Day 14 - Why did Jesus come to earth?

(Micah 5:1-5, Luke 1:39-56)  (Sermon at Northside Presbyterian Church, Dec 23, 2012)

Advent, the season of waiting is almost over. There are two shopping days left until Christmas and I haven’t even finished shopping because I can’t figure out what to get for someone who has everything. Friday I was driving around in all the heavy traffic trying to fix that frustration and making my wife Terry crazy honking my horn (not a toot but a long blaring honk) at some other driver who had pulled in front of me probably preoccupied with the same problem I have.

Thinking about it later, that incident made me realize I had received a blessing that morning from someone’s misfortune. Rev. Ben called me to ask me to preach on short notice because he is sick with the flu. Reading the lectionary the idea occurred that this sermon ought to ask the question, “Why did Jesus come to earth?” Our readings over the next six weeks explore the answer to this question and our passages today give us a snapshot of the answer.

Allow me ask you another question first. How often and how well do you read your Bible? Few of us do read it well, but the Jewish people know their scripture well. They or their leaders read to them every Sabbath from that account of their living heritage and covenant with God. They heard and memorized it; even those who failed to live it.

Jesus achieved power over the Hebrew religious leaders and alienated them by the way he quoted that Scripture to illumine their hypocrisy. When Jesus talked about the poor and aliens he recalled the rich heritage of Abraham, Jacob, the flight from Egypt, the Pharaoh, the wandering in the wilderness to the Promised Land, the commandments, and the blessings and curses for adhering or not to the covenant between God and Israel and the captivity. Jesus amazed those who hoped for the future in humility and angered the proud with words called from Micah and Isaiah.

We should know our scriptures well enough that today’s passages in Micah and Luke connect the deep memories of our religious heritage to our living presence. Those connections ought to come as naturally to us long-time residents of Chattanooga as a reference to Forest Ave, or Lookout Mountain or Missionary Ridge immediately recalls the agony of the War Between the States.

When you hear the Lord speaking through Micah, “²But you, O Bethlehem (of Ephrathah), who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days,” I hope your first thought is, “This is a portent of the coming of Christ!” If that is the case perhaps a closer look at what was going on in Micah’s world may reveal a clue to the answer to my question, “Why did Jesus come to earth?”

Micah lived in the Southern Kingdom of Judah during a time of turmoil and great uncertainty. Previously, Amos and Hosea had assailed the Northern Kingdom of Israel for its flagrant violation of their covenant with God. Wealth was highly concentrated into a very small number of Israelites who owned virtually all the land and abused their neighbors who were the abjectly poor Hebrews and aliens that worked the farms to increase the owners’ wealth. Their religious practices had become an abomination in the eyes of The Lord. Assyria had subjugated Israel and scattered the rest of its inhabitants across the ancient near eastern nations. Now Israel is gone and Assyria is standing at Judah’s door with rod in hand.

Micah, the small town guy is telling the high and mighty in Jerusalem that God’s hand about to strike their cheek.  Why?

And then almost 700 years later Luke writes this famous account of the meeting between two relatives about to give birth, Mary and Elizabeth. We know Mary and Elizabeth, like Micah, lived in Judah when it was under the heel of the brutal oppression of the Roman Empire, and that many of their religious leaders curried favor with Rome by abetting its oppression.

If you know Micah (6:8) I am sure you recall his words, “What …is required of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and walk humbly with your God?” Micah spoke of a new ruler from the perspective of the spiritual poverty of the religious leaders of Jerusalem that created the economic poverty of the people of Judah, just as in Israel. The money in Judah was in Jerusalem with the religious and political leaders. They also owned most of the land and used the inhabitants of the small towns to work it for their profit. Their financial and moral excesses caused hardship on the people.

Elizabeth, like Sarah is a woman too old to have a child but is pregnant. Mary is young enough to have a child but in a predicament of being pregnant before she was married. In their culture, Elizabeth was disgraced by her infertility, and Mary was disgraced by her seemingly inappropriate fertility. John and Jesus will be born cousins by these women, probably share a common childhood, find their separate way into the desert like Moses and the Israelites, and come to their human end in weakness at the hand of the powerful. This passage in Luke is heavy with historical connections.

In these last days of Advent our excitement about Christmas grows but this passage makes it very hard to escape thinking about what the future holds for John and Jesus.  We cannot escape Mary’s grief standing on a hill watching Jesus dying on a cross, and feel her terror and the joy of her faith standing in an empty tomb.

Yet we are excited to hear Luke’s account of unborn John filled with the Holy Spirit leaping in Elizabeth’s womb at the sound of lowly Mary’s voice. Both signify the Lord’s presence. When Elizabeth says of Mary’s faith, “blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord,” we are excited to hear Mary’s declaration called The Magnificat,   one of the oldest hymns sung in the early church…excited until we hear some of her words (vv52-33): “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly;  he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.  He has helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy, according to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.” 

The Message Bible translates this part of Mary’s song (vv51-53)  as  “He bared his arm and showed his strength, scattered the bluffing braggarts. He knocked tyrants off their high horses, pulled victims out of the mud. The starving poor sat down to a banquet; the callous rich were left out in the cold.”

If we have read well, we hear the echo of Micah from Bethlehem calling out the spiritual poverty of the proud and rich in Judah.

These are bittersweet passages but they are our heritage.

 On one hand, none of us are overjoyed to hear these words because we know they strike close to home in our wealthy country and Presbyterian Church; but on the other hand, words heard as the curse of spiritual poverty can also be a blessing. Do you recall, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven?” (Matt 5:3)

Yes, Advent demands we ask the question, “Why did Jesus come to earth?

He came to break the bonds of spiritual poverty. He came to give hope for new life to those who suffer in material want, to those who suffer in the chains of bondage of prison or illness. …He came to give sight to those who are blinded by their blessing and resist sharing it, be it money, intelligence, political or religious power.

Do we do we find the reason Jesus came to earth when we when we honk our horn at another driver like I did, or walk the malls of Hamilton Place, Northgate, K-Mart, Target or in Atlanta or up in New York shopping for Christmas gifts for family or friends who can’t even give you a good idea of what they don’t already have?

Or…do we find the reason Jesus came to earth when we walk over the Walnut Street Bridge into urban Chattanooga and see the dilapidated houses and people hungry for food and the Spirit?

Or…do we find the reason Jesus came to earth when, or if, we drive rather quickly down Riverfront Parkway through the Westside (because we are afraid to walk) wondering if those guys on the corner are gang members and have a gun?

Or…do we find the reason Jesus came to earth when we look under the bridge abutments, or on the hillsides or when continue driving down 11st Street past the Community Kitchen seeing the homeless people walking around, waiting for Good News?

Friends, and you are all my friends, do we find the reason that Jesus came to earth when we realize that our spiritual poverty needs that balm in Gilead that Jesus brings the sin-sick soul just as badly as the folks in the Southside, Westside and Highland Park? 

When we hear Micah and Mary’s declaration, shouldn’t we recall the command, “Feed my sheep,” not “buy more?”  

• Amen.

Day 12 - I Wish My Head Were a Well of Water

I’d like to claim this content as my own, but it is not. I came across a wonderful sermon on Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 by Rev. Marianne Niesen (UMC), given on September 23, 2007 that you can read in full at this url: (Rev. Marianne Neison). It is a poignant reflection on the recent tragedy and actually parallels  more eloquently my post on Day 7.

William Sloane Coffin, Jr., was the chaplain at Yale when his college-age son, Alex, died in a car accident. Alex and his friends had been drinking.  On the way home, he missed a turn, crashed through a barrier, and plunged into the icy waters of a river north of Manhattan. After the memorial service a woman said what people so often say at times like that . . . she mused to Coffin that what happened must have been the will of God.  Later, Coffin wrote . . . "I wanted to grab her and say - 'Lady, that's wrong. God didn't cause this. It wasn't God's will that my son die. None of us knows enough to say that. God doesn't go around the world hurting and killing people.  When the waters closed in over the car, the heart of God was the first of all our hearts to break.'"That is the simple and profound hope of the faithful heart.  There is a balm in Gilead and it is simply this . . .God is not vindictive. God is not absent. God is present in the grief and the despair, in the human condition. We see evidence of it in Jeremiah's lament.  He was a prophet, after all, and his voice became God's voice. Jeremiah 9:1 in The Message Bible translated by Eugene H. Peterson reads:"I wish my head were a well of water, and my eyes fountains of tears, so I could weep day and night for the casualties of my dear, dear people. . . "In the end, the balm in Gilead is God's presence through all the exiles of our lives.   And when we can't see it ourselves - which we often cannot - sometimes we must look through the eyes, the experiences of others.
Amen

Day 7 - The presence of evil

I hesitate to write anything about the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School last week. The violence was pointless. The futility of the act leaves me as a parent numbed by the agony of the grief over those children and parents. Words really are poor comfort for them or me. 

As much as we try, we humans cannot make sense out of the acts of human evil. To rationalize evil almost calls the forgiveness of the resurrection into question.

To understand evil, we have to see the world through God’s eyes. Frankly we just cannot do  that.

Margaret Mohrmann, MD, PhD, a faculty member of the UVA Medical School and UVA Department of Religious Studies reflected on the tragedy of evil in a meeting last summer. She has worked in the hospital seeking to deal with “inexplicable tragedy.” She has a book entitled, Pain Seeking Understanding: Suffering, Medicine, and Faith (Pilgrim Press, 1999) that helps us struggle with answers.

She points out the obvious; namely, that evil is a scholarly intellectual problem until you talk with people who have suffered from inexplicable and seemingly unjustified grief – parents of a terminally ill child, a person facing imminent death from a medical condition or action of another person. The kind of things you encounter daily in a trauma hospital.

The easy explanations are painful and facile. “God is good but evil is deserved,” or “evil helps us grow” ring hollow. Remarkably such arguments can be traced to the early church fathers such as Iraneus.

The fact is a person may only ask the “Why?” question once.  There is no easy answer for the presence  evil in the world, but we had better have ready some kind of response else we may drive them away from any answer that gives even a modicum of solace.

Perhaps we can learn something from the reflections of Martin Buber. Buber notes the Genesis creation story does not describe creation in terms we see commonly used these days by theologians, "creation ex nihilo" or "creation out of nothing." "Creation out of nothing" suggests the creation of a perfect, divinely guided existence; something we do not have or cannot see.

Consider our scriptural tradition. Genesis describes God creating the world out of chaos: (Gen 1:2) "(T)he earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind (ruach) from God swept over the face of the waters." "The deep" was the chaos of the waters. It paints the image of being lost on the surface of some storm-swept windy sea in the blackness of total night with who knows what lurking below the surface. 

In this view, creation exists amidst chaos. Perhaps God created reality by forging peace from an all-pervasive chaos, a chaos that continues to seek to infiltrate and corrupt from the outside. It raises the question I resisted answering earlier, “Do we see God only through our own eyes or through God’s eyes?”

Laura Becker placed her sermon of Dec 16 on her facebook page today. In her sermon she said that advent calls us to the way out of the trap of the world, to embrace our humanity and the humanity of Jesus. She continues, "Our sure hope in the resurrection means death does not get the last word." While I may quibble to substitute “faith” for her word “hope,” she is onto something.

In advent we cannot avoid looking towards our future, a future sealed in the events of a day mentioned  in Simeon's blessing to Mary and the child after his song, the day when the true meaning of advent is revealed. In Genesis (49:5) we learn Simeon and Levi are brothers and the sword is their weapon of violence. They avenged the rape of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob by the slaughter of all the males of Schechem. In Luke 2:29-32, 34-35, this namesake Simeon is a man of God who beholds the culmination of the prophecy all hoped for, a prophecy that he knew would end in chaos and violence. Beholding the child Jesus, he proclaimed to God:

 'Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,

according to your word;

for my eyes have seen your salvation,

which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,

a light for revelation to the Gentiles

and for glory to your people Israel.'

Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, 'This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too.'"

Advent points towards the day when the most innocent and powerful human became the least powerful and took on our guilt, suffering alone in unjustified agony and human death. He cried to God, “Why have you forsaken me?” while his mother and the other women stood at a distance in grief watching his agony. This cry from the cross validated his humanity and sealed our own resurrection.

Sometimes the only thing we can be is a faithful, silent presence to the other person.

I cannot explain to you why there is evil in this blue world. I can only tell you that my faith rests on the cry to God that validated the humanity of Jesus. I know there is a home.

Day 5 - Poverty

What do you think when you read the word poverty? Most likely you recall a person, a situation, or a country where the people live in economically destitute circumstances. You may recall the homeless people you see walking and laying about town on the sidewalks and under the bridges. You might even recall a period of your own life.

When one begins to understand poverty by getting up close, one realizes that poverty is as easily defined.  Some people say economic poverty is a relative thing (e.g., Ruby Payne). You’ve probably heard a person say they did not know they were poor until someone told them. My Dad said that.

At its deepest meaning, poverty is a state of lack, a scarcity or dearth, famine. People who have traveled the globe in outreach to the economically distressed, especially to those who have lived in poverty for at least a generation, find an eye-opening discovery.

Regardless of where impoverished people live, they describe themselves with words and feelings such as shame, inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation, hopelessness, social isolation, and having absolute despair, living in the fear of immediate death and personal disintegration.

Such is the description of poverty. Look again at those words and the deep meaning of poverty begins to emerge. Those words describe spiritual poverty.

We resist admitting it is a spiritual problem. We like to think if someone wants to get out of poverty all they have to do is get a job. Those who see the world through lofty, wealthy eyes may be as impoverished as the ones with a lack of monetary means.

We can’t escape this reality. There is an intimate connection between spiritual and economic poverty.

Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert (in their book, When Helping Hurts) ask, “Why did Jesus come to earth?” Jesus understood that economic poverty is symptomatic of soul-destroying spiritual poverty. Poverty does not reflect one’s station in life. 

He entered the Hebrew temple to make his first public declaration. That temple symbolizes the tradition and heritage of the flight from Egypt and the beginning of a new life in the Promised Land. The worshipper in the temple knows these traditions and that they are framed by these words:

“If there is among you anyone in need, a member of your community in any of your towns within the land that the LORD your God is giving you, do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor. Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’” (Deut. 15:7,11) 

 “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest… you shall leave them for the poor and the alien for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.” (Lev. 19:9-10, 33-34).

The slavery and captivity by Assyria, Babylon, Alexander and the subsequent brutal heel of the Roman conquest also framed an impoverished people who failed to heed these commands written in Deuteronomy and Leviticus.

As Jesus faced these economically and spiritually impoverished people and their history and declared this:

“He stood up to read and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

            ‘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 he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’”  (Luke 4:16-21)

Remember this the next time you see an impoverished person, perhaps you will see them and yourself in a new light.