II Samuel 11:26-12:10,13-15
Galatians 2:15-21
Luke 7:36-8:3

Getting used to things can be dangerous. A lot of accidents happen because of carelessness caused by a false sense of security: we are used to our car tires having enough air in them, so we never think about checking them until they blowout; we are used to our oven lighting when we turn it on, so we never think of checking it until one day it doesn’t light and fills the whole house with gas. We take things for granted, and while it is not good to be constantly and neurotically assessing every situation for problems, the complacency that our lives create can in itself be a danger. The gospel story this morning is a good example.

The pharisee in the story was used to thinking of himself as a righteous person, acceptable to God. In fact, although pharisees have a bad reputation, they don’t really deserve it. Most of them were just like us – good, kind people trying to do the best they could with what they had. Their main problem seems to be their habit of taking God’s love and acceptance for granted. They were so used to hearing they were acceptable to God, and that God loved them, that they were in danger of forgetting how good it is to be loved, and that others were also acceptable to and loved by God. The woman in the story apparently does not have that problem. She was used to being told that she was a sinner: unacceptable to God. We don’t have the full background of the story, but it seems that in spite of the way she has been treated by religious people in the past, something she has heard about Jesus tells her that he won’t mind being in her presence, and that he won’t recoil in fear or disgust at her touch. Somehow, she knows she is accepted and loved by him, and so she responds in a way that is puzzling to the pharisee, who is equally loved and accepted by Jesus.

In the eyes of God, the woman and the pharisee were equally sinful, equally forgiven, and equally loved. That goes for everyone. God knows us best, yet loves us most. God knows us better than anyone (including ourselves) ever could. God knows every dark secret, including the ones we think we have hidden even from ourselves, and yet God loves us more than anyone else (including ourselves) ever could. Most of us already know that. We know how wonderful it is to be completely and totally loved by God. Unfortunately, we get so used to being loved that we start acting like the pharisee in the story; we stop returning the love because we take it for granted. Not that God could ever not love us – God is love, and God could never not love.

The danger of not loving is on our part, not God’s. When we forget how wonderful God’s love is, and how our existence is dependent upon it, we start living a life that is indeed loveless. We stop loving others, ourselves, and God. We don’t do it on purpose, and we don’t do it because we are evil. We do it simply because we are human, and we get so busy with the details of life that we forget the reason for living: love

Like the pharisee in the gospel – he was so busy following all the good rules of his denomination that he forgot to show love to his houseguests. Like David in our Old Testament story – he was so used to getting what he wanted as king that he did not fully realize the horror of the crime he had committed. Like some of  the Galatians in our second reading this morning – they were so used to treating gentiles as inferior to themselves that they forgot Jesus had changed all that.

So it is with us. We get so used to hearing that God loves us and that our sins are forgiven and that we are acceptable to God that we forget how good it is to be loved, and how horrible our sins are, and what an honor it is to be accepted as God’s Children. We grow cold in our love and we forget that everyone else is also fully loved as Children of God. We start to feel superior to others because we follow certain rules that they don’t, or they follow certain rules that we don’t – forgetting the only reason for those rules is to help us grow in love. We carelessly hurt others by our actions and attitudes, and we don’t even realize it. All of these things are completely unintentional, because like David and the Galatians and the pharisee that we have heard about today, we are good people. We are good people who have simply gotten used to being good and being loved, and getting used to things can be dangerous.

That is why it is so important to take time every once in a while to look closely at our lives and see how much we need God’s love and acceptance, and be grateful that it is there for us. We need to not be like David, so smug in our secret sins of pride and greed that we readily condemn others while it our own selves who are to blame for certain problems. We need to remember that although God knows us so well, God loves us so much, and the same is true for people whom we find difficult to love.

We also need to let those people who are not used to hearing it know how much they are loved and accepted by God. Our world is full of people who are used to hearing they are sinner condemned by God. They are used to hearing it, because so many people who are loved by God are used to saying it. That is a shame. They desperately need to hear that they are just as much Children of God as anyone else, and we who are used to being in God’s love desperately need to think of them as such and treat them accordingly, lest we run the risk of growing cold in our love and so become like the pharisee or some of the Galatians in our readings this morning.
Of course, we also need to make sure that our understanding of love is not simply one of being emotionally stroked by the way some people sometimes make us feel. We must learn to actively love – to desire and work for the best for every individual, even if and when what is best for some individuals is not what is best for us, and might even make us quite uncomfortable. We must learn to love people, not just the way some people sometimes make us feel.

Love is too important to take for granted. Other people are too important to disregard. We are all loved far too much to treat each other as anything but the very image of God, showing respect and honor to all whom we encounter, including ourselves.   AMEN

Acts 16:16-34
Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20
John 17:20-26

We just heard the final words of Jesus at the Last Supper before going to the garden where he was arrested. His entire speech is long – 3 ½ chapters in the Gospel According To John, and towards the end of it, he prays that his followers would be united, as he and the Father are. He gives two reasons for this: so that the world will know that Jesus was sent to us by God, and so that the world will know that God loves the disciple of Jesus as much as he loves Jesus. Jesus does not pray that his followers may be one so that God will love them; God already loves us. The desired unity is only meant to be an outward sign of God’s love for us. That is a good thing, because if God’s love for us depended on anything we did, we would not be worthy of that love, because it is obvious from our own lives and from church history that we are not very good at living in unity with other Christians.

That is why Jesus’s prayer is so surprising. It is easy to believe that God loves Jesus. Even those who do not accept the divinity of Jesus can understand why God would love him, because he was so good and kind and said spiritual things. Of course God loves Jesus – who wouldn’t? Those of us who believe that Jesus was not really a goody-two-shoes, but was rather God in human flesh, understand that the Father loves Jesus as the only begotten second person of the Trinity (a love that we do not have the power to understand, a love that is the foundation and structure of the universe). And Jesus makes it very clear in his prayer that God loves us in the same manner that he loves Jesus. That is hard to accept. It is hard to understand, hard to believe, and hard to confront. In God’s eyes, we (as petty, judgmental, and conniving as we are) are loved as much as Jesus. In God’s eyes, we are as worthy of infinite love as is God’s own self. God knows us better than anyone else (including ourselves), and yet God loves us more than anyone else (including ourselves). It is almost impossible to believe that we are worthy of any love at all, much less God’s infinite love, but it is true.

We are worthy, but not because we have earned any worth. We can not earn anything in God’s eyes. It is impossible to do, so it is neither asked for, nor expected. Our infinite and unconditional worth is freely bestowed upon us by God. Our second reading from the Book of Revelation talks about the gift of God’s love, as the Holy Spirit calls everyone to come drink the water of life flowing like a river from God’s throne – freely and abundantly offered. No one is forced to come drink, but all are invited. There are no limits on how much we can drink, nor are there any conditions that we must fulfill, other than simply being thirsty for love and life.

A different river is the setting for our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, but it is just as much proof of God’s love as is the river in heaven. Paul and Silas are in Macedonia, going to pray with some people who meet by a river in Philippi. On the way, they meet a slave who makes her masters rich by telling fortunes. The reason she can do this is because she is possessed by a foreign spirit. Paul confronts the spirit and makes it leave her, healing her and setting her free from its power. Her human masters bring legal action against the apostles for ruining their source of income, since the girl can no longer tell fortunes without the foreign spirit controlling her. By healing her, Paul shows us how much more important to God is our health and happiness, compared to our ability to make money. We are important to God simply because we exist, not because we can acquire possessions, wield power, create artwork, achieve popularity, or make athletic,  intellectual or scientific breakthroughs. God creates us out of love; that is our reason for being and our true fulfillment – not any outward sign of supposed success.

God’s river of life and love flows to us, offering us more than we could ever imagine or understand, and its flow does not depend on who we are, how we feel, or what we do. It is not forced upon us, just offered. We can’t do anything to lose it – we can’t be bad enough for God not to love us – but we can, if we choose, decide to not drink from the river, and so not accept God’s gift. We do that every time we think we can live life on our own and have no need for God. When we do that, we are not really gaining independence, we are simply losing our own life. God offers us life, love, and true fulfillment, and all we have to do to receive it is to be humble enough to accept it. We must admit we are nothing without God, and everything with God. We must admit that we can not love on our own, and that we can not live on our own. We must admit that everything we try to do on our own ends in failure and heartache, while everything we do in God is simply a step to something even greater. But we must take the step to the river and drink, taking ourselves out of the center of our lives so that God can fill us with true love and life. God is calling us to drink, no matter how many times we turn our backs on him.

But back to Jesus’s prayer for unity from our gospel reading. Someday, all Christians might be united in the way that Jesus is one with his father (I suspect  we already are, but we just don’t realize it or act like it). At least we don’t act like it yet, and maybe that is because we do not understand the unity of God, either. All we know is that Jesus desires our unity, so it can’t be bad. Our unity is not a prerequisite for God’s love for us; it is merely an outward sign of it. So until we admit and act like we are one as Jesus and the Father are one, we can at least try to remember that the people around us are loved by God, and therefor might be worthy of our love, too. Just as we can not earn God’s love, so the people around us can not earn our love. It must be given by us, no matter the response. May we freely give from the river flowing into us from God, and may we freely accept it from others, who love us even though we have never done anything to deserve it from them. Maybe that is s start toward unity in Jesus. Maybe that is the fulfillment of it.   AMEN

Joshua 5:9-12
II Corinthians 5:16-21
Luke 15:1-3,11b-32

Our gospel story this morning is famous, and for good reason – it tells us a lot about God, a lot about us, and a lot about the world around us. It has been used as a basis for many sermons, stories, and other helpful forms of  teaching because of the many things that can be gleaned from it. Two of the many topics found in the story are areas we have been hearing and reading a lot about these past few weeks: salvation and repentance. Sometimes the two are confused, as in the often used expressions “get saved” and “repent”. Many people say the two things as if they we the same thing, but they are not. We are saved, because God saves us – salvation is a totally free gift from God that has already been given, and we can do nothing to influence God to save us, because God already has. Repentance, on the other hand, is something that we do – we realize we are doing wrong, and we change our actions in order to stop the wrong and begin doing right. Repentance does not save us, God saves us, but repentance puts us in a position to actually live in and enjoy the salvation that God has given us.

God has forgiven us of all our failings and welcomes us into his own life of joy and peace, like the father in our gospel story. However, until we come to our senses and realize we are on the road away from our true home, like the younger son in our story, we can not enjoy the party that the father has prepared for us. And merely realizing we are on the wrong path is not enough – we actually have to do something to change our path, turn around, and go back home to our father. Repentance involves change in our lives, not merely regret over some of the things we have done, although that is a good way to begin repenting. In order to live as saved people, we need to change our unsaved conduct of pettiness and greed into saved conduct of compassion and gratitude.

Some people say that they can not change their behaviors, but that is not true, for any behavior short of pathology. There are many forms of help available to show us how to change our actions, the easiest and cheapest being the many books in our library with helpful hints on how to change behavioral patterns. Some people say that they don’t need to change their behavior. That is not true, either, because we have all hurt ourselves and others deeply, and will continue to do so if we do not live mindfully in peace and joy. If we think we do not need to change our behavior for the better, that only means we are not aware of our behavior.

Changing our actions for the better benefits us and those around us, and that is good. However, we don’t have to stop at our actions. We can, if we want, also change our thought patterns so that we are not plagued so much by the negative thoughts that drain our happiness and often lead to bad behavior. Many people say that we can not change our thought patterns, but, as with actions, anything short of pathology can be changed – it is merely difficult to do so. Others say that even though we can not actually change our thought patterns, we can learn to become more aware of them so that when they arise we can deal with them in a helpful manner before they do too much harm. Either changing them outright or learning to be aware of them in order to lessen their harm is better than simply allowing our petty thoughts to drag us down into anger or despair. One thing that most people do agree on if they say that thought patterns can be changed is that they are much more difficult to change than are behavioral patterns. But difficult and impossible are not the same thing.  As is the case with behavioral patterns, some people think they do not need to change their thought patterns, but that only means they are not very aware of what is going on in their heads. Once again, there are many forms of help available if one wants to change hurtful thought patterns, the easiest and cheapest being the many books in our library dealing with the topic.

Our feelings and emotions can also be changed, but they are even more difficult to change than thoughts. Our emotions are given to us as a means of perceiving and dealing with reality, but so often they instead skew our perceptions and we mistake them for reality. We are called to be the salt of the earth – all-pervasive yet usually only noticed when missing, but instead our off-balance feelings and emotions sometimes turn us into the vinegar of the earth (souring everything) or the saccharin of the earth (coating everything with a false and sickening sweetness). With hard work and a big dose of objectivity, we can change our emotional patterns and responses so that they do not constantly plague us and those around us, draining us of our energy and joy. As with the case of altering thought patterns, there are many sources to help us, the easiest and cheapest of course being the books in our library dealing with the topic, and some people think that although we can not completely change our feelings, we can learn to become aware of their onset and so be ready to deal with them fruitfully. Both scenarios involve hard work and humility, but we are worth all the effort it takes to be freed of our irrational reactions. (By the way, this is not a plug for our library – we don’t make any money off of it – it’s just saying that in almost any situation, the resources needed for growth are there, if we are willing to do the work.)

Change is not impossible, it is only difficult. We are created in the image of God to live in love and peace in this wonderful universe God has given us. We are created to bless and be blessed by all others. Heaven is our home, yet we choose instead to run away from our true heaven and waste our treasure, like the younger son in our gospel story. God is waiting for us to repent – to turn around and come back. It is our choice, and we all know in the long run, we do what we want to do. We owe it to ourselves to repent and travel toward our father’s house. Our birthright as Children of God is a life of bliss, but we do not live in bliss when our feelings, thought and actions are centered upon us and our fears, rather than on God and his grace.

Even though we are saved, we are still humans, and we will all fail in our task of repentance. We will all fall off the path back to heaven at some point, but we can always get back on. God is always waiting, and like the father in our story, already has the party supplies. Change will be slow and will come in small stages, but any growth is better than stagnation. The first step of growth is in itself a return to heaven. So may we always – every day and every moment – stop our running from God and turn towards God. God will help us on the way, no matter how often we fall, and will never tire of waiting, and if we only allow him, God will actually carry us when we think we can go no further. We have been saved by God who lives with us – we know him as Jesus. May we, in gratitude for that salvation, repent – turn away from our tiny worlds of ego and travel into God’s infinite world of bliss.   AMEN

Isaiah 6:1-13
I Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11

All of our readings this morning involve people who knew they were unworthy of doing anything for God. They knew they were unworthy, and in two of our readings, they told God just that. Isaiah, Peter, and Paul were fully aware of the truth that they, in themselves, were not good enough to do what God wanted them to do. However, God also knows that fact, and it does not bother God, because God also knows that he is the one who makes all of us worthy to do God’s will.

By saying we are unworthy to do God’s will does not mean we see ourselves as evil or stupid or have a bad self-image. It means that we have a proper self-image and grasp on reality, because the reality is: God is perfect, and we are not. No matter how good we are, we are not perfect, and so we can never be fit tools for God’s purposes. We can be really good human beings, as we should all strive to be, but being a really good human is not the same thing as being God – they are simply different categories. However, God breaks those categories and gives us whatever abilities we need to do God’s will.

We don’t always get the same abilities, because God does not want as to all do the same things. However, we are all given something, and to pretend differently is counterproductive and destructive. It might take some time to figure out what our special gifts are, but we can not use that as an excuse for never searching for them or never using them when we find them. We also need to remember that very few people are ever given any kind of spectacular gifts, so just because our gifts are the ordinary kind that allow us to help each other in ordinary ways, we can’t allow ourselves to pout and sulk and not use those ordinary gifts. We are most likely never going to see seraphim or be blinded by Jesus or go fishing with him, like the people in our scripture readings. That is ok, and actually, kind of a relief.

However, we will see God everyday in the people around us – people who are easy to get along with, as well as people who are difficult to get along with, people who make our life easier, as well as people who make our life more difficult, people whom we irritate, as well as people who irritate us. We are called to use our ordinary gifts to bring the joy and health of God to those people, as we accept it from them. We all know how impossible it is to do the job of living with other people without our special gifts from God. So rather than wasting all that time and energy fretting about how difficult it is, all we need to do is admit that we can’t do it on our own, and thank God for his help in doing it. God will bring us through all our daily, ordinary struggles, and turn them into heaven, where in a sense, we will see seraphim, go fishing with Jesus, and even be blinded by his beauty and joy.

We are unclean, we are unfit to do God’s will. What happy news! By admitting that, we give ourselves room to take in God’s gift to us, so that the new reality can grow – the reality that in God, we are clean, we are fit, we are ready, willing ,and able to do all that God asks of us. And all that God asks of us is to live in love, joy, and peace with ourselves, with others, and with God. That sounds like a good job description.   AMEN

Jeremiah 31:7-14
Ephesians 1:3-6,15-19a
Luke 2:41-52

Christmas time is here, finally. All the extra work to prepare is over, and now all the extra work to clean up kicks in. After almost a decade and a half in the kitchen, and now after three years in the office, I still think that if Jesus had known about all the business people did to celebrate his birthday, he would have had second thoughts about being born. But, there seems to be a need for some people to do all the special stuff around Christmas time – the rest of us just get caught up in the whirlwind of it all. Maybe the reason is because it is one of the ways we can tangibly express our conviction that the birth of Jesus is special, and is in fact the most important birth to ever have occurred, because his birth really is about God and creation becoming one.

I have a Hindu friend who emails me to talk about religious things, and he has no problem with saying that Jesus is God, because to a Hindu, everyone and everything is God. I tell him that I prefer the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim view that there is a difference between God and creation. The reason I prefer that view is because I really do hope that God is Love, and I really do think that it takes more than one party to love. If we are all God, and we love each other and God, and God loves us, then all that means is that God has a healthy, well-rounded psychology. It is important to love oneself, but if all there is is just one person loving that self, then I will be greatly disappointed.

I want the God who takes the true risk of love – opening Himself to others who have every right to refuse that love and walk away. God does just that. God loves us, even when we do all we can to pain him and spurn his love. God makes himself so vulnerable that God became one of us just so we could have more opportunities to accept his love, as well as more opportunities to reject it. Jesus is indeed special. He is God, here and now in this universe, on this planet. He is God, and we are not, but we are in a very real way, equal partners in love. Not that Jesus ever spurns our love, but that we can reject his. Jesus reaches out to us every day and every moment with the hope that we will take his love and by so doing become truly human, just like him. If we can remember back in junior high how scary it was asking that special person to our first school dance, or as adults asking that special person to marry us (this example would apply only to guests, of course) – how anxious we were and maybe still are in our dealings with people whom we want to love us – that is how vulnerable God is nonstop with six billion people on this planet. Usually, we say no to his advances. Hopefully, slowly, by doing what we do in this monastery every day, and by doing what others do in their homes and parishes, we all are becoming more apt to say yes to God’s gift of love, and so are being made not only more fully human, as Jesus is, but also even divine.

Jesus is special in a way we are not – he is God and we are not. However, we are made in the image of God, and God sees us all as special in our own ways. As we heard Paul say to his listeners in Ephesus in our second reading this morning, God: “….chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will…”. God has adopted us – in other words, God has chosen to love us. That makes us infinitely special, and since God sees us all that way, we should also see everyone as a special, chosen child of God.

Yet, how often we don’t do that. Instead, we spend a lot of our time dismissing others as worthless or evil. No one is either of those, since we are made in the image of God – of infinite worth and holiness. We do tend to do worthless and evil things, but that does not change our underlying dignity. The people who need our love and prayers most are the people who fly airplanes into office towers, or who legislate discriminatory laws, or who con money from elderly people. They, just like us, are wonderful, beautiful children of God who are ensnared by sin, and for whom God lived among us and died for us. And we must be careful to never denigrate others as persons, even when they differ with us in religion, politics, or culture. It just might be the case that they pray, read scripture, and want to help others just as much as we do, even though they have come to different conclusions about things. We must learn to discriminate between actions and persons. Persons are always images of God, no matter how much our actions have obscured that image.

We all know that we do not do a good job at always honoring the worth of the people around us, or the people we read about in the news. That is ok, our job is growth, not immediate perfection. We just need to always look at Jesus until we start seeing his face in everyone, and everyone’s face in him. Paul has something to say about that growth, as we heard in our second reading this morning: “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of Glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.” Christmas time is here, happiness and cheer – no better time to start on that road to holiness and joy.   AMEN

Jeremiah 33: 14-16
I Thessalonians 3: 9-13
Luke 21: 25-36

For the next four weeks, we will be hearing a lot about hope. The Hope of the World is coming to us, the One in whom we put all our hope, the only True Hope. We will be hearing about letting go of our fear, because we have hope, and we can hope in the Savior of the World, who will be coming among us, who is among us, and who will be among us again. Moving from fear to hope is good, and is something we all desire to do every moment and every day. We are not created to live in fear, and anything we can do to bring hope to the world is good.

However, as we heard in our Compline readings from The Conferences of John Cassian a few weeks ago, hope is not the end of the journey. Both fear and hope imply a certain amount of self-centeredness (we fear for our selves and hope for ourselves), although we can also fear and hope for others, which is good. But Abba Chaeremon says there is another stage of the journey after hope, one that involves no self-centeredness at all:Love.

When we truly love, we take our wants and desires out of the picture and work for the best of everyone and everything. We don’t try to control things so that we can be comfortable, we let others grow into their best selves no matter how uncomfortable that might make us feel. Love frees us from all the time and effort we would otherwise spend trying to make everyone and everything act the way we think it should be. When we love, we realize that the only things we can control are our own actions and reactions, so we spend time and energy working on ourselves so that we can make the world a better place. That doesn’t mean that we deny any other’s wrongdoings, it just means that we work to become the best persons we can be so that we can confront and help change others’ wrongdoings in an objective and helpful manner. It also means that we look at others with compassion, acknowledging their faults while giving them some slack to work on them, as we would want done for us. Maybe even more importantly, it means that we look on ourselves with compassion – acknowledging our own faults while giving ourselves some slack to work on them, and then honestly working on them.

Love also frees us from self-centered motives in our work. In love, we do things not because those actions might one day bring us some benefit. Instead, we do things simply because they are good things to do and will make the world a better place and help some people. Working out of love lightens our workload and makes us happier, not because we do less, but because we are freed from the burden of making sure we see the fruits of our work. In love, we simply do our work to the best of our abilities and then let God take care of the results. Of course, that has the unexpected consequence of us actually doing a better job than if we were working from self-centered reasons and worrying about the outcome of our work. The question of “what’s in it for me” is never raised, consciously or unconsciously, but amazingly, all of our deepest desires are met more profoundly than we ever could have imagined. We actually slowly learn to love people, not just the way some people sometimes make us feel.

I know that I have never moved from hope to love, and I am not sure if I have ever met anyone who has. (I am not even sure I have moved from fear to hope yet, but someday, maybe that will happen.) There is a Buddhist proverb that says: “There are no enlightened people, only enlightened actions.” Maybe we can make that into a Christian proverb: “There are no loving people, only loving actions.” By doing things out of love, we slowly become loving people. Like Aristotle said: “One becomes a virtuous person by doing virtuous things.” One slowly becomes loving by doing loving things. And it is slow, and sometimes it feels fake, but that is ok, we are to be judged by what we do, not by how we feel. But the more we get used to doing loving actions, the more we actually grow into a loving person. There will always be times when we fall down in our attempts to love, but we can always get back up again and try some more.

We will sometimes despair of ever growing, but at least that means that deep down, we want to grow, and that is a major step in itself. The only way we grow at all is through the grace of God, and God will give us growth when God knows we need it, and maybe even more importantly, when we can handle it. All we can do is admit that we need hope and love. Doing that is not easy, but it is necessary. It takes work and humility but is worth it when we finally do it. And we need to do it every day and every moment, if we are honest with ourselves and with God. Like Paul in our second reading this morning, we need to pray that God will “make us increase and abound in love for one another and for all, and may he strengthen our hearts in holiness so that we may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus…”

God will save us from ourselves, that is his job, and when he does so, we enter into bliss that we never knew could exist. We live in a fearful world, but our hope is in Jesus, who is Love and brings us to love. As Jesus says in our gospel story this morning, when we see all the fearful things in our world, all we need to do is : “…stand up and raise our heads, because our redemption is drawing near.” So for the next four weeks, we can hear with confidence all the prophets, evangelists, angels, wise men, shepherds, and little drummer boys singing “Do you see what I see?”. We will see one day – in our fear and doubt we will see the Hope of the Universe who is Love Himself, coming to us to live in us and among us. He is here right now and invites us to share a meal with him as he feeds us with himself.   AMEN

Job 19: 23-27a
II Thessalonians 2:13-3:5
Luke 20:27-38

Our scripture readings from Job and the Second Letter to the Thessalonians are both about trusting God. Paul talks about God a lot, but his words all boil down to two phrases near the end of the reading this morning: “the Lord is faithful” and “the steadfastness of Christ”. Job is a different character than Paul. In fact, Job leaves all the talk about God up to his friends, and instead, chooses to talk to and with God. Because of his relationship with God, Job is able to say that even with all his troubles and arguments with God, he knows that God lives and will hold him in life. The Sadducees in the gospel story (along with the Pharisees in most other gospel stories) have gotten an undeserved bad reputation. They did not mean or want to be stupid and evil, and the vast majority of them were not stupid and evil the vast majority of the time. They just wanted to understand God and live the way they understood God wanted them to live. Maybe the reason they got such a bad reputation in the gospel stories is because they spent so much time trying to analyze their relationship with God that they didn’t have any time left for an actual relationship.

We can so easily be like Job’s friends or the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Paul at his wordiest, spending so much time talking about God that we never get around talking to and with God. Of course, talk about God can and should be helpful – it is called theology, and there is nothing at all wrong with it. We just need to steer clear of substituting theology for relationship with God. In fact, Paul, most Sadducees and Pharisees, and probably Job’s friends, all had wonderful relationships with God, and those relationships were most likely helped and fueled by their theologizing. However, the Book of Job, the Gospels, and The Acts of The Apostles all show us how theology can never be a substitute for trust in God.

Jesus talked about God a lot, too, like the example in our gospel story this morning. But we must always remember that he also spent a lot of time talking with God. We need to follow his example, and discern the proper times for theology and the proper times for prayer. We need to be like Job, and know when it is more helpful to talk to God than to talk about God. We need to be like Paul and know when our words are getting in the way of our lives. And we need to be like all those good Sadducees and Pharisees, and allow our religion to help us and others around us.

God is the God of the living – living words and living relationships. Both are good, and both can help the other. May God help us to know which to turn to and when, and may we be open to God’s directions.   AMEN

Genesis 32: 3-8,22-30
II Timothy 3: 14-4:5
Luke 18: 1-8a

The first sentence of our gospel reading from Luke this morning sums up the basic idea from all our scripture lessons today: “Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” Pray always + don’t lose heart = perseverance. That might seem easy for Jesus to say, because sometimes we have the mistaken notion that Jesus found it easy to pray. All we need to do to dispel that misconception is to read the story of the night in Gethsemene before his arrest. Knowing how difficult it was for Jesus to pray, we might wonder why he expects any of his disciples to pray, and we find an answer to that problem in the parable we just head from Luke.

Usually, the parable is interpreted in such a way that the corrupt judge represents God, and the widow represents us, and if we only nag God enough, we will finally get what we want. However, it might make better sense to see the judge as ourselves, and the widow as God expecting us to do the right thing, and persevering in that expectation. Megan McKenna explains it this way in a book in our library: “we see ourselves as the woman, the righteous one, demanding our rights from God, when prayer [should be] acknowledging we have no rights…We never think God might be the widow and the tables might be turned.” (Parables – The Arrows of God pp105-106).

In other words, we are not to pray in order to change God; we are to pray in order to let God change us, so that we can see the world as it truly is – as God sees it. Praying in order to change ourselves is much more difficult than praying in order to change God, because when we truly see ourselves and how much we need to change, we usually don’t like what we see and we often despair at the possibility of ever growing. That’s why the first sentence of our gospel reading this morning is so important: “Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not lose heart.” (Perseverance.) As Megan McKenna says in the book just quoted: “In Hebrew the word for prayer means to stand in the presence of God, to be seen for what we are, to be judged and not run away.” (p 109) We need to keep at it – to stand in the presence of God with nothing hidden, knowing that God loves us more than we ourselves or anyone else ever could, even though God knows all our secrets. God knows us best, yet God loves us most. God knows the wonderful people we can become if only we persevere in truthfully allowing God to change us. God knows firsthand, because God is one of us. Jesus persevered in prayer, as difficult as it was, and asks us to do the same.

Prayer is not the only thing that needs our persistence. We also need to persist in our work, as the other scriptures we heard this morning make clear. We heard Paul writing these words to Timothy: “I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching.” Those instructions are for a pastor, but we are all called to be pastors in some way to the people around us in our everyday lives. Jesus worked and prayed as he fulfilled his calling, and we are to do the same. Every walk of life offers opportunities to bring God’s love, peace, and joy to the little part of the world around us. As Paul tells Timothy: “As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.”

With all of this in mind, the strange story about Jacob from our Old Testament reading this morning might make a little more sense than it usually does. Jacob was not a good person. He was a cheat who was cheated and then cheated his cheater. Now he wants to change, to repent. He wants to turn around – to come back home and do the right thing, but he is scared of what his brother (whom he cheated) might do to him. Jacob is not used to doing the right thing, so he takes every precaution to protect his assets in case something goes wrong. The one person he can’t protect himself from is God, so finally God confronts him. Jacob perseveres in his encounter with God, and in doing so, is changed so much that he is given a new name. He also carries with him a wound from the struggle. So it is with us – we might be wounded from life’s struggles, but we can’t say we have truly lived until we have truly lived until we have had those struggles. And even though it often seems a struggle, like Jacob wrestling, it is only through perseverance in prayer that we can be changed, given a new name, and become a blessing to those around us.

So that is our job as Christians: to persevere in prayer (standing in the presence of God with nothing hidden, allowing God to make us into a new creation), and persevering in our work (bringing Jesus into our own world in our own way). It is not easy, and it never gets easier, but it is necessary.   AMEN

Zechariah 12:8-10,13:1
Galatians 3:23-29
Luke 9:18-24

Occasionally, one finds a surprisingly wise person on television. One such person is Red Forman, a character on That 70s Show. His house is usually filled with high school kids doing typically foolish high school things, and he gets agitated at them and tries to set them straight before throwing them out of the house. He usually begins his wide sayings with a burst of profanity and ends them with ridicule of the person he is addressing, but rarely, the script writers give us a glimpse that the reason he says anything at all is because he really cares for all those kids, and deeply loves them. Of course, being a man of his era, he is not good at expressing his love in any way other than providing a house and food and punishment for bad behavior, but even so, he does his best in those areas. One of his wisest sayings was to a dope-smoking slacker (Hyde) who was being sullen at his own birthday party because he thought it was silly. Red knew that his wife and the other kids had put in a lot of work on the party, and seeing Hyde belittle their efforts made him angry. He took the guy aside and said to him: “(expletive deleted!) Being a man is all about doing things you don’t want to do.” He did not finish his speech, because what he really wanted to say was: “(expletive deleted!) Being a man is all about doing things you don’t want to do, because you love the people you are doing them for.”

Being a mature Christian as described by Paul in our second reading this morning from his letter to Galatia has a few things in common with the words of the prophet Red Forman. There is the obvious connection to doing things we don’t want to do because we love the people we are doing them for. We all know about that one – we do certain things when we are tired or would rather be doing something else because the task we are doing will make a better home or world for the people around us. Sometimes we are given the grace of a good attitude about it, sometimes we are not, but we do the tasks anyway, because our eternal love does not depend on our momentary attitude. Of course, the more often we do the actions, the more opportunity there is for the grace of a good attitude to be given to us by the Holy Spirit.

However, there is a less obvious connection between Red’s words to Hyde and Paul’s words to the Galatians. Being a man or a mature Christian sometimes involves doing things we don’t want to do simply because it takes so much effort to figure out what to do. We are no longer under law – we don’t have a convenient list of things to do and things to avoid. We are now in Christ, and Christ taught us that doing the right thing was a lot more complicated than just simply following a list of dos and don’ts. He also taught us that doing the right thing was a lot more satisfying for us and helpful for the world around us than just following a list of dos and don’ts. Basing our acts on faith is more work than basing them on law, because faith operates on love, and to love people we have to see them as Jesus sees them – as worthy enough to die for, as we heard in our gospel this morning. Basing our acts on love rather than law does not mean that we just do what we feel like. Love takes a long term approach to what is truly best for everyone, not just a short term solution so that everything is tidy and looks good for the neighbors. Living a life of love by faith does not include dismissing rules and regulations as irrelevant. Faith knows that rules and regulations exist to help us learn how to love, and so has the utmost respect for law, but faith also recognizes rules and regulations as only the beginning of love, not the fulfillment of love.

That is why mature faith takes a lot of work – we have to gratefully take the wisdom of laws learned from God and handed down to us by Godly, loving people in the past and use them as a basis for our own life of Godly love. We have to respectfully listen to Godly, loving people from other cultures, places, and points of view as they share their understanding of law and love so that we can learn from the Holy Spirit speaking through them, guiding us to mature decisions. We have to honestly search our own motives for everything we do, making sure they are based on a desire to serve God, rather than ourselves. Being a man is all about doing things we don’t want to do, because we love the people we are doing them for. Being a mature Christian is all about doing things we may or may not want to do, because we love our selves, our neighbors, and our God so much that we will do the work it takes to find out the right things to do. The more we do them, the more chance the Holy Spirit has of giving us the grace to want to do them, and the more we will learn to love doing them. But until then, we just have to be grown up and do them. So thank you, Red Forman, for loving those kids enough to get upset at them. May we work as hard at loving the people around us, but without the profanity.   AMEN

Acts 16:16-34
Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20
John 20-26

Our first scripture reading from the Acts of the Apostles mentions two ways of dealing with inconveniences caused by other people either not doing what we want them to do, or doing what we don’t want them to do. The first way (one of dismay and disappointment) is shown by the reaction of the owners of the slave girl, out of whom Paul exorcised the fortune-telling demon. Instead of being happy for her freedom from demonic possession, her owners were upset at their loss of income. They were more interested in someone else making them comfortable that in the comfort of that someone, and their self-centeredness brought a lot of useless trouble and disturbance to many people, while never restoring their income from the slave. The second way (one of joy and happiness) is shown by the reaction of the jailor in charge of Paul and Silas when the earthquake opened the prison doors and unfastened the prisoners= chains. Although he was initially upset enough to consider suicide, once Paul convinced him that the prisoners were all still there, the jailor wanted to know how he could have a share in Paul and Silas’ saving God, and then he brought that salvation the rest of the people in his house, and the next day the prisoners’ cases were dealt with in a favorable manner. The jailor’s ultimate positive reaction to the freedom of his prisoners brought about a chain of good events.

Unfortunately, our reaction to other people’s good fortune is often that of the slave owners, because we tend to focus on our own inconveniences more than on the freedom of others. In the heat of the moment, we don’t usually stop and consider the fact that another person’s good fortune can only add to our good fortune in the long-run, even though it might be a block to reaching some of our short-term goals. We tend to be not only self-centered, but also short-sighted (and in fact, the two are the same). We all depend on each other, because that is the way God made us, and the true fulfillment of others can only be good for us and everyone else. Every person is equally loved by God, and so is deserving of our respect. By building up others, rather than tearing them down, we strengthen ourselves. By being joyful at others’ good fortune, no matter how it makes us feel initially, we only add to our joy and the joy of the world around us. A book in our library by Sister Ayya Khema calls this good reaction to others’ good fortune “sympathetic joy”, and she lists it as one of the four best friends we can have in life (the other three are loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity).

Sympathetic joy is difficult for us because we tend to falsely believe that we are the center of the universe, and so if we are not at the top of every heap, our universe is in danger of collapse. The truth is, that if we are the center of our universe, then our universe is already collapsing, whether or not we are the top of the visible heap. God is the true center of everything, and by allowing God to be our center, we are free to be our true selves (relieved of the burden of holding our universe together), and others are free to be themselves (relieved of the burden of propping up our false regimes). Others might do things or believe things or say things that make us uncomfortable, but that will be ok, because it won’t be a threat to our false godhood anymore.

God is God, and we are not. As we heard in our second scripture reading from the revelation to John, Jesus is the “Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Jesus will hold our world together and will be everything we need, so our legitimacy and integrity do not depend on how well others buttress our world view, beliefs, and desires. Our legitimacy and integrity spring from God, who says: “Come”, so that then we can say to others: “Come – let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.” We are not given the option of deciding who does or does not get to come and drink. We are only given the option of being happy about it or not. Life is too short to choose unhappiness, and eternal life is too long to choose unhappiness. Sympathetic joy really is one of our best friends. AMEN