now, as I say, this experience brought me a flash of enlightenment, and here it is: always, always ask if there’s an easy trail up the mountain.

Of course, when it comes to spirituality there are no easy paths. All the trails are “red dot” trails. They all lead through rough terrain. They all have places where we stumble, slide backward, wander off the path, or get lost. In spiritual matters we travel the path with compasses we can’t always read and maps we don’t always understand—and, sometimes, we pick the wrong trailhead and make the hike up a lot harder on ourselves than it has to be.

To me, our youth is a lot like the foothills of the mountain, when we start the ascent. We have energy and excitement to burn. We wonder about the trail ahead, where it will lead, what we will find, and what the mountain holds for us.

But the foothills remind me of our youth, and particularly of our adolescence, for another reason—a darker one, if you will. It is usually in its foothills that a mountain seems most shadowy, most confusing, most disorienting, and, in its own way, most frightening. The bears and the mountain lions, they say, all live below the tree line.

Let me put this in perspective. If you celebrated your eighteenth birthday this year, here is what life has shown you: You were born in 1990, the year of the first multinational war of the post-Cold War era, the defensive Operation Desert Shield that became the offensive Operation Desert Storm. When you were one year old Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested and charged with unimaginable crimes. When you were two years old the bloodiest European conflict since World War II began when Serbia initiated its “ethnic cleansing” campaign in Bosnia. When you were three years old the World Trade Center was attacked—for the first time. When you were four years old the massacre in Rwanda began. And so on and so on, through the attacks of 9/11, the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a renewed sense of nuclear threat from North Korea, Iran, and the occasional itinerant terrorist.

Imagine yourself as a young person in our society, trying to find your way through that forest to higher, clearer, sunnier ground.

And yet today—as throughout history—the young people of our society find the faith and courage to do amazing things. By way of example, the church I attend has in its membership dozens of young people who devote countless hours to volunteer work. They travel to Appalachia to help with building projects. They send needed items to victims of natural disasters. They participate in a thirty-hour fast to raise money to fight famine. They collect food and clothing and Christmas presents for those in need. In myriad ways they serve the least in the kingdom. And that, Jesus tells us, is the path through the forest.

Of course, Jesus was once a young person, too, and the Gospel of Luke tells us a marvelous story about that time in his life. Every year Joseph and Mary traveled to Jerusalem for Passover. When Jesus was twelve years old, they traveled to Jerusalem together, celebrated Passover, and then set out to return to Nazareth. After a day on the road Joseph and Mary looked for Jesus but could not find him, so they turned around and headed back to Jerusalem. For three days they looked all over the city without success. Then, at last, they discovered him in the Temple, “sitting in the midst of the teachers, both listening to them and asking questions. And all who heard Him were astonished at His understanding and his answers.”

The Bible includes many remarkable stories, some so remarkable that they don’t fit very well within our human frame of reference. But this story fits perfectly. Isn’t it just like a twelve-year-old to worry his parents? Isn’t it just like parents to struggle with understanding their twelve-year-old?

I think this story seems so true to our experience, too, because of what it says about Jesus’s own spiritual journey. He stood on the threshold of young adulthood. His parents could no longer simply carry and pull him along as they could when he was a child. The time had come for him to begin to find his own legs, his own way, his own path. And Jesus chose to start his journey at the Temple.

A time of beginning came for Jesus, just as it comes for all of us. Most of us begin our spiritual journeys from home and take something of our home along with us. In the same way, Jesus began his spiritual journey at home, in the Temple, in—as he said—his “father’s house.”

This story also tells us something about our next stop up the mountain, that middle phase of life, and it does so by describing the actions of Joseph and Mary. I think that the gospel give us a delightful little clue here. It starts the story by noting that Joseph and Mary “went to Jerusalem every year at the Feast of Passover.”

Now, why would the story tell us this? Surely, it doesn’t do so in order to convey that Joseph and Mary were people of faith—the text offers much more compelling evidence for that than attendance at a religious ceremony. So, why this detail?

I think that perhaps the story tells us this in order to suggest that Joseph and Mary had fallen into a pattern; that they followed the same course year in and year out; that they had done what so many of us do during the middle phase of life: do this year what we did last year, and next year what we did this year. Joseph and Mary had a plan, a method for managing the complex project of moving all of the family and relatives from Nazareth to Jerusalem and back again. The plan worked pretty well, had the virtue of predictability, and absorbed their attention.

But while they were focused on the minutiae of the journey, while they were following their reliable agenda, they forgot a little something: they left Jesus behind. As do many of us in the middle stages of life.

Again, the trip up the mountain tells us a lot about this. Midway up we start to get tired. The thrill of the climb wears off. Our beginning seems far behind us, and our final destination far ahead of us. Sometimes we wonder about the path we’re on, but mostly we just keep moving forward because every other possibility seems too hard. For many, it becomes a passionless time, a time for putting one foot in front of the other, a time of trudging.

For many of us the middle part of the mountain poses great risks. We stop cutting a bold path and start following an easy one. We keep going in the same direction even if it’s wrong. We stare at our feet and we miss the view. We forget all the promises we made to ourselves back in base camp. Our dreams become small, and we become small with them.

The Masters of Zen Buddhism understood this phenomenon. They understood how easily we become dull and detached, how easily we become deluded and diluted. And so their writings call us to wake up, to live in a full and focused way, to watch so keenly that nothing escapes our notice, to listen so closely that we might hear the sun set and the moon rise. “You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself to each day,” the Zen Master told his student, “so that you live as though a fire were raging in your hair.”

Jesus calls us to rage—to rage with purpose. To rage for peace; to rage for justice; to rage for the downtrodden and the defenseless; to rage for an end to poverty; to rage for an end to prejudice; to rage for those in harm’s way when disaster strikes; to rage for love.

Midway up the mountain we have serious climbing at hand. Those who climb hard will face obstacles; but they will also find angels at their heels; and angels will bear them up.

And this brings us near the top of the mountain, our later years in life. We have some pretty clear instructions that apply to this part of the mountain.

The first is this: Do not forget that you are still in God’s service. God’s call does not include a retirement plan. Your employer might think of you as retired. Your employer might think of you as retired; the government might think of you as retired; the spouse you annoy on a daily basis might think of you as retired. But God does not retire anyone from any of the most important work we do in life: the work of forgiveness; the work of compassion; the work of building community; the work of sharing joy; the work of easing grief; the work of playing and praying and praising.

You see, in God’s eyes, our job description remains unchanged regardless of our age. And, in God’s hands, we find the strength to do that job—no matter how far up the mountain we have climbed.

The second instruction in the later stage of the climb is this: Watch out—God may still surprise you. Some of us, nearing the top of the mountain, think we have seen it all and that life can hold nothing new. I wonder if anything we think gives God greater reason to laugh at us.

Indeed, the Bible is full of stories of God’s surprises—including many visited upon people rather late in life. When Sarah concluded she was too old to bear a son God surprised her with Isaac. When Elizabeth faced the same disappointment God surprised her with John. When Noah’s children were grown and married God surprised him with a very ambitious project. It was probably later in life that Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea encountered one of God’s greatest surprises to the world—a carpenter from Nazareth named Jesus.

I know a little about late-in-life surprises. In her mid-eighties my mother relocated to a lovely retirement community in St. Joseph, Michigan. She’d had a rocky life. Her first husband died in the Second World War. Her second husband (my father) died in his sixties of a heart attack. She fell in love again, and that good man passed away as well. Throughout all of this she battled cancer, chronic heart problems, and a severe loss of vision in one eye. I’m sure there were many dark nights when she thought she was done with life, and wished life done with her.

But God had some surprises in store for my mother. She found a new community of friends. She did some creative writing, and rediscovered her joy of music. And she met Ed.

Then my mother did some surprising of her own—she and Ed eloped, got married, and moved in together. In the late days of winter, God surprised my mother with the bright sun of summer.

And this brings me to our last instruction about these later days. There is a story about Picasso that I think expresses it perfectly. In an interview near the end of his life someone asked Picasso why his early paintings were so formal, geometric, and studied, while his later paintings were so free, unstructured, and spontaneous. “Well,” Picasso replied, “it takes a long time to become young.”

It takes a long time to become young, indeed. Because it is only in wisdom that we rediscover the virtues of being open, innocent, accepting, non-judgmental, quick to laugh, eager to play, sensitive to suffering, and attentive to the soft still voice that comes to us at night and belongs to the Holy Parent who loves us all. Oh, how Jesus understood this. “Let the little children come to Me and do not forbid them,” he said, “for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 19:14)

And so, it turns out, my experience on that mountain in the Northeast provided a worthwhile flash of enlightenment after all. For, at the end of all our climbing, all our seeking, all our wandering and wondering, at the top of the mountain, at the limit of our quest—we find the moon-shaped face of a child. Staring back at us. Smiling. Laughing at how seriously we have taken ourselves. Puzzled at how long it has taken us to arrive. Inviting us to lift ourselves up over the top, join hands, sing loudly, and dance in a crazy and gleeful circle as if we were children loved beyond all describing.

Because we are.

And because of such indeed is the kingdom of heaven.

Amen.